Getting ready for Mud Day!

Ithaca is a tremendous place – warm, friendly, open and passionate.  If you’ve seen Portlandia you’ll have a pretty fair sense of it.  If you haven’t, then imagine a town where the hippies got organized, and won.

The downtown is pedestrianized and filled with trees and art, creating a plaza between the shops (all independent, of course) with generous benches for seating, cool dapples shade, and interesting sculptures half-hidden in the shrubbery.

Oh, and a playground, which offers the only way one can “drive through town”.

There are a dozen tie-dye clothing and glassware shops, three independent bookstores and an oil-and-vinegar emporium.  Everyone drinks coffee and no one is in a hurry.

I went to buy stamps and the man behind the counter heard my accent.  We had a jokey conversation about “damn foreigners”.

“At least you guys speak English,” he said, winking.

“Better than you lot do,” I replied.

“BOOM!” He shouted, startling the people in line behind me.  “Solid burn.  High five me!”

In how many towns are you high fived by public officials?

Rusty and the fabulous Anarchy Zone team brought me here to do some playwork training – what an amazing collection of brilliant, dedicated individuals!  I’m heading over there now to help get ready for International Mud Day.

60 cubic yards of dirt are about to be delivered, and the fire department are coming tomorrow to hose it down.  This sheer quantity of mud won’t fit into my brain (though I’m sure that tomorrow a surprising amount will be squashed into my hair and clothing).  Hurray for mud!

Second in the series on play memories – now from Ithaca!

Greetings from Ithaca!

I’ve gone to visit Rusty Keeler and the Anarchy Zone that he and a range of wonderful people have begun.  Details and photographs to follow!

In the meantime, here is the second part of the series of posts on play exercise memories.

As always, let me know what you think – especially if you disagree.

With love,

M.

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I’ve often thought that playwork should be one of those professions (like therapy) where professionals are obligated to seek those services for themselves.

We’re all drawn to this work for complex, shifting reasons – because it feeds some hunger we have for self-healing, for joy, for time spent outdoors, for inspiration, for hope. There is an old Jewish idea of tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and sometimes it’s suggested that we choose tasks of repair that mend for others breakages that we suffered ourselves. We can end painful cycles, spare others and triumph over our old wounds.

For me, playwork appealed to my anger at the breakages I saw in the world, the systematic silencing of people in the basis of age, ability, orientation, strangeness. Coming at this from an eco-feminist, anarcho sensibility, playwork offered tangible, practical and joyful possibilities to help disregarded and disempowered young people make immediate changes in their worlds, and to do this with humor and compassion.

We are all imperfect, troubled and flawed. We all nurture secret hopes. We have all been hurt and all have an instinct for self-healing. We each have our reasons for doing this work (and those reasons are clearly not money, fame or popular respect) but how do we separate our reasons from the work itself?

Last week I shared some stories about these exercises, and others shared their own in the comments, so let’s delve into the processes of these exercises so that we can better understand how to observe, reflect and respond to what is happening.  Instead of focusing on groups which we have led, let’s try this for ourselves.  Take some time now to cast your own mind back, to sit in the sensory recollections, and let them fill you.

What do you feel when you recall your own childhood?

What do you remember?

For me, ‘play’ and ‘not-play’ memories are all jumbled up, and they don’t come running when called. I remember burning the soles of my feet on the summer-hot concrete of San Diego docks, skipping shade-to-shade all the way home. I remember being small for my age and hating it when adults thought I was younger than I was, or called me cute. Playing Barbie and Ken with a neighbor girl, how she took all of their clothes off, and the plastic clinks they made when she smacked them together.  Day-dreaming in my room, and the glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck above my bed. I remember loving my cuddly toys for far longer than I thought appropriate, and the fear that this love was childish and somehow weak.

The immediacy, the potency of childhood memories is still striking and for a moment I am caught, a taste in my mouth of the sticks we’d chew and call “Indian gum” but the mouth itself thirty years old and in another country. The skin on my arms and the back of my neck rises in bumps.

