7th floor vii)imaginary tea room

“Where does this go?” I wrote in the margin. The margin tempts the page to have an extended edge, a river of open space that exists in parallel to the page. In all my attempts to include margin notes, do I try to dissolve the edge of the page so that another story blends into this experience? Some readers quietly delight to resolve the duality of the printed page and the margin with margin notes of the thoughts evoked while reading. It could even be marks, lines and squiggles. Still others might resolve this quite differently. The invitation stands.

I had to stop writing in a book when a five year old visited; he was just learning not to write in books. I had forgotten that rule and quickly put the project away until later. I have a weakness for children’s books with crayon annotations. In the small community where I spend summers the library is a community social center, so it is not uncommon to have loud greetings and conversation. I found myself wondering if the silent library will become something described historically.


Maybe I do need a point of view ad absurdum. Comparing apples and oranges. Like not favoring universal heath care because of the level of abuse. That’s a given in any social system where education is lacking, and scarcity promoted. The right to equal care in a wealthy country should not be negotiable. One is an apple the rest are oranges. The arguments are absurd decoys of reason. We fail each other. I’m sorry.

7th floor vi)imaginary sportswear department

Boundaries

The exploration of points of view and the resolution of dualities lead me to boundaries. Boundaries become porous as we dissolve dualities. We can decide on the boundary conditions for what we believe. In play we reset the boundary. As we think about a duality, we decide where on the continuum we cross over from one condition to the other. Sometimes we forget that there always exists a point next to the one just considered. Thus we end up with a situation where we include that one or we decide not to. If not, then we have the boundary. Some boundaries tend toward greater subtlety. Some create a proverbial brick wall. We need boundaries to help us distinguish what we mythically establish as our self or ours. It helps sometimes to playfully let go of this duality of mine and not mine.

(Mind and Not Mind: As a child I couldn’t hear the difference between the words mind and mine. I mixed them up, usually using mind when I meant mine. I remember the embarrassment and helplessness that I felt when this occurred. Now it seems more curious that the distinction took so long to form in my brain.)

It helps us notice that in a way everything belongs to everybody already, even if we like to think of it as only ours. If everyone interrelates as human or even as alive or even chemically of this planet, then from one perspective, we create a single world organism and everything we own exists as part of the world resource. So what each of us has, all of us have as well.

The duality disappears and so does the boundary. Paradoxically I construct a situation where the boundary creates a helpful resolution. I seek something related to fences making good neighbors. In some cases my immediate surroundings help me settle in to write. I create an artificial state where writing occurs and step into it. I set up a duality to establish a location for action. I have the boundaries to help me structure my perspective, I can play with the boundary and see what new effect I can accomplish.

Boundaries create funny lines. I found myself reinforcing boundaries when using the metaphor of a river in a young person’s book report. The river metaphorically separated good and bad, past and future, hope and despair, and even life and death. But which river does that?

Duality Exercise #6: In and Out of Bounds

Write about a memory of a time associated with getting out. Write a description along the edge of some page or object. Getting out could be literal or metaphoric. Let it follow the edge; let the text butt up against the edge. It can trail over the edge. It can line by line approach the edge and break up words. The letters can squeeze up at the edge. Now imagine a riverbed of text. Write it on another part of the surface. Let it separate one region from another. Decide what idea the river separates. Write about getting in, or staying in, or what is left inside the boundary below the river of text. The text can even flip to the other side, crossing another boundary. Add a time and place for the memory and for the present.


I sense the river could also dry up. When dried up it becomes a depression in the land where water once flowed nourishing both sides of the bank. What do our boundaries delimit? Do they become the illusions by which we reinforce our faith in the game of life? Do we use them in such a way that the game matters and we matter. When we become concerned about personal meaning, do these beliefs perform a service? They also cause tremendous suffering. We may want to simply experience the river and its in-between-ness.

7th floor v)imaginary infants and toddlers department

Something about the polarity of close up and distant forms a threshold of play. Perspective and distance offer a guide to remind us that something can seem insignificant at a distance while all encompassing close up. In fact with the art of worrying, something distant can become so distorted that we can’t disengage from it. It gets psychologically sticky .Given its meaning in the scope of our life can help us realize that it didn’t matter at all. Or that it fails to represent the interesting part of our life. Some other little understanding we had that connected us to another person, although insignificant close up can begin a whole cascade of events of significance.

