positioning play: wow, I did it. Or now I did it, or how!

  
Repositioning: A few notes for the never weary and never faint at heart, among or amog whom I don’t count myself frequently.

As I come to the end of editing and placing the text with images, I reversed the page order. A note like this floated on the wave of the first entry that appeared in the blog over the next and final block of time as a clue to the directional shift. It is one of the play strategies in action. There will still be a little bit of editing, but the gist is that day by day the 'seven' entries of each level starting at the end now occupy the first position, backing our way to the beginning into the final bookish form. It finally starts on site with the beginning of our playful encounter.

Here's what to expect. Each on the following levels will offer a series of approaches to playfulness. Although they can be followed as a complete exploration of the level, I'd suggest choosing one entry from each level. After making a path through the levels, either spend more time on a level that engages, or pass through the levels again making different choices.

The levels start with an introduction[1], then comes a note[2], then a journal entry[3], and then a pocket[4]. The next levels describe play behaviors, starting with repetition[5], transformation[6], imagination[7], altered time[8], and unexpected elaboration[9.] From there we move to perspective[10], and more imagination[11.] Then there are 3 levels of appendices[12-14.] Finally there are afterwords[15.] I will admit that some levels have as few entrees as three and the afterwords extend to 21. I liked thinking in cycles of seven. Hopefully this provides enough orientation.

My deepest wish is that entries will invite greater playfulness in life.

begin here: repositioning play

Welcome. it begins: the book about living playfully that I spent the last decade writing, or saying I was writing or musing I wasn't writing.

Sigh. it begins with a wobble and several layers of journal like reflections. Then I include a series of inductions/introductions.

Of course that really happens all along. Eventually the ideas form into more formal/formzl layers that reflect my play beliefs and current techniques.

Finally the whole thing folds back on itself and repeats the full text in reverse so that the end is the beginning as seems only fair in such things. And both here and there we stand at the beginning, ready to start. The cyclic nature mimics a calendar and suggests a journey. The layers intend to explore beliefs more deeply, though depth can be an illusion. Most of the blatant errors are mistakes; a few are dedicated to the humor of such a venture. At times I knew which were which. Now I offer a blanket apology. I created all the images, because pictures tell another story. Frequently I delighted in how this progressed.

 I appreciate if any piece of this project provides or inspires enjoyment: mostly it is here as a dedication to more playful living in all corners of the planet. May the earth survive us.

don

a first approach: wobble

, wobble

WOBBLE

An introDuction
that was once a Conclusion

Sometime in a past summer the word “wobble” starts to appear in my thinking. I write another draft of my play book and I need a way back into the subject. While stacking rocks upon each other, a loose tooth 'kin dof' play suggests: a sense of balance about to occur. Unlike the loosening of the tooth, this becomes a fitting into place of an element. I move a little and subtly I can move my hand away and the stack stands. My breath separates from the stones. Here begins an offering.

In summer Valentino suggests to me that writing a play book ought to be playful and I have to admit that the play has drifted out of the project. It waddles out to the river we watch as we talk and swims off into the darkening evening. I recommit to write about play playfully. He has suggested that writing about failed attempts to write about playfulness might be interesting. Some description of the experience could provide hints and clues surrounding playfulness: a lengthening nine year mystery.

I laugh inside, Shelly is suggesting a writers' group to get me going again.

I hear the critical voice in the back of my mind clear its throat. Can a cynic be playful? Can a wobble leave in place the underlying intent to engage? My writing self, oversensitive to criticism, determines to pretend to start again. The point: ah, to keep at it in some form and to discover what playfulness in writing feels like. Just as in everyday life, nudging a playful response, living on a playful bias,
simply living simply respectful of resources,
aware that much of this struggle occurs in a lap of luxury
compared to the experience of the rest of the wonderful inhabitants of this planet.

So if our priorities lean more toward the quality of life rather than some measure of quantity, then I extend an invitation on a jaunt, exploring the things that I use to make my life more playful. While on this personal journey I encourage others to discover a personal more playful path.