Putting these memories into words is a thinning process; I flatten them to push through a letterbox of communication. A memory told changes character, becoming something that takes place publicly outside of the remembering body – just as Stuart Lester says that asking a child to explain their play is “disembodying”, so is explaining a memory. The trade is the possibility for connection, for airing and releasing something which was carried within for so long.

We rarely give enough time to these exercises.  We make assumptions as to their effect.  Some adults are reconnected to a forgotten joy that spills over easily into advocacy – but not necessarily. Play memories relocate us within our childhood selves (or reawake the children within us), and these children are hungry, curious, selfish and strong. The process from this to advocacy is one of translation, of projecting your own needs (met) onto those of children today (unmet) and then recognizing what you can do to make a difference.  For advocates, we need adults who can step aside from their own remembered needs and understand how to support children’s play as an adult.

For the play deprived adult, however, the experience can be rather different. It is easy to slip into jealousy, suspicion, anger or withdrawal – all the emotions we see in play-deprived children every day. Alice Miller wrote on our need to process childhood oppression, developing sympathetic understanding for ourselves and for the adults who couldn’t do any better. If not, we simply pass these on to children in our care, looking to them to meet our needs in explicit and subtle ways, and in doing so continue the cycle of abuse and mistreatment.  This can be true for parents and caregivers, teachers and playworkers.

From The New Yorker, June 28th, 2012

Miller, a former psychotherapist, had grown disillusioned with the notion of the ‘talking cure’ and argued of the danger of creating or continuing a ‘false self’ – one that says and does the right things, one which performs but cannot truly experience, reflect or grow.  This false self masks the true one and old traumas, these scabbed-over wounds that itch and trouble us and yet remain unexamined.

We recognize the impact of our own childhoods upon us, and of ourselves upon the play space. And yet we are often terribly British about these potential conflicts, with the professional message often seeming to be that “you must handle your problems, just not here”. And indeed, how are we to address these problems? If simply talking about them isn’t enough, and we are wary of revealing so much to the people we work with, how are we to proceed, as individuals and as a profession?  And how are we to effect the widest possible change in children’s lives?

In the next and last post in this series I’ll discuss another method which can be used in parallel with or replacing play memory exercises to help adults learn to recognize and meet their own play needs, draw up childhood experiences in a supported environment, reconcile past traumas, and connect with others.

What’s more, we’ll do it using the skills we already have.

First day back in NYC

What a day!

I flew in Tuesday and, thanks to the miracle of West-bound air travel, arrived only three hours after I left Heathrow.  My first day in NYC was, to say the least, fairly dazzling.

The first meeting was at MoMA, where Sharon and I heard more about their amazing-sounding exhibition called Century of the Child AND planned for the Pop-Up Adventure Playground that we’re doing in collaboration with them Friday, August 10th.  As an art nerd and former NYC resident, I can’t tell you how warm and proud this collaboration makes me – or how excited I am to check out the exhibition itself!

The second was at Mother’s in Williamsburg – a detail I am including only because they served the BEST sweet potato fries I have ever had – with the wonderful ladies from Microtopia.  Our Pop-Up Adventure Playground was next to their site on Governor’s Island during last summer’s FIGMENT Festival, and we’re looking to see what other chances we might have to play together soon.

In the evening we went to  an event at Flux Factory called “Your Neighborhood, Who Decides?”  People from 596 Acres spoke about the vast numbers of publicly owned vacant lots in the city – 596 Acres in Brooklyn alone (hence the name) – and the tools that they’ve developed to help community groups organize around them.  Does anyone know of an organization like this in the UK?

After all of that, it’s no surprise that jet lag finally hit and I fell asleep on the train back, leaping up for my stop just in time.

First of a series on play memory exercises

I’m off again, tomorrow morning!  Back to the States.

While I’m flying, here is the first of a 3 part post on Play Memory Exercises.  I hope you enjoy, and let me know what you think!  Especially if you disagree.

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Play memory exercises are used by a number of people working in play and playwork (and undoubtedly other fields too) to help adults remember their childhood experiences. These play memories can be elicited by simple questions, by prompted visualizations, and participants usually say that the process was far deeper – the memories far more powerful – than they would have anticipated.

