I Just Came In From Playing.

Let me catch my breath. . .

Whew, that's better. Now, where was I?

Oh yeah, playing. Today I have a bit of a poem for you. I love poems. They are concentrated bits of someone else. What it might be like to be them and how like me they are.

Here is a bit from "East Coker by T. S. Eliot:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Aside from the poem, here is a good example. I cut and pasted this little snippet from a page that had the text in white on a dark background. So when I pasted it here, it did not show up. I did not think it worked so I pasted it again. Finally, I played around with it and saw that the computer did exactly what I told it to (stupid thing) not what I wanted it to do.

Always a way to play. Do read the whole poem when you get the chance.

Making Time To Play

So I try to play a little bit every day. Sometimes that takes the form of a few minutes with my flute. Sometimes I surf some and one thing leads to another or perhaps I heard something on the radio or read it in a book and I look it up and learn something.

One way or another, I find a minute or two to play even if the play take the form of fantasizing about having all the time I want to play.

I drive about two hours a day back and forth to work. Sometimes I turn the radio off and let the world get by on its own while I drive. I watch the people in the other cars or pedestrians along the way. Often I watch the sky. The sky is a marvelously complex thing. Hardly ever the same. The other day, I saw a contrail from a high-flying jet casting a shadow on a lower level thin layer of clouds. And I have seen one instance of the famous pulsing contrails.

The important thing is to take time to play. Make time to play.

Other Ways I Play

Probably the most common way I play is to learn stuff. Usually there will be something that catches my imagination that will drive me to do some searching and reading on line. Sometimes that will satisfy my curiosity and sometimes I will look for more.

One of my favorite performing artists right now is Corb Lund. His song Horse Soldier, Horse Solder has generated a couple of sessions of searching for background. He mentions the name of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forest with whom I was not familiar. He also refers to an incident at Mayerthorpe, Alberta, Canada that I had to look up.

So just about anything can capture my attention as a opportunity to play. Even my job. :)

How I Play

My favorite way to play right now is to play my Native American flute. I have had the flute for about 10 years now. When I got the flute, the maker suggested that the best way to learn to play was to make friends with it. That is what I have done over the years. After a while, people started to be attracted to the sound of the flute.

There is a story of the creation of the flute that says that after the first man found the first flute, he wondered how to play it. He slept and had a dream in which he walked out in a clearing in the forest with his flute. A voice said "play the tree tops". So he started to let his eye follow the treetops playing a higher note when his eye came to a taller tree and a lower one when his eye fell on a lower treetop. This process began to feel natural after a time. After a time he followed the flights of birds or butterflies or a babbling brook and after I time he could allow his mind to wander and follow his thoughts.

That is pretty much what I do. Everything is a spontaneous reflection of my experience of the moment.

First Note

Well, this is an experiment.

I have heard a lot about blogging and I thought I would jump in and try it out.

I think that most folks in western culture loose track of how important it is to spend time doing just what they want to do. It seems that most people spend their time doing what they think they have to do. Hence, the name Notes On Playing.

Play is a pretty neat word. It has a bunch of meanings. My intent here is to include every single one of those meanings. In French, the usage of the verb "to play" is used differently depending on what you are playing. One plays "at" a game like chess. One plays "of" a musical instrument. Everything is fair here, of or at or any combination.

Well, that's the first one.