Play, I Pray You

A letter on the necessity of creative play.

I am like a character in a movie who uproots their neatly grounded life and returns home, only to enter into a season of ambivalence.¹

And you.

Do you also know the anxiety of ambivalence? The interior chaos that comes from being conflicted between vying places or people or purposes. It’s an eternal tension, really. The forever finding oneself on the fragmented path that splits, seemingly separating you from where you are and where you want to be? Who you were and who you are becoming?

As a child, split between homes and hearts, and who has moved countless times, uprooted to leave love and land in hopes of new life, my heart is no stranger to the sensitive nature that settles when a soul has been splintered between places, people, and purposes.

The impulse often rises—to strategize, to control, to cling, to secure security, to plot and plan so that this season of unrootness doesn’t last forever. So that failure isn’t an option. So that foundedness comes fast, stays infinitely long, forever.

But our brief existence on this earth is not about control. There is no control, only the illusion of it. Hence, the necessity of creative play. To create and play without the guarantee of a specific outcome is to take part in the inherent invitation of life.

To risk.

To love is to risk. To live is to risk.

To play is also to risk, and, so it is, the practice of such play prepares us all for the risks of love and life.

Play is practice for real life.
—Rachel Marie Kang, Let There Be Art

In this last season, though I sought (and desperately clawed and reached and grasped for) strategy and security, I came to find I needed to, instead, return to play. One of the graces of returning home, I do believe.

I’ve sensed the prompting, the beckoning, not to reinvent myself but to rediscover who I’ve always been. It has not been easy. It has not always been fruitful. I have had to let many dreams and desires die in the process. I have had to ask myself hard questions. I cried heavy tears. Sat alone with myself in the most vulnerable of thoughts. I have been at the mercy of many things being outside of my control. I am without, in more ways than I could ever begin to explain.

Still, somehow, life is aglow. Still, somehow, my soul is awake and waking more. Still, somehow, I am simultaneously becoming who I’ve always been and who I was always meant to be.

And here is where play comes into play . . .

It’s easy to stretch yourself thin. To think that expansion means extending widely, rather than excavating deeply. Mmm. I’ll write that again.

The truth that I have found, in this last year or so, is that, in many cases, it makes all the difference to dig deeper, rather than simply expand wider. To, instead of shapeshifting and stretching your size to fit the one million molds of a plethora of possibilities, dig deep to find the truths and treasures trapped beneath the surface, the answers that are already all there.

Paper has always been my first love. And, in fact, even as I type this, I am coming to the realization that paper has also always been the steady presence in all of my multifaceted passions. Journaling. Poetry. Letter writing. Essay writing. Scrapbooking. Sending snail mail. Magazines. Reading books. Publishing books.

Somehow, someway, I stumbled upon papermaking, and it has felt like walking through a wonderland door that’s been waiting to be opened by me, key already and always in the hollow of my hand. Papermaking marries the writer in me to the artist in me. Two parts of me that have often (more like always) been at odds with each other.

Now, no longer conflicting, they are colliding. Concocting. Collaborating. The deepest possible coming home to oneself.

Play, I pray you.

Listen to the heart’s leading,
let your body bow to the beckoning in the wind
that asks you, dares you, to dig deep,
to reach into the places where ruin is rampant,
where losses linger, tauntingly,
telling you to forget, to forfeit all of who you are.

Play, I pray you.

Not on the world’s stage but
in the sanctuary of your heart,
in the stillness where thought,
dream, and memory dwell,
where you can always return home to,
the roads memorized by the you
beneath your post-modernized becoming,
the you that remembers chalk on driveways
and imperfect portraits pinned on
the sticky surfaces of fridge doors
cracked open in boisterous kitchens
tucked behind the tall pines on
backroads, all on the way back home.

Play, I pray you.

Like your life depends on it,
like your heart can’t live without it,
like your soul won’t survive without it.

Play, I pray you.

Not to find your place, not for profit,
not even to become a benevolent prophet.
But play, I pray you, to preach to your own soul,
telling it the truth of its own inherent worth,
no matter what is made, or not made,
because all the matters is that you are made,
indelibly content in and with who you are,
who you are becoming, and
who you’ve always been.

As always, comments are eternally welcome here. Share how this letter spoke to you and tell the story of what play looks like in this current season.

Play, I pray you.

of FALLOW

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1. See also Sullivan’s Crossing on Netflix because, truly, Maggie Sullivan’s untethered life is an exact carbon copy of my own right now.