five pieces, and what they reveal: the third one

My favorite
exercise is walking.
I particularly like to
walk in nature.
I build
on physiological repetition.
Steps create a meditation. I play,
repeating a simple act over and over again.
My body, mind, and spirit know that I play.
In my soul I play and something soothes; something heals.


Repetition Exercise #3: Walking

Go walking and consider the repetitions.
The breaths, the steps, the rising and falling of limbs, posture...
Think about how each aspect repeats.
Move through space.
Include the sensation of air and of clothing on the skin
and even include thoughts in the mind.
Some of these patterns get very little attention.
Structure the thoughts as a meditation on being grateful
or observe thoughts and watch them form repetitive patterns around feelings.
I add picking something up while walking.
The act becomes another type of repetition in the dance.


Anything can define something.


It seems ironic that this section has to be rewritten because I erased it by playfully hitting some computer keys. In the interim since this event occurred, I have learned the value of an undo command.

I did lie down on the floor and play dead in order to regain the strength to type what I had just finished transcribing. For an empathic reference, consider I never learned to type. It took hours. In recomposing my thoughts, the humor of the play on repetition sinks in.

Since I still don’t know the second thread that I planned to follow, I make a detour. I delete a few tangents. I remember the little boy saying over and over again some expression with potato. He must find this word a soothing auditory trigger. He uses a discordant intonation.

Repetition holds the essence of the initial step of what we could call getting warmed up to play. In one sense we already play. From our earliest games we repeat behaviors or even just rhythmic movement or sound. Over and over these activities thread together to create knowledge of basic behaviors. I remember bouncing a ball and counting the bounces, heading to one hundred. Was I five? Somewhere in the 70 somethings I remember jubilantly feeling that such high numbers and so many bounces were really something. A friend, describes hundreds of lay-ups in basketball repeated with pleasure. So we start play there. Quite soon the initial repetition becomes a phrase of its own, which repeats a new rhythm and then adds some subtlety of another dimension.

Look at patterns in nature, in music, and in architecture. These patterns remind me of the fundamental nature of play.
A rhythm carries us along for a while and then another replaces it and carries forth followed by yet another. And feelings accompanying them.
The way in which the universe organizes itself allows for some human awareness of this repetition.

Time creates repetitive phenomenon.
The quip being that time, a divine intervention, prevents us from experiencing everything at once.
Repetitions of hours or months or even moments create playful ways of linking events.
In each moment we begin a series of activities that form new patterns.

five pieces, and what they reveal: the second one

this might be a blank piece. Maybe that would be why someone else doodled here. Imagine this in white ink on white paper; and you have a marker in hand. I offer a visual doodle with lattice and stone. Is that cheating? Can you cheat at playfulness?


Sometimes we learn something by repeating it over and over. Playfulness links any tedium we experience with some other physical, mental or spiritual activity. We engage our own definition of the quality of repetition so that we observe and value the give and take of the process. The act becomes personal.


I return to drawing marks on a surface: I am not a doodler,
that’s the concern here. I would delete this piece and start again, but if I do that I will do it a little later. I doodle with materials, with objects that are cast off or lost. So if you doodle…..

Repetition Exercise #2: Doodling(using our hands as we listen.)

Take a spot and doodle for a while a repetition of points and lines and shapes, probably while attending to something else. I asked John if I could have his doodle after a meeting we attended. Some people better focus their auditory attention while doodling.

Set it aside, do some more; and look at it again later.
Try it as a bookmark. Use any shape or size.
Repeat the process on the other side. Doodle over doodles.

As close as I get is a tally card. I repeated marks to try and track a pattern about something else. In the process I didn’t use the same marks, but I did repeat the basic action of putting marks in their columns. I definitely can see the repetition in this process. I like the regularity and the irregularity of the pattern.

When faced with repetition, I immediately shift and set up some slight transformation. The way I play acknowledges the need to repeat while simultaneously altering the act, object or notion. So my playfulness enters as the response to the implied need for repetition.

Collecting similar objects strongly represents repetition. Here, too, in my collections the gathering reflects play because of the attention to the slight variations. These make the act engaging. I definitely play in the playground of the subtle novelty seeker. Discoveries and new ideas litter the path.

[I seek novelty.
(Two ideas catch my attention. One gets lost.)
Four types of personality factors come to mind.
Novelty seeking holds one corner.
Balance that by a need for familiarity.
This places soothing on a continuum between familiarity and novelty.
Seek soothing.

Stimulation is also present.
Sensation seeking represents a similar process as novelty.
Something can be stimulating in the subtlest ways.
So the novelty can express itself in pattern variation
rather than in strong physical experience.
Loud sounds and fast rides represent the common course of novelty seeking,
though dissecting difference could be novelty as well.

That quality pulls my attention.
Could someone else find a roller coaster soothing?
Does novelty and soothing intersect playfully?
A connection surfaces; does it relate to repetition?
I like to figure out how things connect.

Overhearing someone named Mark talk today,
speaking words about being a connector;
part of his endeavor includes making heart connections.
Does that have anything to do with repetition?
The link eludes me.



Do we connect with the heart?
Is that where soothing and stimulation meet?
Better walk around the block; walking and blocks lend themselves to repetition.
The blocks are building blocks from childhood.
The walks loosen a knot of thoughts that confound me.]

five pieces, and what they reveal: another one

Five pieces
Level 5 Pieces Repetition
re
pepet it
itition
s

let’s begin again;
in the process of repeatedly trying to capture the idea,
a few unexpected discoveries occur.

false starts of this section have more to do with a playful approach to repetition.
transformation signals play during repetition.
Mirroring transforms. So do subtractions and multiples. Transformations help us notice subtle changes.
The multiples have playful slight variations. So now we can begin a second beginning again.