Like many people, I was first introduced to the idea of play memories by Penny Wilson. She has used play memory exercises beautifully on many occasions – helping to awaken adult’s recollections of long-ago summers as well as their understanding of and sympathy for children.  I have seen her begin with play memories and and to start them people on a road to play advocacy. She has also completed a gorgeous photo and story series called “The String of Beads” that combines images with interviews with local older people to tell an oral play history of London’s East End (buy it here).

I have used versions of these exercises myself in a number of different settings, and agree that it’s powerful stuff. On an individual level, it is astonishing to see how people’s whole demeanors can change, how their expressions soften and they say the unlikeliest of things.

When it works

“I was bully,” one 92-year old Greek Cypriot woman said to me.

“You were bullied?” I asked, not sure if I’d heard correctly.

“No!” she said. “I bully, I take from other children. Dolls, oranges. I see and I take.” She reached out her arm, the hand thin and crabbed now, and snatched at the air.  She laughed and laughed at who she used to be. All around the table those who shared her sheltered accommodation rolled their eyes at one another, unsurprised.

Another time I began a short workshop with a play memories exercise, encouraging anyone who felt moved to share a memory of a place or beloved object with the group. It was stilted at first, then one man spoke very softly.

“I, I played by the railway tracks,” he said. “It was quiet there. It was mine.” He looked at me, with his eyes shining. The air in the centre of the circle became warm, and as people talked of their favorite spots, their games with pebbles and shells, we all joined together in seeing how all of us had shared similar experiences in very different countries. Afterwards, the man approached me.

“Thank you,” he said. “I have not thought of my childhood in so long, and remembering it was like a gift. A gift I did not know I possessed.”

When it doesn’t work

There were two younger members of that second circle who looked distinctly uncomfortable. Two people with very little to share. Many professionals in the field have told me the same – that the younger members of their classes and workshops simply didn’t play out as they did, didn’t play as freely, and don’t have the memories to draw upon.

This can be extremely problematic. Those afore-mentioned professionals have expressed to me their concern that adults who didn’t play as children will be less able to support children’s play – they’ll have a limited skill set for play, their own needs will be too great to be put aside during sessions. In truth, if we as a field say that play is vitally important, doesn’t it follow that practitioners who were denied those opportunities themselves will be less able?

Then there’s Brown and Lomax’s 1969 study linking play deprivation and serious violence. This study, or summaries of it, are read in playwork training sessions all over the UK.

Having a coffee with a new volunteer playworker, this study came up in conversation. The new volunteer was nervous, fiddling with her teaspoon and not meeting my eyes, but the words seemed to boil up from deep inside.

“I nearly quit the course,” she said. “I mean, I like playwork and all, but I thought it wouldn’t like me.”

“How come?” I asked. She twisted up one side of her mouth.

“I didn’t do all that,” she said. “Running about, getting into mischief. I was at home with my sisters, watching TV, looking after my Dad. And well, I’m not a serial killer.”

This made me reconsider some of my assumptions around these exercises. If I hadn’t had that year of living on a boat, what warm and powerful play memories would I be drawing upon? For many of us, remembering our childhoods is not a simple or comfortable process – many memories are opaque, troubling, or buried under sediment that requires time and gentleness to sift through. There was lots of wonderful stuff in my childhood, but I also remember strong feelings of frustration, of loss of power, of loneliness. Memories of those feelings are without question essential to my own playwork practice, but are not to be dragged up casually, or in an open forum with people I do not yet feel comfortable with. I am not alone in this, and when asked for a play memory in public I realized that I draw upon one or two that are safe, well-worn, outdoors and free – ones that feel appropriate to what is being asked of me.

I remembered how many of the older people I’d interviewed said how lovely it was to remember their childhoods – and how one of Penny’s interviewers had flatly refused to remember his. It seemed to me then that asking people to draw upon those memories so they would come to see the value of our position is irresponsible, perhaps even psychologically unscrupulous. At the same time, being interested in the children that we all were, the children that we will always carry with us, and gathering oral histories, reawakening our younger, playful selves – this is powerful, vital stuff.  How to reconcile these positions?

