10. 'Nothin' Special': In The Company of Children
by O. Fred Donaldson, PhD
I remember bounding out the door of my uncle's farmhouse on the first day of summer, taking in undeciphered, all that lay before me. I disappeared quickly from the range of the adult world; I had only a short time to get beyond where I knew that I could be seen and called. I ran about hither and yon, as my mother would say, greeting the four horses meandering about the barnyard, Buster, the Saint Bernard bounding along with me, and the tall green rows of corn. At times like this I ran about attempting to be everywhere at once. As I recall, I did not leave with any plans or expectations, rather I encountered the day as an adventure, making do with whatever came to hand. Playing with the frogs in the farm pond, chasing the horses down the land, exploring the old caboose in the woods. I understood doing nothin'. I was as much inhabited by the farm as I inhabited the farm. Surrounded by the farm was like being tucked into a down comforter on a cold night.
Hours later I would hear the ringing of the large dinner bell that stood on a post outside the kitchen door. I wandered home for dinner stopping along the way for just one more little bit of play, until finally I found myself at the mudroom door.
'Hurry and get washed for dinner. Where have you been?'
'Nowhere.'
'Who were you with?'
'Nobody.'
'What were you doing?'
'Nothin' special.'
My mother smiled at my answers. She knew that I was somewhere, probably with someone, doing something. And I knew that she knew this too. So, what's going on? Sometimes I gave these answers because I was playing somewhere, in the hay loft, or chasing the horses. It isn't that I didn't know where I was or what I was doing. I was playing with the world.
This kind of nothing points to a notion of childhood that is too often only examined by eyes narrowed by the calculations of adulthood, which no longer feel the urge to journey and seek out who lives beyond our categories. In this sense 'nothing' describes a vacancy which discounts all else that might pass between people, where we experience a feeling of emptiness at the heart of being.
My reply of 'nothin' special' to my mother describes the presence of an absence or the nothing that is known to be there beyond categories setting me in a much wider constellation beyond our abstractions, categories, and pedagogies. This nothin' is characterized by a sense of wonder, surprise, and expectancy that keeps a child's eyes wide open. Nothin' here means everything. In this play I am initiated into the world, where borders between me and other creatures are places to explore, where the earth gets ground into our skin and a sense of belonging gets under our skin. Too often we fail to realize that we are in the 'nothin' special' presence of the sacred, because we are too preoccupied with tasks or because our categories seduce us into believing that childhood is just 'kid's stuff.'
Play with children and wild animals over the past 30 years has shown me that play is not a condiment to be added in order to spice up an ordinarily dull, lifeless existence. Play is not a vacation from life. Rather play is life's adventure with all its grace and grit, sacredness and ordinariness. Play is the cipher used in the encoding of an ancient, hieroglyphic code of primary importance through which we are brought home again. Like a haiku each play meeting focuses on a moment in which the sacredness of ordinary life is brought forth. In these encounters we are authenticated by each other and therein by all beings. It's not that I know more, but more deeply. The question about life's meaning vanishes, yet I can't point to it or define it. For a moment my soul breaks open, like a shaft of bright sunlight searing through expansive gray clouds leaving bright the ground around, providing a glimpse of life's possibility.
Play becomes an experience of trust and spirit, of heart and body, of life and death, and of grace and grit. The essence of being a playmate is to play my heart out. Literally my heart is at my fingertips. To put one's life into the hands of another is play. There is no hiding place. I have to be fearless. Within these moments is an extraordinary intensity that perhaps can best be described as fierce loving. It is powerful when life faces life and the compelling torque of meaning is compressed into each moment. Years of experience playing are consumed in these moments of contact when bodies are held in each other's grasp and spirits are released.
What follows are five brief encounters, direct expressions of life's play. Like haiku each meeting focuses on a moment in which the ordinariness of the sacred and the sacredness of the ordinary in life are brought forth.
One day I sit and cradle Erin, who is 18 months old and has Down Syndrome in my arms. Before our play session Erin's mother tells me her doctor recently told her that, 'Erin's brain is not growing. She has no intelligence.' She is disheartened as she interprets the doctor's words to mean that her daughter, 'is a nothing.' All too often such language ricochets within us increasing our fear and separation resulting in an absence of a presence.
