WHY PLAY?? YOU MUST!
The opposite of Play is NOT Work. It is depression. Brian Sutton-Smith
In times of Destruction, Create Something.
Maxine Kingston
In times of Creation, Destroy Something.
anon
Play is the ability to Dissolve and Coagulate
Paraclesus
PLAY is about Making Imaginal Artifacts
PLAY is about carving Anima
PLAY is recoginzing Totem animals
Recent Play Times
for/with Omega Staff,
School Garden Pre-School
More about PLAY:
* the creative process and common natural materials.
* learning about human nature from nature
* "ordinary creativity"-- that energy we all have and use to make our lives everyday.
* an exploration of the needs, costs and benefits of tendencies we all have towards expressing the ungovernable, the untoward and the contrary parts of ourselves. But it is not just about the maker. It's an attitude towards the making of objects... Or perhaps, it's learning that objects get themselves made through us. Objects "matter" themselves into existence through humans and that there are old ways that effect this. Some call them "archetypes."
- *about what Carl Jung calls Active Imagination... processes, exercises for encountering and witnessing parts of the unconscious, The Creative Unconscious.
- * about self-directed activities: making things with ephemeral natural materials; making things in the tradition of the surrealists who favored chance and intuition over formula.
* about ways of seeing, ways of being and ways of doing and the changing mix of all three. This means that there is no first way, best way or one way.It'sd about finding the Ways-of-the-Moment into a other parts of our s'elves. Here are a few dozen such ways. I as I'm collecting and writing about... I am just another elocution of these realities. m now writing this material on-line. I did not create or invent any of the idea.
- * in the tradition of the Trickster, that age-old tendency to take the world apart AND then put it back together in another way... using hand, head and heart. The Trickster is not a destroyer, but an artist:
- St. Francis of Assis
The Wayward Artist is the central character in PLAY. S/he's the artist-in-residence in us all. S/he must make.S/he makes things, dinner, his way, appointments, deals and trouble. What s/he makes are imaginal artifactsHmmm, gender differences?
What's "Wayward"? short for awayward, turned away, from away
following one's own capricious, wanton, or depraved inclinations : UNGOVERNABLE "a wayward child"
following no clear principle or law UNPREDICTABLE
opposite to what is desired or expected UNTOWARD
Synonym: positively, pleasantly contrary
It's taken me years to figure some of this out. Every so often, tucked in between sets of chairs, beds and tables, I'd find myself making something "else". Something that wasn't really a chair or a table. After years of "elses", I began to see certain patterns and themes in these objects.
WHY Anima?
They have something to say about the many aspects of our s'elves: some preferred, some hidden away, all with influence. At the moment, Anima, is the word associated with them.
There's also something about the Croning time of life.