When we make up something, we repeat an idea. The repetition in some basic sense reinforces itself. We could start with repeating ideas, words, or behaviors. The ideas could allude to these behaviors, while the words could describe these behaviors. Think about language and making things, Think about performance. Think about observing how something occurred.

Let me do something again. Let me rewrite this. Doing that creates repetition. Doing something again to make it more comfortable likely leads to an experience of mastery. Repetition mirrors something, doing something that you saw done. And I realize that in the doing, we always alter the process in some sense.

What about copying? Copying leads to the notion of transferring something. Something transferred requires recognition of the source or the trail that the something passes along. Entertain whence it comes.

Repetition Exercise #1 Mapping

Let’s map how we know something,
whom we had to know to know that next thing. Where we were. What else happened then.
Take an idea or fact and consider its source. Break it apart into components of knowledge. Pretend like you have a map in front of you and mark in details with reference to time and place. Nest other details in open spaces. Connect the ideas with line, dashs, dots. Block off some areas.
and annotate the source of these bits.
See how far back a line of an idea traces to some point in the past. It can fold back on itself.


As an example, I learned French in High School from Mrs. A whom I recently saw at a 30-year Reunion.
The word Souvenir entered my vocabulary.
I had to take French first in 7th grade where I remember my mother correcting my pronunciation.
I had trouble distinguishing between the “ou” and the “u” sounds.
I remember the word souvenir having a charm based on the word's exotic sound and length.
I almost remember the first time I wrote it.
I could say the word by six or seven before I could read or spell it.
Shall I write this story on a souvenir of a place like Niagara Falls?

That place also would have entered my early consciousness, though I only saw it in my early 20’s, well after the place name became fully grounded in my vocabulary.

Set up a memory trail around the repetition of a word or an idea or an object. Write it onto an appropriate or inappropriate surface.

Could the very language of the repetition chapter literally repeat itself at some point? That would annoy the proofreader in each of us. I remember rereading a line of a book several times until it dawned on me that I had entered a repetitive loop. I heard that biblical verses follow a structure based on repetition. I never checked, but learning uses repetition. Repetition until mastery precedes the sudden shift to another level of knowing. I think that shift represents play and the repetitions provide the preamble.

five pieces, and what they reveal: the first piece

I begin to notice that repetition and slight alteration are the elements of behavior that allow for playfulmaking.

Do that again!

laughter... I have just finished swinging a small child back and forth.

L-O-I
I-O-L


I imagine setting up a matrix made up of elements that I have collected or discovered. I arrange them in some kind of order by some repetitive sorting and there they are. Just so, inviting exploration. I strip back the behavior, it could be walking steps, it could be hammering nails, it could be sorting papers. It could be drawing lines or writing words. It could be ordering thoughts. Again the behaviors could be devoid of playfulness. I want to choose the playful way.


Repetition Exercise#1: Mapping
Repetition Exercise#2: Doodling
Repetition Exercise#3: Walking
Repetition Exercise#4: Worrying
Repetition Exercise#5: More Walking
Repetition Exercise#6: Familiarizing

I started this level so many times that I have stories about writing about repetition. I want someone else to playfully set up a matrix that contains these stories and ideas. Et Voila

iv/ seventh pocket

A final empty pocket

Can we ever be at the wrong place at the wrong time? When playing, don’t we always arrive just now and move to where next unfolds?

Mystery

The unclear possibility becomes quite useful when we feel trapped or limited in the process of living. Mystery allows us to attend to some alteration that makes something unexpected valuable. I never learned magic tricks, but I remember being told distracting and focusing attention accomplished the trick.

Maybe the biggest mystery is that life unfolds without tricks.

Mistakes

Certain mistakes have immediate value. They lead to some discovery we would have missed. When we play we pretty easily excuse mistakes and refocus.

Anticipating mistakes in order to prevent them may be inefficient.
We want more time to spend on interesting things the mistake introduces.

Sometimes I can catch the shadow of a mistake. Though more often than I wish were true I end up trying to anticipate and avoid "mistakes." It's more of a doomed role It is exhausting. That role shapes the internal message. Don't make a mistake.
In a manner of speaking we play this doomed part. Like so many games we play as adults, the rules have been misconstrued and the playfulness has been obscured.

Be drawn in by a mistake. That's a better rule.

If we turn this around then any choice we make provides a chance to explore an expected outcome. In the present moment of that exploration, many things happen simultaneously. We reclaim our right to make mistakes. We learn about unexpected things.
We discover a healing feeling from within that affirms an age-old truth that we know what interests us. And we have more energy to explore playfully this moment.

Flexible like branches in breezes.

iv/ sixth pocket

another empty pocket with a question, and this one has a hole in it.

How hard is it to notice that what we believe is a way of packaging our perception of the past and the future? When we play we deepen our connection to the present; and so past and future can fade and lose their hold.

Do possessions really matter? Is this why we lose things when we play? Does the belief in possessing loosen?

To enter the realm of play requires an active imagination. An intention to suspend certain rules of daily living helps. We have to navigate certain limits that we accept without thinking. The simple act of holding an improbable or unexpected outcome as possible shifts the way in which we interact with the world that holds up the more likely outcome. That outcome screams, “ I am what happens!” We propose a quiet meditative playful retort,“I will gently hold onto this improbability!”

The improbable constantly occurs. Not oddly at all, the improbable requires its own occurrence by definition. Our goal places increased awareness on this occurrence. Sometimes play requires siding with the improbable. Playing embraces the improbable.


