Recently, I’ve been trying out an exercise with my students in my writing classes and workshops. I ask them to make three lists involving memorable experiences of creative play. The first has to do with experiences in childhood with play. The second asks them to list things they do presently they consider creative play. And the third is experiences in which they have observed others in the act of creative play.
“Creative play” is a rather abstract idea and can be taken to mean many different things. But many students get it right away. To help them, I use the adjectives, “organic,” “inventive,” or “homemade.”
I give them examples from my own childhood. I tell them of scouring the alleys of my neighborhood looking for machine parts, junk radios, TV tubes, wire, batteries, junk that I turned into what my friends and I called “contraptions.” (It was my sci-fi period, what can I say.) Or I tell them about this wild storm that split apart a tree in our side yard, out of which my sisters and I built a giant nest in one of its downed branches. Forts were big in my neighborhood: tree houses, foxholes, dens under large bushes, cardboard box towns, abandoned cars.
I like to watch their faces as they set to work, lips curling into smiles, nodding heads, eyes turning up and out as they tune into these memories. I then ask them to write down beside one experience per list, a body part, a place, the situation out of which this occurred, and an emotion they associate with it. This is to help them elaborate a bit and connect the experience to their bodies.
I have been using this exercise as a kind of ice-breaker because it never fails to illicit a story a student can tell about a creative experience that everyone feels at once connected to, often bringing very funny confessions and fascinating insights into the nature of creativity. They can use any story or experience from the three lists. As one might expect, most tell a story from childhood. But a couple chose the present and one invariably chooses an experience of watching someone else.
One student this term told of a man he watched in Chicago, who was known to stake out a street corner in a popular ‘hip’ section of the city, and with boom box, skimpy speedo, running shoes, and his buff Asian body, rocked and danced for hours, as if he were alone in his apartment. A kind of performance piece for sure, but it wasn’t any more elaborate than dancing to his own music with his own beautiful body in a public place.
I ask students to listen carefully and watch the bodies of their classmates as they relate their experiences. I want them to notice characteristics in people’s bodies and in their descriptions of these experiences. For the student who described the dancer, I asked him what did seeing this organic “performance” make him feel as he watched him? And his response was perfect, “freedom” and “rebellion” and “pleasure.”
Again and again the characteristics of pleasure and freedom of expression came up. Pleasure in both the physical actions felt in their bodies and the pleasure of their inventive use of a situation or the things around them. One woman spoke of cooking now for her friends, and how much she enjoyed the whole process of going to a market and picking out vegetables (“I just like to see the colors and go down the aisles and think of all the things I could possibly make.”) What was still most pleasurable for her was not only the physicality of cooking, shopping, chopping, mixing, but the serving of food to her friends.
Several students spoke of games they made up with neighbors, jumping from furniture, taking on the roles of make-believe people, playing out scenarios of TV shows, creating scenes and sets for dolls or in some cases making anti-dolls where Barbee becomes some character of their own invention far from the plastic All-American ideal.
Another trait students point out is the inventiveness in their experiences. Furniture, books, sticks, stones, pots, old clothes, or whatever is at hand take on symbolic meaning. With inventiveness, too, also comes a kind of power or even a kind of confidence.
I was struck by the pragmatic nature of their examples. The context or situation or a given space provide a form that doesn’t’ limit their creativity but actually serves as a foundation or impetus for their imaginative response. Even awkward situations became opportunities as one woman described dealing with guys that annoyed her and her friends by turning them into dupes by making up elaborate fictions about who their lives. One woman told of how she turned dreaded trips shopping with her mother into make-believe games where she hid under clothes racks and scared women who’d pull out dresses from off the rack. “Hey, that’s mine! Put that back! This is my house!”
Bedrooms, playgrounds, backyards, department stores, street corners, bedrooms, and alleys—any place can become a stage or starting point for our creativity.
