Find Meaning and Play
Out of a playful movement of elements whose interrelations are not immediately apparent, patterns arise which an observant and critical intellect can only evaluate afterwards.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work.
But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth.
The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
~ Carl Jung
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The feminine is a vast ocean of eternal Being. It was, is and shall be. It contains the primordial animals “red in tooth and claw”; it contains the potential seeds for life; it knows the laws of nature and exacts those laws with ruthless justice; it lives in the eternal Now. It has its own rhythms, slower than those of the masculine, meandering, moving in a spiral motion, seemingly turning back on itself, but inevitably attracted to the light. It finds what is meaningful to it and plays. It may work very hard, but its attitude is always one of play because it loves life.
It loves, and if that love is penetrated by the positive masculine, its energies are released to flow into life with a constant flow of new hope, new faith, new dimensions of love.
~ Marion Woodman
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It’s amazing what can be discovered through play that can never be discovered by effort alone. We live in a culture that believes in heroic struggle and upward striving. It’s a very masculine idea that elevates striving and overcoming odds by the sweat of our furrowed brows, when we could probably get there a lot sooner if we sang and danced a bit more.
I’ve even met artists who told stories of their heroic exertions to overcome creative challenges and how it almost killed them. Well, it seems to me if art is just lugging a boulder up a mountain to say you did, you’re missing the point. If at some point you don’t start laughing with delight at what’s being created, at what’s coming out of you, maybe you should try another line of work.
I’m not saying it’s not work because it is, but it’s work with joy in it. Why would you commit your life to a work that is basically drudgery? Let’s have some pleasure in our work, let’s enjoy it. Beauty comes out of joy; work without joy and pleasure in it can’t create real beauty. One of the things we unconsciously look for in any work, art or otherwise, is if the creator loved the process. Yes, I know we look for skill and talent and imagination, but those things fall flat without passionate play.
We learn and create best through play because it opens us to another kind of intelligence, another kind of creative energy. The dutiful artist who sticks to the rules is going to make dutiful art, which won’t inspire or surprise us with an insight or an original take on anything. And trying to be original makes it even worse.
If we take this one principle and ask ourselves where we feel playful in our lives, whether it’s in our work or relationships or anywhere really, we may be shocked to discover we don’t know much about it. We may have left it behind with childhood. Maybe this is why the art impulse rarely survives the transition to adulthood. We forget how to play.
Whose fault is this? I think we should look at our educational system and how regimented and unfun it is. I think it could benefit from a lot more playfulness. What we have is an assembly line that has very little tolerance for the creative spirit. Unless that spirit is wedded to a very sturdy or exceptionally lucky child, that playful focus will be snuffed out.
We need to re-examine how we raise our children. We need to find ways to keep creative play alive throughout our whole lives.
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Volume five of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
Here are three reviews of my writing:
David Price has become one of my favorite writers once I discovered his work on the Medium site a few years ago. I’m amazed at how he continually is able to spark my consciousness with thoughts, ideas and observations of our world and the range of possibilities in the human experience. The best way to sum it up might be to say that through his words and images, Mr Price has a knack for providing rich sustenance for the human soul.
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Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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This book encourages in the true sense of that word as no other I have known the creative process in oneself as spiritual necessity. David Price’s writing is beautifully alive, articulate, kind. The form is prose; the feel is poetic, flowing, metaphoric. There is not a dry line in it. I heartily recommend it to anyone who longs to crack the shell around their own creativity, to become more sensitive, creative, and alive themselves.
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Plus this comment:
There is something about your writing, an ineffable quality I can’t quite place. It’s brilliant.
— Shain Thomas
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It is this version:
