9th circuit second [square] door Unexpected Elaboration

Dahl dash dot dish day

These circuits intend to encourage deeper attention, along any whim or direction that invites exploration,
listening to a quiet voice within that says, “I’m not done yet.”

The act of borrowing…
Ah ha
Everything is derivative by its very nature.

In fairness to mother nature our behaviors and thoughts all derive from living webs and patterns. We record a natural trajectory.
Meaning derives from nature. Intensity of interest, another matter.

Feel encouraged that play derives from nature. Celebrate borrowing ideas, giving credit, and elaborating. Celebrate lending ideas and seeing them unexpectedly elaborated by others.


Elaboration Exercise # 1: Copy(catt/dogg)ing

Take some activity that someone else does. Hopefully choose it because energy draws toward it. We hesitated because we didn’t want to copy them. This time celebrate copying playfully as an initial activity. Go ahead and do this; even involve others. Explain that this activity derives from something someone else does. Now it unfolds further. There is some mystery here, trust it. Let new ideas flow into the activity. Engage long enough to sense feelings and sensations, rather than just thoughts. Notice any unexpected nuances? At some moment does it veer off in it’s own direction that we can now savor? Did any residual shame depart at a certain moment? Can we describe a sensate experience, a way of knowing not with the mind? Can it be put into words or other marks?

Can we map play thresholds?
Can we copy parts of other maps?
We can make our map on another map.
A map represents a journey or a directional flow.
We may inquire and wrestle with ideas that catch our attention. Maybe a color evokes an aspect of our exploration. We may end up with something that reminds us of an important aspect of playfulness. We can draw a map onto a card and carry it around. How about setting up a chart with little distorted drawings? Sometimes a list holds an essence of an idea; sometimes a symbol adds focus.
Maybe write around the page rather than follow lines.
At the end of the line, squeeze a word in; or put an invisible hyphen where the imagined text field ends. Some new words and non-words get invented. Do arrows help direct attention? Use other symbols from maps. If we need a quick course in borrowing, look at any map and use some of the iconography. Borrow symbols from other realms.

When unexpectedly elaborating in the public domain, give credit as accurately as possible to your source; and if you stumble upon something simultaneously as another does, marvel at the universe’s sense of timing, rather than limit perception to a loss of novelty.
from

Play for the Soul

9th editing

9th circuit first round door Unexpected Elaboration

may I stop when I am 2thirds full.

Bag ban bah ben bar

Sound, remind me to find my voice. This might be the 9th rendering of these ideas. To find my voice means to remain curious, to yield to wonder and to invite us to follow a path of discovery that isn’t chartered. How do we do that? The metaphor of playing a game fails. We aren’t following a set of rules. It isn’t rules per se; it’s abandoning inflexibility. Notice the invitation. Take off, set a course and explore.

Isn’t our remembered childhood experience that we played at any chance? A door opened to an experience and we popped through. The door is there where once was a seemingly blank wall. Notice these openings; pass through.

Playfulness begs a certain amount of room, not too much and not too little. Does it have to be just right? For each situation there exists a personal fit. Our task becomes the development of sensitivity to that individual “just rightness.” We learn our way in and out of the three bears’ chairs. Sometimes too big fits just right. Sometimes too small fits just right. Sometimes just right needs a little tweak to fit.

Does the threshold of play open at our toes and fingertips, right at the surface of sensation right now?
Invite the intention to elaborate an unexpected playful cycle?


Looking at the value of a bowl

This cupped form
covered
in a green glaze,
like an offering:
none preconceived vessels.
the artist hand
trained in Switzerland.
Other pieces lack the simplicity or mystery
of these bowls.

Does she feel differently,
when she makes these particular objects
and glazes them like this?

Is she at play when she makes them?
What language would she use to describe the creation of these?

Do they retain playfulness?

This bowl reflects something. Maybe it reflects luck.
It captures some balance of life forces. Is it beauty?


Unexpected elaboration intentionally mixes and matches repetitive, transforming, and polarizing actions. It introduces or resolves polarities, while shifting time references. Do this when you play and take it with you where ever you go. Do it in your mind as daydreaming. Do it while you are doing something else entirely.
from

Play for the Soul

9th editing

8th grade 7th period Altered TIme

(When I started this section as a grade and measured it out in periods, I completely forgot that I once lived my days in 7 periods.)


