Play Is Fucking Holy

why she’s my patron saint of play

I’m riding high right now. Cracked open and filled to the brim. The muses, solitude, solidarity, all of it. I see beauty everywhere and I’m feeling feelings I regularly assume I’ll never feel again.

I just got home from Santa Fe. I was there because a friend sent me the link to a writing retreat boasting Anne Lamott and Julia Cameron, and since Santa Fe also happens to be where Lisa lives, I signed up. I learned later that our friend Jacob was also coming to town that weekend. So I went for writing and also not.

Here’s a valuable lesson I learned: there’s a big difference between conference and retreat. Retreat means you might wonder, at intervals, if you accidentally signed up for a multi-level marketing scheme. There may be loud music, group dancing and inflatable crayons thrown about the room. There will probably be a lot of talk of intuition and many, many affirmations.

This is not to say I didn’t love it. The whole weekend was dedicated to play-by-many-different-names. SARK was not for me (my most inspired moment was probably listening to the voice that said, It’s time to leave this session on intuition early and go write your cousin a letter), but Julia Cameron definitely was. That woman is the real deal. I’ve read portions of The Artist’s Way over the years, have had phases with Morning Pages, but I wasn’t prepared for her presence. She’s an American treasure: no fanfare, no big displays of emotion, just so clearly connected to the muses. I went to her intensive workshop before the official start of the retreat, the perfect way to prime for optimum magic. I hear she’s sometimes called The Queen of Change, and I very much aspire to also be called that by many people one day.

She didn’t present for the full room of hundreds until Sunday afternoon, the last day of workshops. In spite of a spasming back, she delivered with wit, laying out her Four Tools for Success: Morning pages, Artist Dates, Solo Walks and Writing Guidance.* Reminder: we can still be muses to others when we’re not our best.

devotees are everywhere

I take a lot of walks. At least half of my days include long walks with friends, usually an hour or two of meaningful conversation. Feels like a two-birds-one-stone-thing: blood flow and social connection. But when Julia Cameron talked about the importance of walking alone, I was flooded with relief. It was permission—emphatic counsel—to prioritize another thing that can feel hard to justify. Though my favorite images are always solitary women walking toward the horizon, I’d kind of forgotten walking alone was a thing.

I’ll come back to walking, but I want to backup. I woke up Sunday deciding to skip school. I’ve been to a few writing things now, and I’m getting pretty good at knowing when to follow the schedule and when it’s time to do my own thing. I do not leave my daily life and family to feel restricted elsewhere. I need time for integration. Most magic occurs in the spaces between things. I wanted to write in the sun. I went to get a manicure. While I waited to get my nails done at the mall, I discovered a delightfully funky used book store, found a gift for my new friend Darcy, some poetry for myself. Significant playtime by noon.

Before Julia Cameron, I returned to the French cafe where I’d eaten lunch every day, in part because they had a killer salade niçoise, and in part to swap contact info with the artist/mother who worked there with whom I’d connected. Then the reminder to walk alone. Clarity that my time at the retreat was complete. Just enough time to run and buy a little succulent and appear at my friend Pam’s art show and sit on the floor with some of her paintings. To learn that Lisa had been there earlier and had pulled out the exact same three paintings I did. That’s the kind of thing that happens when play sprites are activated: synchronicity reigns.

a perfect day

Then I went back to Lisa’s and had roof wine at sunset with some of my favorite people in the world and we had a lovely meal and stayed up until the wee hours playing with the sand tray. It was a day turbo-charged with play: solitude & surprises, gift-giving & receiving, delight, connection, the sacred and the silly.

I wasn’t surprised when I woke up after only sleeping for two hours. This doesn't happen to me often (almost never), so I listen. The muses are not fucking around. I grabbed my hat and headphones and started into the sunrise. I love the desert, don’t think any setting primes me more for inspiration. I wandered for a few hours, music blasting in my ears. I stopped to make a bouquet of wildflowers, smelled all the desert plants. Everything was holy.

I talk a lot about all the things that get in the way of our collective ability to play. I talk about play mattering. A lot. But this weekend transformed something. Play became the closest thing I have to religion, something to live by, something to devote myself to. I know I can’t always be out wandering in the desert alone, but I can start not shying away from the knowledge that our collective survival hangs in the balance. Paying taxes is not real life. Nothing was realer than a weekend in the desert with hundreds of creatives and a couple human muses.

Optional Assignment: Go for a walk by yourself. That’s it. Headphones are always recommended, but the sounds around you are good, too.

Here’s a confession: At any given time I have one song that I’m listening to obsessively on repeat. Especially in the car. I understand the journey of a full album, but when I find something that hits right, I don’t want a saga, I want to be bathed in that specific experience. I can’t tell you why a song becomes the song. Except that it’s not about the words. This is the current song, has been for weeks (yes, weeks), but it was only on my dawn walk that I actually listened to the lyrics. And now I’m obsessed all over again.

*I guess these are all in The Artists Way, and I’d like to suggest a newer edition of the book to the publishing world. I haven’t opened mine in a long time because I can’t stand the cover, yet the content is truly timeless. Anything we say about not judging books by covers is absolute hog shit.

What’s unequivocally beautiful about a writers retreat is the hundreds of people simultaneously agreeing that source and inspiration and solitude matter more than anything in the world. Out in the world, I often feel like a lone salmon pushing against the current, fatigued beyond belief from insisting I must be right that this stuff matters. There is something incredible about being in a room of hundreds of people who feel the same way. It can also feel like a cult, but at least the cult has a message I came in believing.

If it annoys you to hear someone gush like this, remember that a few months ago I had a wavering will to live. That is the point: play begets play and sometimes it literally saves lives.