I turned my life upside down. though that's not essential, just wobble something loose and balance it anew. Maybe eat dessert first at least a few times and figure out if a spoonful of dessert up front makes an attitude about something a bit sweeter.

John asked me when I write, and I mumble something because, of course, I haven’t been writing and have no idea when I will be writing again, and here it comes again a writing time; and I relax and rather happily return to the subject: wobbles.


In earlier drafts I found myself preoccupied with ideas that remained flat. I don’t pretend to think of this as the last writing, but I do like to notice that certain ideas over time have expanded in unexpected ways, for instance the notion of a wobble. Or I prod the way we use the words play and work. I really wanted to provide a bunch of play exercises until I realized that I can do things in a playful way, and I can do the same things in a flat dull way; and they are, of course, the same things.

What 'kindo f' wobble is this. The same work or play activity can be play or work for different people, and the same activity can sometimes be one or the other for the same person. Does an attitude and a feeling at a given moment form a wobble? I am a cleaner-upper kind of guy; and when the dishes and dust pile up, I feel cleaning as an unpleasant chore. If I clean here and there as I go, I find I like the sense of rendering order and making clean. Rarely I pour a closet out on the floor and clean it all up. So you wont find me there with any predictability that I recognize. The goal of this offering supports more of the unpredictable. The quality of the unpredictable in play doesn’t lend itself to careful scrutiny or containment in written words. Of course, that basically would be predictable.

I read that there doesn’t seem to be any scientific basis for a benefit of play. I wouldn’t attack science for that, I would just support the notion that some things remain qualitatively illusive and deserve support for that 'illusiveness.' Few remain illusive; so respect the balance and then allow for the wobble.

In the working mechanism of machinery a slight wobble allows the gears to get from stand still to motion. Apparently the universe contains many wobbles: the earth on its axis, the moon in its orbit. the tide along the surfaces of the shore. How wonderful to find some quality of the big picture based on a wobble. So in the workings of the universe we have a give and take that doesn’t negate the structural laws of life but adds a certain quality to the whole. That’s what I want to explore, ways of adding a certain quality to the whole, through wobbles.

By introducing wobbles I find that I have a better sense of belonging more of the time. Some times I feel like I am trying to get away with something, but mostly that "getting away from' reminds me that I find little support for what I do. I intend to improve the quality of my life in a most simple way I can imagine. I hope to be more and more playfully present for what happens now. I reject more fear, though I can sense how fear confuses. I become suspicious of more wealth, though I can sense how wealth seduces. I suspend owning more stuff though I can sense the owning addiction. I will remain addicted to fitting things together simply and not wasting so much of the planet's resources, hopefully sensing the fun wobbles as I proceed.

I make it sound like I have a bigger plan, which I don’t. I make it sound like I have some major answers, which I don’t. But I have this idea about the wobble and where it gets me; and I hope it can get more and more of us somewhere where we truly like being, so we don’t feel like we have to take something away from someone else in order to have fun and sense satisfaction.

I have several other rules I play by. Only I have to say that these aren’t rule rules. Call them criterion governing experience.

I hope that the humor I sometimes feel as I play with objects will seep into the text. So far I'm not convinced, but that remains one of the story's mysteries.

When I play I give up on certain aspects of life and invest my attention in a similar though separate set of beliefs and expectations. A little surprise forms at times as I lose my position. I start again to develop
positive playful experiences. I imagine readers that make similar discoveries. Doesn't play seep into behavior with a bit of consistent encouragement?

My first rule of play: Do what you want to do first first. Something about us as members of an animal kingdom gives us some kind of access to an order different from socialization, not to judge socialization as bad, but rather that some of us have become over socialized, while others of us have failed to become adequately socialized. The over socialized frequently postpone the thing we would rather do first. The under socialized create a different mess. It may be a bias of observation, but I find if I do what I want to do first, the rest gets done more easily, sometimes in far less time. I am playing.