Duality Exercise #5: Friendship Map

Jot down the earliest friends and through whom we met them. Maybe include the location or setting. Go forwar Continue until everyone we know connects into the network. Then we can see on our map how everyone connects. Some will make double links. Some will have disappeared though without them others would probably not have entered. We have constructed a friendship map. Think about where and how this map can reside. I think in a conversation with a stranger they can quietly enter my map, so there really aren’t any strangers. See the fifth pocket blog entry.

Sometimes we have to go backwards to get the sense of the flow forward. Take any friend and trace their lineage. A line of acquaintances for Leia follows. It runs back to walking mornings from my house at sunrise in winter starting in 2004, talking to a stranger on the red road who always wore a hat, which runs back to Brad Lewis and the house back behind mine which I visited with Angus in 2003. From Angus at night bowling in Hilo back to Dwight, and back to the Kalani retreat in 1998 and then back to Max who encouraged me to attend and then back to the ticket to the Independent party where I met him in Durham in 1996, the ticket coming from my about to be ex-wife whom I met in 1981through Kate whom i met dancing in Chapel Hill in 1978 and then to Jean and Dick teaching folkdancing in Raleigh in 1970 and then Laurie and then Glenn and then Larry and Danny the summer before I started 9th grade in 1968, and their mother and my mother and my father’s job in North Carolina and my birth to my parents in southern California in 1955.

And as I notice, it is far more complicated than I would like at first and it introduces such a pleasure at seeing each event drawing support from the previous one. In fact I put down the book to write this and it is the book of which Leia spoke to me on a recent walk. So that the ideas and objects of our life are also part of these threads crossing time and space. d adding friends met because of other events in our life and whom we met through them.

Once I have this line, I can spin from it many other individuals and I have to extend sections of it to include other events that might have seemed small at the time to open into a major part of what has become my life. There could be a curious effect of tapering or dampening parts to redirect life toward other action.

So now I see that there are a series of ways to find create a friendship map. And there is a curious sense of the value of the map. I wonder if anyone else would do this for everyone they remember. Would they take the time to fill in details so that the map described the life it shapes and the life by which the map is shaped?

Seventh floor iv)imaginary cosmetics department

Duality Exercise#4: Outer Genius

To fashion a tribute to the genius within each one of us, we will need to search our memory for anything we thought or someone mentioned as special about us. It doesn’t have to be specific and we don’t have to agree. Just take that factor and choose something we always want to change about our self whether or not another agreed with us. Take something to represent a literal small token of each of these aspects or remembered stories. Choose an object, an expression written on a surface or a little sketch. Literally bind these pieces together. Use thread or some other filament. Think of this as an ornament. Go and hang it up somewhere in the world. Select a place of attention or a least traveled path. Leave the ornament there, and see when it comes into awareness. It marks a path of alchemical genius. After all who says whether what others value and what we fail to value holds true importance in the universe. Sometimes we hope so; sometimes we definitely hope not. Make margin notes on this process throughout a year. Marriages take time to transform.

7th floor iii)imaginary school supplies department

Some people label playing with opposites and wedding dualities the essence of genius. I don’t believe geniuses label it as genius. I think they just think in this playful way. I think they enjoy the tension between the expected and the unexpected. They attend to some detail that attracts attention A seemingly unimportant detail repeatedly overlooked begins a cascade of interesting ideas or phenomenon. On this plane, we have left the predictable rules behind in favor of altered perspectives.

What we assign to genius might be a set of principles that we all could practice. My list includes the following.
-new juxtapositions
-altering time or place axes
-making simple comparisons, the heart of metaphor
-applying a foreign concept to a familiar situation
-applying a simple concept to foreign situation
-noticing an underlying false assumption and correcting it
-understanding a principle from another context
-following an intuitive insight
-persevering
-experimenting
-redefining impossible as improbable and selecting a bias to increase probability

Duality Exercise #3: Inner Genius

A foundation for our own inner genius encourages us to think more openly. We too quickly allocate the playfulness of a genius’ mind to them, excluding ourselves. For each of the examples above, dust off a memory of a discovery about life. Include in the list things we learned later represented a distortion of truth. I think geniuses treat errors fairly leniently. The error simply invites us back into the process of discovery. In this case playfulness serves as a way of holding simultaneous perspectives of the known universe. That universe becomes expansive or contracted depending on what experience engages us. Or we could say by where we feel our breath. By definition this represents a dynamic wave of awareness into which we check in and out depending on our level of engagement.


Now turn this list of real or imagined discoveries into a little chart. Annotate the chart with some related or unrelated detail about when the discovery occurred. Set up a simple genius chair. A favorite chair will do nicely. Place the reminder sheet under the cushion. No cushion? Then tape it or attach it in some other way to the chair. Invitation: use this chair for reverie.