Attributed Meaning

Most people still have memories of attachment to objects from childhood that hold greater meaning and value than an observer might attach. These objects have been labeled transitional objects. The expression unfortunately implies a transition out of childhood dependency into adult independent functioning. I have arrived at a different conclusion. Shame tricks us into letting go of the mystery that allows attachment. These objects serve as reminders that affirm our ability to cross over into the realm of make believe. This realm fills itself continually with potential solutions to the smallest concerns and the greatest threats to the world’s ecology. Child idealism often becomes an avenue to generate global solutions to problems that adults bogged down with details, fail to fathom.

If a clutched teddy bear can support an individual through inner turmoil, then… Our current society advances exploitation of resources and ostentatious displays of wealth and conspicuous consumption. Have we simply found a way to create vast teddy bears out of home furnishings and jewelry, out of cars and planes, out of boats and swimming pools without giving ourselves simple truly sacred objects? We had these objects by our side when we were young, and they didn't take up much room.

There is a hole in my pocket.


Val asked for a donation to benefit a Belly Acres silent auction; and I am thinking about a bag of a hundred found pennies for good luck. What will the label say? May all these found pennies bring you and everyone around you compassionate good luck and may they inspire generosity.

iv/ fifth pocket

I wanted to add an empty pocket here

Here’s an idea I carry around in my pocket. Are there any strangers, really? Or are there just people we don’t know yet and connections we haven’t discovered?

The improbable
When I travel I notice improbable situations. I see the same strangers repeatedly. It has become a personal point of honor to notice familiar strangers. I think I naturally notice a lot of details and I am not sure how many details other people notice. Do you notice details? If you travel do you run into the same people repeatedly? There is something about the improbable that is part of playing. I met five men hiking with one of their sons. They were provisioning a father son team that I had met three days earlier and again the prior day. What about the little I knew of the father and his son and the five men and the son of one of them led me to ask if they were hiking in to meet the former? I asked a friend if it were obvious to him? He said it never would have occurred to him to assume the connection or to ask after it.

This first example tends toward recognizing strangers. Another example was learning layer by layer that the stranger in front of me was someone I had known decades earlier. The string of questions which began as social pleasantry, veered toward a set outcome. This stranger across from me had to be a high school student in the class ahead of me with whom I worked on a project. Not recognizing the other created a strange perspective.



The Unexpected
Noticing the unexpected and including it in a worldview serves as a structure within play. Lightly holding onto observations of our environment helps increase our relationship with the unexpected. Trusting intuitive knowing helps. This could be called exercising the right hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere processes information spatially and may be responsible for making connections among random events so that they form meaning. In this manner we can arrive at knowledge without knowing all the details required to build that knowledge. Certainly part of living playfully develops that aspect of our mental process that allows us to see the whole picture without necessarily knowing many of the details. A hologram offers way to think of the process, where knowing one detail allows that bit of information to reconstruct the whole image. Playful experience has the potential to develop greater confidence in our intuition.

Making a detour through a friend’s yard to get back on track to where I was headed, I ran into a young man taking photographs of a cat in tree. I hadn’t noticed him when I turned in, and so, surprised I introduced myself and we talked about his name and how he was named after an ancestral scholar. I had run across the scholar’s name in a family tree and upon checking realized that ten generations back his foremother and my forefather had been siblings. He had to stand in the path that I hadn’t intended to take and I had to ask the series of questions I chose to discover this other trail through time.

iv/ fourth pocket

Histories in our pockets

Carrying something around in our pockets,
Nothing really,
but just something
to see where it fits.
It might just fit in a pocket.
A smooth stone, some found pennies, a bottle cap, several buttons a crumpled shopping list, a couple of rubber bands and a paper clip. I like the image of the parent who empties the pockets of the child’s clothes before putting them in the wash. What story did this token have? I tend to set things out to observe them, sometimes in a place; sometimes, no place. I stumble upon these tokens, maybe rearrange them, adding like to like, or an odd bit to a set of likes, and they evoke reverie. Try it or notice that you already do that, too.

We continuously come across cherished and worn objects that beg to release histories. These secrets of their use become encoded in the worn surfaces and chipped or broken corners. I have several rolling pins and some came from a neighbor’s home. She was over 90 when she died and her home was emptied and sold. I wondered how many pie-crusts and how many biscuits had come under these wooden cylinder. In an age where kitchen goods sold as antiques fill roadside warehouses, I wish that pie and muffin tins would recite stories, including overheard conversations or favorite recipes.




Tell the story of some object, simply and with some sense of humor, and let it spark someone else’s imagination. If no one is around to listen, write on a slip of paper and let it be a label for the object. Whose old worn tool is this is?

iv/ third pocket

Journey in my pocket finding a journal page after learning how to use the strike through function on the text i had chosen first.

