Play: A Playful Child Lives in Every Adult Part Two

1958

With my instructor watching, I was trotting on a horse seventeen hands high on a trail outside of the corral where I usually practiced. At my own height of five feet five inches, that horse was three inches taller than I was at its withers.* Losing my balance, I pitched forward and instinctively clasped my arms around the horse's neck, ending up clinging under its head. I hung scared—until finally I safely dropped my feet to the ground. A day later, I was crying my way through a case of poison ivy each time the calamine lotion wore off and had to be reapplied. And that was the seeming end of horseback riding for me, something I had longed to do since reading every horse story in the children's room of the town's public library.

Years later, when I was much older and had begun reviewing my life with intentions of change, strong-delayed feelings of regret emerged that I had not had a mother who told me to return to riding lessons. Even if I had felt afraid getting on a horse again, I would have regained self-confidence and felt happy and successful at returning. Instead, failure grew in their place… hiding in my inner child.

1999

Our playful child enjoys simple pleasures: running on
a beach, playing with a pet, eating a juicy piece of fruit
with our hands.*

Over the years, I bought children's books for myself. When I learned this was a way of being in touch with my inner child,* I began buying them for my newly established counseling practice clients.*

One night in my weekly True Self: Inner Child–Inner Parent* group gathering, five members and I repeated the opening poem, "To Our Children,"* then put our drawing pads on our laps in readiness. We were about to dialog with our playful inner child. We had read Lucia Capacchione's Recovery of Your Inner Child, so at this point, we already knew that play was an aspect of the child of our inner self, one who is waiting to be recognized and to contribute to our adult life. I asked my group members to pick up a colored marker in their right hand to write what our adult voice might like to say to our inner child, such as, "Inner child, would you like to come out to play?" Then exchanging hands so the marker was now in our left hand, we paused in anticipation of hearing our inner child's voice. We drew what our child told us about their feelings and the activities they would have us do, and then shared our new insights with one another, learning from others' inner child at play as well as our own.

My counseling ended when I moved to India, specifically to Meherabad* for the purpose of spiritual training and, in time, the development of my writing. After fifteen years of service in different positions there, I met a woman from Great Britain with whom I discovered a shared view that adult play was important. We agreed that badminton would be our choice as the equipment could be purchased in the city I frequented. Meherabad Trust land provided room to play in a large parking area of hard-packed dirt. It was fun without competition, as our basic effort was to keep the birdie in the air as long as possible—not very! For months, we batted and missed, and laughed as we retrieved birdies over our heads or wildly far off from our positions. Eventually, a change in circumstances ended our "friendship tournament," but our accomplishment stood as witness to the truth—play was fun!

2018

On a visit to my family in America, I learned there was an opportunity to ride. My granddaughter would do my tack at a stable where she both rode and worked. As she galloped her horse around the large indoor ring, I walked my horse around its outside lane, happily following the directions my instructor called out—heels down, pull back your left rein a little.

My realization is, "An experience may return to us years later in which a door has already been opened, and this time we know the joy of accomplishment and its benefit of greater self-confidence.

* The withers are at the top of the shoulder where the neck joins the body. 
* Lucia Capacchione, Recovery of Your Inner Child:  The Highly Acclaimed Method for Liberating Your Inner Self (New York: Simon & Schuster /Fireside, 1991), 212.
* Capacchione, Recovery, 228.
* Children's books for True Self: Inner Child, Inner Parent: When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry, Molly Bang; Rudi's Pond, Eve Bunting; Rain or Shine, Ronald Heuninck.

* The principle of this work is to recognize our parents as having done the best that they could with their own children; what they missed understanding in their parental role due to its absence in their own childhood the group members would now provide for themselves as parent to their inner children, their true selves.

*  To Our Children

    To our children     We love you.
    To our children     We will protect you.
    To our children     We will open the windows and
                                  Doors of our hearts and minds
                                  So you may take deep breaths
                                  Of sunny, blue-sky love.
    To our children      We will help heal what hurts you
                                  And make safe what scares you.
     To our children      We will teach you, play with you
                                   And take you to new places.
     To our children      We will listen to you, look at your
                                    Art and not make fun of you.
     To our children      We will take you with us
                                    Or let you know where we are.
     To our children       We will grow from what
                                     You teach us
                                     And always be grateful.

                                    © Prema Camp

* Meherabad. The site of Avatar Meher Baba's Tomb-Shrine (Samadhi) and site of world pilgrimage as well as His early primary residence, ashram, and headquarters of His activities until 1944; now overseen by the Meherabad Trust.