Here's how i started my chart, I make them up.
-new juxtapositions: plastic toy collections by color
making smoothies out of frozen bananas
-altering time or place axes: numbering sequential journal pages;
stopping professional work to write this decade long oevre
-making simple comparisons, the heart of metaphor
comparing myself to a wave on the sea...

7th floor ii)imaginary appliances department

Duality Exercise#2: Polarity

Take a familiar polarity, black and white, good and bad, etc. Line it up on a continuum from most so to most the opposite. Now consider some aspect of reality that intersects the continuum and that slices it along that new direction.

For example, let’s take some found object and play with it with the intent to transform it by marrying it with an opposite. We might take an unused packaged object and remove it from its package. Find an almost used up similar object and repackage it. Repackage it attentively so that the caged worn element offsets the new packaging. Wrapping could serve as the alternate axis that unites and resolves the new and old object duality.

What could we do with black and white? Collect objects of varying shades of grey and place them in a container that has only black and white marks on it. Write with a black marker one aspect, let’s say the collection time of each object and write with a white out marker the location of the find. Consider the value of the object by adding one colored object. In color theory value derives from pigment, while shade grades from black to white. The colored element shifts the axis. The time and space continua hold white and black in some balance.

How about reworking good and bad?

On a relativistic level we may have noticed that from someone’s perspective the bad event serves a purpose that someone considers not bad and for others the good event serves a purpose that they consider not good. In fact for a larger and larger group of people the events have varying degrees of goodness. We need to spend a lot more time exploring these degrees of goodness, if we want to effectively instigate and support peace.


An educator likes to remind parents that when children fight over an object the best refocusing solution involves grabbing the object and running with it. This offers the children the opportunity to turn their united focus on retrieving the object. Now surrendering the object redraws the lines of alliance. Although no proponent of war or disaster, most survivors of disasters and major conflict report stories of deep connection as the community refocuses priorities on survival. The rules shift and they transform the duality.

7th floor i)imaginary home furnishings department

The mind creates dualities. The mind tries to help us discern perspective by creating dualities. The Buddha regrets that the mind succeeds so thoroughly in this endeavor. He hopes we appreciate that we imagine these dualities. However, most of us commit deeply to thinking and believing in the strands and veils of polarity. We believe in either one side or the other.

On this plane At this point we get to play with this aspect of our own life. Playfulness brings contrasting perspectives into proximity. We juxtapose contrasting views. In some cases the duality actually dissolves. And with this dissolution humor infuses our experience. We internally ask how we could believe that those two aspects of life only exist in opposition. We experience how they blend together or when looked at from another perspective occupy a different realm. Or they can align in such a way to be eclipsed and disappear.

I think a mathematical formula exists to express this resolution. We start with a line, an imaginary string of points, rather than a string. We line up the points on a continuum, concerning some aspect of life. We realize that the points don’t actually all fall on the line, but never mind that. Then we rotate the line in space so that it stands on its end, allowing that the line extends forever. And then it piles up as a point. In that moment the polarity aligns and resolves. Its line like a star in the sky comes to us as a twinkle in the night. That gaseous mass spans miles and this edge and the opposite edge represent polar opposites, but that difference resolves in our perception of the night sky.

Do you remember the white foam core design school project and how it turned from inspired formulation into discarded elements? [See note seven] That might have been grace on a breeze.

Perhaps we all need to hold expectations just so, so that we might fall through dualities successfully.

As all children know nothing separates one culture from another or one living creature from another. Only in our insistence in dualities and our indoctrination by them do we lose the actually quite porous boundary between the light and the dark, the new and the old, the skilled and the novice, the believing and the disbelieving. We can include the good and the evil and even the knowing that the duality doesn’t exist and the insistence against all odds that it does.


Duality Exercise#1: Favorite Dualities


Make a list of favorite dualities. Include any already transcended and the one’s that feel most stubborn. Let them stand. They can probably be arranged in order of seeming rigidity. Proceed by coming up with ways that set up a continuum between one extreme and the other for some of them. Now search for a perspective that approaches the line of that continuum from a different angle or direction. Consider playfully dissolving the persistent polarities. Jot down ideas and then imagine converting them into behaviors. Write down the dualities in order to see them in a different light. Write them around the page rather than on the line and runwordstogether and bre akt hemat u nusu alpo in tsso the ym akeo the rwords. We add a layer of transformation intentionally in order to capture a new perspective. We want to push our construct toward a novel discovery. We are just documenting several favorite dualities. We let them be understood.

