We were at the Wild Center, up in the forests of the Adirondack Mountains, visiting their exhibit TROLLS: Save the Humans!, which featured six trolls made by artist Thomas Dambo to inspire humans to rediscover nature and be good stewards of the Earth. The whole thing was very impressive, full of play, learning, delight, wonder, and its own kind of enchantment. No question, my excitement and wonder about the trolls echoed that of the children, most of whom were on summer break, and their adults, who vacillated between a certain concern about what their children were doing with those sticks they were picking up and their own wonder at the trolls themselves.

Adults love to play, too.

Maybe because it's summer or maybe for more existential reasons, I've been noticing the subject of 'play' coming up in different spaces that I'm in a lot in the last few weeks. Certainly, play is really important.

Along with the category of "play" comes, almost automatically, the category of "work". Dominant culture tends to separate these two categories. The separation begins early in life: it happens somewhere in most people's experiences of childhood education.

Going to school trains people to go to work - and the idea of what "work" entails shapes what "education" is supposed to be doing. This is especially easy to recognize when you remember that in the 19th and 20th centuries, schools purposefully trained children to work in factories. School bells, which echoed the bells used to signal the beginning and end of shifts; rote learning that entailed repetitive tasks echoed the repetitive tasks that industrial jobs require; and mandatory school attendance and body discipline (only sit in a desk, never run around) all trained the young mind-body in ways that shaped those mind-bodies to be able to perform certain kinds of work. "Play" meanwhile, was designated to breaks - recess, holidays, summer vacation. As you grew older, "play" was what children did, and adults had to be "responsible" and "work."

In the context of the United States and Canada, Indigenous children were also sent to highly abusive boarding schools/residential school, which forcibly took from them not only play, but their connection to their cultural heritage, language, and identities - and trained them for an assimilated existence in service to the colonizer, with boys expected to do low-level manual labor and girls expected to enter into domestic service.

None of these pedagogical or vocational approaches fits with how traditional sustainable/regenerative cultures raise their own children.

It did not take long for the Industrial approaches to education to be challenged by many people. For example, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who in the 1920s and 1930s argued for the critical importance of the social origin of the mind and of the significance of play as a crucial aspect of children's development. Hierarchical teaching methods and rote learning have been disproven as effective in teaching other things society seems to claim are important, such as enabling active citizenship and collective problem solving of complex problems. Much less imagining entirely new forms of socio-political-ecological organizing, ones less drenched in colonial patterns of authoritarian governance.

I come from a long lineage of educators. My grandmother, who taught second graders in the 1940s and 1950s, found multiple "alternative" ways around the dominant systems of her time. So perhaps it is not surprising that in the pedagogy I've been developing for the ReMembering Course and other courses that we offer, I lean into a wide array of 'alternatives’, which I tend to think of as common sense/ enabling the whole person to show up. This includes including: acknowledging existing knowledges and diverse contexts, creative integration sessions, embodied exercises, rituals, vocalizations, somatic experiences, and artistic practices. It also means creating the container wherein it is easy for participants to learn from and with one another as well as from me, and to enable participants to exercise your own agency in what, how, and when you choose to engage with the material.

Early on in our educational offerings, participants told me variations of: "this is the kind of education I wanted in college/university/grad school...... If I had been learning like this, history/religion would have been so much more fun..... I always knew history/religion/ecology/theology could be better."

I'm always glad to hear that kind of positive feedback. And I'm also a little sad. I'm sorry that so many people have had to suffer through so much suffering, pain, and trauma around/through/within education.

And I'm sorry that we still conflate "work" with something that is distinctly "not-play".

I'm not saying "serious" vs "fun". That's another problematic dichotomy - at least in my world, the two can absolutely go together. I'd like to think that is true for the artist Thomas Drambo, who spent hours and hours crafting these enormous wooden trolls: I imagine his work/craft/art is both serious and fun. Perhaps even: seriously fun!

Much of my best work comes when I am able to "play" with it. To be curious about it. To let myself open to the wonder, awe, and appreciation of humans and the natural world, including a lot of the horrors. Serious play and playful spiritual listening, especially with the natural world, is a key part of so much of what I do, from writing to teaching, to preaching, to creating new offerings.... Sometimes it is light-hearted play, as in, 'let's try this out, it might not work, but it could be really fun!'

As a witchy minister, my job includes a lot of things that other people might consider 'play' or 'off time activities', including: praying (often in nature), singing, creating and participating in rituals, studying scripture, myth, histories, poetry, and listening to/being inspired by the ways that I and that we are within (not separate) from nature. Really, most of our core eco-spiritual courses, including circular time, and even my approach to 1-1 spiritual direction, comes from this.

When people like me - and maybe you too - do the kind of work that criss-crosses all sorts of boundaries. re-assessing the categories we’ve been given, especially around "work", "play," and "education" is especially important. I am uplifting education (both teaching and learning) here because even if you are not offering courses per se, education plays such a huge role in so many different types of work and social change that many people are practicing some kind of education and co-learning, regardless of their official job description.

Minds are social 'things,' and humans are inherently life-long learners.

I wonder if part of why I hear people talking more about play is also because there's something about the category of  work that is not, well, working.

This is a bigger topic than I can really get into in this missive, so I will gesture to it as a set of questions:

• If scientists in a self-described scientific-oriented society who have been talking about climate change for over fifty years have consistently not been listened to by the leadership of their own society, then is the work of doing and communicating about science "working"?

• If doing "good work" is also burning people out and leaving them so exhausted that spending time playing with children feels like a chore, is it really "good work"?

• If a president could get rid of the work done by thousands (millions?) of people over many decades in less than a year, what does that say about the nature of that work itself? About society?

I, meanwhile, find it more helpful to shift from thinking about the categories of "work" vs "play" to thinking about different kinds of attention. (This also deserves its own article, and let me know if you want to me to write one on it!)

Focusing on "what kind of attention am I giving/experiencing" has been a much more helpful framework for me. I both do and really need to shift between different kinds of attention. And let's be clear: that is a somatic/embodied and ecological experience, not just a mental/intellectual one.

There are certain types of attention that look like not-paying-attention-at-all.

To attend - a variation of listening - to a river (which I did a lot of in the last few days, which was quite delightful) versus at-tending to a client or to a dream or to a friend have different kinds qualities.

Sometimes we can't offer a specific quality of attention that other people want/need - and that's ok too, but it helps if we are aware of this and communicate about it.

Some days, I attend to documents on my computer. Some of that is very playful. Some of that is - really not. I hope I am prioritizing the right things.

Some days, I spend a lot of time in the woods, at the lake, or alongside the ocean.

Or with delightful wooden trolls.

Most of that is very nourishing. But let's not kid ourselves: it also has its own challenges and requires its own kind of 'work'. Such as co-ordinating driving several hours to a relatively remote location to be surrounded by lots of strangers (aka tourists) who also drove many hours to be in the woods looking at wooden structures and telling each other the importance of taking care of nature before getting back into their cars and driving to their air bnb/hotel.

Sometimes, I get very amused at what us humans do....

So: play well. At home, at school, in the woods. In each season, not just summer. With kind trolls and big paint brushes and mud. Play well in this great big drama we call social interactions and these games that we humans made up called work. Be sure to check in with your inner child and make sure she is playing at least some of the games that she actually finds amusing, be they on a computer or splashing in a pond or cloud gazing for no "purpose" except that clouds, ☁️ ⛅️ too, are playing their own serious cloud-game up there...

Sara Jolena