As Erin squirms rapidly and haphazardly her body bends out over my arm. My hand cradles her head and my arm blends with her spine to support her rapid and unpredictable motions. We move together in spirals until she is close to my chest. Holding her head, I lower my face until I am close enough for Erin to nibble my beard. Our bodies become still and our eyes find each other. It is as if we lock in on each other. This is a time-space of connection during which Erin stops her rapid head bobbing and her eye motions slow to a steady gaze into my eyes. Erin provides me with the opportunity to share an epiphany, a small window of divine connection.
Paul was in my kindergarten class. He had leukemia. His doctors and his parents were afraid that rambunctious play would hasten his death. So, for six months we touched in a variety of other ways: he snuggled in my lap while I read stories; I carried him around the room on my shoulders; and, I lay down in the block area when he played with the blocks. But Paul didn't join in our roly-poly play.
One day about six months into the school year Paul came to me and asked if I would invite his parents into school for a meeting. The four of us met the following afternoon. Paul began quietly, with a sense of urgency, 'I want to play with Fred. I know that I am not going to live as long as the three of you, but I want to live my life as if I were.' His sincerity moved us. Through many tears we agreed that Paul could play with me. When he came to school the following day he was so excited and his play was so rambunctious, passionate and uncompromising that he was exhausted by the end of the morning. He stayed home and rested the following day. Because he played so hard when he came to school, Paul could only come to school every other day.
About a month later Paul died of leukemia.
On a June day I entered the enclosure to play with Nala, a 500 pound Barbary lioness. She was lying down near the entrance. I watched her and quickly knelt down about 15 feet away. She watched me intently, quickly stood, and trotted toward me. As she closed the distance between us my experience of time changed. Suddenly time sped up. I lost sight of her and the next instant I realized she was on me. She had somehow pounced on my back and enveloped me with her body. She landed her 500 pounds on me with overwhelming force and as gently as falling dew. Then time slowed down. I could feel her body and teeth not as weight but as presence. I felt each part of her separately and simultaneously. Her front legs completely surrounded me, holding me snuggly. I recall my fingers feeling the softness of the fur on her left paw that was a few inches from my face and being amazed that not only were her claws retracted but I could move the paw. There was no tension in her paw. At the same time she grasped my head in her jaws. I could feel her canine teeth holding my head firmly from the base of my skull up over my ears to my forehead.
I felt no fear, there was no pain, no cuts, no blood. I would never have believed that a lioness could be so fierce and gentle at the same time. After a few moments she released me and we stood calmly watching each other. In her embrace I experienced a quickening with the celerity and decisiveness of a lightning strike, the snugness of a tree bud, and the gentleness of a breath of spring breeze on my cheek. Never had it been so important and urgent, if I am not to fail the purpose for which I am created and gives me meaning, to remind myself to play my heart out. She reminds me to play each moment as if my life depends upon it.
Some months earlier between classes at a Head Start site a teacher called me in and asked me to help get a hummingbird out of the classroom. It had flown in during the break between morning and afternoon sessions. The staff had tried everything they could think of and nothing worked. They were afraid if the bird stayed in the room when the children arrived, besides making it impossible to quiet them, their excitement and noise might make it even more difficult to get the bird out, perhaps the stress would cause its death. I walked in with no idea of how to 'catch' a hummingbird. The staff had already tried everything I could think of. So, I stopped thinking, walked in, stopped in the middle of the room, and reached up. The hummingbird flew right into my open hand. I cupped my other hand over it and ran to the door, releasing it to the sky. It immediately flew up, hovered and darted off over the roof.
At a cancer retreat Pat asked me if I would show her some play activities that she could use with her teenage son. She said that they had played before her cancer had become so disabling. Even though Pat's body was frail and she often needed oxygen, her spirit was anxious to play. I showed her two play activities that she could do with her son while sitting in a chair or lying on a bed. Then I smiled and said that I had another idea. Her eyes sparkled. I demonstrated an aikido back roll that I use to give young children vestibular movement and cuddling.
I asked her if she would like to try it. 'Yes!', she exclaimed. Pat sat in my lap and we positioned her oxygen next to us so the cord was unhampered by our movement.
'One, Two, Three, GO!' She giggled with delight. 'More,' she exclaimed. Back and forth we rolled; our giggling filled the room. After a few rolls we rested quietly.