At this point in the transcription of my original text, I came to the end of the pages in the composition notebook. I wasn’t done. Almost without thinking I flipped the notebook over and began writing my way back through the book in reverse. During the original writing, this moment opened a potential space that up to the point of recognition had remained unavailable to me. Although I didn’t actually write my way back through the text; none-the-less in a way, I wrote backwards while proceeding forward. Although no actual edge existed at the end of the composition book, I had written to the end and then playfully found a way to continue. It reminded me of letters I had seen where the text appears first in one direction then another and rarely on a diagonal. In play we frequently go right up to the edge of what we expect before we can perceive what happens next. This requires a profound sense of trust in our own ability to come to the wall and pass through it. In the example given, I could feel the disappointment mounting that I would run out of room before I finished what I wanted to write. The feeling seemed less interesting than the curiosity about what I would do next. The duality of there being not enough room and there being plenty of room to continue teased and comforted me. Elegant solutions develop to most perceived problems, if we just turn our heads, hearts, minds, bodies, spirit, and soul in a helpful orientation, letting our perception reassert itself. We release a few dualities in the process.

Level Six Transevenati.n: Potions and Enchantments and more Incantations and more and charms and a Talisman

Sometimes the process of unraveling isn't as far along as we would like and so we draw our attention to the breaking, bending, burning, rubbing, scratching, scraping, grinding, wetting, dissolving, tearing, please join with more...



...and plan ways to playfully include these types of transformation. As an example I might choose dissolving as my process and take an incomplete deck of playing cards and let the weather dissolve the surface of the cards for a season. Now I have elements for a new construction. I might attempt a house of cards; though I actually made a collage tryptic, with a prayer of mourning cut out in strips and pasted around the edges to commemorate a loss.


Transformation in the material world includes attending to the degree to which different materials come apart. I tend to notice what something started as and what it becomes. Transformation comes in many flavors.

Transformation Exercise #6: Talisman

Let us create one more object to remind us of the principle of transformation. Take a bit of something and help it along in its weathering. Choose one of the listed functions and set it into action. Place the material out into the world where the process occurs. Periodically check on it. Or set up a processing plant. Select from a roadway a piece of something that episodic pressure helps degrade.

Place this substance in a container. Leave it visible or wrap it. The contents exist under a certain layer of mystery. Label this talisman of transformation: nature at play.

I found in the attic an old blue upright Hoover and placed it for a season among the houseplants that summered outside. That old vacuum’s wonderfully cracked cord held my imagination. I remember a whitish blue surface and deeper richer blue in the cracks, almost like a ceramic glaze.

Level Six Transixi.n: Potions and Enchantments and more Incantations and more and charms

Returning to the realm of the object,

Sometimes rust connects one element to the next in a set. Rust reveals aging metal. It changes the surface and sometimes interrupts function. Sometimes the surface becomes so pocked and darkened the object takes on a whole different beauty. Irgun resides here, an African spirit of iron, strength and integrity. I often think of Irgun respectfully and playfully when I find discarded pieces of metal that wear lines of nature. It inspired a definition of art as any object that engaged the imagination because of the signs of human handiwork amid nature’s handiwork.

At first I called these transformations simply substitutions. In a set of objects we can playfully substitute one item for another more predictable item. Sense humor? Much of my recent play involves simple placements and replacements. Open a suitcase; find lots of kitchen aluminum “Jello” molds and a damask pillowcase, and two small nutmeg graters, an enamel strainer and a sturdy aluminum bowl. What happens here?


When we add an unexpected weathered found object into an assemblage, the ordering mind takes hold of the order and tries to include the altered object.

Nature loves to distort objects. The Japanese aesthetic of Wabi Sabi:

[space/time...spirit/matter...
subject/object... construct/ideal…
(misery of living alone in nature away from society/cheerless...chill/worn/withered...)
more/less]

formalized this natural weathering as part of a 14th century tea ceremony. No other aesthetic draws in my heart and creative impulse, as does Wabi Sabi. It allows players like myself to take any discarded natural or man-made object and value it for the natural signature that it bears. In my imaginary realm nature has played with the substance and offered it back to me charmed, saying come decipher the wonder of existence. Sometimes the object humorously and exquisitely presents itself, so that I simply want to contain it in my hand or nest it in a container and share it with others.

Consider: a found flattened glue can lid with attached brush. A rusted remnant from contact cement. School projects art class circa. 4th grade.

