Deep Play, Diane Ackerman

 “According to Ackerman, "Every element of the human saga depends on play. Even language is a playing with words," she said. "We, as human beings, require a poetic version of life. All human beings of all ages and all cultures use the elemental poetry of everyday language."  http://www.news.cornell.edu/chronicle/97/7.24.97/Ackerman.html

 Ackerman examines play in an all-encompassing way that goes far beyond children’s games.  In fact I would say her definition of Deep Play is really deep involvement – deep participation.  So she can include religion, risk taking, and poetry within her mantra of deep play.  But it is really deep engagement and a seeking that becomes the driving force of the books exploration.

“Creativity, psychotherapy,, sensation-seeking – all are ideal playgrounds for deep play.” “…rapture or ecstasy – each is fundamental to the notion of deep play.  So is transcendence, risk, obsession, pleasure, distractedness, timelessness, and a sense of the holy or sacred.”

“By dreaming we mean the belief that long ago, these creatures started human society; they made all natural things and put them in a special place.  These dreaming creatures are connected to special places and special roads or tracks or paths.  In many cases the great creatures changed themselves into sites where there spirits stayed.

“These creatures, these great creatures are just as much alive today as they were in the beginning.  They are everlasting and will never die.  They are always part of the land and nature as we are.  We cannot change nor can they.  Our connection to all things natural is spiritual.  We worship spiritual sites today.  We have songs and dances for those sites and we never approach them without preparing ourselves properly.  When the great creatures moved across the land, they made small groups of people like me in each area.”   Gulawarrwuy Yunupingu – Aborigine

“Never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion.  The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firmly braced, like a bobolink on a reed.”  John Muir riding a tree in a thunderstorm.

“To be looking everywhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.” Abraham Maslow

As a writer I have to love the section on poetry.  Try this paragraph as a sample:

“All language is poetry.  Each word is a small story, a thicket of meaning.  We ignore the picturesque origin of words when we utter them; conversation would grind to a halt if we visualized flamingoes whenever someone referred to a flight of stairs.  But words are powerful mental tools invented through play.  We clarify life’s confusing blur with words.  We cage flooding emotions with words.  We coax elusive memories with words.  We educate with words.  We really don’t know what we think, how we feel, what we want, or even who we are until we struggle to find the right words.”

The craft of writing poetry is a monklike occupation, as is a watchmaker's, tilting tiny cogs and wheels into place. It's ironic that poets use words to convey what lies beyond words. But poetry becomes most powerful where language fails." Diane Ackermann - Deep Play.

Diane is a bicyclists and incorporates both the inspiration of her rides and reflections on bicycles within the text.

"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worh having just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author - Sherlock Holmes).

Her Deep Play is the way we fully interact with life and in that we are guided by personal desires, mythology, comfort and custom.

“The home becomes a principality in which certain values are upheld, certain subjects or words are taboo, an asylum, a sacred realm full of rituals.”

Why does the wedding ring go on the third finger?  The Romans believed there was a nerve from the third finger to the heart.

But in many ways Deep Play is a banter back and forth between nature and people.

“There are noble reasons for protecting the environment - one might argue that its our moral duty, as good citizenes of the planet not to destroy its natural wonders.  There is also mercenary reasons - the vanishing rain forests contain pharmaceuticals we might need; the Antarctic holds vast sotre of fresh drinking water; thick forests ensure that we'tt have oxygen to breathe.  But another reason is older and less trangible, a matter of ecopsychology.  We need a healthy, thriving, bustling natural world so that we can be healthy, so that we can feel whole.”

The complexity of relationship and the challenge of deep play and intense experience is captured in this quote:

“Nature is crude and erotic, chaotic and profuse, rampant and zealous, brutal and violent, uncontrollable despite our best efforts, and completely uninhibited.  Small wonder the natural world terrifies many people and also embarrasses the prim puritans among us.  But most people find nature restorative, cleansing, norishing in a deeply personal way.  To have peak experiences, mystics, prophets, and naturalists have traveled into the wilderness.”