Author: KPB Stevens

How do we form pilgrim communities?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Greg Hitzhusen was a student at Yale Divinity School, he and a few others started an Outing Club, which took students out onto the campus for weekly meditations, and also took a spring break hiking trip every year. One day, while they were hiking in North Carolina, they came out onto Shining Rock at sunset and saw forested land spreading before them for miles. They had what Greg describes as a collective spiritual experience. This experience was the fruit of the group’s deep investment in their exploration of nature spirituality, and their acceptance of the hard work of being in the wild.

It was a high point of Greg’s many years spent exploring nature spirituality, during which he found many profound teachers. A few years before, he’s taken part in the Yitziah Jewish Outdoor Leadership Training Course, and become fascinated by the spiritual communities that can spring up in the midst of wilderness programs. He concentrated his academic research on similar outdoor environmental ministries, delving into how they thought about their work, both practically and theologically. He found that they all emphasized spiritual growth and renewal, often tying participants’ experiences to the wilderness stories of the Jewish and Christian traditions. His research made him conversant with a number of writers on creation spirituality, such as Stephen Kellert, Ursula Goodenough, and Bron Taylor.

We’d invited him to the Ministerium because we wanted to explore the idea of pilgrim communities, groups of people who come together for a set religious purpose, for a limited amount of time, and then disperse when that purpose is accomplished. Could these outdoor ministries serve as an example of such pilgrim communities, we wondered, and if so, what could we learn from them? Part of our concern was over their accessibility. Is there a way participate in pilgrim communities that are based around nature spirituality, even if one isn’t physically able to go on long hiking trips. or prevented from doing so by family or work responsibilities? Yes, Greg told us, all you need is a group that is intentional about going outside. He told us about the square foot exercise, in which one spends an hour simply meditating on a square foot of ground. Even such a simple thing can lead one to state of wonder and awe, since every small patch of ground is so amazingly various.

But the best practices for forming a pilgrim community in nature do require immersion in the natural world, which is best accomplished through multi-day excursions. Greg said that groups of twelve to fifteen people are best, since they allow for intimacy and variety without becoming unmanageable. A lot of very intentional planning needs to go into a successful trip. It’s a good idea to ground the trip in worship, maybe starting and ending with liturgies within a home trip. This, indeed, is one place where he nuanced our idea of pilgrim communities, since many of the groups that head out on these trips do so from a synagogue or church, a base community which supports them and which they benefit through their pilgrimage.

Once the group has started out on the trail, it’s important to engage them in what Greg calls a “portal” exercise. These are exercises that are meant to mark the liminality of beginnings, where pre-existing concerns and worries are named and then left behind. Through these exercises, a group begins to know itself as a group. Part of a group’s formation is its coming to understand the importance of mutual leadership. Sometimes groups of people assume that, regardless of any rhetoric around learning to trust one’s own leadership, there will, at the end of the day, always be someone there to bail them out. Experienced trail guides know that the only way to counter this assumption is to let group leaders fail, even if it means that they take people for miles in the wrong direction. Through such an experience, they come to understand that their leadership really belongs to them, and isn’t merely a hollow rhetorical device.

During these journeys, participants learn to value something other than peak-chasing. Sometimes the most profound moment doesn’t come on a mountain top, but while wading through weeds and bracken. And on all of these journeys, participants learn what their Jewish and Christian spiritual forerunners always knew – that the wilderness has the capacity of clearing away the distractions of our lives, and helping us notice the presence of God all around us.

Towards the end of his talk, Greg paraphrased Thomas Aquinas, who said that no one thing can adequately reflect the goodness of God, which is why God made all things. Often our faith communities become inward focused, and fall into thinking that they, somehow, know all there is to say about God. But creation is saying something more. Can we, as pilgrim communities, open the book of nature and learn from it?

My Summer in the Body

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

That first night in Traverse City, having driven all day to get there, I rode seven miles on my bike, through woods that bordered a broad inlet, to a yoga studio in an old office park. The studio itself was on the second floor of an a-frame building, and we laid out our mats under roof beams and skylights designed by a ‘70s architect who wanted to make its occupants feel as if they were perpetually settling into a deep woods cabin for a long winter’s night. Now it was July, and the sun came through the skylights strongly. Some of the panes were stained glass, and patterns of wavy red and green fell across our bodies. The instructor told us that she had been to a workshop over the weekend, where she had been challenged to cultivate her gratitude, and given the practice of giving thanks for each person that she met during the course of a day. She led us in centering our breath, and told us that it’s from the breath that we draw our strength and balance. After the class I rode back to the hotel through the darkening woods. In 2001, the city erected a large-scale model of the solar system along the trail, with miles between the far flung planets. I rode passed them, towards the sun at their center. I had never felt more at home in my own body, stronger or more connected to the world outside my skin. The bike seemed to float with no real effort from my legs, which rotated on the pedals as if they were rotating planets themselves.

This was halfway through a summer during which I dedicated myself to exploring body spiritually, a summer in which I visited a Reiki practitioner, did a lot of yoga, walked the labyrinth, and meandered meditatively with the dog. The fact that Christianity is so disconnected from the body had really begun to trouble me. We believe, after all, in an incarnate God. We believe that mystery took human form and occupied a body that was just like ours. Not an idealized body, not a perfect body, but an aching, sneezing, itching body. In John 6, Jesus goes out of his way to annoy everyone by using the word sarx to describe this body. There were two words for body in Greek, sarx and soma. Soma is the good or neutral body, the healthy body of a stranger coming down the street, or the idealized body of a loved one whom we hold in our arms. Sarx, however, is the body that ails, that has unpleasant functions, that bears wounds and scars. It is the body on the toilet. And this was the body that Jesus claimed for himself, and told his followers to partake in. Yet for most of Christian history we’ve run away from the body, and haven’t developed forms of body spirituality as the Hindus developed yoga, the Sufis developed ecstatic dancing, and the Buddhists wrote entire sutras about the breath. Christians find ourselves borrowing these practices because we have so few practices of our own. If Jesus loved and partook in the body, even and most especially the sarx body, shouldn’t we? And can attentiveness to the body aid in the work of the soul?

I began my summer-long exploration of these questions with Reiki. I met a Reiki practitioner while visiting a friend in the hospital, and a few weeks later I went to visit her and her house so that she could explain Reiki to me. We sat in her parlor as lithe cats prowled the carpet and draped themselves across the furniture, and she told me that she had first learned of Reiki from a nun, who had been her first teacher and mentor. The Catholic Church has since prohibited the practice of Reiki, she told me, since it doesn’t come from the Christian tradition, although the church does still approve of the idea of healing touch. I found this attitude difficult to understand, since Christianity has long practiced a tolerant appropriation of practices from other faiths, borrowing all sorts of things, including our Christmas traditions and the fact that we call the Day of the Resurrection “Easter.” But as my friend talked, I began to feel some of the reserve that must have effected the Catholic bishops. She talked of auras and seeing ectoplasm running down walls, and of a cultivated sixth sense that helped her in her work. There seemed to be a whole worldview behind Reiki that I wasn’t sure I could subscribe to. But I remained curious, and made an appointment so that I could experience Reiki for myself.

A few days later I lay on a message table in her Reiki room, after having signed a form in which I gave her permission to touch me and agreed to keep my clothes on. Since I’m naturally reticent about my body, I had more trouble consenting to the former than the latter. She dimmed the lights and put on a playlist of meditative chanting, which on New Age albums is almost always accompanied by synth music. I closed my eyes. For a long time, there was only stillness. I’d peek from time to time and see her moving her hands in the air above my body, sometimes making soothing motions, sometimes brushing at something, cleansing my aura. Eventually her hands came to rest on my shoulder and my arm. I had wanted to set aside all thought during the session, to practice centering prayer as it was going on. Usually, during centering prayer, little skeins of thought flit past my mind, like the strips of paper inside of fortune cookies. During the Reiki session, my mind filled with incredibly vibrant images. I followed them, one after another, as they shifted and transformed. It surprised me, because even though I paint and draw, I seldom think in images. It felt as if some dormant part of my creativity was being set free. Maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me, since my entire premise had been that the soul and the body are intimately connected. It made a kind of sense that a body practice would untangle knots of memory and realign thought itself.

Reiki, for me, was deeply cataphatic, meaning that it was full of positive, descriptive images of the self and the divine. It was about perception, in the same way that a walk with the dog is about perception. For me, these walks are an opportunity to train my ability to see. I walk slowly and study the neighborhood carefully, watching the buds leaf and the flowers bloom, and, as the summer continues, the sidewalk grow littered with debris from the trees. For me, cataphatic spirituality implies a deep attentiveness – attentiveness to images and nature, and also attentiveness to thought. Meditation, in the classic Christian sense of the word, is about attentiveness. We meditate with scripture (lectio divina), images (visio divina), or experience (Ignatian examinem), and happily follow the lines of revelatory thought that these practices lead us to. The body can be brought into this kind of spirituality fairly easily, as my experience with Reiki demonstrated. In Christian practice, walking labyrinths lends itself to cataphatic spirituality, as the labyrinth is an invitation to go deeply into one’s sense of self and journey with God. But in the center of the labyrinth, you’re supposed to stop, and simply rest in God. Only, what should you do with the body while you’re resting in God?

This resting in God is apophatic spirituality, a spirituality that is content not to know, that accepts that truth is often beyond words, and that advocates divine relationship over theological or personal meanings. Apophatic spirituality is more about intention than it is about attention. It is the spirituality of contemplation, where we gently refuse to become entangled in our thoughts, and wait patiently for in-breaking moments of a grace and a deep sense of relationship with God. It is the spirituality that Denise Levertov expresses in her poem The Avowal:

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

Can the body be involved in this kind of spirituality as well?

I turned to yoga to try to answer this question. I went to many different yoga classes, in many different studios over the course of the summer. A friend of mine complains that yoga studios have become boutiques, always willing to sell you stretchy pants and fancy dew-rags in their elaborate lobbies. Large images of Hindu gods and goddesses, or of the Buddha, often predominate. It’s unclear to me whether my fellow yoga practitioners are followers of the Buddha, or even know which Hindu god they’re facing, but I have to admit that I don’t feel uncomfortable in these environments, for all their New Age incoherence and costly paraphernalia. The instructors are always very intentional in telling us to reverence whoever we want to, and when we dedicate our practice, I dedicate mine to the Jesus I carry in my heart.

I have never been particularly athletic, nor agile, nor coordinated. So yoga presented a challenge for me from the beginning. Just moving between and holding the poses occupied my entire consciousness. This led to a de facto kind of centering, as my pesky, meandering thoughts slid away and my body stretched and stretched. What surprised me was that yoga led me to a deeper understanding of centering prayer itself. Often when I’m praying, I come to moments where my thoughts are temporarily in abeyance. These moments don’t last very long. Soon a new thought floats across my mind and I forget to let it pass me by, and follow it. Then I have to use my centering word and bring myself back, for another brief moment, to that place of contemplation. I have begun to think of such moments as moments of balance. Just as, while practicing yoga, I find balance in a pose for a moment or two, until my muscles start to quaver and my body starts to tilt, so in Centering Prayer I find moments of balance before the muscles of my consciousness invariably contract. The soul and the body seem to have the same frame, to experience the same vagaries, to achieve the same balances.

John O’Donohue said that the old neo-platonic way of understanding the body and the soul is backwards. For the neo-platonists, the body was the prison of the soul, and the soul languished within the walls of our bones and skin. For O’Donohue, it is the soul that contains the body, encircles it, holds the body within its embrace. When we meet people, we meet their souls first. I have a dancer friend who talks about kinesphere, that orbit of personal space that surrounds our bodies. Some people have expansive kinespheres and some have contracted ones, and we can sense it, and understand how open they are to the world by our apprehension of their kinesphere. The other day at the grocery store I saw two women together, both with their faces pointed resolutely at the floor, their shoulders rounded forward, their arms held tightly to their sides. I felt that I was looking at their constricted souls, and felt compassion for them, but also, remembering the advice of the yoga instructor in Traverse City, gave thanks to God for them. It is, perhaps, true that we can understand the state of the soul by looking at the body and the way it moves through the environment, even if we don’t indulge in ideas of auras or ectoplasm.

My summer in the body has taught me that to pay attention to the body is to pay attention to the soul, and vice versa. They belong with each other, intimately connected, and the prayer of one is, in the end, the prayer of the other. I’ll go even further than that. To pray with both body and soul is to intentionally link oneself to the cosmos. The body helps us to notice and apprehend the universe that surrounds us. The soul helps us to make meaning of it, and enter into relationship with it. We are, all of us, navigating solar systems of thought, movement, and relationship, both on earth and within our glimpses of heaven.

Who will I love, and how will I love them well?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Two events led me to start thinking about, praying with, and making art in response to the Song of Songs. The first was a Bible study during a clergy quiet day. We were reading Jesus’s Parable of the Dishonest Manager (Luke 16:1-13). As we sat in a circle, annoyed and shocked that Jesus would tell his disciples to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal habitations,” I began wondering whether I had ever done exactly that. My mind traveled to the early days of my relationship with my future wife. We met when we were twenty-two and still in college. Neither of us really knew who we were, and we acted out different social roles, imitating our peers or images in the media or, at best, some vision of who we hoped we would be someday. There was something dishonest about the way we presented ourselves to each other – not in a conniving way, just in the fact that we didn’t know who we were, and therefore didn’t have much chance of being authentic in our relationships with anyone. It was through falling in love and being faithful to each other that we learned who we were, and everything that’s real in our lives and relationships now is the result of our patience with each other as we fumbled around and made mistakes and presented ourselves falsely. Reflecting on this as I sat in that circle of priests, I realized that my wife is my dishonest wealth, and I felt how miraculous it is that she should love me, and I her, a true gift of patience and luck and grace.