A consideration of time and memory raises the question of how much of an event exists in the present and how much forms in memory. The memory becomes an immediate souvenir. Is the personal souvenir a way of enhancing memory? How much does it take us out of the present moment? Usually I play in order to engage more fully with something in the present. I do this by playing with associations to the present and distortions of those associations. This process engages some of my attention and pulls other attention away from aspects of the present. In play the balance between what we attend to and what we edit shapes our experience. Time allows us to carry out these processes. Time also allows us to give our self the impression of mastering some aspect of our perceived world.

One day I play with Chinese characters in the Tao Te Ching. I allow myself plenty of time to copy the lines onto different surfaces, which I plan to use to make small packages for objects. I discover that the characters start to become familiar so that by the middle of the day, I can set up my own simple quotes. The game didn’t have that as a goal. As a tangent I sense learning by exposure and repetition and distortion. In an odd twist one of the lines that I copy says that this kind of behavior veers off of the path and therefore abandons the way of the Tao. Then I decide to write verses of the Tao on the outside of structures in my yard. At first the strokes of the brush are awkward, eventually I run out of room and delight in drawing the final characters on the ground. This is one of those moments that are almost too much fun. An acquaintance sells caps and tee shirts that reassure: “It’s okay to have too much fun.”

Time that amorphous ether surrounds the present that we can’t see, though we know, or should we say that we believe, exists. We usually fight time. We view it as taking away from our experience, when time creates the imagined medium that we use to hold experience. I hope by being more playful more of us can reclaim time. Reclaim the time it takes to have the experience of being alive. When we attend to the connections and associations, we make life playful. And like looking for pennies or sharks teeth, we find opportunities where before we missed the cues.

8th grade 6th period Altered Time

How we experience threads of time and how another does, hopefully allows us each to value our experience and that of another. One of the basic differences in individuals, we realize, is that we don’t experience time the same. How we speak about procrastination or over-working an idea states something about how we relate to time. The challenge not to conform to the set definition of time encourages us to reclaim our own cadence. In so doing we sense a choice as to how fast or slow we engage over a given period of time.

Time Exercise#4: Play with Cadence

How about playing with errands for a while? Let’s play with household tasks. I don’t mean the actual task, I mean the time, let’s play with the time we spend. Decide ahead of time and a bit artificially to explore cadence by setting up a few unpleasant tasks and play with the time used to accomplish them. Don’t use normal thinking about time to set goals. In play time we could complete the task in no time or in all the time depending on which would allow us to maximize awareness, imagination and humor. Just take an activity and reset the cadence up or down. Now engage and complete some part of it. See what aspect of it can offer up gratefulness or joy. Mining joy suggests that how we approach a task and how we hold intention, imagination and humor influence what we call fun. What aspect engages imagination? See where the humor expresses itself.

I wonder if while we approach time, we can register it with other senses. And I wonder if there is a sensation of time that we sense in ourselves with an organ we don’t classify under the classic senses. Short-term memory functions might be under more conscious control than we at first expect. Times fluid nature peaks out. It seems quite remarkable that two people can experience the same event with separate cadences so that for one it completes too soon and for the other it stretches too long. Let’s play with this to our advantage.

I encourage anticipation as part of any longed for event. That stretches the time. I have begun to consciously make travel time part of the vacation, including special games to mark time. Travel lends itself to generating souvenirs. We can also experiment with the end of the trip. Notice when we switch out of the mode of being away. Compare how we do this depending on how long we travel. I think it humorous that the last part of a week long vacation can begin before the final weekend, when normally the weekend would be a full respite in it’s own right. Reclaim respites within respites!

8th grade 5th period Altered Time

Sometimes I like to detail time down to the second. Shifting the detail of measurement brings something in and casts something else out of the relationship. The ordering that we choose can make time stand still. January 10th 6:12:35pm Royal Hawaiian Island Time, frogs cacophony, voices below, written in small letters on the bottom of a cylindrical oatmeal container. I suppose meditation has this built in lesson, if we are willing to accept it. Most of us find unstructured time uncomfortable. We define life as the challenge to fill it. We may even think of play as filled time. However in regaining playtime, we shift our perspective.

