appendages i-vii, a limb

Licenses To Play
5 cents




Pass into the realm of make believe. The truth anchors our ship in a safe harbor. We leave our everyday life safely protected. We begin to enhance an altered credibility.

Enhancing Exercise #1:Detailing a belief.

Take an improbable idea that you always wished were true and develop support for the idea. Keep it light and focused, and set a limit on the time involved. After that time carry the belief to someone else Hint: Don’t have a starting point, Consider as an example laughing as though tickled by something.

Take a quote from someone, but quote it as misheard. Take an idea that seems trivial. Take a behavior or expression that comes from family stories. Take a page from Miss Manners. Read about some other culture and adapt it. Seed a direction of inquiry.
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Embark on deepening the mystery. Remember from childhood how to spin a yarn or a long tale. Return to times when saying, “You’ll never guess what happened to me!” blends several things that happened with several wished for scenarios.

We enter the realm of the storyteller. Decide to bring to a social setting a tale that encourages others to tell tales about themselves. Use specific historical events or current events. Remember that we all put a certain spin on what we remember. That spin serves as an essential element of remembering. Each memory subtly shifts (or for some of us, blatantly shifts) differently from every other memory of the same event. Memory being of an observer has its own uncertainty principle built in. Two people can remember the same event differently depending on how it touched them. Own and elaborate a spin. Explore personal things and imagine special things in the world.

appendices i-vii seventh heart

Become interested in the packaging of any object. The packaging surrounds the object. Inside the packaging is a layer of air, wrapping and confining the object. Outside the packaging more air wraps around. These air pockets separate the object from everything else. The interior space begs to be played in. These exercises, this writing, these musings revolve all around these layers of space.



We have a chance to see things differently when we play. The space becomes a medium that we have at our finger tips to explore. As the vast machinery of perception kicks in and the movement begins, we have an opportunity to glance at the potential role the space between things plays. It can buffer the object or become so minimal to almost not exist at all. It can become wide. Suddenly we can navigate this space and pass through the brick wall and come out on the street outside where we sense we stand all along.

appendices i-vii sixth heart

Engage the heart of play by selecting a group of words that carry special personal meaning. They may be key words that always catch our attention. I select: synchronicity, heurism, optimism, enthalpy, choice, serendipity, intuition.





In any activity I find these concepts near the surface, creating an order and suggesting connections from one object to another, trusting that observing them introduces a sense of delight. I hope to find them standing for truth about play. I want to experience them as they reveal more layers of unexpected playfulness.

appendices i-vii fifth heart

In social settings a spontaneous shout of glee reveals a blatent playfulness. Or we may muse, “I did not know I could do this so easily or offer this so generously.” The heart of play acknowledges moving through the doorway into the play realm and sometimes it reveals the expansion of the play experience itself. Scenes in movies sometimes sweep us up passively into this sense of play. With a rush of emotion, we delight in some life truth staged before us. We may have to stage a reenactment to get the full effect for our self rather than the effect on us as an observer. It's a challenge worth exploring.





Heart of Play Experience #3 Putting into Words

Once we have a sense of living playfully, other words can fill these pages. Add words as commentary. Don’t push the prose; let words stand telegraphically or poetically. Remember that like love we have a concept that eludes certain aspects of verbal description. Trust that we know when we balance on the giving and taking fulcrum. Let the verbal approximations hum of the experience.

appendices i-vii fourth heart

Heart of Play Experience #2 Openness

Making known in a way
that is really still more hidden than known
is a manner of partial playful openness.
I am trying to "capture" this partial openness;
only I really don’t want it captured at all,
just remarked.


We gently hold an openness to possibility. When it happens, we know because some piece of our life puzzle fits into place with a feeling of satisfaction. Again I use the metaphor of puzzles. Puzzle solving tends to use shifts in reference. We shift from using the image on the pieces to place them to using the shape of the piece as a sorting and fitting principle. And then there is some other selection criterion that moves the stalled puzzle solving process forward. Do pieces call to each other?

appendices i-vii third heart

When I watch some people leave somewhere for somewhere else,
and even now when I leave,
I witness us suddenly realize we have forgotten something.
Appreciate the time it takes to go back.
Go back once, twice, three times.



Once the judgments that strongly criticize ill preparedness quiet,
and like all criticism generated in the realm of thoughts to protect our self,
they do quiet,
the humor of the multiple attempts to leave fills a potential space.
Why be so prepared when we can smile and chuckle as we leave again and yet again?
We reveal the give and take of leaving. The play shines through. Try it!

appendices i-vii two hearts

Play gives to us a moment when we feel the whole puzzle shift, and we sense an important personal piece falling into place. It tucks right in. Our awareness takes on a new level of playfulness. In this timeless experience of play something shifts and gives way subtly to something new. The metaphor of a little bit of give that exists in a machine between gears seems closest to this subtlety. At one moment the machine rests still.


In the next the whole apparatus hums along. As direction overcomes inertia, motion begins; we pass through a state where play between parts exists. That state or that window occurs where some force initiates the next motion. We use the expression play for this. It probably wears the machinery slightly with use, and it also allows the whole mechanism to advance. In one sense it lurches into existence. Its nature represents the overcoming of inertia. We push through the veil. In another sense it reveals the elegance of potential flight. At one moment the bird perches and in the next the bird flies.


In my memory is an image of Charlie Chaplin, standing in the gears of the world machine. I see him there and think: there he stands in that moment when the whole thing starts to move. Motion plays him. Potential movement promises magic or whimsy. It promises play. It intimates delight.

In the puzzle sense we reach our finger tip just over the edge and pull up a little piece of reality and discover underneath the opening of another world.