The wisdom of playing

Did you ever play when you were a child? Of course you did. Even if it was in our own minds, children played to escape if they had to.
Play was a time to get dirty, gooey, muddy. I had a creek below my house, and I used to love going exploring in the creek bed. Sometimes I would dream of finding arrowheads, old coins, relics. Mostly what I found were snakes and bugs, but the fun was in imagining and in delving into new territories.
When you become an adult, play becomes a waste of time. Even before a person is fully grown a young person gets messages like: "Don't play with your food," "don't play in the rain," "you shouldn't play with them" and on and on.
I have been reading a wonderful book called "Playing By Heart: The Vision and Practice of Belonging" by O. Fred Donaldson. He is a play philosopher. He has worked with children and animals who have gone through tramatic events, and shown them how to play. Donaldson talks a great deal about how trust is required to play.
Our society looks down on adults who spend time playing. A teacher cannot get too close to a child for fear of it looking inappropriate. Donaldson says, "The trust of play is a natural wisdom, a bond that saturates one's life. It is like a seventh sense that, enabling one to detect what is far away, hidden and innermost."
We all have an inner child that needs nurturing within us whether we care to admit it or not. It is dying to come out and play. It has been locked away to long. It wants to dance, sing, paint, color, even if we are awkward and uncoordinated.
If we take the time to love and nurture our inner child that is time well spent. It is making the world a better place because it is giving the world the world the best version of ourselves in all that we do. The world is worth it, and we are worth it. We deserve being spoiled a little. This life is short.
I once heard that the closest we can get to the divine is when we are spending time creating.
Blessings!