January 11th, 2002 Puna Hawaii.
June 9th, 2009 Point Roberts, Washington

So can i call the soul the non-linear processor of the mind? Do I want to say that that is all there is to it? Norman Mailer said it might span life times. Is that necessary? Of course that is just the linear trying to exert some meaning. Clare said language dictates how we perceive. It is a form of control over our minds. We are brainwashed through conventions of language. We are socialized through language. We define our identity through language. Mostly through spoken language. The other languages of the world that span cultures and species are still operative. They are the non-linear probably not very verbal languages. Some will call them the languages of emotion or desire. I call them the languages of connection. They may be from my soul or from my heart. They are my animal languages. They are my animistic languages. I can speak to stones. They are the language of connection. They are about my desire to know and be known. I am just learning in this season to speak these languages more directly. When they are spoken they are literal and then linear. Even though they are clearly non-linear in origin. I have trouble with the linear speakers. I fear that they will label me as a tease or even worse as a threat. I am not really going anywhere. I am here already. I am simply playing my soul. So the work about connections makes more sense. Work about puzzles fits. The work about language indirectly touches on core beliefs. The work about layers and significance including the most recent revelation that of course as one penetrates deeper and deeper one is likely to end up much of the time passing through meaning back into ooze or chaotic molten substructure, or even through to the other side which rather than being some new or future or heavenly plane is just the back alley that runs behind the room we just entered on the most current quest for meaning. There are all these short stories about these phenomenon. I am always sensitive to them. The elephant parable about perception of the world. The entering the rooms of mystery deeper and deeper until you find yourself back out on the street. The meaning of life being that there is no meaning of life. The story of pessimism being a luxury that wastes the precious resources that we all have to create a vibrant world society which perpetuates itself and wages peace and holds the mystery of the present moment at the center of it’s spiritual practices.
If I succeed in writing a book about play, it will tell stories of intuition and serendipity, and present time. It will be fragments of a story about a world order that continually and playfully solves the most seemingly serious dilemmas of maintaining world peace. The wager is justice. A justice that isn’t fair but rather attends to the subtle differences of all organisms in a complex web, valuing the unfolding present moment. I think that some of the important instructions are about activities that impact least on our global resources and most on our purer quality of life. I think the stories I tell have to come from a level of storytelling excitement. There has to be room to fiddle with the outcome based on new threads that lend themselves to expression in the moment of telling. All these packages of found objects impacted by the creative machine of our commodities culture are stories about unraveling and savored memories. But are they about the present moment? They are only about something as they are playfully fitted together. Once they are fitted they are about the past again. They are about memory again. They are traces of something valuable that no longer exists. New constellations are unfolding. New relationships are being attended to and savored. Sometimes the old ones are holding an evocative power to fool us into believing that the past is more valuable than the present. This disservice is hard to address. All our acts of coveting objects of beauty for any other purpose than preservation of the delight they evoke is folly. I know this is true about the objects in the safe deposit box that are gold. There is no treasure greater than this breeze. Can my work communicate this? Or does my work have it’s own message that I keep trying to nudge toward this story. It might be that I am saying something quite different to different people and I only think I am speaking about these metaphors against scarcity and aggression. That would be disappointing on several levels. Do I ever become the recognized artist? Would I have anything to say after I say this piece? Will the work successfully alter the consumptive processes in time? Am I willing to proceed knowing they won’t? Which treasure is my consciousness to the greater world community?

iv/ second pocket

Nesting in my pocket

Some activities nest within others. The wonderful luxury of play reveals how with inner encouragement, one activity flows into and initiates another. Some activities beach themselves and simply end, leaving us open to choose the next action. Or we stop one activity and leave it and go on to another. In this manner the second activity nests in the first. The game of house cleaning performed this way connects unrelated activities. Although chaos can tip the balance away from productivity, there are some enchanting aspects. Generally time loses linearity. Sometimes a lot more gets done in a short amount of time. Sometimes a difficult or noisome task abruptly reaches completion. Frequently a missing component of some project unexpectedly appears. I like to think of this as the return of the missing sock. I have literally chuckled when some missing hardware appears in an unexpected location and fits the need to complete a task that I have repeatedly postponed. Today I am getting rid of all sorts of recyclable paper from drawers: many years of paper. I have found a few keepsakes. I am ready to tackle the next desk. Did, though didn't find any treasures.

I found an old lock mechanism again in a drawer. It was in the house when I moved in eight years ago. I like this object. I don't know where it came from. I didn't notice that it had one bolt that released the handle until two days ago. It feels hand fabricated. Yesterday I mounted it on the slider bathroom door. I drilled a single hole and in half an hour had the handle in place with the lock mechanism displayed on the door exterior. Hanging that door took two years. Michael did it while I was away. He said it would be simple, if i brought him a 36inch track kit. Tiling the bathroom took several years. Dina and her father did that and put in a few irregular creative squares with my encouragement. I really like the tile details and the brass handle. And I like a new idea for display nooks. There's a bit of sawdust to clean up on the next cleaning round.

What I would invite you (dear reader) to do at this point is to take on a postponed task and see if it can be shaped playfully, using intuition, timing and lightness. What happens?

iv/ in one pocket

Be amused and entertained by what tools develop out of what is at hand. It pleases me that the lack of some implement has led me to some alternate playful approach to an activity that I never would have discerned without the detour of inconvenience.

Consider.

I collected ocean fishing lures after a beach storm. I was going to make something, but I just got interested in the pieces. I wanted to make beach charms out of feather and bones and shells. I had forgotten to put needle-nose pliers in my pocket. I ended up using rough sea stones to create a frictional cutting edge. I remember thinking that I had rediscovered the predecessor of scissors.

3; third entry: folding

Oh okay, a third one. I am folding time (iii)

Sunday Dec 28 2008
Decide that play uses what you have and goes from there toward wherever comes next. That’s a big piece of how to explore the territory. It isn’t doing without, it is very much doing with.



Thursday Sep 17 2009
Staged the first Lily Point rock stack with and for the walking group after our regular 45 minute morning walk.




Sunday Jan 15 2010
What about Froebelgabe? Explore and decide that the yarn balls are now beach worn stones and the columns are the aged pylons upon which the cannery once stood, and the loosed logs are the sticks and the beach is the stage: wood stone water, discovery and insight. Doing with.