My second rule: Order something in my immediate environment. I don’t necessarily have to complete this ordering because it usually leads to some other interesting invitation that I want to explore. Or I may only order up to a point before I want a different order.

When I see my way to another project, I try not to tell myself to wait. Usually I hear that voice in my head and have to lightly calm it down. No particular order informs how I play. I have taken to leaning projects against walls, or piling them up somewhere, so I have access to them when engagement resumes.

A third rule: Be involved in more that one activity before completing an earlier one. This seems counter to getting things done, but my experience reveals the opposite. More gets done and I spend less time pondering when I might get to something. Not that I don’t do plenty of pondering, just that frequently I notice it lacks interest and move on. I also find that sometimes some thing serves as the lead activity for another activity. And that that second activity really brings the greater satisfaction. Sometimes even the second thing provides something that makes the first thing easier to complete.

A fourth rule: Everything you need presents itself, or stands near by. I marvel at what can be used to solve problems when the right stuff eludes my grasp. I frequently make up uses for things for which they were never intended. In fact some surge of joy expresses itself when this happens. I also find that the small piece of what I need just happens to be around when I need it, so that I dont need more material to create what I need. Some of these extra pieces become pleasant reminders of this process. Of course, I would be the kind of person who likes the worn and mended rather than the new and shiny.

I have a certain oppositional nature and a certain distrust of the status quo. Simply, it doesn’t comfort me. That constructed center doesn’t reflect who I am, so I often find comfort in doing quirky things. I make up rules for a while; and then I change them. Not to exclude anyone, just to hone my awareness. I don’t really know if anyone feels good about being like everyone else, mostly I assume most of have varying degrees of similarity and difference unlike a constructed normal.



The most recent rule of play: Once I tell a story about how I enjoy something, I bare false witness. Strangely what I thought I enjoy shifts slightly to challenge and reveal a new story. I no longer do enjoy that exactly in that way. Play seems very flexible. It makes room for inconsistency; probably the rules only approximate the experience.

So the final rule might be that when you believe something, loosen up the perspective to embrace the wobble. Allow for growth and change. Believe loosely.

a second approach: becoming a play auto mechanic

I drove the Saab up yet another gravel road and dislodged the muffler from the manifold. I could have cried. I was miles up the gravel. No other traffic. I really didn't like this game. eventually three people stopped and asked if they could help, but we were at a loss. I ended up tying a rope around the clamp and threading it through the back of the engine around some supports. I turned around. I made it several miles before I had to tighten the rope, due to scraping on road rocks and near paralyzing fear. When I got back to down, I called Dennis. And he said that's what he would have done and that aside from the noise the car would be fine. Oh, how I hate the engine's growl.

After complaining elegantly at my lost hike on a most beautiful day of October, I again went under the car. After unwrapping the rope and fetching some copper wire, I pushed with my shoe to align the pipe and wrapped wire snug enough for a three hour drive home.  The engine growl calmed: an almost tamed engine.

Fixed by playfulness, I mused. Before departing I took a walk along the river and found a fire pit, from which I extracted fishing notions, making a set of false flies:  playful happiness, soothing despair.

a third approach: first next

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

this new playful attempt puts my ideas in a format on the internet.

what i realized in my exploration of play, is that it takes a certain attitude to experience life playfully. all my attempts to make exercises that enhance a sense of healing, required a playful attitude toward the exercises i suggested. that meant that a person could be playful or not. this caused a certain sense of disappointment. (not experienced playfully.) and so i set the exercises aside.




now, i consider that people who are encouraged to approach life playfully, perhaps by exploring these suggestions, may discover a resource for a healing.

a fourth approach: stamped

I frame a day playfully. The elements include tasks on a list in my mind, and added loose threads of being in a town, I left almost a decade ago.  I have 30-year roots. A college town changes, but some of the characters remain the same or recycle themselves. I walked into 411 for dinner and thought Heidi was at the bar, only she isn’t a member of this cast. The conversation brought to life a few friends who have been dead a long time. I remember people who have been dead 30 years. I am fascinated.

