a waking mind aware of being here nor there

(or, mental amusement before seeing the light of day)

I am older than the selves of life leap-frogging along the making of time and place.

I am before the restless generations of becoming and dying and becoming. Before the chaos, the watery womanly demos of unthinking flesh and bone generating the moon time. Before the history of fallings from the womb and returnings to its vaginal elections. Before the breeding laying beneath the seeing of me alone unpartnered, uncoupled from the frenzy of fucking before corpses of stone deadly silence.

No music without the drumming of knowing nothing, knowing everything in the dance. The eros of gorging, of nippled firming of magical wands, then seed spewing and lactation. Who understands the middle churning between the alpha and omega, the bearing of souls from wet wombs spasming the vibrating streaming of being in and out of touching the accordian stops and starts. The attuning done by ear, not seeing the measurement in darkness but in light.

What withstands the onslaught of viral memories of how to suck the energy out of nothing and be such being. Rosy redness sainted nick clauses of coded connection, spitting of flakes of blood frozen in falling from night sky of the womb, here and not here, there and not there. Which is it after all?

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Play, who’d ‘a thunk it so serious

I just got the first issue of my print subscription to Scientific American Mind, and its lead article (“on page 22,” it says on the cover, which pictures a young fellow in a business suit juggling colorful balls in the air) is titled “The Serious Need for Play: How it improves your creativity, emotional health–and cuts stress.” I wonder if this cognitive neuroscientific topic is viral: I haven’t googled the major professional journals, but I’d be willing to bet the idea’s been making the rounds. (BTW, I don’t care for SA Mind’s subtitle for the article. It seems they stopped short in their list of benefits of play that it prevents tooth decay or body odor or…. ;)

playfulness and creativity and serious social progress

In recent discussions at online educational forums, I’ve shared a persistent and clear vision I’ve had of communities of digital-mediated learners as social/scientific laboratories in which participants innovate and design solutions to real-life local and global problems/challenges they encounter in these times of rapid change and dangers of status-quo mindsets. This video portrays for me the kind of interpersonal playfulness of learning and its productive outcomes which suits the centers of learning I have had in mind. The video gives substance to the hopeful vision of engaging new learning which would replace the fruitless (solely academic knowledge seeking), un-dynamic, un-playful, and obsolete system that we’ve allowed ourselves to believe is inevitable.

At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play — with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).

Tim Brown is the CEO of Ideo, a design firm founded by David E. Kelley in 1991. Brown carries forward Ideo’s mission of fusing design, business, and social studies to come up with deeply researched, deeply understood designs and ideas. Ideo is the kind of firm that companies turn to when they want a top-down rethink of a business or product — from fast food conglomerates to high tech startups, hospitals to universities. Ideo has designed and prototyped everything from a life-saving portable defibrillator to the defining details at the groundbreaking Prada shop in Manhattan (IDEO designed those famous see-through dressing rooms).

Ideo’s website sandboxes are a fun browse (recommended: Kid & Play, focused on children and fun). And check out the Global Chain Reaction for a sample of how seriously this firm takes play.

Where Do the Children Play? (video)

Based on a song by Cat Stevens and video clips from “The Lorax,” muppetmeatloaf created this YouTube video which asks a very big question: Where Do the Children Play?

homeless

(written on Tuesday, February 22, 2005, early in the morning)

Come out and play, they said.
We’ll see if we can bat grenades
over the red river with the butts of rifles.
The bayonets are sheathed
so our swings won’t bloody the bases
from cuts in our bellies.

This isn’t the game I played, I said,
when wee kids wrapped a broken ball with tape
and hit it with a naily Louisville slugger
and ran paths in the grass
to laughing collisions at home.

Come on, they said.
We’ll clear a field of corpses
and run round the red sucking mud.
No, I can’t, I said.
I’ve lost my legs for running fun,
and you’ve no home to return to.

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