Some experiences of students reveal not only how pragmatic and organic our creativity can be but also how comforting it can be psychologically or how troubling depending upon how it is used. One student in a workshop described dealing with death by coming back from a funeral and deciding to play “mortician” and asking all her friends to play dead so she could put make up on them and put them in a box. “Everybody in my neighborhood wanted to play dead that summer.” Another African-American woman described the awkward emotional territory of gender and sexuality and perhaps race as well as she described a well-known game where all the girls at recess in her class would go out and capture a boy, pen him down on the ground, and taunt and torture him with the threat of a kiss. “I was the one they decided should be the one who kissed the boy. I don’t know why they chose me. I can’t even remember actually kissing these boys but attempting to do it was enough.”
It was a brave example she chose to give to the class, reminding all of us of how games and creative play can turn destructive. This “kissing game” reminded me, too, of the unconscious energy that often animates our creative responses and action, which is why conscious intention plays a very important role in our creative work and play.
Creativity is often misunderstood as some special talent or in-born or God-given skill, as if we have nothing at all to do with its cultivation. When, in truth, it’s in our very nature to change and create. The mind and the body crave our conscious use of creativity. We seek the pleasure, perhaps even unconsciously, of the challenge the sensual world presents to us, not only for our own survival but for the survival of an evolving planet.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Remnants and Reminders of 1968
1968
On the pier at Hollywood Beach on the far North Side of Chicago near where I live, there is a remnant of the summer of 1968 when thousands of people—young people and activists—descended on Chicago for the Democratic Convention. I took this picture last year still amazed that after 40 years, the spray painted letters that spelled out an icon of that summer, E U G E N E M C C A R T H Y, had not faded but had become a part of the pier, refusing any of Mayor Daley’s graffiti buster blasts of chemicals. The bitter winds of winters and blaring beach sun had not dimmed the sentiments and message left embedded in that iron railing.
Remnant of 1968 on Hollywood Beach Pier
I’d heard stories and read about that explosive week when the people outside of the institutions of power had as much to say as those inside. And as I watch the tame and at times banal Democratic Convention while the world waits for America to finish it’s two year election, I am “hoping” that “the fierce urgency of now” doesn’t become another cliché.
For whatever you want to say about Chicago and the summer of 1968, you can’t say that people blogged about what was going on in the streets and minds of America, they came together to Chicago and demanded to be heard. Sometimes stupidly and violently, yes. But people felt rage and frustration at what was happening in America and around the world. They didn’t sit quietly watching on 48-inch screen TVs. In Europe they shut down governments and cities that year. Here, Chicago became a circus of poets, activists, hippies, yippies, artists, young, poor, black, white, and brown. And they left their mark.
I came upon this remnant a few years ago sitting on the beach grading some student essays. I stared at the faded lettering, noticing first the M and C and the string of rusted yellow letters before it and after. I knew that the beaches had become campgrounds that week. But it couldn’t be that old. Or could it? I squinted trying to make out the rest of the word. Yes. It read M C C A R T H Y. I got up and walked over. Could it actually be who I thought it was? And there was the letters before that name, spelled out to confirm my hope: E U G E N E.
I remember, my first feeling was to go to tell someone. I looked around at people on the beach that day a Vietnamese couple walked along the pier, some Hispanic children were playing in the water, gay men were lounging down the beach in groups. The lifeguard was in her boat. A few fishermen were casting their lines. Who’d even know, if I said something?
I looked at the beach and in my mind I saw the campers there, turning back the time, the tents and the energy, recalling that the beaches and parks that week had become training centers, gatherings for music and speeches. Ginsburg and Mailer and many poets and activists held court.
But the memory that was strongest was of my mother taking me one afternoon after school to the Court House of Gas City, Indiana where she’d grown up a few miles away from our house in neighboring Marion. She’d wanted me to see a presidential candidate as they were tromping through Indiana that spring of 1968. Robert Kennedy’s motorcade had driven by my school the week before and my 70 year old second grade teacher was one of the only teachers who refused to let her children out of class to see a Kennedy pass our recess yard. My sister, a fifth grader down the hall, came home ecstatic, transformed. (Later when Kennedy had been shot, she wouldn’t come out of her room for a day until she emerged the next day with a poem that she read at dinner and then broke into sobs and ran back into her room.)
So my mother took me to see Eugene McCarthy make a speech on the Court House steps of this forgotten factory town of central Indiana. I can remember only his elegance, the way his pants looked, baggy and grey to match his hair, his white shirt, and hair blowing in the spring afternoon. I don’t remember what he said. Maybe fifty people stood with arms folded and listened. But I remember feeling that my mother wanted me to see him and the people who’d came to hear him. “Listen to what this man says, he’s running for president.”
After that we went to my grandfather’s bar down the street. He came out to our car in his bar apron, a factory worker who’d finally saved enough money to open his own business, and he gave me a Milky Way bar, and we went home.
American elections should never be about candidates, they should always be about what they were intended to be: acts of faith by individuals that their beliefs, their work, their words, their lives matter and affect the future of an evolving, impressionable world.
On the pier at Hollywood Beach on the far North Side of Chicago near where I live, there is a remnant of the summer of 1968 when thousands of people—young people and activists—descended on Chicago for the Democratic Convention. I took this picture last year still amazed that after 40 years, the spray painted letters that spelled out an icon of that summer, E U G E N E M C C A R T H Y, had not faded but had become a part of the pier, refusing any of Mayor Daley’s graffiti buster blasts of chemicals. The bitter winds of winters and blaring beach sun had not dimmed the sentiments and message left embedded in that iron railing.
Remnant of 1968 on Hollywood Beach Pier
I’d heard stories and read about that explosive week when the people outside of the institutions of power had as much to say as those inside. And as I watch the tame and at times banal Democratic Convention while the world waits for America to finish it’s two year election, I am “hoping” that “the fierce urgency of now” doesn’t become another cliché.
For whatever you want to say about Chicago and the summer of 1968, you can’t say that people blogged about what was going on in the streets and minds of America, they came together to Chicago and demanded to be heard. Sometimes stupidly and violently, yes. But people felt rage and frustration at what was happening in America and around the world. They didn’t sit quietly watching on 48-inch screen TVs. In Europe they shut down governments and cities that year. Here, Chicago became a circus of poets, activists, hippies, yippies, artists, young, poor, black, white, and brown. And they left their mark.
I came upon this remnant a few years ago sitting on the beach grading some student essays. I stared at the faded lettering, noticing first the M and C and the string of rusted yellow letters before it and after. I knew that the beaches had become campgrounds that week. But it couldn’t be that old. Or could it? I squinted trying to make out the rest of the word. Yes. It read M C C A R T H Y. I got up and walked over. Could it actually be who I thought it was? And there was the letters before that name, spelled out to confirm my hope: E U G E N E.
I remember, my first feeling was to go to tell someone. I looked around at people on the beach that day a Vietnamese couple walked along the pier, some Hispanic children were playing in the water, gay men were lounging down the beach in groups. The lifeguard was in her boat. A few fishermen were casting their lines. Who’d even know, if I said something?
I looked at the beach and in my mind I saw the campers there, turning back the time, the tents and the energy, recalling that the beaches and parks that week had become training centers, gatherings for music and speeches. Ginsburg and Mailer and many poets and activists held court.
But the memory that was strongest was of my mother taking me one afternoon after school to the Court House of Gas City, Indiana where she’d grown up a few miles away from our house in neighboring Marion. She’d wanted me to see a presidential candidate as they were tromping through Indiana that spring of 1968. Robert Kennedy’s motorcade had driven by my school the week before and my 70 year old second grade teacher was one of the only teachers who refused to let her children out of class to see a Kennedy pass our recess yard. My sister, a fifth grader down the hall, came home ecstatic, transformed. (Later when Kennedy had been shot, she wouldn’t come out of her room for a day until she emerged the next day with a poem that she read at dinner and then broke into sobs and ran back into her room.)