Pat had to leave the retreat early to be with her family. When she was ready to depart I went out to say goodbye. We hugged, kissed, and looked at each other in silence. Pat died less than a week later, but not before we experienced the joy and love, the touch and belonging of original play.
Coming out to play with the world may seem simple and frivolous with children, and cute with a hummingbird, but downright suicidal with a lioness. Re-discovering the capacity of play in the midst of cancer's or leukemia's anguish may seem impossible. But are these encounters so different from those I have everyday with children? I think not.
Here are five encounters, direct expressions in which I meet life, not in the categories in which we live our lives, but in sacred playgrounds in which unconditional kindness allows the ephemeral to coalesce in a tangible moment of grace the realm of life in which we feel the contagion of authenticity deep within the heart of life. Play's kindness means that there is only one kind of life to which we all belong. In play there are no differences that make a difference. I touched Erin, Pat and the hummingbird with the same touch that Paul and the lioness used to surround me. To play, then, is an act of genuine responsibility, an act of trust in a life given in trust.
The true power of our capacity for play is not survival of the fittest, but the actual experience of being alive. Paul, Pat, Nala, Erin, and the hummingbird express the vitality, potency, pliancy and fertility of an aware being. The difficulty is that to play in such a circumstance means that we must not be afraid of life. Play is not just about courage in the face of attack or death, it is about the courage in the face of life.
The more I play the more I smile at my intimacy with the community of life that gathers me from all the remotest ends of my being, as if into the heart of a family singularly my own, and confirms for me a direction of spirit. Eric, Pat, Paul, the lioness and the hummingbird provide me with a sense of the living mystery of what love is meant to be. They help to heighten my sensitivities, perceptions and awareness to be able to live my finest moments dangerously exposed beyond the frontier of my knowing. I have long ago discovered that my mind in its search for meaning comes dishearteningly quickly to its frontier of understanding and promptly turns to my heart to carry on beyond my last 'why.' I marvel about how regardless of my inadequacies and fallibilities, my playmates revive in me a fiercely loving heart.
In play there is an unconditional amnesty that carries us beyond the frontiers of fear. This is a journey of a different kind, not within the categories of culture, but out beyond borders undertaken out of love in search of love. Play is the touching of spirits, hearts and bodies in which one playmate gives his or her life into the hands of another. In one instance I am the holder, in the other I am held.
To assume that we are alone and unconnected is an illusion of the most dangerous kind. No matter how much fear, abuse, and aggression are brought into my playground, I continue to turn towards a feeling of wholeness of the human spirit as the only way of preventing humans from forever being mere prisoners of our endless chain of hurt and revenge. When my heart stops, I am exiled from life's current. To be left out of life's play is to be dead, and to be withheld from it for any length of time is to be comatose.
Together we penetrate to the playground that Rumi spoke about where heaven and earth have not yet divided. Coming out to play in this playground we discover our belonging. In these moments of grace the boundaries of species are effaced and the unlimited possibilities of play are allowed to flow as a primary condition written into the contract with life. We give to each other the presence of love and what we receive from each other is the gift of life.
In such a playground there are no enemies, no sides, no fault, no blame, no revenge, no fear, no self defense. Original play is not a matter of fixed technique, not a matter of 'knowing' what to do. Play demands years of practice in that which cannot be practiced, such as the openness of a beginner and a wholehearted intention to give and receive love. In this play there is no need for self-defense. To defend oneself in play is not to play. Self defense is a self-defeating strategy.
Like the child who runs out to engage the fullness of the first day of summer, a radical realization shines from our eyes and roars from our hearts. Such a state of living fully provides us with a sense of belonging that transcends not only how we have thought about our place in the universe, but how the universe itself is organized. This may seem foreign at first, but in time we remember an ancestral intelligence, a yearning for this great belonging, a wild compulsion bubbling to the surface. This is a recovery of original play of a qualitatively different sort. What is involved is a genuine transcendence and not simply a restoration. This difference is described in a Zen poem, Iron Flute Blown Upside Down:
The bellows blew high the flaming forge;
The sword was hammered on the anvil.
It was the same steel as in the beginning,
But how different was its edge.
Genro
Article previously published in a different form in ZipLines (Summer, 1999), p8-11.
Contact:
3800 W. Devonshire Ave., Apt. C-78
Tel: (909)925-1496
Fax: (909)925-6123
E-mail: Ofreddybear(at)aol.com