As some objects unravel, they reveal aspects of their integrity we’ve forgotten or never knew. Sometimes they remind me of archeological finds, displayed for the curious. Now I can create a whole set of weathered objects and also add an unused object to heighten awareness of the transformation.

At one point in my life, plastic deeply offended me. I still resent the litter. But in the game of life some offensive behaviors don’t resolve simply by our outrage. I began to notice the colors that plastic takes on as it degrades. I’ve even found enchantment in some of the shapes, colors and surface textures. In a recent fire one of the few consolations were the melted plastic forms flowing along surfaces. Almost dripping off, or pooling. Some times the name brand or logo of an altered object stimulates amazement. It gives an anti-commercial message.

Transformation Exercise#5: Litter Poem

Collect three or four usual items, which once held familiarity. Collect them from the back of your kitchen drawer or from your closet or garage. Collect them from litter in the neighborhood. Combine them in a single form to make a little physical haiku. Words can mark the surface or marks can just fill the surface wordlessly. If inspired, these little totems can occupy places to remind others not to litter. Imbue the object with this intent, if so inclined. Or place some other intent in the totem and place it, appropriately according to that intent out in the community. If anyone asks about it, elaborate the intent. Let it serve as an elaborate community outreach program to end littering. Don’t worry; when the world suddenly becomes litter free, we’ll still have plenty of things with which to play.

I have a large greased bolt and a small aluminum wire wrapped around the bolt’s thread. The other end of the wire wraps around a small sycamore branching section. Another darker thin twig balances on a hole in the washer around the bolt. The whole assemblage sits perched at the edge of a shelf, posed for flight or tumbling folly. Three lines for my Haiku: the bolt, the wire, the branching wood pieces.

Level Six Transfivmat.n: Potions and more Enchantments and more Incantations

Level Six Transfivmat.n: Potions and more Enchantments and more Incantations




La Lune Allume, LA Lune Allume La lune allume la luna allume la luna allume
La Lune Allume, LA Lune Allume La lune allume la luna allume la luna allume,


some night alone
along the street
hummed and hummed and hummed.

Transformation Exercise #4: Enchantment Chant

Reclaim voice. Not the singing voice that sounds just right, but all the edges of sound that a voice can make. Let sound come forth. Take sound or tune or rhythm and repeat it with slight variations. Consider this the first part. Maybe invite a friend to join in voicing. Then begin a second “verse.” Sometimes a room with a good echo helps us release our expectations. Improvise a part based on any idea. We can call this an enchantment. It may remain raw sound, but it may also vibrate in and out of our sense of the cacophony. Can we create a round? If words seem daunting, just hum.

Just like the variations in objects there are the variations in sound. If we attend gently to night sounds there are variations. If we attend to voices there are variations. I wish we could each develop a personal tune that we could offer to each other and which we could all share as a round when hummed or sung together. It becomes an imagined chorus. When a group of friends were taking on names, I wanted to call myself the by the summer song of a Swainson’s thrush. I couldn’t even begin to make the sound. It had a complexity that caught my attention and wouldn’t let go. I joyfully imagined a name I couldn’t even pronounce. I’d have to wait until the bird sang and then say, "Hear that? that's my name."

How wonderful to learn there is a meditation group practice that is based on the sounded breath. Imagine hearing the group of breaths vibrating. Our voices are individual. We hear each other and recognize each other. We hear people mimic others and we are amused when the sound is almost convincing.

An amazing sound memory occurred on Muir pass humming in the rock shelter with at least four other people. Sound flowed abundantly, coming easily from many voices. I would love to hear that again. At one point I used the words on the sign that described the use of the hut as a source. I was completely enchanted, completely satisfied, comforted, celebrating: not just the accomplishment of the morning climb, reaching the pass, though more than that savoring the moment fully with this particular group of sounds coming from this collection of people gathered in this spot. Nothing more.

Level Six Transfourmati.n: Potions and Enchantments and more Incantations

Sometimes we mimic another who doesn’t speak like we do. We can take on gestures of others or inflections in language and transform how we sense our self in the world. Usually I take on the vocal inflection of the people around me. In foreign languages this gives me a chance to try and learn to speak more comfortably. Regionally it lets me blend in. Some accents get stronger, and some lessen. We unofficially become method actors. Most of us take on roles and try and play them in all sorts of settings. We can play with sounds.