Practically speaking, play memory exercises are often our first port-of-call in building conversations around play – and this may be more exclusionary than we realize.

“Think of a favorite childhood place to play,” Tim Gill began when speaking to a crowd at Shoreditch House. “How many of you are remembering a place out of doors? Hands up.” And the hands went up. He asked how many of these had adults around, hands rose and fell. He did not ask whether those adults were parents or not (something I would have been interested in) but did mention the difference he sees when doing this exercise with groups of different ages. The younger the audience, the less likely it is that people will have played out of doors and away from the adult gaze.

How do we frame this discussion carefully, when telling someone that children today are being robbed of something that they were also robbed of, and that this loss has real and terrible consequences? It is delicate, to say the least.

On a site in East London, I was speaking with a parent who had come up to complain. She was furious with the children who played in front of her house, with us for attracting more children and then ‘rewarding’ them with string, tape and plastic tiger masks.

“All this, all this noise,” she said, spitting out the words. “All this mess. And they ride their bikes around and around, anywhere they please!”

“Where should they go?” I asked. “They cannot cross that busy road.”

“They should stop in,” she said. “Stay indoors, that’s fine. It was good enough for me. I had none of this,” she shook her hand in anger at the warm summer day, at the loops the children were making with the bicycles round and round the hollowed-out playground, at the bags of fabric and chalks that caring adults had brought and shared. “I had none of this, and I turned out alright!”

So?

We need other ways, in addition to the elicitation of play memories, to help adults recognize the importance of play in the lives of children, and in their own. We need ways of doing this that do not highlight the lack, but instead help them to build upon what they have so that they, like the children we work with, can create the environments they need to play – and to play out, both physically and psychologically.

And that’s what I’ll be exploring in the next installment!

Wink Murder

I was watching a group of children who were told to play a game.  The adult hadn’t wanted to tell them what to do, but she’d been told what to do, and so the orders came cascading down.  She softened it as much as she could.

“What game should we play?” they asked.

“What’s a good game to play?” she replied.

“WINK MURDER,” one girl shouted.  Others said “yeah” or groaned.  The groaners were in a minority, so the game went ahead.  The group was mixed-age, however, and one boy of only 5 stared around him with an expression of happy bafflement.  When the oldest child there asked for volunteers, he put his hand up and waved, grinning.  She sent the detective out and made him the murderer.  However, once the Detective returned from exile it became clear that the young boy had no idea what his role in the game was supposed to be.  He just kept sitting there, looking around and smiling, waiting for the game to happen.

After a few minutes the older children began laughing and whimpering with impatience.  With no murders taking place and being unable to explain things to the boy, they were trapped in the rules of the game.  What do you do with a killer who can’t kill?

One child fell over backwards, shouting “I’ve died of boredom!”  The others laughed.

Another collapsed sideways.  “I’ve died laughing,” he said.  More laughter, and the little boy clapped his hands at all the fun that was being had.  A third tipped onto the floor, and began snoring.  “I’m just asleep, me,” he mumbled against the carpet.

Soon the detective stood facing the little boy, who was now the only member of the circle still upright.  She pointed at him, accusingly.

“YOU are the murderer,” she said.  All around her, the other children laughed and muttered to one another.  “Finally!”

The little boy looked up at the detective and clapped and clapped and clapped.

“AGAIN,” he shouted, and everyone else chorused “Noooooooooo.”

Painted cars and playgrounds

Just as soon as I’d been remembering San Diego, there’s a Playgroundology post about a visit there!

Next time I visit my family out there I am for sure going to The New Children’s Museum.  Go look at that website right now!

Back?  Okay then!

Here, as your reward, is a photograph of another playground car.  This one is located at Haywards Adventure Playground, a place for disabled children (or children with disabilities, if you’re American) and their siblings in north London.  An old, broken down car was donated and then the staff set about fixing it to the ground, securing the doors open and replacing the engine with fragrant, edible plants.

This early work was done by the adults, in preparation for children’s free and total use of it.  The doors were wedged open with a ramp so that all the children could enter and drive the car.  Half-sunken tires provided seating for those who wanted to watch.  The sage and lavender created a sensory cloud, attracting a mix of children like butterflies.  Choosing edible plants meant that the children could smell, tear and eat at the leaves – whatever they felt moved to do.  The children were supplied with paints and markers and traffic cones to make it their own, if they choose.

