One-minute Icon – #play as important as sleep

Take a minute out of clock-time. Look at the painting. When your mind wanders, note what it is wandering to, and switch your attention back to the painting. Try to find a place of open awareness rather than thinking (which paintings and poetry enable). What came to mind?

I was reading about the importance of play in one of the late Howard Clinebell’s books. Then in Miriam Darlington’s playful Otter Country I read about the ability of otters to take on the colour and texture of the water around them, ‘the water on the fur produces a blur effect, reflecting light and giving a strange soft focus. It’s not just the otter’s colour that keeps it hidden; it also uses the water and light to its advantage.’ (p.248)

I decided to play around with the colours of otters and the water they live in. What about snow otters? You don’t have to be an artist to play around with colours on a piece of paper, it can be a meditative or revealing act. The colours we instinctively chose might tell us something about our mood.

When was the last time you played?

In a book called ecotherapy – healing ourselves, healing the earth, the late Howard Clinebell quotes from a psychiatrist Stuart L. Brown on the ‘playful behaviour of both young and adult wild animals from the Arctic to Africa. He discovered how remarkably playful animals are, including creatures as diverse as polar bears, elephants, wolves, zebras, leopards, dolphins, cranes, and chimpanzees.’ (p.230) I have no doubt this includes otters. He concludes that ‘exciting studies of the brain, evolution, and ethnology or animal behaviour, suggest that play may be as important to life – for us and other animals – as sleeping and dreaming.’ (p.230)

Brown went on to study what happens when human beings are deprived of play….’Brown studied 26 convicted murderers in Texas and found that 90 percent of these men had largely playless childhoods or played only in destructive ways like bullying and cruelty to aniimals.’ (p.230)