The second event that led me to the Song of Songs was a planning meeting. We were at the Edge House in Cincinnati, the Lutheran campus ministry that serves UC. A trapeze company had set-up in the park across the street, and as we talked young people were flinging themselves into the air. We were trying to decide on a theme for an autumn retreat, and we started by asking ourselves which questions our students were really asking. After a considering pause, one of our group said, “Well, I think they’re wondering who they’ll love, and how they’ll love that person well.” This was so basic and obvious that it was astounding that we had never addressed this question with our students. We turned to our Bibles and leafed through them, wondering whether scripture really spoke to this question at all. Maybe in Genesis, in those scenes when Isaac meets Rebecca, and then later Jacob meets Rachel, at the well. But more obviously, and certainly more extravagantly, in the Song of Songs.
It’s a primal question – “who will I love, and how will I love that person well?” The way we answer this question will affect not only our earthly relationships, but our relationship with God. This is what the early and medieval commentators on the Song understood so well. Until the Enlightenment, the Song of Songs was the second most preached about and commentated on book of scripture, surpassed only by the Gospel of John. It was treated as an allegory for the soul’s relationship to God, in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. To this day, many Sephardic communities chant the entire Song of Songs before Shabbat services every Friday. For Origen, and Teresa of Avila, and Bernard of Clairvaux, it was a text for celibates, a passionate enactment of human/divine relationship that could take the place of any earthly need for sex. But the Enlightenment, and the 18th and 19th century Biblical scholarship that followed it, put an end to this reading. The Song might be any number of things – wedding choruses, songs for fertility rites, court poetry – but it was, decidedly, not about God.

Last summer I led an adult forum on the Song of Songs, and when we came to those passages that compared a woman’s breasts to twin gazelles and bunches of grapes, one of the participants asked “should this even be in the Bible?” It seems so lascivious, and it is. But the fact that it is in the Bible should tell us something. It seems possible, and even likely, that those who compiled and canonized scripture understood that the Song of Songs is about God, while understanding that it’s also about sex. Perhaps they knew what we’ve forgotten, that the passion we bring to our earthly relationships is a training ground for the passion that we will, through much prayer and worship, eventually bring to our relationship with God. “Who will I love and how will I love that person well?” The Song of Songs suggests that the way we answer that question in our human relationships has everything to do with how we’ll learn to love God. Perhaps, through fidelity and patience, we might all come, eventually, to recognize and give thanks for the dishonest wealth we receive as we form each other in relationship, and through this recognition, come to dwell, spiritually, in eternal habitations with God.

A Reflection on the Ministerium of Ideas First Year

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What do our faith communities need to learn about in order to better serve the world around us?  Twenty-four clergy and lay leaders gathered in April of 2014 to answer this question and form a new group in Columbus that we dubbed “The Ministerium of Ideas.”  It’s the outgrowth of a community that had met for almost forty years, gathering on Friday mornings to listen to talks given by Ohio State University professors.  This group thought of itself as “the Church listening to the University,” and I started attending the talks in 2012, when I became Missioner for Campus Ministry.  I was attracted to the group for several reasons, the first being the graciousness of Bob Russell, who organized the talks.  Bob is in his eighties, long retired from being a Presbyterian campus minister, but still deeply curious and connected to the life of the campus.  He, and his efforts, reiterated to me one of the most important aspects of campus ministry these days.  The Western tradition of higher education came out of the church, and church and academy have long had a symbiotic relationship.  The academy provides the church with new knowledge and ways of thinking about a changing world.  The church spurs the academy to think ethically about new discoveries, and prophetically calls it to return to its original purpose of nurturing the human soul, educating the characters of young people, and making the benefits of its discoveries available to all.  Campus ministry acts as a bridge between the church and the academy, and the talks that Bob Russell organized for so many years showed me a way to strengthen that bridge and widen it’s reach.

The twenty-four clergy who gathered in April to answer that initial question were from a variety of mainline denominations, and from the Jewish and Buddhist faith traditions as well.   We ate lunch together and switched seats every fifteen minutes, using a World Cafe format for our discussion.  Our initial question generated many more questions.  How do we build diverse communities?  Are we failing at critical thinking?  What would it be like to participate in communities of creation instead of communities of consumption?   What are the armageddon type fears of the moment?  What will it be like to create bridges between physical & tech-based communities?  We asked many more questions, but of all the questions we asked, the one that touched me most deeply was, “how do we even define our current culture?”