One friend ended up with a blueberry farm in the northwestern part of the state. I think he told me that the last time we unexpectedly ran into each other. I had been thinking about him in the way that someone can be remembered without personal details, because I had eaten lunch in his hometown. I hadn’t been there for a long time and it was the setting for an old television show.

The morning developed around the theme of not wanting to get out of bed, and I decided to play at indulging myself. I lightly wondered at the lethargy, but ended up reading for an hour about the brain, pain and education in three different sources. Eventually a shower was more inviting than bed. During my stretches I was particularly curious about the further stretch of my Achilles tendon.

Breakfast had the extra treat of a few homemade raisins.
I don’t know why I get such a kick out of the sour candy–like taste of my Washington raisins. But from the beginning they have brought me a joyful zing. I want to jump up and down and say "I made these, aren't they grand?"

Remembering that John Scott had asked me who was going to help me deal with the mess in West Virginia, I decided to enlist my brother’s help in filling the Andrew’s lane pothole. I still wonder about the natural formation of potholes. There must be knowledge about this. A few shovels and brooms, some broken cinder block and we were well on our way. In fact we were done very soon. Ray mostly checked something on his blackberry.

I decided that banks were the task of the morning. I suddenly had the urge and energy to roll up max’s damaged Polaroid pulls from his 60th birthday party that had been altered by the fire in Hinton. So although I didn’t get out of the house until noon, I did manage to visit 3 banks and one post office and a copy center and accomplish five nested tasks. There was something about walking down the street and seeing the college town as it reinvents itself for the next set of students. This seemed obvious rather than nostalgic. The panhandlers still rub me wrong. While in the copy center an odd fellow came in; and overhearing his comments, I had to wonder about his sanity. It inspired a brief playful inquiry into the not all accounted for characters that a town supports. And that made me think back on the panhandlers and their stories. I felt like a town could have a portfolio of characters that everyone knew. It seemed to playfully promote safety, rather than compromise the right to anonymity.

In my own quirky way I was getting glue from the copy shop to use on old stamps that had gotten stuck together in a safe that some undoubtedly quirky fellow had had in his house in DC. They had become the responsibility of the real estate agent to remove. I became the user, reuser, and recycler of these stamps. Since they had to be soaked, they didn’t meet a standard of philatelic interest. I was using some of these stamps to finally send a scoutmaster in Texas some other stamps for his troop. This man, also a physician had contacted my lawyer brother for some unknown reason and solicited stamps from him. My brother was uninterested, though I was quite amused to think that there was finally somewhere to send vast numbers of n-plicates that had begun to fill more and more space. Although I don’t know this man, I included a note to document the times I had tried to send this envelope over the past year. I had lost his address when my hard drive died, as we say. And I had been surprised to find an envelope that he had sent to confirm he was still doing this project with the scouts. Of course, this year’s hard drive crash almost threatened to force a repeat of last year's dance of the envelope without an address, but part of the back up saved his address. So I can only hope he gets a kick of the energy required to supply him with said stamps.

The woman at the post office looked familiar and I asked her how long she had worked there. Did she say 37 years, with Friday being her last day? She liked the old stamps on my envelope, which reminded her of when she started working at the post office and the rate was 8 cents for a first class letter.

I went over toward the other bank and was distracted by a photo and the word ‘Hapa.’ Having links to Hawaii, the word immediately evoked “Hapa Haole,“ the term for mixed ethnicity. Sure enough some guy in LA had a traveling show of photographs of mixed ethnic humans with hand written text below their image about how they answer the question, "Who are you? I was delighted with his work and the way it was displayed and how I had stumbled across it and taken the time to explore it. It inspires an oral history project in Hawaii: Were we what we remember?

