I'm not going to try to force these thoughts into a format of paragraph and form and matter, because now they are coming hard and fast and numerous. And I need now to get them down before I forget and I need to post them before I decide not to.

I just spent a glorious hour on the porch, discovering among other things, the small clouds of gnats that hover lightly over the sprouting clover and the big, fat black flies that sun themselves on the serrated, deep greens of the monster bush that obscures my view. I watched grackles nest in the top of the electric pole, next to the silver, spiraling transformer. And I heard bird call that tells me that the sudden population of flicker that have moved into the environs was not an isolated or unrelated incident. The avian landscape has changed in the last year and the air is filled with song unfamiliar to these few blocks of Wallingford.

The sunlight, reflecting off the blooming trees, is fluorescent green. It colors everything in its hue. And where it meets the dark blue of the sky, there is no boundary. There is only dance.

As I sat, I thought about Doing and Being in regards to writing and spirituality. Or rather, I struggled with them until I came to something major and transformative, which is what I'd like to share.

When I was a child, I crawled out of my bedroom and into the trees. I lied to my parents so that I could spend time in the darkness by the water and rock. I talked to red-winged blackbirds and squirrels, and met frogs that I named. Everything, answers to every question I could ever ask, all lessons I could ever learn, all of my young needs were met simply by nestling into the bosom of nature and magick. I was never more complete than when my head rested against wood and my small body was cupped close in the root arms of earthen enclosures.

There were no rituals, no full moon ceremonies or change of seasons or sabbats or more than the faintest discernment between day and night. There just was wood and water and earth and animals and birds and fish and wind. And that was enough.

That was Being. And that is where I started.

Being is not something I have to learn, or something I have to shift to. It's something I have to remember. And remembering it brings all the storytelling of my childhood into my adult life, which has been what I've been working on for the last ten years.

What's more, bringing childhood into my adult life and weaving it together with the flow of Being is where another of my major projects and philosophies comes in. Because that is Play.

My realization about Play today is that Play is Being. Children play well because they begin with Be. Adults add Do and Play becomes the thing of rules or sports or structure, valid but never quite the same level of magic and wonderment. Getting back to Play is getting back to Being. And what's more, getting back to Play is not getting back to being silly, or goofy or childish or making baby talk. Writing from a place of Play is not writing stories about bunnies and sharing. That's the adult defining the adult world as "serious and meaningful" and the child world as "frivolous, but charming". That's the adult thinking that Play is regaining the inner child by becoming the actual child, rather than seeing that a child plays as a child because he is a child and that adults should play like who they are too, not who they once were. Seeing Play in this way is perpetuating the duality that leads to a loss of Play and the need to continually have to recapture it, plan for it, or make it a part of practice.

Instead, the view of Play as Being frees Play to take any form that it wants, and also connects it to the present. Play is an opening, an infinite possibility of flow and truth without boundary and without judgment. It's a space of unfolding and it's a place of Joy. And Joy is not happiness. People we call "happy people" are not always happy. Instead, they try to live their lives joyfully, as Joy is a state more of alignment and wholeness than "happy" implies.

Play is not the realm of the child. And to regain Play is not to become a child. It is, instead, to become yourself fully as an adult.

So what does that mean for me? The answer to how to Be with spirituality and writing is simply to Play while doing it. There is no difference between Being and Playing to me, and so the ways to go about either are now very clear.

That's how I started, both in my solitary child wanderings and in my obsessive scribbling of poetry on every surface I could find. I didn't enjoy doing these things. I didn't have fun with them. They gave me Joy. They made me feel like myself more than other things did. It's only when I grew old enough to think critically, as I trained the big brain and listened to the noise around me, that I began more and more to lose how those things felt and instead only remembered how to Do them.

All these realizations are the start of a new shift in the ways I go about living my path, and they bring together and entwine huge sections of my work in ways that are now obvious, and have obviously been interconnected for some time, but have largely eluded me. Managing this is still complicated, as all the little demons still yell very loudly. But I feel after today like the way is much more clear, or at least the way TO the way is more clear.

Giving myself the allowance to experience them in being rather than having to do them, also releases a significant weight. And honestly, if the answer is "Keep Playing", well what could be a better future than that?