On an eight hour car trip as I left town, I heard on the radio a woman describe some aspects of living silently for 12 years. Suddenly my trip in relation to her experience became playful. My seven additional hours shrank in perspective to her 12 years. She said the hardest aspect of the process, holding her self as an empty vessel with empty thoughts and empty feelings challenged her sense of being. This sets up a challenge for my hours. How easily can I play outside of the time frame? Each time I found myself measuring time by distance from my goal, I would return to her words about emptiness. Then I come back to the present moment, being empty and notice the surroundings whizzing by. Landscape in motion becomes a more engaging stimulus than places I knew I would eventually come to along the way. The eventual landmarks that I had used to measure my progress made me feel distant from my goal. These landscapes interest me. I feel more comfortable here than anywhere else at this particular moment. I just hold the empty space.

In the last half hour I got trapped in a narrow space about saying goodbye to old friends from whom I had grown distant. We all seem to have lost the ability to say goodbye. Something about the pain of leaving, or the potential finality of time apart tricks us into the myth that if we don’t say goodbye, we will avoid the pain. The amazing part of the driving experience became how I couldn’t release my old friends. They ended up filling me and the car and the landscape. It almost seemed like a joke. She had said the practice challenged her out of her comfort. I only now see an element of humor in the final experience of filling myself with unresolved conflict at the end and supposedly easy part of the drive. The end of the trip filled time in a very different way. I can mistakenly pay too much attention to the end. Our minds play with time even when we think we don’t. Do we need remedial courses on play so we stop filling time?


By focusing in this manner, we play with time again.
Layers of experience can be interrelated that occur for each of us at different points in our process of exploring play. I enter the text now and when I had written in this chapter before. Playfully there could be a whole set of annotations that indicate the number of times, the time and place of writing. Sadly not to have this detail hides connections. Though over the last three (four, six, eight) years as the text develops there have been times when this page has been imagined in very different forms. Time still separates these layers. First the text appears in a composition book on a warm Mexican winter morning. Once it arranges itself on a bank brochure in a Swiss mountain spa. Then it settles into computer files. Geographical locations separate the threads. Each writing evoked different feelings. Playfulness returns with the layering of the ideas.

The text gestates. It hibernates. I include a type of journal that speaks about my play thoughts, using lines and points on flat pages. I am wrapping the basic text with a veil of thoughts about play to encourage several ways of looking at the experience as we live it.

8th grade 4th period Lunch Altered Time

bei mit nach seit von zu gegegenüber
Sometimes the feast is on an image
or just a nibble of the corner of the image
or what is just underneath
bei mit nach seit von zu gegegenüber
(dative case:
the German prepositions that take indirect objects
so to speak; s.z.s)

8th grade 3rd period Altered Time

Somewhere I read that certain people couldn’t see things of which they didn’t have the concept or experience. I remember a description of a ship coming in from the sea. It now seems I made this up; I can’t find the reference; or did I simply fill in a gap? If true for some people, and true some of the time, then there are playful opportunities of seeing and understanding. At a certain stage of retinal development if the visual cortex isn’t stimulated the mind can’t learn to see. It does seem to be true for remembering certain details of a story. We end up changing aspects of time and other details when we retell certain stories. In retelling a story we playfully fill in missing gaps with or without awareness, just as we do in most acts of comprehension. We want to include this type of construction and deconstruction in our play.



Time Exercise#3: Lucky Love Perspective

Another playful practice develops around found money on the street. Pennies do seem to fall from heaven or at least frequently from pockets. The practice follows these simple instructions. Each time we find a penny heads up, it reminds us of our good luck. Find tails, then presenting it to someone else brings good luck to them and us, reminding us to be generous. I also like to borrow from a story I heard on the radio about a tradition of folding pennies into the clothes of a loved one who travels away. These pennies, called ‘I love you pennies’, fall out of the clothes when the clothes are subsequently unfolded. These pennies represent a simple type of simple souvenir. Write messages on the pennies or write a date or location when or where you find them with a very fine tipped marker. I recently added the ten-digit zip code to my writing since in an odd ordering system that describes where I am in a postal national ordering system. The pennies span the time from their casting, through the time of their casting off until discovery. A friend told me he likes to remember a story from the year when the coin was cast. Time suspends itself in some aspect. We inhabit a looser time and space continuum.

8th grade 2nd period Altered Time

When I read I notice the margin. A blog page doesn’t give access to the margin. But in my reading usually there is a margin. And I always have my journal page with which to experiment. So in the margin jot down any even momentary notion you experience. When you attend to sensations they become easier to spot. They also take on a value when considering how they influence perception. Two notes jotted in the margin can introduce a new set of relationships to explore.