3; entry two: motion

So Okay a second one (ii)

The machine was out of gas, even though I had just filled it with gas;
and when I finally refilled it, it ran. I had made up a series of ungrateful stories about how this had occurred,
but the moment I will savor was later on the phone - an interpretation -
hearing how the lawn mower is mad at me for letting that other fellow mow my lawn this summer.
Lying on my back on the sofa,I kicked my legs in the air and laughed freely. Who behaves this way? Who gives permission to be playful in the body, dancing and prancing when feelings arise in our limbs? It seems in our nature not to be still creatures all the time. Some times be still, sometimes be motion,
dodge the balls that are lobbed across the evening sky when an adolescent,
playing among a circle of neighborhood children.

My brother has something he does in the kitchen when he discovers a big new genealogical link in the family hedge, his wife calls it the cousin dance.

To movement I respond stillness, to stillness, movement. That is the idea that accompanies this morning. And layers with these two previous thoughts. We were walking in rainy mist and the walking and earlier stretching accompanied a quietness in my mind. A peacefulness settled. We were cloud walking.

3; entry one

So okay three journal entries (i)
Friday Dec 26ishth 2008 or several days before (created Sunday Dec 14th, recreated some Sunday Dec 20ishth, 2009)


Let’s just say that since you were about ten, you wanted to write a book, and let’s say every few years after that you would start some writing or collect some idea for a book. And then let’s just suppose you got older and decided to take time off from your work to write a book. Let’s assume that you aren’t really a writer, but more the kind of somebody who likes to jot down ideas. In fact you have been filling volumes of paper pages with ideas since you finished high school.

Now granted you’re a playful sort, so you have decided about a decade ago that the book will be about how to be more playful in your everyday adult life, it follows that the intention is for the book to capture some of the playfulness in your life and to encourage others who want to be more playful to be so immediately, with every turn of the page so to say.

Looking for some documents, I came across a file marked ideas for my book. This is not a recent file.

What I hope to communicate is a sense of playfulness that informs much of my life. It isn’t fun and games, so much as an attitude and a bit of humor. I savor creative unexpected solutions. I like the feeling that finding-something-that-will-work-for-what-is-needed evokes. As a collection these feelings refer to the personal solutions to dilemmas that face a grown man.

I believe most humans can choose to be more playful and that we could enjoy a lot more of what happens in life, if we made this choice.

seconds: note thirteen

Play is like flirting. Maybe it even is flirting. It let’s you meet a side of someone that feels alive. There is the promise of fun and connection. We want to be around these people, we feel better in their presence. They seem to know something about living that we want to discover inside us. And they sense we know it, too.

This completes a circle of notes. Soon, I'll start again at a beginning.

seconds: note twelve

Um.


Well I had a pleasant morning waking before dawn and writing a few journal pages and then stretching in a few yoga poses and then arranging some of the game boards around the upstairs room, where i am planning a display of a series of small boxes.

I'm going to invite Tom, a fellow down the road to come and explore the boxes. If it goes well, I'll invite a few more people one at a time to see how they respond.


As i walked over to have breakfast and spend my morning on line checking up on medical research, investments, email, phrase origins and the blog, i resumed my humorous collection of detritus. Yesterday i gathered a handful of rusty smashed bottle caps.(to put with a bunch of found change.) So far today it is a few aluminum can pulls, a dozen small yellow stones painted when the road line got painted, a small piece of plastic which i will throw away, and a handful of bananas, which weren't on the road, which i arranged on the hood of John's car. By this time it being not that much after sunrise.

Four English house sparrows accompany my reverie.


Um.

seconds: note eleven

Eleven

No eleventh note. I have fallen into a hole. A hephalump hole from memories of winnie the pooh.

How come I don’t know how to engage the playful side of other people?

Well, before I posted the last note a friend sent me a link to a site where a young boy played the ukelele and sang an English song. Only he doesn’t speak English, which only added to the layers of cuteness. An acquaintance joined me on the porch where I was sitting watching and writing and she passed along a friend’s aphorism. Cute feeds us. I thought about little babies, new to life, reaching, or simply resting. Somewhere in the midst of this I heard a young child playing a word game where she repeated some refrain. She was out on the street and I could barely hear her. She seemed to be both playing with someone and playing alone.

I think of the wonderful things people say in childhood as they are learning the way into language before all the rules apply. I suppose these are the wobbles in the spoken word. “Whose this is this is?” my daughter once said. I kept repeating it, until I could write it down. I was charmed. I kept that slip of paper for many years as a token to remind me of the layers of cute.

I have been wondering about the solitary nature of how I play. How I am amused by how things fit, or almost fit. How they remind me of something else or almost remind me. How I am pulled to make language wobble a bit, keeping meaning.

What was that hole I fell in? It was the report card category called "plays well with others." I am sure I always got a check mark. My brother didn’t always. When I spend time observing the habits and choice of spoken content of others, I rarely notice a quality of playfulness. How do we hide from our playful nature?

I wish there were a playful way to object to a lack of playful intent. I’d like to have some quip like the friend’s friend’s aphorism that melted the resistance. I’d like to be the person in the crowd who politely objects. Not enough playfulness here; but, of course, it is not in objecting at all, that’s just digging in deeper.

I’ll just have to keep playing and improvising, saying yes. After listening awhile I’ll have to charm the snakes out of the trees, as a friend said. There are many avenues to playfulness.

But I’ve come to admit that as an adult, I play by myself.

seconds: note ten

What is it about my spoken voice that gets left out of my written word?
How come I can charm and convince and even lead with my spoken word, lines that simply flow out of my mouth from my mind; but I can’t accomplish these feats with the written word?
Sometimes I like the sound of my written word, but I can’t figure out the discrepancy. I am equally surprised when my spoken words produce laughter. I am delighted but unaware of the source of humor.