Play: Issa Part One

Come to me

let's play

little sparrow orphan!

                        Issa

I am seventy-eight. I walk to my twice-weekly Tai Chi class for seniors. I am learning how to build a new life. I have gone from living in the Eastern Hemisphere of the world for eighteen years to being reassigned to the Western Hemisphere, to the country of my birth, America—it is foreign to me. I walk through neighborhoods of small houses, cross streets without cows and congested vehicle traffic—(but nonetheless have posts with a button I push, then wait for a flashing white hand that signals I can safely cross). This day, by an upward glance on one of the routes I take, I see a lone sparrow on a bare branch of a small and fully bare tree. I have observed few birds here, whereas in India I was an avid bird watcher, and even had a Greater Coucal appear regularly in unusual locations in metaphysical relationship. I stop in wonder . . .  thankful, delighted . . . and speak to it. I keep watching it without movement. I have recognized another who I perceive as alone—as how I find myself at times, even with family and the few kindred souls that I have met. But the strongly empowering patterns of my life before my departure on May 20 are gone. I share minutes with this sparrow. By its head movements, I am aware that I am noticed. It is comforting.

Back home, I intuitively open my haiku book* in search of a one about a sparrow. I am rewarded. Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa and I meet across the almost two centuries since the time of his writing. From his description in 'The Poets" section I learn that Issa "had particular affinity with children and vulnerable creatures of the natural world."*

My realization is, "Between humans and nature there is a fine line that by inner and outer vibrations can have fluent and fluid boundaries."

* Tom Lowenstein with Victoria James, Haiku Inspirations: Poems and Meditations on Nature and Beauty, (London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2006), 154. "From as early as the tenth century, many Japanese poets became preoccupied by two contrasting experiences: the demands of social life versus the pleasures of solitude. . . . * Poetry, like meditation, could be a medium of spiritual experience, and haiku poets' writing often emerged from a solitary, meditative poetic mood that they actively cultivated. . . . But detachment from society could also lead to loneliness." Ibid. p 49.

Everyone is a Writer Family Writing Part 10

Wellington Cramer 

Staten Island Ferry-Boat

Most of my dreams, and I have had millions, seem best to present themselves on the Staten Island Ferry-boat as it ploughed its way from 69th Street in Brooklyn to St. George on Staten Island. My mother was a dreamer—mostly removing herself from reality. My dreams took me all over the world, all over the United States. They took me there in balloons, on trains, and on camel back. I was very much taken with Richard Halliburton and his Royal Road to Romance. He rode a bicycle around the pyramids, he pranced through the Taj Mahal, and he swam the Hellespont. I was a great lover of Lawrence of Arabia. Funny how I have always had such an affinity for the Germans and the Arabs. Have you ever smelled the water in the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island? Have you ever smelled hemp from a tramp steamer lying at its dock? Have you ever smelled a coffee roaster riding on the Sea Beach Express over the Manhattan Bridge? Can you possibly imagine the aroma in Bridgeton, N.J. at the Ritter plant in Catsup-making time? Can you feel the aroma of tar and coal oil as it is freshly laid on a dusty road? I can even smell snow and rain.*

With my first poem written in 1974, I became aware of poetry as a new and important part of my life. I built a small library choosing its books by finding the poetry section of a bookstore and seated on the floor taking down titles that caught my attention. Randomly turning to different pages of each one, if I could find five poems that I liked, I bought the book. The day I found Beyond Words: Writing Poems with Children by Elizabeth McKim and Judith W. Steinbergh, I was drawn to every page of student and author poems. The author's words below were my first view of what poetry could be.

Elizabeth McKim and Judith W. Steinbergh write, “Poetry is a special way of perceiving the world. It is a weaving together of feelings and environment. Poets not only see things in great detail, but also see them on other levels.... In order to write poetry, one must be vulnerable, sensitive to sounds and rhythms both in language and in the surrounding environment.”*

My dad's poem, "Staten Island Ferry-Boat" was written sometime during the 1970s. Reading it, I knew my dad as a new treasure, as a writer—his world right then become mine in this special way.

My realization is, "We remember poetry because it takes us by thought, by feelings, and also by sensory detail into a new world—the one that the poet is offering."

* Wellington Cramer, "Staten Island Ferry-Boat" in A Flower for God: A Memoir (Seattle, WA: Wilson Duke Press, 2021), 120.

* Elizabeth McKim and Judith Steinberg, Beyond Words: Writing Poems with Children (Green Harbor, Wampeter Press, 1983), 7. MA: