This might sound redundant; I think I’ve touched on play in creativity before. It’s important. I find myself reminded of and/or drawn to what use to delight me as a child. Before expectations and responsibilities became the way my life has been shaped. For example, I crave quiet contemplation with the outdoors and all that entails: the trees, birds, squirrels, the ocean and beach, the river, the trails, the wind speaking through the leaves; the curiosity and depth that the elements connect us to within ourselves.

Is it just me? Have you felt that too? Maybe in different forms, but still—it’s there at the edges of your days, yes?

Curiosity for creatives is so essential; it’s what drives our work forward, allows us to make new discoveries, and sets the atmosphere for play. What if I use this color? What if I break down this word? What if I try this stitch? What if I collaborate with the river in a painting? What if I switch this stanza with this one? What if I add a vertical column, ladder words and create a new poetic form? What if you don’t have an agenda in mind and you just spend the day/week/month experimenting and playing? You don’t know what you could create until you begin to play.

If you are a wordsmith, try these ideas as exercises to begin to play:

• ask a lot of “what if” questions

• combine words or images that don’t “go together”

• turn verbs into nouns and vise-versa; use verbs as adjectives

• grab a partner for “The Exquisite Corpse” game

• pick a color and make a list of all the things around you that are that color: create a poem/essay/short story from that list

• pick a word at random from a book at random on your shelf; free write for 10 minutes using that word as a prompt

• sit in a public space, writing down as many pieces of conversation you can hear; write a dialogue with those snippets for a character you are developing

• take a page from an old textbook or magazine & make an erasure poem

• if you are a fiction writer, write an essay

• if you are a non-fiction writer, write a poem

• if you are a poet, write a short story

If you are a visual artist, try these ideas as exercises to begin to play

• restrict yourself to one color and focus on texture

• play with two mediums that you normally don’t combine

• begin a mark-making practice

• do many blind contour drawings

• paint never using a paintbrush—only common household objects or tools found in nature

• draw/paint with your non-dominant hand

• cut 15 random shapes and/or images from a magazine or book; make a collage

• deliberately blur a scene before taking a picture

• take pictures with your camera around your neck, never looking through the viewfinder

• choose one subject and take 20 pictures of it/make 20 drawings of it—ask a lot of “what if” questions after each picture/painting

• choose a color—only paint with that color or take pictures of scenes with that color in them

And whatever you’re curious about, wherever your interests lay, follow them! As I have been known to say, the medicine you need is whatever is in front of you in this moment.

My character, Mina, from A Harmony in the Key of Trees: A Healing Myth is a child who follows her curiosity, who keeps a journal of all her interests, who is an expert at play:

Alchemy

She twists two strips of cloth

around the crabapple’s trunk,

cording the cotton fibers

layer after layer;

an offering for the white petals

she plucks and tapes

onto cool, blue painted pages:

perfect corollas.

When she leaves the maple

she polishes the roots

with sweaty, greasy fingers,

surrounded by grass blades

jutted with moss and violets.

The leaves she glued in her notebook

dry and crack, pieces flake off.

Mina stores them in an envelope with a plastic window,

learns to tape the leaves onto the pages.

When she writes over them, she feels

the pen’s nib breaking through each cell wall,

her body registering the thin depressions

as a new shape is pushed into both their bodies.

Borrowing a magnifying glass

Mina spends one weekend studying

the fine hairs on some leaves,

sculpts petioles and ribs from clay,

paints them in greens and browns.

She draws all the shapes she sees in the leaves,

cutting them with tiny scissors

releasing the chlorophyll, smearing

white pages green, painting her fingers and knuckles

with thousands of chloroplasts

like so many tadpoles in a pond.

Like thunderstorms, Mina is a cloud

mingling with air pressure, fungal spores

smoke, ash, temperature.

Mina doesn’t realize yet

she isn’t creating a remedy;

she is the remedy.

Embrace your inner Mina and play for awhile. Become your own remedy in this amazing process of creativity and creating.