And they did.

Of loved and broken toys

When I first started out in playwork I was pretty sniffy about toys.

For me, it was all about household materials, natural elements – grinding flowers into perfume, sawing planks to build a fort, and sitting around a fire as the sun tipped over the housing estates beyond. This idea of ordinary loose parts was a way out of the commercial and the over-priced trap we’d all fallen into, an escape from the overwhelming tide imported plastic rubbish that is probably made by children as much as for them.

And yet, and yet, children insisted upon loving their toys. They drew small figures out of their pockets as they walked in through the gates, to show their friends and run along the railings. They counted out trading cards and swapped them endlessly, and knelt behind plastic tigers that gave them a louder growl than they’d yet found on their own. I went back to my reading, looking again at Winnicott on transitional objects, at Dibs.

Here are three little descriptions of toys I’ve seen lately, in different contexts.

1. At a play setting recently in a school, helping carry large plastic boxes of toys out from the store cupboard. “Baby dolls in the home corner,” one of the staff team said. “Soldiers and blocks and trucks and so on over there.” I looked down into the box of Action Men I was holding, all those naked and putty-coloured heroes jumbled up together. The one on top had its string joints loosened by time and use, and lay there with its limbs flung out with a balletic, corpse-like grace, its vacant expression turned towards fallen comrades.
2. In the Toy Museum in Istanbul, they had rooms of toys divided by era and theme.

   

   Of all of these, I felt the closest to the plastic cowboys and Indians – they felt like the toys of a childhood parallel to my own, that of the boys I knew, that of the adults in my family whose 1950s childhoods I had seen in TV shows and read about in books. It was so easy to imagine dioramas just like these laid out on living rooms carpets in America, in Britain, in Germany and Japan – all the places these specimens had been collected from.

   

   In peering through the glass of these display cases, whole realms of the imagination began to unfold. Were these built in response to children’s shrinking landscapes of freedom? It seemed then that a toy, the right toy, becomes an extension of the self. It is a process of imaginative introjection, a dance of flow-with-object in which your physical self-reference shrinks and is projected through a bottleneck, emerging into a new realm of tingly possibilities. You melt with your toy, suddenly able to leap and wrestle with alligators, fly and shoot and drive with your small, mute, tangible (and eminently transportable) pocket guide.

3. Today, I went to an auction of furniture and home decorations and found these among the sideboards and tea sets. A leather suitcase lay open, flat cardboard orange boxes full of jumbled tin trucks, plastic tracks, and a paper mache collection box for the Barnardos Home. All of them, gathered in lots and tagged for the convenience of browsers and bidders alike.

   I would have bought a boxful, if I’d anywhere to put it. The three-legged lions and wagons that peculiar shade of 1960s red called out to me. They all seemed so homeless, so like the melancholic ending of The Velveteen Rabbit, and I wanted to gather them in the same way that as a child I had taken up the lumpy toys, the wounded squashed ones at the back. I wanted to make something new, maybe take photographs like Minimiam and the Little People Project – but this time, with dinosaurs.

Play memories of family and beach

Do you ever have that feeling that a topic just keeps coming up, no matter who you’re talking with?

Recently for me, it’s been play memories. I’m working on a longer piece about these (and how we use them in training and outreach) but first I thought I’d share some of my own.

I’ve written before about the tide pools I played in as a child, and the shock of recognition when I saw them again for the first time since childhood. Two years after that reintroduction, I’ve found photographs taken when I was young and my family made a trip to the coves in La Jolla.

My childhood was in many ways “ahead of its time”. Growing up in Southern California, I was driven everywhere. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was nearly 10 – simply because I didn’t see the point. Where could I go? We had regular assemblies at school on Stranger Danger. Instead, I took classes: art classes, dance classes, juggling classes. I tried to be good at everything, and was usually more popular with the teachers at my progressive schools than I was with my peers. Most of all, I read. I read adventure stories about children whose parents were dead or hopelessly neglectful, where children ran half-wild and got into muddy mischief that I could never have imagined.