I was asked to make an announcement at a gathering of artists and I was struck that the people who were speaking in front of the group used what I would call a timid voice and far too many words to convey the point. I didn’t have a timid voice; I spoke succinctly with authority. Not because I felt like an authority, but so people could hear over the hum of creative conversing. I felt this as a form of translation, as though the timid were speaking a foreign language. I began, “Let me translate that for you.” The room pealed with laughter. Was it the unexpected frame and the charm in my stance? Add this discrepancy to my wobble collection.

seconds: note nine

The surprise in play
is how captivated I become
by some detail. In this case
it is the wobble.
After all the word play can refer
to that little give and take
within the machinery of gears
that mechanically allows for the whole thing
to get going.
I am curious about a collection of wobbles.
They are my affirmations of play.
The earth wobbles;
the moon wobbles;
the north pole wobbles;
and the surface of the sun wobbles.
And my,
as I try and accomplish some task,
memory wobbles.
I am so pleased with all these wobbles.
The tide wobbles.
The splinter in my finger wobbles.
Some wobbles are miniscule.
Some wobbles are enormous,
but in the realm of wobbles,
wobbles tend to add something
without destroying the integrity
of the material or the system.
Maybe that’s what I like about them,
and maybe that’s at the heart of some ineffable explanation.
Maybe.

a note on the image: this is a wobble totem. I made it over a decade ago at the Eno River Festival, Durham, North Carolina, out of a small worn piece of river wood, 2 rusty iron washers and a bit of fishing line found as I walked around. I placed the washers around the wood and threaded the line through the washers to catch a hook of wood. I continued walking around the gathering, dangling this pendulum of sorts.

seconds: note eight

How odd, I clearly was close to something and it evaded me. Even though I had a sense of it, it didn’t stay. But like a lost thread of a dream, elusion stands. I don’t know when it will return. I am aware of waiting. Well, I wait, then. I wake the next morning and here it is; it is a sigh. A breath that reorients me to what is in front of me, around me, what offers to engage me. I am here. Sighs are sometimes interpreted as impolite, so we are socialized to stifle them. But I think it realigns our inner and outer worlds, or can do that, given a chance. It is a type of mini-meditation. So yesterday was about sighing and being present.

Yawns aren’t about being tired but are probably a realignment of muscle groups. Sometimes we only let ourselves realign at the end of the day. And why are yawns contagious? Can we hear them? Perhaps it isn’t visual.



Sigh

seconds: note seven

One afternoon in my last semester in design school, I came back to the studio to work on what was not working. I joined two other classmates. I don’t remember how our attention fell on Lottie’s sculptural solution to our assignment. But this women who didn’t seem to have the same attitude to design had arranged on her desk the most beautiful collection of foam-core surfaces that met the challenge of the assignment in a way that was so simple and understated it took my breath away. One of us called it to the attention of the others. Enviously we admired the structure. It dawned on us that perhaps she hadn’t yet attached the elements together. There was a tension and energy in the room and a sudden burst of laughter as we disbelievingly finally touched the structure to test our perception. And then the whole hypothesis dissolved as each one of us through gales of laughter realized this was just a discarded pile of material. I laughed so hard I had to hold onto the door jam to get my side to relax. And then we stopped laughing, like you do when you can’t stop in grade school, as Lottie came in with a new pristine sheet of foam-core from the supply store.

The memory still fills me with such playful delight and joy. I sense perception dancing, casting a spell over the room. That sense of each of us drawn magically right along on each other’s coattails. I hope we didn’t hurt her feelings. I can’t imagine how we could have explained the event. I think we three just went away playfully transformed.

seconds: note six point sevenfive

6 and 3quarters

In the course of what I lightly call writing my book some amusing playful resistant twists occur. I was writing about repetition as a method of being playful. The first draft got deleted by mistake. I slightly unnerved. The second draft seemed to miss the point. So did the third. I noticed that the playfulness entered through slight variations that occurred when I repeated something. I had done that in writing the chapter over and over again.

I stopped on the point and stacked rocks on the old fishing pier pilings. I liked how a few rocks could form a stone cap. A series of stone caps were conversing with each other; they observed the waves and the coming and going of the tidal water. I played. There are still some pieces of metal from a previous game I played of metal placing. Along the route home I collected a few beer cans as a civic duty and ended up spilling some liquid on my bag and sweater. Played washing bags and rags to get rid of the smell, though back in the yard I discovered a neighbor had dropped off a shredder from the hospice thrift shop across the border. I was very confused, and thought someone else had brought it, as it was already in my kitchen, when I met him at the door. I came from the back yard and had just moments before been at the kitchen door myself, as apparently had he. He insisted he had bought it for me, as I had asked him. What also confused me was that I had asked him if he had one. And he said he hadn’t.


Play doesn’t happen as an imagined activity; it is happening all the time as it unfolds. It is the work of my eye and my hands, stacking or weaving or placing something in relation to something else. And my goal without doubt is to save the planet bit by bit by recycling everything we throw away, turning it into something that is reexamined, recycled into something that amuses, until it can be reused for something else.

seconds: note six

From within comes resistance to being told anything. Two paths cross. “No, I won’t.” and “No, no, no.” How odd to write this and sense the familiarity with how a friend reacted to an exercise I suggested in a previous draft. Here it is, her response coming at me from within. I know this stance. It isn’t playful, but can be played with. I see so many of us still as youngsters pouting and all but stamping our feet, saying I won’t play with you. What I am not saying is that you are hurting my feelings.

The first path has to do with presentation of a request. I have to slip it by my judging mind. See if in some way you would like to do this sometime. When it fits somewhere in your plans or your activities, try it. Feelings are hurt, but then there’s not wanting to miss the out.