(A book by an author who shares an Acadian name with a man whose laugh I enjoy in winter/ A small boy describing the middle of a swimming pool.)

Notes can be by different readers or by the same one at different times.

An exercise related to taking time to recognize patterns comes from collecting shark’s teeth on the beach. A friend once told me to look for fossilized sharks teeth along the coast near Topsail, North Carolina. I would struggle to find one during a week spent each summer. Sometimes I would forget until late in the vacation. One year I found a few teeth and noticed that there was something about the black shiny color that seemed to distinguish the teeth from other objects on the beach. The color spoke. Something about the shape and size held my mind in a different state. A certain edge alerted me to a tooth even mostly submerged in sand. Suddenly, subtly, we converse. The teeth and my mind’s pattern recognition center communicate in some nonverbal language across eons as I comb the beach. The rush of delight I feel in entering this collecting state disconnects me from linear space and time and reconnects me in a seemingly timeless dialogue. The humor I feel, considering my hunt and the time since these teeth actually helped a shark hunt adds to the peculiarity of my pursuit. Each time I return I have to remember to suspend preconceived notions of searching and resume the special pattern perception dialogue. Now I realize that far more fossils exist than fossilized teeth on the beach. The raven within me delights in the black shine.

Time Exercise#2: Time forms Patterns

Hunt for some object by suspending the direct search and by selecting a characteristic that the mind can hold while the rest of our attention disengages from the outcome.





I’ve been wondering if whale and dolphin spotting along the coast follows a similar focusing and accommodation of perception.

8th grade 1st period Altered Time

One of my favorite experiences of playfulness winds around awareness of nonlinear time. Deep in concentrated play, an hour can slip by in a breath. Equally surprisingly time can slow down so that vast amounts of play occur within a few moments. In fact this surprises me more, for I look up and no time has passed and something wonderful has been going on. Can we attune ourselves intentionally to altered time references. Think of the universe as existing on an adjustable time/space continuum.

While playing, we can keep everything from happening at once by assuming linear time. Though sometimes it seems everything does happens all at once.

Cover the clocks; don’t wear a watch. We can always peak. Set a long enough period to play so that the time limit doesn’t structure the activity. Try different lengths of time to find how we respond to best.

We can alter our appreciation for what happens by playfully creating a document of what occurs over time. I have make a practice of writing on objects. If the date, time and location appear written on the object, attention can focus on some unique aspect of our experience in a certain moment. In so doing we enhance our memory of the moment and through the object have a souvenir of the event. (Or as we might say, the non-event.)



Time Exercise #1: Souvenir

Take an indelible marker along on a trip. It could be a vacation or even an un-looked forward to event. Remember part of our purpose brings play back into all aspects of our life. Proceeding through the event, write on objects that avail themselves. Write the date, time and location somewhere on the object and make a collection of these objects. Consider including some other detail of interest. Maybe include snippets of overheard conversations. Bring them home for review later.

1-10-2008 3:45pm 96778-2971 sound of excavator over on the waterfront, smell of lava rock and oil recalled from yesterday’s bike ride, written in tiny black letters on the bottom of an empty cylindrical cardboard oatmeal container.

Consider attaching a thread to each one and a few small objects. These small tokens on threads can be grouped and the threads used as a bookmark. We can annotate the book mark to record the books it marked.

Or consider copying notes onto the objects. Using a different style of text or color of ink to distinguish various annotations. By running everything together we also alter our perception of time. See how changing the size of the script or using the other hand to write alters perception. Using the same annotation style allows pieces to be grouped possibly out of sequence, which on closer inspection creates a different sense of time.

Expand the idea of what can be written upon. Certain times we want to hide the annotation; other times we want it up front and center. Trust hunches about where to put text. When placing surfaces together, piece them together thoughtfully, unless thoughtfully becomes too controlled. Then just be aware of how fingers are drawn to place them and look and see if a pattern reveals itself. Consider this like putting a puzzle together where the objects serve as our pieces and we establish the edge of the puzzle.



I like to make arrangements in drawers for this reason. Some times a level of humor introduces itself randomly. A breath or two for observation might reveal some hidden aspect of what at first seemed a random assortment.
Thus, we may be quite impressed by the way the patterns play with our imagination and dovetail to tell an unexpected story. Will they lead toward some new idea or association? When we can touch into this flow of playfulness we involve ourselves in a very special relationship among time, space, self and being.