So my mother took me to see Eugene McCarthy make a speech on the Court House steps of this forgotten factory town of central Indiana. I can remember only his elegance, the way his pants looked, baggy and grey to match his hair, his white shirt, and hair blowing in the spring afternoon. I don’t remember what he said. Maybe fifty people stood with arms folded and listened. But I remember feeling that my mother wanted me to see him and the people who’d came to hear him. “Listen to what this man says, he’s running for president.”
After that we went to my grandfather’s bar down the street. He came out to our car in his bar apron, a factory worker who’d finally saved enough money to open his own business, and he gave me a Milky Way bar, and we went home.
American elections should never be about candidates, they should always be about what they were intended to be: acts of faith by individuals that their beliefs, their work, their words, their lives matter and affect the future of an evolving, impressionable world.
Neural Mirroring & Watching the Olympics
Michael Phelps imitating a butterfly
Yesterday, I saw two boys racing down the sidewalk in my neighborhood, one on foot, one on a bicycle. Smiling, laughing, bumping into each other, they raised their arms and crossed an imaginary finish line. As they raised their arms, I, too, felt their joy, my cheeks lightened into a smile and even my shoulders and chest lifted slightly.
Across our little earth, images of Olympic athletes are bouncing through the skies and beaming down onto screens and into the brains and muscles of boys and girls of all ages. Never mind the medal count or the hyped drama, my body isn’t listening, it’s absorbing the dives, the jumps and leaps, the rhythms of legs and arms, the glowing eyes and faces of other bodies half a world away. Like those boys running down the street, the Olympians are dancing around in my mind and body, awakening my muscles, triggering emotions, and engaging my creative mind.
Human Bird or Olympic Athlete?
What’s happening? Why is my body responding in this way?
Neuroscientists call this sympathetic physical response of one body to another, neural mirroring. We absorb the patterns we see and feel as we witness the physical movements and emotions of another. Surprise, surprise scientists are confirming what we all know deep in our body: we are deeply affected physiologically by the world around us, especially those in our own species, and those close to us—our families, friends, and communities.
Neural pathways in the brain are constantly evolving and adapting to stimulation from the body’s experiences, needs, and amazingly from our imagination itself.
We go to a play or watch a dance performance or concert, and we come away enlivened, emotionally charged and challenged. We are not only affected by the performers and the patterns working in their bodies and minds that create their art, but we are also powerfully influenced by the emotions and patterns in the bodies around us.
So can images do this through TV? Of course. It’s not as strong as being next to someone in a yoga class opening their chest in a backbend so much so that your own back and chest ache for the release you’re feeling from them, but it’s happening. The key here is being sensitive and conscious of the feelings and sensations in your own body and, I would argue, how your imagination or mind is responding. Being aware of the imagination and using it to deepen feeling and emotion, actually is an adaptive device of the brain to stimulate the body.
Body plasticity is brain plasticity
Those boys, I witnessed in their imaginary world, are not only feeling the sensations and emotions of Olympic athletes, they are recreating them in their mind and replaying them in their bodies. How healthy, for them. and, for anyone who happens to walk by.
I’m always amazed at what happens when I practice yoga outside by the Lake. Invariably people walk by me and out of the corner of my eye, I see a hand rise over a head or a few twists of a torso, a forward bend suddenly in the middle of the beach. People are relaxed. They’ve taken off their shoes. They’re throwing balls for their dogs or watching their children making things in the sand. They’re breathing more deeply and the energy of the lake is lifting their spirits. Their bodies are alive and they see my body bending and diving into a sun salutation and sympathetically their muscles plead for the same. Or, is it the other way around? Perhaps it’s not me who is affecting them, but they who are making me feel more deeply into my own body? Or is the feeling mutual?
Swimming and Yoga: Flying Fish...
Swimming and Yoga: Flying Fish (Part 1)
Nude swimmer or human fish?
Sometimes when people ask me how was I first introduced to the practice of hatha yoga, instead of technically answering them “in my college acting class,” I want to give a more truthful answer: “swimming at my grandparent’s lake cottage in northern Indiana.”