On the walk home, which took me along a route I used to walk everyday for years, I came to a sudden construction block with no path around. I had to retrace my steps. I had an intuition some path would be blocked, I had no idea how blocked it might be. Along the reroute, I picked up two crushed cans and wondered about the value of a single recycled aluminum can. They remain an icon of our time. The crushed form spoke as well. Which king paid more than the price of gold for a set of Aluminum utensils? When had it become cheaper to reuse aluminum than mine it from Bauxite? Did I drive through bauxite mines at the border of South Dakota and Wyoming in the Riley 1.5? Those photos were sadly lost; part of the first hard drive crash. The Riley continued to run.

I stopped in at Fine Feathers at University Square, after I noticed it again last week. The store had been new in my first years here. It was like walking onto some kind of stage. I saw no one, then after a moment I realized there were two women sitting to the far left. One spoke. I asked how long the store had been there and who had started it? How long had they worked there? They answered my questions. In some fashion, they were of another age. The age that wasn’t fully extant even when the store opened, I imagined. I think we were each charmed by the other. 34 years she said, and she had worked there from the beginning for the owner. What wonderful and possibly grotesque stories of dresses and the people who wore them…
I came home to write this, enjoying peanut butter on rice cakes and a little Point Roberts dried fruit leather.
We’ll go and swim for 45 minutes this evening as a conclusion to the day's play. The love of life is in the details. Was it playful? So it seems to me.

a fifth approach: mes boîtes

here's is what the bird told the sleeping beauty after the fire. he says it in his own language and she dreams it:

there is something evocative about all the shoe boxes left in the house last may in hinton after the arsonist's fire consumed the back wall, and the fire department’s dowsing of the flames that took off much of the roof. this brought on a game of ordering. i've loved boxes since i first saw amal and the night visitors as a child: so these are my boxes. across my life, i have had a series of boxes that i filled with special objects. i had numbered the first 3, and then created dated shoe boxes of the objects that had collected on my desk. the later boxes included unfinished projects as well as bits of the world that i had picked up from the street.

i was amused to see some objects appear in several boxes: a whispered language. i gathered the boxes from the floor of the neighboring house, where they dried out over the summer. some fell apart and had to be placed in other boxes. i brought the mess back to stephen and liz's basement and explored them there. i got a few new shoe boxes and created a series of nine boxes, playfully putting bits away and moving a few objects from one box to the next, making little notes as I borrowed things from one time period and tucked them into another. at first it seemed unlikely that i could contain the material. some things seemed too wide or bulky. over the course of five days, i arranged all the pieces into what became nine boxes. some pieces fit inside others. once i finished, i took a series of photographs to make a "slide shoe show."

the boxes will eventually join the series of journals i keep. a few objects in each box may move into other boxes to complete what i had set out to make, but didn't complete. a few characters made of neckties might benefit from metal bits that would nicely weigh their limbs. things like that enter the creative process. i write some text on the lid interior and delight to find that i have done this in the past as well. i imagine adding notes in the future.

the pipe cleaner little man that naomi schiff made for my fifth birthday april 1960 has his bed in a mexican dish that came from the house on andrews lane when we moved in oct 1974. i can count out my life ...

a sixth approach: soul induction one

The soul* always plays. Sometimes we forget.









*I use the word soul to refer to that fragment of a universal experience that feels like our personal link to everything as it folds and unfolds.


I once called my musings

Play for the Soul

because I found my inquiries into a sense of soul full of similarities with play. A journal entry from 4-24-2003 listed the following associations on the soul.


Soul: hovers outside awareness
Soul; non linear timeless
Soul: all at once always
Soul; holds no dual nature; both/and
Soul: in every cell of our body
We can experience Soul concentrated in our body
Soul; continues before and after what we believe in as life
Soul: present rather than known
Soul; seems absent, though present
We can go through life without connection to Soul
Soul: always in balance; not belief bound.
Soul; doesn’t compete.

an out of order eighth approach: mind as inquiry

an out of order eighth approach: mind as inquiry

Is there ever a permanent order? Can something be out of order and remain out of order? Which order reigns?

