Play in the City 2013

Tonight, I am fighting for my own life. For some inexplicable reason, my family is trying to kill me. I run from one hiding place to another in my old house back in Switzerland until being cornered by my father. I launch at him and break his collarbone. I spot a broken window and crawl through it, watching the glass claw me but feeling only a tickle. I fall hard on the ground and melt into it. I fall again on my back and somehow I’m staring at a bunch of dark grapes. Guess I’m in a vineyard. I force myself up and start running through things. Through Westfield tube station in London. Through my mother’s office building and down the Rue de Marché in Geneva at Christmas. Nobody is following me. The gut-shrinking fear keeps me pelting through scene after scene until it settles on a damp country road at midnight. Someone is following me about two strides behind. Without looking back, I know it’s an old ex-boyfriend. I consciously think this is someone I should truly be afraid of. But the primal fear has waned into a sense of urgency to just keep going. We keep running. A pair of headlights light the pavement for us. 

The top of the mountain is shrouded in fog, and I am all alone. My legs ache from the steep hike up, but pride swells in my chest. I’ve hiked 4.5 miles and gone up about 360 meters, mostly for the view, but despite my misty grey surroundings, I’m smiling ear to ear. The experience of walking all alone has given me the chance to really push my own boundaries, both physically and mentally. I set a challenging pace for myself, and spent the duration of the hike alone with my thoughts and the trees that surrounded me. 

On Friday, I had a doctor’s appointment. Before seeing my doctor, a nurse asked me to take off my shoes so that she could weigh me. This made me very nervous. Still, I took off my shoes and got onto the scale. When she read aloud the amount I weighed, I was not surprised, but I was terrified. I had lost ten pounds since I came to Bryn Mawr. Walking back from the doctor’s appointment, I thought a great deal about the weight loss. It was not a good sign. To be very clear, I do not have any sort of eating disorder. I have lost weight because I get very absorbed in any and all activities I partake in. If I am reading, writing, watching TV, knitting etc. I will often forget to go to lunch, drink some water, sleep, or even go to the bathroom. In the past, friends and family have been able to break me out of the trances I get into while I’m working. But, at Bryn Mawr, I have to be much more independent. I realized, while walking back, that I needed to take better care of myself.

It is special. Different from other trips, the journey to Tibet is so unforgettable that even now, the experience is still vivid in my head. Normally, I visited and played in different tourist attractions when travelling; however, when I went to Tibet, my family decided to visit the schools there which are incredibly remote with limited teachers and outmoded equipment.

After hours of rough car rides, we finally reached the school gate almost at noon. Putting on sunglasses and scarves, we got off the car. The scene in front of us shocked me: students were studying on the bare playground with eyes hardly open in the scorching sunlight. The principal and teacher warmly welcomed us, the children cheering loud for the books and stationery we brought to them. When our short visit came to an end, the teacher squeezed into crowd with four pieces of white silk (named Hada in Tibetan for greeting guests) raised to chest and a shy smile on his sun-burnt face.

It was an upward spiral. Not just for my emotions, but the building I was in. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is a cylindrical art haven that has the viewer walk up in large spirals to different rooms full of beautiful art. There can be similarities drawn towards the spiral staircase in the Vatican, both in design and spiritual experience. I started my journey, but did not know where it would take me.

The lobby was a little bit crowded, full of people waiting to start their artistic expeditions. Though I was with my family, I knew that this was something I wanted to experience by myself. As I made my way up the first tier, I read the sign that said that the Impressionist painting section was coming up. I paused, took out my headphones, plugged them into my iPod, and began to play Claude Debussy’s beautiful piano pieces. Clair de Lune, Danse Bohémienne, Pagodes – the music these artists were all inspired by. I felt ready to enter the room. I could see how Impressionism worked: the paintings reflected how the music sounded, one small part didn’t seem like much, but altogether it harmonized perfectly.

The summer before my junior year of high school, I went to a weeklong nationwide conference for United Methodist youth groups. There is one thing from that week that stands out in my memory over all else. The second day of the conference, there was a workshop called “Walking the Labyrinth”. I thought this sounded pretty cool, so I got a couple friends together and we went to check it out. It gave the lowdown on what labyrinths were made for, what they were meant to do, and what we should try to focus on while walking through it (which was basically anything that was troubling us). At the time, there was not a whole lot troubling me, so I walked through with nothing specific in mind. But I kept getting worryingly turned around. The point of a labyrinth is that you’re always going a new direction, and not necessarily one that seems to lead to the center. But because of all the other people also walking it, right next to me, I would see them on their own path and think I was walking the wrong way or had somehow stepped off my own path and onto another, and that I wasn’t going to end up going to the middle at all. What if I never reached the center?! I was getting more and more upset until I realized that I had, indeed, been walking on the right path all along and I stepped into the center. I sat down for a while, as we were told to do, to reflect on my experience. I closed my eyes and thought. When I reopened them, I was surrounded by an entirely new group of people.

Samantha Plate

Play In The City

11/17/2013

Deep Play in Critical Writing

I played with Frost. It was October. If only I had learnt from Ray Bradbury that October was a grotesque Country where you should only step foot if you are looking to be assaulted by the skeletons your mind shoved in a closet on purpose in the first place. It was October, silly.

I opened the closet, and out walked Robert. He brushed off the Frost from his shoulders; it must have been cold and dusty behind the Doors. Or he was tired of being cold. He walked out. And I stepped into his Home Burial.

I fell deep. The door was wide open and I fell damn deep. I told myself all I had to do was pull apart the words and reconstruct them into a window. So I sat on the narrow, creaky staircase and listened attentively to Frost and his wife. But slowly – I found – slowly, I was listening to myself. And I had the same voice as his wife.

I was accusing. I was hurt. I was pushing away. I was losing. I was missing. Home Burial. 

There wasn’t a way to pick out my own words, care about his, and try to assemble a window which might cast light on our conflict. What we needed to was to smash open the windows we already had, and get some fresh air.

I was overwhelmed as I fell deeper and deeper into Frost’s Home. Or was Frost just pulling out some things that already existed deep in the back of my closet?

 Lay them on the table. Let me hear you say what you already know about them, but use a different voice so you can hear yourself do the talking. 

I often feel like I experience deep play while I'm writing (even while I'm writing analytical papers). Although I don't actually know if Nightowl felt deep play, I see it in her argument. Whenever I write, I am so absorbed yet malleable. Often, I end up convincing myself of my arguments after I wrote them down. Since Nightowl observes an opinion and then comes to agree with it, it seems as if the process of writing led nightowl into a state of deep play. But, I may just be projecting.