And yet, in other ways I was very privileged. When we went out for family adventures it was along the coastline of La Jolla, Balboa, Coronado. We jumped in and out of coves for hours, often. For a long time we had a boat and when I was eleven we moved aboard that boat for a year – a year in which I had a dingy of my own and a series of adventures that have defined my life (and my playwork) ever since.

I had long days with my parents of loitering on these small and gorgeous coves, the delicate pockets of ocean and smooth sculpted rock. Sunburnt nose and the grit of salt and sand in the back of my throat. The joyous honks of sea lions, each fat as Father Christmas, sliding and lurching in the harbour mouth.

Sometimes I’d dig so deep into the rich, heavy sand that it would fill my hair and swimsuit completely. My parents would hose me off in the backyard before letting me into the house and I remember turning in that hard cold spray, feeling it strike the pink skin on my shoulders, the scrap of sand pushed off my skin, the noise of clumps falling on the hot concrete steps before being wrapped in a huge towel and walking back inside the large cool house, to my books and my TV.

Why do you write?

This Playwork Blogger Network thing has had me thinking more about writing – why we do it, what it’s for, and how it feels.

I tend to make notes compulsively during play sessions, scribbled onto sweaty little pieces of paper then crammed deep in my pocket for later. It can be surprising how few words I need to remind me of the intensity of a moment, the details of what was said and done. Sometimes it’s a way to exorcise memories, to create a new context for something that’s troubling me.

For me, it can be a way to practice explaining myself. Mostly it’s about working out how I feel as I go along – explaining myself to myself, if you will.

So if that’s the case, why publish?

A friend of mine, a gifted playworker and extraordinarily talented and inspiring writer, recently said that she was too disheartened to write these days, that she was tired of feeling that no one was responding. I’ve felt that way too, that blogging is like talking down a well, like throwing bottle after bottle of messages into the ocean. But then occasionally I’ll be in conversation with a colleague at a conference, say, and they’ll ask how my parents’ move is going, or whether my little red suitcase survived its latest adventure. I’m always surprised, as if I’ve been caught gossiping behind my own back.

When we blog it’s partly to seek a connection with other people, to provoke a response which might suggest we’re not alone. This is the exchange we make – in blogging we share what we please, when and how we please, but we have no control at all over response or reply.

Ultimately then these modest little posts offer an invitation to our world, to our way of seeing. They’re cues to join us over here, in this little game we’ve started. This is why it’s so important that we join up together, that we read and reply and comment on what one another have written. That’s the way to transform lots of lonely writers making their solitary cues into a real conversation, into a chorus of voices all chattering about play and playwork – about everything.

What about you?  If you write, why?  And if you don’t, why not?

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Here are some links!

Orwell’s classic essay Why I Write

A post at the Artist’s World called Why Do I Write? that elicited maaaaany comments from readers on their own motivations

A series of short essays by famous (and famous-only-to-their-Moms) writers on this very subject

Somewhere in here are the makings of a wonderful fort

For anyone who’s been wondering, the great Saxby Family Relocation is nearly complete!  After a day to pack then clean then drive south, followed by two days of taking things off the truck, we’re totally at home!  All boxes are emptied, all pictures hung on the walls, and my folks and I are off to the beach.

I’m totally kidding!

This is the Dining Room.  What – you mean you couldn’t tell?

So, moving takes time.  This is especially true in the early stages when it’s like one of those travel games, the kind in which you need to move all the pieces to reach the piece you need.

Outside of these cardboard canyons is a beautiful landscape.  From my window I can see and smell flowers, and jasmine blows in.

The view from the front is pretty sweet, across a mill pond to the railway bridge beyond.

There’s lots to go exploring – I’ll need a boat of my own, I think, for all the Famous Five, Over Sea Under Stone type adventures I’ve got planned.

There are also swans that will apparently take brown bread straight from your hand.

I’ll be spending more time with my folks this summer than previous years, helping them settle in.  My head’s full of ideas churning about, and this seems like a good place to put some of them to paper.

Just as soon as I find the fittings for my desk.