An odd and wonderful thing about play stems from attempts to figure out why we play. Every attempt so far fails to show that an assumption about play holds true. Our bias to favor a deeper value for playful behavior intuitively makes sense, but science doesn’t support any hypothesis we propose. Our problem stems from the need to make sense of something that in its nature remains senseless. It remains senseless but not unimportant. I hope that after this exploration play still seems senseless, and that that senselessness comes to represent something cherished, however impractical or insubstantial. We can view senseless as without direction, because in this realm of play the value of direction yields to the value of whatever happens in each moment.

a seventh approach: spirit

This text takes inspiration from the timeless quality of play. This timeless quality seems to heal some inner imbalance. Aspects of healing extend from physical cuts and scratches to emotional hurts and neglect. Healing extends to spiritual aspects of living.

Thus, this book encourages play, bringing us back into personal balance, exercising basic skills of inner awareness.

Breathe these pages.

seconds: note one: the stumble

Friends helped me realize that playing is how I live my adult life. I have always found other ways to proceed and have found when I simply engage in activities, ideas pop into my head about ways to make most activities more playful. There seems to be a constant adjustment to what comes next. Call it an internal wobble.

When I try to write a description of play for someone else, something essential gets left out. Basically we can make anything playful, so the idea of proposing exercises that promote play introduces a problem. The exercise can be playful, but it can also be completed in a fashion that I wouldn’t consider playful. So how do I provide a qualitative difference when it isn’t a matter of what we do, but how we do it? It is about a relationship between an inner and outer world and a consideration of what happens as we proceed. Something already appears in my written voice that separates me from my play state. But here’s what’s next.

As an 18 year old, I first stumbled back on play. It was an unhappy period, finding that what I filled my time with didn’t alleviate my distress. This event came after the time I tried to eat seven Swiss Chocolate bars at once. Well, actually I ate them in series and failed to complete the game. Chocolate has never been the same. I’ve never tried that game again with chocolate, but I did try it once with cookies without the dire consequences, except that now I can’t buy more than two types of cookies at a time.

One afternoon, I simply began to arrange some objects in a container. I cut some things, and glued some things, and made a kind of collage out of images and text, and small objects. Something unusual happened. I lost all sense of unhappiness, or of completion, and time folded back on itself. I just fell out of the usual parameters and found at the end of the afternoon that I felt fine. I can’t even describe it as feeling better. I removed myself from the measures and checks with which I had usually assessed my state of mind. I had a fine time. I remember few details, though I do know that at one point I checked the time and I still had most of the afternoon in front of me. I felt as though I had been engrossed in my activity for a long time. At another moment I was surprised that an hour passed in what seemed like a moment. I was puzzled and pleased.

A lot of time passed before I had another experience like this one, where time vanished and activity simply unfolded. But something had been revealed, and I chose to call this play. I felt like I had stumbled upon something of great value that I couldn’t accurately describe.

As I have explored this realm, some things seem to help me get there and some things help me stay there. I am pretty sure this is idiosyncratic. But I think the process and certain aspects of the process show up again and again. So I will offer some of these notions and hope that along the way they will provide you with a way into your own play state. I’d really like to encourage you to invite yourself into this realm. And I then encourage you to explore what’s next. Hopefully my descriptions will encourage you to define your own experience more clearly, rather than lead you to expect us to share the same experiences.

seconds: note two: play portal

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, the tin.  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: perhaps a litany of school 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.

seconds: note two and a bit: waste bin

***
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 three: altered time

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 a flexibility of truth. Both sides from their perspective were faithful to 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 three point three three three: backwards

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? Was it 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 mind button to push that reorients what is there?
What is it about buttons and the notion of pushing something to set it into motion? Buttons are knobs or attachments. They join layers of fabric. They are a catch and release.
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 four: open time

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 arranging.

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 where you ride the next.)

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 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 four and a half: truths

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 the 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 a 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 remaining 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 five: doubt-play

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 (dies) 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 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 scattered thoughts. 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, would they be like 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 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 six: opposition

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. 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 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 the 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 nap.

seconds: note six point sevenfive: resistance

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: slightly unnerving. 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 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 a 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.