Do you remember how to play?

I think it might be a fairly simple equation.

Curiosity + Imagination x (time outside of time) = PLAY

When you think of yourself as an adult actually playing what does that look like? What parts of you are immediately resistant, unsure, or maybe a bit intrigued?

I keep a blanket in my car so I can easily grab it and spread it out in the field near my house. A part of living in rural New Mexico is that your yard is typically a dusty patch of ancient dirt with a random prickly pear cactus, a long abandoned piece of farm equipment, and a landmine of goatheads. A blanket therefore becomes a life raft.

A few weeks ago, I gathered my handheld recorder, a few contact mics, a point and shoot camera, and set up on my blanket. On one side was a makeshift pond created from a sunken plastic horse trough, and on the other side a massive fire ant hill. A perfect place to play.

This is me in practice.

What happens when we have no set agenda, with only the ingredients of what is nearby, a few chosen toys, and the directive to simply wander about and stay curious?

For the next hour, I laid on my belly and stared into the murky pond water where clusters of microscopic beings were in a state of becoming, I took photos without a phone, questionably stuck my geofón mic into the base of that enormous fire ant hill (we have a ongoing and complicated relationship), and heard otherworldy sounds that made me run away while shaking off ants from my microphone as I headed back to the safety of my blanket.

Eventually I wandered off and plopped into my hammock that I hadn’t visited in nearly a year and remembered what joy it is to swing back and forth staring up through the branches of a newly leafed out tree.

These days, there seems to be a focus on regulating your nervous system, and as a therapist, I get the intent. But for me, to regulate something is to control it, manage it, often without regard for the environment this nervous system is situated in. A nervous system is meant to respond to your internal and external environment.

What if instead of staring into screens and watching videos on how to regulate our nervous system, we just wandered about (literally or imaginatively), and actually played for an hour? Because we need more than to be regulated, we need connection with other bodies, other-than human bodies. We need to enter the worlds that exist all around us - the ones we cannot readily see or hear, the worlds that exist within pond water and ant hills.

I wonder if what we need more often is to shift out of our typical state of consciousness and into a mode of being that fosters connection beyond the human. A co-becoming and entanglement with place.

Play can do this.

Play for me is communing, it is being in community with the imaginal beyond the human.

What if the sense of being alone, or feeling lonely is a result of forgetting how to enter into the wondrous that exists all around us? If we correlate community as being solely with other humans, I feel like we are missing something essential.

“Finding community is a tricky thing. Community could live at least partially in the imagination, rather than continually forced into the literal. Our community should involve long dead poets, sharks teeth, the heavy frost of a Scottish glen, the erotic trim of a Bedouin tent.”

~Martin Shaw

I Dare You To Go Play For An Hour

P.S. - If you read my last newsletter about listening for radio waves, then you ‘ll know how smitten I am with this type of play.

A beautiful example of play and relationship with our kin, the electromagnetic field, is the work of Audrey Briot who is currently an artist in residence at Ma Umi in Japan. Her current work Ocean of Waves “develops textile and plant-based wave detectors, combining soft materials with electronics. Interweaving Earth’s resonance and deep-space radiations, this spiderweb-like sensor attunes to the radio waves and electromagnetic fields that pass through the Yaeyama Archipelago.”

If you’re on IG, you can listen to the sounds coming through on her beautiful spider web-like weavings.

CREATIVE WORK FROM MY PEERS WHO KNOW HOW TO PLAY

If you haven’t already checked out Cody Cook-Parrott’s new book, The Practice of Attention, it’s a gem! (their upcoming Study Group for the book starts this weekend, and their classes are incredibly fun!)

Check out Catherine LaSota interviewing other artists about how they make their creative projects happen in her Creative Containers video series. And don’t miss the final free literary event she hosts ~ My So-Called Literary Life (with special guest from the cast!!!)

Katherine De Vos Devine (IP Lawyer + Art Historian + practicing Witch) is someone you want to know and have in your corner! Check out her recent article Artists Don't Need Fewer Lawyers. They Need Better-Trained Ones. You can deep dive into more of her work and writing over at Protect Your Magic.

P.P.S. - Show me how you play! Reply back to this newsletter and send me your silly photos and weird art projects.

Listening with you, Adrienne