Transformation Exercise: #3 Gibberish

Welcome yourself back to the world of made up language. The rules begin with the simple invitation to speak a made up language. There are wonderful made up sounds just waiting to be spoken. There are wordless sounds near at hand or mouth. Speak or sing the sounds. Speak them with enthusiasm and charm. We can delight that another can get the gist of our meaning and can respond.

Some people can make up language transformation rules and speak new ones or a slightly altered form of our own language. Gales of laughter followed a language created by altering each word, using the same initial sound. It seemed too simple. Det Dit Das Dursprisingly Duccessful Dand De Dunderstood Derfectly. Din Dact De Doticed Dat Din Da Dertain Day Dat Dis Danguage Dartss Do Dake Dense.

At a campfire some friends spoke gibberish between refrains of laughter. I once offended a friend during a hike by singing made up songs. Actually he just wanted to sing along, and I didn’t have the playful-mindedness to let him know my song rules, i.e. the words. Almost all of us can sing along with a made up song as soon as we’re invited. When we drop into a setting where we truly don’t speak the language, we immediately begin to rely on nonverbal aspects of communication. Sometimes we forget our own ability to play at understanding. Speaking English louder and louder keeps us from our playful side. How few words do we actually need to understand and to successfully communicate on a basic level? Almost every child knows inherently how few. Most adults can remember.

Level Six Transformathree.n: Potions and Enchantments and Incantations

My hiking partner likes to make up expressions that transform language. He has done this since childhood. The alteration requires some familiarity with the sound of the expression, rather than with the proper expression. A suburb of Portland that seemed less open and friendly than the city became Gression. An expression ends most meals along the trail: “Tomato and Lettuce go!” I transform this, “Lettuce tomato and go,” which confounds him. Friends add to his repertoire. So now we hear new expressions. Some of them come to us as messages from the bumpers of cars we follow: Envision Whirled Peas. Other’s spill out of our mouth when the wrong word gets spoken: Tab a craxi. Some times a cliché reforms itself: That’s just water over a spilled bridge. When we attend to spoken language we alter perception. We can play with expressions.


Transformation Exercise: #2 First Words

Try using your own first words again and see what impact they have. Write a story to go along with your first words and re-speaking them. Supposedly I said, “ Up and Down.” I chose to write them on a triangular scrap of wood. I was charmed that the bit of wood could be rocked back and forth, lifting the words I had written on each side: Up and Down.

Try out a misquoted cliché, or language substitution in everyday speech. If someone laughs or asks about it, find out what examples they remember. Collect a set of verbal transformations. Savor them.






A friend delivers aphorisms with authority as though spoken correctly. He has the uncanny ability of a retired high school English teacher to make us think he speaks correctly.

Level Six Transformatwo.n: Potions and Enchantments

In play transformations can easily introduce layers of humor, and hopefully humor influences perspective. Transformation also suggests that mastery doesn’t occur only by repetition. More accurately mastery links exploration with creative possibilities. Again if we look back to childhood or to children, we can find special stories or memories of gestures that slightly change expected behavior. I recall with delight the way my child said things like “pi-an-i-yo” and “slipperly “ Attempted mimicry creates pleasure in my ear. Like in the game telephone we whisper a phrase into the ear of a neighbor and a message passes around a circle. I wish the game celebrated auditory transformations all along the way as word sounds deconstruct and reconstruct an expression.

Transformation Exercise #1: Language

Collect a few memories from childhood, which hold a reminder of the playfulness of exploring creative possibilities. These can range from family stories to remembered sayings. Write them on the surface of an object that has at most a tenuous connection to the words in the story or the period in the past. This can be a first enchantment.

While describing my exploration of play I heard about a group of five who bonded during mild adversity. The name of one man’s aftershave provided the short hand for their experience. When the group after traveling a long international distance with cancelled flights and missed connections asked the hotel restaurant hostess for a table; she turned them away. After a moment she paused and asked if the gentleman wore a certain aftershave, which he did. She then proceeded to find a table where moments earlier none existed. The name of the aftershave became a code word for the shared group experience. A scent became shorthand, humorously connecting several people’s memory. The adversity became a savored story. The response to a scent transformed first one person’s experience and then the whole group’s experience. The expected response changed and a private language forms.

All of us tend to generate private language whether, with awareness or without. Language gets transformed and laden with personal meaning.

As we speak, we use private language layered into the public language. Humorous stories pass along through verbal exchanges. Sometimes the playfulness resides in remembering the humor. Sometimes others can be included. Sometimes the next layer of humor comes with the retelling.

Remember to make the effort to value the humor, or the play muse might depart taking the humor with her. The preferred method of play brings the humor forward and lets other feelings dissipate.

Level Six Transformati.one: Potions

One…Observe gently and notice some order. Attend to detail. Nature repeats in cycles, which at first create indistinguishable variability.

Two…Can we find the difference between one plant and the next, one leaf and the next, one area of bark and the next?

Three…Start with fragments and threads either in a story or of an object, or even of a behavior or belief. They hold traces of something not fully acknowledged. Sometimes gathering the pieces together becomes a playful event. I like to gather fragments and then establish threads that connect them.

Four… The function of associative memory based on feeling states satisfies some personal need. We can think of it as self–soothing with memory.

Five…Imagine a gossamer veil forming around the playful intention.

Six…Threads pull playful responses as thoughts drift. Could we literally attach threads and then labels to anything and everything?

We pull things apart and notice connections. We reattach things and make our own connections. Some of them reflect personal quirks. I call this a sandwich, because of the layers. We can remember other layers and create memory sandwiches. Sometimes I use the expression bookends to capture a similar notion. Something happens and I remember an earlier event. Some thread links the observations. The relationship can be tenuous. The same person arrives again. Someone uses the same expression that someone else used. I make a note on some surface: a sandwich. Here’s a bookend. I realize that two things happened in the same place separated by some time. I might have heard about it from different sources.

We layer bits of connection. Some connections we have yet to discover. We get to use all the aspects of play, even those of which we have yet to speak.
We need some of each ingredient to play. Otherwise elements of the transformation may distract us from play.

Reverie: Describe personal aspects of experience that blend together to make a activity playful. Include any essential ingredients.

Not being much of a cook, using a metaphor from cooking seems like skating onto thin ice. Not being much of a skater… However, potions seem part of the territory. Mud-pies. Something about the decade, could be several decades, old gooseberry chutney I find in the back of the fridge, when I look for jam enters the equation of transformation. Just the image of this slightly squat, pear shaped jar of faded fruit evokes some enchantment. It generates the notion of gathering together jars of sauces that line a refrigerator door. These jars seem like game pieces. They wait to move by some order to document some gustatory experience: a potion making workshop, with lots of cayenne. The chutney seems strong. It stands alone.

The chutney distorts my sense of connection; I lose my creative path. Maybe I am just not that fond of chutney. It does however reminder of labels on jars of recipes made by older hands. It reminds me people who have died, though left behind a jar into which they poured creative energy. I still have one last jar of my great aunt’s raspberry preserve. It is also decades old by now. And then I am imagining a chess set of saltshakers filled with other than salt.


I play where simple transformation arises. My play action generally involves changing some aspect of something. I think different people have different realms where their playfulness takes root. We can tease these out based on personal values and beliefs, attending to our inner experience.

I attend to the slight variations that distinguish one item from the next. I order a set of elements literally or in my mind, and then connections begin to occur or they demand further attention and elaboration. This ordering and arranging of groups of slightly altered objects represents the heart of something personal. It seems both a soothing process and a stimulating one.

five pieces, and what they reveal: another fifth one

Repetition occurs with collecting.
Games of hunting for similar objects in widely disparate environments
repeat behaviors. I have a collection of aluminum kitchen objects
that will become part of a playful installation about recycling.
I collect a different type of dish for a friend who remembers
her grandmother’s kitchen with those dishes.
This play encourages reminiscing and it enhances a quality of the objects.
It adds a light magical thinking. The dishes carry
the goodness of grandmother’s care. I also have collections of artist business cards from various locations and studio tours.
These are the ephemera
of our daily
lives.


We often repeat general themes in play. We draw these themes from surprise occurrences. Some event in our lives sneaks up on us and we play our way through it. I sometimes wonder if my lapses in memory have lead to annotating objects with text to help keep the time sequence from getting jumbled. Once we sustain the initial surprise, we can reenact the event through play. It tickles us when we see a child mimic an adult either because of the uncanny accuracy of the reenactment or because of some unexpected distortion that has been introduced.

Repetition Exercise #6: Familiarizing

Find some familiar object, noticed in daily activity with some frequency. Over the next 3-6 weeks, make a collection of them. Consider each a reward either in itself or in terms of something else, with which we wrestle. Consider aluminum bottle tabs, old yellow pencils, or bottle caps. What objects do we notice along roadsides? Different objects draw our attention. This serves as a subtle reminder that we see the environment differently. Some of us notice fan belts, rope, or tire tread. Some of us notice shoes hung on telephone lines. Choose a small enough object, preferably something already noticed for a time, that we can transport easily. Create a container for the objects and let it fill. Or bind them in some other fashion together. Box or wrap them; mark or label them in some fashion to complete the collection. The label hopefully reminds us of the role of repetition and subtle transformation as we play. It will be a talisman of playful living.



