- Tina Rowley
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- Weekly Zephyr #111: Playskool
Weekly Zephyr #111: Playskool
As a member of Earth 2022,
I have gotten good at certain things and gotten worse at others. This isn’t Show and Tell so I’m not going to brag about whatever I think I’m good at right now. (No disrespect to S & T or being good at stuff and knowing it.)
I am good at some things that don’t sound like a brag, though. I’m great at going limp, for example. Absolutely love to do it, have cultivated it forever, can go dead limp on a dime. Some people have to keep moving and I am not one of them.
Pop quiz on the word PLAY
the recreation word, not the theater word
1. Love it, I play all the time.
2. Playing is great for kids and I think adults should do it, too. It’s good for us.
3. I feel in my heart that it is dumb when adults engage in play. Not dumb, okay. Unimportant. Goofy. Maybe a little offensive given everything. Dumb, though.
Nobody can see you answer in your brain so be honest. I myself aspire to be an uninhibited one but, you know, inhibitions. Everybody’s a two. In 87% of cases, though, a two is a secret three.
If you told me to play, play right now, I’d stand there like a dolt. A kid would be at it immediately. I’d think, okay, I’ll do, what. A little drawing. Or dancing? Should I dance? Is that it? A collage, I bet you mean a collage. And I’d do a collage very hard and then check it off the list and feel healthy.
[Here is a space where I spent 300 words or so opining on play vs pleasure vs rest and the heaviness of the world and then guess what, the words disappeared. A fairy told Substack to eat them. I shouted NO NO NO NO NO because I barely slept last night and it’s hard to write the Zephyr on no sleep but the words I worked so hard on entirely not in the spirit of this post were gone]
Haha! Somebody’s having fun! Not me!
Point taken, though, world.
The words disappeared when I toggled away looking for this picture:
That’s a structure made out of sticks from my yard in early springtime a few years ago. Here’s the context, from an old Facebook post:
Spent time in my yard today barefoot and sitting smack on the ground, getting my Earth on, and the memory floated back to me how to be outside like a proper, flat-out child. It was like a visitation. I sat there gathering and moving sticks around with no point but dead serious like it was my job, the best job, I was the queen of this job. Made this I don’t know, dome, house, place for someone to do something that’s none of my business. A fairy or someone. I didn’t ask. Twenty different springtime smells disappeared in front of my nose as fast as they appeared, hi-bye, and birds with different voices jammed out piecemeal to the right and left above. To be out there like that was me and nature saying to each other at the same time “You know what to do, please get me untwisted/I know what to do, let me get you untwisted” and when I came back into the house I felt like a whole person from the feet up.