9th circuit seventh star door Unexpected Elaboration

Na nag nab nap nay nab


Playfully approach more endeavors, break them down into lengths. Engage in the parts that really inspire. Do the parts that require making up new ways to accomplish them. Try those new methods. Invite a friend along. Everything flows in some grand motion. Dust off the best thing that could happen. Let’s see what is happening. Let’s use imagination and live each small moment as fully as we can, down to the inspiration and the almost unnoticed pause before the next breath. We can be amused when we pass through a final door and find we are back out on the street under the street lamp where we started. Come with me down the chute to... [dear reader: Send me my reference to coming out in the street again, please.]


Does power flow from simple truths? If someone notices our behavior and we sense they would like to ask what we are doing, consider telling them that we are having fun playing. Leave it at that and see if they ask other questions. Being gently truthful about play can bring it back into our lives where it belongs. We have a lot of unexpected playful elaboration to engage in over this stage of our life.

Radicalized elaboration, radical playfulness,
goes to the edge of what you do before you complete anything. Add and transform actions of life, changing your perspective. The material, not just material, an approach to material shifts; engage the process, repeatedly attempting to make subtlties visible. Fully played with material like an experiment you can’t observe directly, reflects some other measured mystery.
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Play for the Soul

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9th circuit sixth oval door Unexpected Elaboration

I asked a group of middle-aged volleyball players if they ever had flying dreams. Of 9 men, 3 didn’t. Two flew without being in a physical body. And each of the other four had specific ways in which they flew, using their body like a super hero, like a bird, or like a fish though through air. And then there was my skipping along realizing the side-swipes of my steps had lifted me off the ground unexpectedly, perhaps more like a fish than bird or super hero. Most of these men hadn’t had these dreams in a while. Does our dream world reflect something of our play world? We can inquire about something familiar to us of others and explore the variations, finding unexpected elaborations?


On the bookshelf
Creativity (underlined) sits unread,
a dry husk. Unfit.
While reading, hands remain unengaged.
Playfulness absent, Nails bitten,
A sign. Hands measure something:
Linked emotional well-being.


Thinking about playing, never picking up anything and playing with it, there's a rub. The degree of kinesthetic organization and learning determines a degree to which this type of play proves essential to learning. The knowing comes later. What someone says, you simultaneously “speak” through your hands. The lag in the translation favors the experience rather than the knowing.
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Play for the Soul

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9th circuit fifth nook door Unexpected Elaboration

Lah lash lath lay

Elaboration Exercise. # 3: Shrine for Totems

As we’ve moved through these various layers, we’ve created a series of play testimonials about different aspects of creative expression. Create a place for these objects on a shelf or in a corner of a room. These representations or totems can serve as reminders of aspects of playfulness. The first time we gather and set them down, don’t pay attention to how they get assembled. Come back and check on them later. Do a little sketch of how they sit. Remember we can use symbols, doodles, words or any other method of annotation. What do we notice about these objects? How do they relate to each other in this layout? Rearrange them. Do they still contain reminders of playfulness? What about the place where we place them? See what changes, if we choose a place where we pass them regularly. See if they will be in the corner of our eye frequently. If we want to we can move them around to several different locations and experience what difference location makes. We can place them in some kind of carrying container and keep them with us. Do they invite us to live more playfully?


Play with them.



Keep the elaboration process active. Have a sense of humor about this and see if you hide aspects of play literally in the way you set up a shrine. Allow the symbols to tell a story just as one relates to another. You can apply some embellishment to the shrine. Play remains available even when life gets busy. Take the detour.
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Play for the Soul

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9th circuit four rectangle door Unexpected Elaboration

Jah jag jam jaw jar jay

I’d like to do that a little more.

Elaboration Exercise # 2: More

Take an exercise of which a little more practice would seem enjoyable. Add another layer to it by combining another aspect of play discussed earlier. Borrow ideas from childhood, or ideas that might have made childhood richer. Use any references. Bring in extra materials. See what happens.

Send in the results, possibly as testimonials inscribed on odd surfaces. Send a sketch or a description or a photograph covered with personal annotations. Send a copy with additional notes in the margins spilling onto the image. Send them to anyone who will enjoy them, I will; or send them as a surprise. Let this thread elaborate into community outreach for valuing play. We could send it to someone we don’t know whom we think would do better what they do, if they valued their playful nature more fully. Reaching out to ask someone to play, our earliest social engagement skill still offers a viable and valuable proposition.

Unexpected Elaboration of play shows you how you approach playfulness. Elaboration allows you to add personal to what you have developed. It reveals what you sense at any given point in the process. In the realm of play, right ways don’t exist. You don’t get to anywhere. Equally your way represents only one way. In fact in elaborating play, as you mimic others, you knowingly and inadvertently borrow from others. We borrow from the vast experience of human community. This act of borrowing has to be washed clean of indoctrination about competition and winning outcomes to be authentically valued. The novelty of play comes from the inner experience of the individual or group.
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Play for the Soul

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9th circuit third key hole door Unexpected Elaboration

Gath gash gay gal gap

That I’d like to do.

Elaboration Exercise # 1b: Making It

We can try a similar exercise with something we always wanted to make. The short circuit: “Make it.” Consider something seen in an interior design magazine or a gift shop or a piece of art. Something that evokes in us the “Hey, I could do that” response. This time for the purpose of creative play, hold to that response. We release the attachment to how this turns out. We search after a feeling that engages a process within. Describe how it feels to do this. Make notes; maybe even on the surface or interior of the object created. Or imagine it’s a cake, how about eating it and letting the crumbs fall onto cracks on another surface as a reminder to invite unexpected elaboration. Describe the emotional map passed through in making this object. Retain a perspective of an amused observer. This may provide essential clues to our personal playful identity.

Hands can serve as a barometer of playful activity. Their activity reveals something we can’t measure with thoughts. This type of activity links the body to emotional well being. “Don’t sit still with empty hands, make things?” Playfulness exists in our body. Maybe play simply reflects kinesthetic experience.

Does play represent learning without having to know?
Could playfulness express a personal sign language?
Can we understand play as eternal wisdom coming through our hands?



Interest revolves around the enhancement of moves through layering with other ideas and behaviors, rather than with the reduction of play to a set of moves. Many times something will seem like a novel approach and later you’ll notice another's similar style or form in some other context. Synchronicity reigns. (logicum inconstantia) from

Play for the Soul

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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.
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Play for the Soul

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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.
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Play for the Soul

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