play

i'm reading Margaret Wheatley's incedible, Walk Out Walk On.
today... reading around p. 64... talking about play.

i'm going to post some of it here... so very poignant.. i'm trying to contact her.. make sure she is good with it.. would love to post it in our book as well.

if you aren't reading this book - a high recommend..


up to this point.. the book is talking a lot about Mesh thinking (Gansky) and using what you have.
so then about p. 64 she brings up upcycling.. that i hadn't heard of ... it's recycling but with out large energy inputs and by products. she writes

upcyclers challenge themselves to reinvent the world by playing with its waste.
and all around that.. she goes deep into play... and i love it.

some quotes i just had to tweet:

finishing isn't the point
confront catastrophic human and environmental degradation. this is the perfect place to build another dream... to have a healthy social fabric, we need healthy public spaces. when we restore a degraded public space, we restore our connections to each other and to our community. we make the impossible possible.
games transform the landscape of our environment...
if you don't have any kind of dream i am sure it's impossible to create something..  paulo freire

places of play... she refers to oasis

has magic in it - a magic that beckons people to stop by, to contribute, to create something beautiful together

this is what we are seeking with city as floor plan.. just doing.. playing.. in spaces - imagine school becoming that..

we have expertise. but instead of relying on our expertise, we all pitch in wherever we can, and a community is rediscovered.

a lot of my friends and gurus are discussing funding and what is fair. many are pushing for funding going directly to a person. i get how fair that sounds... and i get how we don't all believe in people enough to believe in commons... but either way - we would be missing out.
if we were to get gov moneys per census.. then communities decided how that was spent.. but i mean the alive people in the community.. and ongoing via crowdsourcing, perpetual beta.. not only would it be a more humane a fair way to acquire resources, we would find we don't need as much as we're thinking. but most of all.. we would rediscover community. we would rediscover our richest asset and our most soul quenching desire.. to be known by someone.. to commune.. to communicate. and to play.

play creates chaos and redundancy and confusion. but it also creates the space in which we invent together, we inspire each other, and we talk through differences.

.. convinced they're not creative, waiting for experts and entrepreneurs to tell them what to do.
in the logic of play, people are invited to break rules, experiment, innovate, and be original.
if we want to created a healthy and resilient community, we need to invite the members of that community to play together. when we play, everything once again becomes possible.
we do not conform to what we already know. play invites us to explode the boundaries, to distpt the familiar. there is no failure in play; we're not trying to get it right. we are not even trying to solve our problems. no, what we're doing when we play is exploring our dreams.

then she writes of people, unlikely connections, now being

magnetized to this collective dream...

and how then we

rediscover one another.

l