I collect bottle caps.
(Well truthfully, I collect them all, pennies bottle caps pencils ropes, aluminum pull tabs, cards. You never know when…. Well, no, I only do it when I get a little disenchanted and need to add a little whimsy to my diet, or quirkiness to my step.)

I intend to use the bottle caps to make a snake. I eventually invent a tool to put a nail hole in each one of a hundred. After a series of repetitions, I assemble them on a wire to form the snake. I copy the idea from a Mexican folk artist; though I make my snake’s head and tail out of crushed lead wine bottle seals.

five pieces, and what they reveal: the fifth one

When I walk, I meditate, though I frequently play. I collect similar objects. I collected cellophane cigarette box wrappers. Repeatedly adding one to another, I created clear pockets for odd bits. Some of them directly related to play: a marble. Others related to the idea of play: a small stick. In an earlier time I collected colorful elastic hair ties. They make rings around a bottle on top of the medicine cabinet. Some number of hair ties affirmed each walk cycle. The final collection affirmed a season of early morning reverie.


Along the path stand a series of trees that I have altered in some way with rocks that I have placed near their trunks. I smile when I inadvertently come across another walker"s walking annotation. One time I came by and found my stones moved out of place.


Someone played a different game. I reset them. I return to my steps; I sigh; I smile. Some years later a storm has reworked the area. Someone has played a different game. I return to my steps; I sigh; I smile.


Repetition Exercise #5: More Walking

Go walking. Attend to movement and breath, to sensations and thought patterns, and to other factors that surface. Maybe collect more than repetitions of movement. For a set period of time walk the same route. Know repetition, hold continuity, experience subtle change.

One time when I walked, I heard a drum beat and altered my steps to respond to this beat. How can people suppress the response to the beat? This inner urge to move with the rhythms that surround us seems to express itself as the first few notes register.

Rhythm works on the basis of repetition. Clapping and drumming seem like great games of repetition. Our bodies remember these rhythms, which get passed from friend to friend and from generation to generation. Childhood clapping games, based on repetition and speed, show up in diverse cultures. While hiking up a series of switchbacks along a section of the John Muir Trail, I decided to involve a friend in a repetition game where at each switchback of over twenty, we added a movement to the previous ones beginning with a simple clapping against raised hands. Word traveled out about those guys on the switchbacks.

We can consciously celebrate through meditative repetitions many early behaviors. I imagine for some that the act of standing up or of initiating movement through crawling brings playful pleasure through attention to the repetition. We can rediscover experience through playfulness. Perhaps that happens when we crawl on the ground with an infant who will crawl without modeling. Most children will not just sit here.


Exercise routines require this kind of play. Take courage and exercise playfully. Activities that we like to repeat enter our routine. If we add an object to the routine as a counter, then that object affirms our behavior. It may be as simple as a stone from the path or as altruistic as collecting a bit of trash and disposing of it properly.

five pieces, and what they reveal: the fourth one

Repetition #4: Worry Game

With a certain attitude, we can track the ways of worry through the mind. The tracks rarely get our attention, though worry rightly describes a game. The option to play the game differently and with humor seems advisable; or adds flexibility; or supports cleverness. You choose.

Map the favorite steps in creating and supporting a worry.
Mine would go something like this.
Make a list in my mind of everything that happens in the next while.
Continue until I find two or three that evoke some level of anxiety. Nest these together so that once I realize I can’t solve one smoothly, I notice that I catch myself up in the next one. Soon notice that the next carefully looms. And takes back my attention. It is like a high wire act on the flying trapeze.
An imaginary knot of mental ropes might describe the situation.
Here we go again and again.
This blocks memory of any previous success. Keep threading the thoughts though these lines. I realize that I have a choice that I fail to exercise.
Meditative reflection and choice seem important allies in restructuring any anxiety game; So does gratefulness for other aspects of our life experience. So does going out for a walk.

Describe a personal version. Write it on a large enough stone. Know where that stone rests. Maybe turn it over and look at other side. Woody Guthrie wrote the verse that reminds us that the back of most no trespassing signs stand blank and empty, awaiting our instruction.



Sometimes meditation describes an emptying of the head. I think another definition allows us to enjoy the humor of our thought patterns without becoming engaged.