That would make my mother my first yoga teacher. I remember her there in the water, up to her waist, holding me with her hand under my belly, telling me to kick or stroke, making me practice putting my face into the water and breathe. Then she turned me over and taught me the most important lesson of all: how to float.
I wouldn’t have said this a few years ago, but as you mature in your study and practice of yoga, you begin to discover that the principles of yoga and “gurus” have been around you your whole life.
In fact, swimming now in Lake Michigan, I often consider the Lake itself as a teacher. Certainly that little lake in Indiana was where I learned to confront the fears of deep water. Respect and fearlessness, the classic opposites of yoga, are there for you in every swim.
I never competed, though I was a jock in high school, swimming was not my sport. For me it had a kind of romance, especially lakes. We also had a backyard pool, and it was a place to escape many difficult emotions and the surprises my body seemed full of as a teenager. Ironically, it was yoga and the opening I felt in my body that really reintroduced me to the joys of open water swimming. And now, during the summers especially, I swim as much as I practice asana. Living by Lake Michigan in Rogers Park, I swim every day I can, and often long distances, over a mile at least.
I used to worry that swimming somehow competed with my yoga practice, thinking that it was taking away time and energy away from my practice. A healthy concern but it’s a phase many people go through in their practice, discounting activities and any kind of physical exercise off the mat as somehow profane and maybe even bad for your practice. Hiking, bathing, running, and dance are, as we all know, highly spiritualized practices in many traditions. But you learn that you can observe your body and mind in everything you do. Sometimes I try to blend them: meditating by the lake for a half hour before swimming, and then following a swim with an asana practice. Nothing, nothing is more soothing and energizing than this regimen. The prana is very rich by bodies of water. And I highly recommend it.
Yoga and swimming complement each other in many ways. Both of course rely on careful control and awareness of the breath. Yes, you use your mouth to breathe in swimming, but the rhythmic working of the lungs, expanding and releasing has taught me how to find the right patterns and effort when exerting and feeling stress. Anyone who has ever found themselves in panic situations in water, in currents or suddenly fatigued or cramping, knows that the first thing you do is turn over and float and relax your breath. I have also learned a lot about efficiency and effort in my swimming from yoga. I used to muscle my way in both yoga and swimming, now I feel for the ups and downs of energy, and adjust accordingly. Twisting and tunneling through the water, I find the proper rhythm, the most efficient stroke, and feel for just the right pace and effort to maintain propulsion. Swimming, I’ve come to accept, is an on-going vinyasa. Most important of all, I have learned to find the pleasure in both these parallel practices. And this, ironically, is still a struggle for me.
I practice freestyle or “the crawl” but all the strokes can provide a flowing movement. The crawl gets its name because you literally crawl through the water, just like a baby moving across the carpet. Back and forth, the body rocks through the water, joyously recalling perhaps ancient sensations deep within muscle memory of our childhood body floating there in the warmth of the womb.
When I’m not lost in the dreamy world of my swimming mind, where ideas flash with equal brilliance and absurdity, I often become mesmerized by the watery bottom, imagining the future when the rippled sand below hardens and is heaved and tossed across a yet unknown continent. The ancient bed of a nameless lake, forgotten over millions of years. Or looking to the east in the early mornings, I watch the sun, shattering over the surface up to my nose, lights that I swear are crackles of real fire dancing on the rippling water. And then, I’m awakened by my own body, as a wave of energy passes through me. Perhaps, I’m passing over a spring bubbling up? Or perhaps, it’s a jolt of adrenaline coursing through my blood, feeding the muscles in my arms and legs? Or is it, the lake itself, electrifying my skin with it’s own energetic life, a wave weaving its way through a watery world beyond my comprehension. And yet, I sense some lift, and for several seconds I seem to be swimming on top of the water, so light, it feels almost like I could leap out of the water like a flying fish.
Nude swimmer or human fish?
Sometimes when people ask me how was I first introduced to the practice of hatha yoga, instead of technically answering them “in my college acting class,” I want to give a more truthful answer: “swimming at my grandparent’s lake cottage in northern Indiana.”
That would make my mother my first yoga teacher. I remember her there in the water, up to her waist, holding me with her hand under my belly, telling me to kick or stroke, making me practice putting my face into the water and breathe. Then she turned me over and taught me the most important lesson of all: how to float.
I wouldn’t have said this a few years ago, but as you mature in your study and practice of yoga, you begin to discover that the principles of yoga and “gurus” have been around you your whole life.
In fact, swimming now in Lake Michigan, I often consider the Lake itself as a teacher. Certainly that little lake in Indiana was where I learned to confront the fears of deep water. Respect and fearlessness, the classic opposites of yoga, are there for you in every swim.
I never competed, though I was a jock in high school, swimming was not my sport. For me it had a kind of romance, especially lakes. We also had a backyard pool, and it was a place to escape many difficult emotions and the surprises my body seemed full of as a teenager. Ironically, it was yoga and the opening I felt in my body that really reintroduced me to the joys of open water swimming. And now, during the summers especially, I swim as much as I practice asana. Living by Lake Michigan in Rogers Park, I swim every day I can, and often long distances, over a mile at least.
I used to worry that swimming somehow competed with my yoga practice, thinking that it was taking away time and energy away from my practice. A healthy concern but it’s a phase many people go through in their practice, discounting activities and any kind of physical exercise off the mat as somehow profane and maybe even bad for your practice. Hiking, bathing, running, and dance are, as we all know, highly spiritualized practices in many traditions. But you learn that you can observe your body and mind in everything you do. Sometimes I try to blend them: meditating by the lake for a half hour before swimming, and then following a swim with an asana practice. Nothing, nothing is more soothing and energizing than this regimen. The prana is very rich by bodies of water. And I highly recommend it.
Yoga and swimming complement each other in many ways. Both of course rely on careful control and awareness of the breath. Yes, you use your mouth to breathe in swimming, but the rhythmic working of the lungs, expanding and releasing has taught me how to find the right patterns and effort when exerting and feeling stress. Anyone who has ever found themselves in panic situations in water, in currents or suddenly fatigued or cramping, knows that the first thing you do is turn over and float and relax your breath. I have also learned a lot about efficiency and effort in my swimming from yoga. I used to muscle my way in both yoga and swimming, now I feel for the ups and downs of energy, and adjust accordingly. Twisting and tunneling through the water, I find the proper rhythm, the most efficient stroke, and feel for just the right pace and effort to maintain propulsion. Swimming, I’ve come to accept, is an on-going vinyasa. Most important of all, I have learned to find the pleasure in both these parallel practices. And this, ironically, is still a struggle for me.
I practice freestyle or “the crawl” but all the strokes can provide a flowing movement. The crawl gets its name because you literally crawl through the water, just like a baby moving across the carpet. Back and forth, the body rocks through the water, joyously recalling perhaps ancient sensations deep within muscle memory of our childhood body floating there in the warmth of the womb.
When I’m not lost in the dreamy world of my swimming mind, where ideas flash with equal brilliance and absurdity, I often become mesmerized by the watery bottom, imagining the future when the rippled sand below hardens and is heaved and tossed across a yet unknown continent. The ancient bed of a nameless lake, forgotten over millions of years. Or looking to the east in the early mornings, I watch the sun, shattering over the surface up to my nose, lights that I swear are crackles of real fire dancing on the rippling water. And then, I’m awakened by my own body, as a wave of energy passes through me. Perhaps, I’m passing over a spring bubbling up? Or perhaps, it’s a jolt of adrenaline coursing through my blood, feeding the muscles in my arms and legs? Or is it, the lake itself, electrifying my skin with it’s own energetic life, a wave weaving its way through a watery world beyond my comprehension. And yet, I sense some lift, and for several seconds I seem to be swimming on top of the water, so light, it feels almost like I could leap out of the water like a flying fish.
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