4 minute read
play in three acts
AURORE MAREN
Cast of characters:
Narrator
Three children, siblings: Claira (5) , Thomas (7), and Syblle, (4)
Their grandfather David (86)
Act 1
Summer, on a wide sandy beach somewhere in the far Pacific Northwest.
Narrator: Play is a highly evolved sense, and engages a most essential human emotion, Joy. The conversation between the two, play and joy, may create a feeling sense of peace or equanimity.
Claira squats on the sand and draws a heart shape then backs up, moving her hands back and forth cupping a string of hearts in the sand.
Thomas takes a clam shell and fills it with water from the tide and pours the water along the line of one of the hearts.
Syblle runs and jumps over the string of hearts — like jumping rope, she skips back and forth, back and forth….
David, who has been watching the sun dance on the waves, turns to see his grandchildren playing. A smile runs across his face and he whispers a prayer to himself, ‘may the peace created by my grandchildren’s joy spread across these ocean waves.’
Act 2
Early winter, in an open field, once a cow pasture: an aspen grove singing on one side, tufts of yellow tall grass, blackberry bramble and wild rose, scarlet in the fog and sun. Ten poplars hold an arc, various spruce and fir stand as points, marking time.
Narrator: Light is nature’s play. In any creation of space, the play of light, defines the space, gives it its breadth, its depths and height. Light is a dancer; its movement, its presence, its absence is choreographed by time.
Landscape Architect: To create spaces in this field, I must watch Light, the dancer, move through the seasons beginning in winter, thus I may notice the unfolding of spring’s new growth. My shears and clippers and mowing will articulate this movement. I wish to experience in my body, as I walk through this field, a similar wandering path as of that dancer, sunlight. There will be shade and shadow on the vertical and the horizontal. There will be enclosure and opening, solids and voids. There will be places of movement and rest. This is my play, I am joyful here, always.
Act 3
Late autumn, falling quietly, sometimes quickly. Yellow leaves of aspen and alder shroud the grass turned green again after rain. Aspen’s white marbled trunks show a wall, solid, comforting, embracing, holding back the bitter winds. An eagle and a hawk are clearly outlined against the sky; summer’s leaves no longer disguise them.
Narrator: Anticipation is the Play of autumn: summer ends and winter is not yet. Light is more dramatic in its change of movement from shadowed clouds to soft tender fogs, to shafts of sharpened light through barren tree branches.
Thomas pushes a soccer ball through the leaves with his feet, sometimes kicking up a swirl of yellow and gold along with the ball.
Claira walks slowly and bends down to pick up a leaf and then another, fingering each leaf carefully and placing them back to back, then spreading them like a fan in her hand.
Syblle runs through the leaves kicking them with her tiny boots until, oops, upside down she falls, laughing she makes her fall into a somersault, leaves flutter everywhere.
David sees the eagle and the hawk, and puts up his right thumb and forefinger to the sky to measure how far apart they might be. He places his left hand on his heart, sighs and smiles.
Narrator: And so ends our little Play. Please make yours as big as your imagination can hold, never cast a cross eye upon it, for play wilts under criticism….
Take your play by the hand and infuse it with your joy. Rest in the memory of it. Let its peace be your pillow, of dreams.
The brilliant and gentle spirit, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, OC, LLD, FCSLA, BCSLA, FASLA, once said about designing for play, ‘All you need is a pile of sand, a pile of dirt and a pail.’
‘The act of play must resonate from within. Play is a pure act of the imagination on the wild.’
Wilding she called it!
— from my conversations with Cornelia
AURORE MOURSUND MAREN studied English literature in Colorado and Oxford, landscape architecture at Cornell, and clinical social work at Columbia. From an island in the Salish Sea, she travels mostly by boat, does landscape projects, independent clinical social work and tends the inner and outer light of place in words, gardens, paintings and glassworks.