The second path is like running up against a solid wall of opposition. I will not and never will. In this position something has to dissolve and be transformed. The entire play universe recreates itself. To do this I imagine throwing myself down on the floor as if to tantrum. I do just that, on the carpet. It seems melodramatic and surprisingly a little fun. I end up looking at the dust and cobwebs under the bed. I play dead. After I play dead a partially reconstructed universe forms.

Right now, between reading in several books and jotting down these thoughts, I give up, and play dead. It might last a while. I can sense the resistance to the project of living my life and am curious to discover any path of return to engage my playful nature.

Even the tone of my writing voice seems distant and disengaged. Am I lecturing myself? Some separation settles in and that calls forth the tantrum.

This is the very nature of it. I am not remembering a time like this. I am experiencing it right now. And in a way I am resisting it even in describing it.

This is when the event jumps up from the page and takes over and shuts the reflection down. Hey, I’m really not playing. I am not. You can observe all you want, the transformation won’t occur, the playground is closed, period. Go take a nap.

seconds: note five

I HOPE this is working… Ahh, self-doubt, now there is something to play with.

I WAKE at five and get up. I write in my journal until half past and link small sharks to eavesdropping. I am looking for a playful approach in and out of self-doubting. Is dissatisfaction a component of self-doubt? Or is self doubt some creeping dissatisfaction?

I WRITE with the (desntist’s) dentist’s office pen. The pharmaceutical company’s pen ran out of ink yesterday, it had covered many pages and possibly several months, scrawling on both (dies0 sides of a continent. I sometimes think of pens as having greater meaning than convenient writing implements. The pen being mightier than the sword, we hope; it is a souvenir of the time spent writing. It bears no responsibility for the content, but with a little rummaging, it can be drawn into the story. It came from somewhere. It had placement value as someone in the advertising world says. With the question of big pharma’s influence on the prescribing practices of physicians, it has weight. That pen had a nice weight that made it a good writing companion. In some ways the writing was spoken, the pen standing in for a listener. It never speaks, but takes note. It might make an odd mark under my influence. And it can refuse to go on, as it did yesterday, running out of ink amid a flurry of discomfort. It can be almost like a little receiver. And then as I write on the computer, I am writing to whom through what? The keyboard is some modified souvenir pen.

SO WHERE are the small sharks? They are in the water swimming around unseen and not threatening the swimmers on the surface. The small sharks were with an expansive school of small fish. I can see turmoil, fish swimming deep below. And can we hear the sharks evoking fear? Are they pens or swords? And even if I can’t eavesdrop on them, I can eavesdrop on conversations about them. I can learn day by day that it wasn’t Jeff who saw them, nor was it Arthur, but Tuko. She swam earlier. She’s more elusive. Her placement on the beach requires intentional tracking. She’s also an artist and a neighbor. Ah, artist is where the doubt dwells. Call yourself an artist and the pen stops writing. What did you say? The whole conversation pivots. If several were eavesdropping the room gets silent. Perhaps she will converse with me about small sharks, or about sharks and eavesdropping or about something entirely different that will lead my creative thread to some satisfactory pass toward further creative constructions.

SO WHAT about writing earlier in the morning like this? Will that allow me to have my say about something that interests me that I can carry around during the day and bring out as I meet people at the beach? Here, this is what I’ve been thinking about. What have you been thinking about? It isn’t for everyone. Some people will feel silenced by the perceived complexity of my thoughts. I am prone to scatter. I am also prone to collecting those pieces. Is it complicated? Mostly like an overheard conversation, it is banal. Misheard conversations might be an angle to pursue.

AND HERE are the first birds, I wondered for several weeks how early the birds start. They splice their voices into the frog medley. If they ate the frogs they could be the small sharks among the school of fish. It is at least a quarter hour before sunrise when they start. It is the cardinals first and then will come the doves. I guess I have been awake several mornings. Ask me later and I might not be so sure. Hear the doves? Doves

seconds: note four and a half

While driving across country this spring I initially stopped at every, and then when that was too frequent, every other rest stop. Somewhere in Minnesota stopping put me on the shore of a lake in the Mississippi river where muscles grew prolifically. It became the center of the shell button industry, which subsequently vanished when the shells were over-harvested and buttons could be made of other materials. Do these old buttons have something to do with that experience?

I found an old red World War II ration token in the bunch of buttons, and a scissor sharpener, and an old hem stripper.

Two summers ago driving across the country and wanting to make a souvenir of my trip, I stopped in Zanesville, Ohio. Outside of town I met a guy selling tokens of lots of things, including UPA blue and red ration tokens like this one I found in the button tin. I hadn’t seen them before and had asked what they were. I bought a few other things with local significance. Now another one of these tokens appears in a mess of buttons. Would I have known what it was or taken the time to find out? Why does that matter? I don’t know yet. It has an evocative power that informs a stubborn attachment to matter.


The truth is that I still don’t know what the button collection is about: the old buttons with their threads still attached and their discoloration and their shades of off-white. Someone over time buttoned those buttons into buttonholes. And unbuttoned them and lived and played and laughed and cried, and most of them came from shells and maybe one of them came from a lake formed in the Mississippi river in Minnesota, part of an industry that formed and developed and disappeared. A trace remains on a sign in a rest stop parking lot. I like knowing about this


I am drawn to write this text on a surface; perhaps, the interior of a container of buttons.

seconds: note four

Play seems to depend on open unstructured time. I can’t say I am going to play for a set amount of time. Usually I just go out to play without a clear idea of where I am going or what I am going to do. I need some kind of extra time to fit the next piece into the puzzle. When I sat in the corner chair and my mother proposed activities, I rejected them. Then after a while I got up and left to go do something. Mom brought me to a threshold. Thinking about it now, the sound of her voice and her presence may have been what I needed.

Thinking isn’t what is going on in the interim; I’ll tentatively call it rearranging.

Regard it as a stance of the inner mind that is sensitive to a myriad of possibilities and doesn’t arrive at a decision by making them, in the sense that we are trained to think.

(I don’t really know what I am going to do. This is some other way way of knowing; it is not exactly making a decision. When I am attuned to it, in my play (worrls) world, the flow of ideas and the impulses to complete actions happen like riding a wave. You get on one and then ride it and it takes you some (whenre) where where you ride the next wave.)

If you want to be open to what comes next, you have to get out of the way, and you have to stop proposing choices based on a list of likely scenarios. Maybe the improbable is about to occur. You can propose, and I do sometimes, but it doesn’t seem playful. Be sensitive to which activity opens a space. Then let wonder and some other sense of order take over. This can sound passive to an activity-minded individual, though I experience a swirl of activity unfolding. This part of the universe is anything but passive. We are the activity, even, if it is hours yesterday sorting old buttons.

With those buttons is it their age that catches my attention? Is it their history as a form of value? For me they evoke game tokens. Does everyone have an image of a button jar or box?

seconds: note three point three three three

WHERE did I write, “I’m backwards. I’m backwards.” The speaker was the youngest Burnstyn child. Mom would know his name. Did I like the sound of his delight or was it being told the story that framed my attention and the adults laughing? had he been playing like this before we came? He was in the driveway of their new house. It was my first visit and I was not yet seven.
I want to use that for an explanation for how to read the blog, which of course starts at the current entry and moves back to where I started. I look at my dozen postings and think how awkward. We come to everything backwards. We join in now and then construct back to some point that serves as a beginning and then feel like we are moving forward. How do we manage this? Is it like turning everything on our retina upside down? How many ways of playing are really partially incomplete alterations of perception?
Is there some button to push that reverses what is there?
What is it about buttons and the notion of pushing something to set it into motion? Buttons are attachments; they join layers of fabric. They are a catch. If I don’t do more writing will I have things to post and if I just post a page a day after what period of time will I have said everything I want to say about playing? I guess I’ll find out.
There's the wobble. I'm backwards.

seconds: note three

Play alters my sense of time. In play I accept a layering of time as experience unfolds. Of course, I could reorder these vignettes and place them in chronological order, but that is not my experience of play. Even if everything in my life happened along an ordered time line, the layers of my experience draw from disordered time. The advantage we each have is that we can, if we choose, draw on any developmental milestone we already have accomplished. This allows a type of creative flexibility. We can approach a set belief and alter it. We can explore fluid truths. This includes regressing back to a time when we hadn’t learned something yet.

I am reminded of my elementary school self. “I don’t need to know that yet,” was what I told my parents when they tried to teach me something about what we were learning in school. And please don’t ask me when or how I learned read. I was raised on a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read; and to this day I think that book was more about can’t reading.

Now I like to read as many as seven books at once. I discovered that the chaos of several stories layered together often produced unexpected connections among the stories or the plots, or the characters, or the authors, or the settings. This makes me sense the flexibility of truth. When I first heard a Greek Myth retold from the perspective of a victim, supporting a completely different sense of what had occurred, I was spell bound. This revealed the flexibility of truth. Both sides from their perspective were faithful to their truth; and these truths were completely contradictory. How amazing a discovery, truth was not unitary. It formed and reformed around perspective and background. Truth had playful qualities.

seconds: note two and a bit

***
Welcome to the ‘waste bin’ of my story
Scattered about are the italicized Appendices of false starts, branches that proved awkward, some part of which I just couldn’t let go. I created a realm into which to put these pieces that might appeal to some other inner state. I am charmed by the idea of making these words into strings of tiny marks, the suggestion of sense.

I like the notion of a place for left over pieces, because when I play I try to use every little scrap. I use what someone throws away. I’m drawn to what has been cast off. From the start I have recognized the scrap bins of others as a good source of material.

I begin again. I restructure. This time I have moved my initial thoughts to the back of the book to create an original appendix so that the book opens as an invitation to play, rather than a series of thoughts about playing.

I feel disappointed when I can’t play first.

seconds: note two

I have a sore wrist. I sorted buttons from a tin I have had around for a year, sitting on two yoga cushions in my bedroom. It is an old yellow and red slightly dented cylinder advertising a cracker company. I had my doubts about button sorting. I dismissed the activity several times, but the invitation persisted. I can sense that I had to sort those buttons to continue playing the vast puzzle of my life. These buttons now sit divided into four sets. I touched every one of probably a thousand old bits that haven’t been touched in years. 40 years easily, I imagine. That takes me back to a time when I was in elementary school.

The transition from school to home was difficult. I don’t know why. But a habit developed that I sat in a chair in the corner of the kitchen in the afternoon and talked to my mother. There may have been an accounting of my day. There may have been some complaints.

The main idea as I have come to see it was my request for help with what was going to happen next. I had to go through some portal. Her words and my words created a spell, rather than solved a problem.

I wanted help deciding what I would like to do, though in retrospect I didn’t really.

I might have been waiting for her to reveal some secret of our past that would make everything make sense, or perhaps I was waiting for her to reveal some magic ability that would banish doubt and anxiety.

I didn’t think the things my mother proposed were what I wanted to do, but...

Eventually I would get off the chair and go off to play until dinner. At that time I had my own room and a closet with toys. Sometimes I rearranged the closet.