It became clear to me that many of us were feeling bewildered by the rapid changes in the world around us, many of which are technology-induced.  Many of us felt unmoored, unable to make sense of a world where communities are virtual, religiosity is declining, consumerism seems to have become definitional to the human race, and only utilitarian values seem to matter.  And it occurred to us that if we felt this way, most of our congregants probably did as well.  The beauty of that question, “how do we even define our current culture,” was that we all suddenly realized that we weren’t alone.  The terror of that question was that it seemed so huge, something that would take years to answer, even as the culture transitioned beyond whatever temporary answers we could arrive at.

After the luncheon, I was joined by Bob Erickson and Jim Miner in putting together a schedule of talks that would begin to explore at least some of our questions.  Over this past academic year we heard about collaborations with the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math), learned about institutions that have changed to meet the needs of their changing neighborhoods, explored the intersection of religion and the imagination, and investigated end of life issues.  We considered ways of cultivating a culture of reverence, asked whether it’s possible to live lives that aren’t centered around the economy, practiced reading the voice of our culture, and played with different models of religious community.  Each of these talks generated as many questions as they answered, but as our last speaker, Ben Norton, said, faith is a journey, not a set of certainties.  Over the course of this past year, we came to realize that listening to the voice of the university is a faithful act, one that expands our understanding and helps us address the urgent questions of our parishioners and neighbors.

Give Play a Chance: A Reflection on the Play Conference

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There’s an etch-a-sketch mounted on the wall of a Columbus coffee shop, with a carefully etched picture of leaves and flowers, and the words “Give Play a Chance.”  I took a picture of it and texted it to Jane Gerdsen, Jed Dearing, and Aaron Wright, my co-collaborators in the Play Conference that took place at Saint Stephen’s in mid-April.  Jed texted back “we’ve started a movement!”  Perhaps we’ve simply managed to align ourselves to a meme, a theme, a societal need that’s being articulated by multiple voices.  Our cultural worry right now isn’t, primarily, that we live in a violent world, although we do.  It isn’t that there’s growing inequality, although there is.  Our main cultural worry is that we have divorced ourselves from the energy, creativity, and community-building nature of play.  We worry that our children are only being taught to take tests, that parents are obsessed with safety and won’t let their children walk to friends’ houses anymore, that the decline of our churches and other social institutions can only be stopped by long, dread-filled meetings and careful money management, and that our governmental institutions are full of malevolent schemers who are trying to take away our last vestiges of joyful freedom.  We are living with a play deficit, and feeling the consequences.

Play Science is a growing discipline that has Stuart Brown as one of its progenitors.  Brown and his colleagues have discovered that play is as essential to human life as good nutrition and sleep habits.  They’ve identified several necessary ingredients, or “signatures,” of authentic play.  First, play is voluntary.  You can’t force it on other people, and you can’t play with any goal in mind beyond playing, which leads to the second signature – play is purposeless.  It has shown benefits, but no objectives.  Third, it’s not aware of time passing.  It flows.  Fourth, it’s fun.  If you’re not having fun, you’re not playing.  And finally, it takes us out of our limited self-consciousness.

This last point can best be emphasized by a number of activities that we did at the Play Conference.  On Friday night we held a variety show, and to open it I asked everybody to stand up and start walking around the room.  Then I asked them to greet each other as cowboys would.  People passed each other, tipping imaginary hats and saying “howdy” in half-embarrassed voices.  I switched it and asked them to greet each other as English lords.  This was meant to help them overcome their self-consciousness.  Once they’d spent a few minutes letting go and allowing themselves to play, we could start the real game.  Ana Hernandez, who led the music at the conference, used a similar technique before worship on Friday and in her Saturday workshop.  She asked everyone to gather together and hum, choosing a note from a chord that she played for us.  Then she asked us to listen to the people near to us and switch to their pitch.  We kept switching pitches, moving and adjusting, and really listening to each other.  The purpose was to cultivate that listening, but it was also, I think, to help us get past any initial embarrassment and turn aside from those interior voices that tell us that there is a rigid method to singing and that we have to follow it.

Joe Boyd, President of Rebel Pilgrim Creative Agency, told us a story on Friday night about his own conversion from drudgery to a life steeped in play.  Joe became a successful evangelical leader at a very young age.  His Las Vegas church grew rapidly.  But he felt disconnected from joy and from the message that he was preaching, a message that was entirely focused on the afterlife and construed human purpose in terms on not messing up our chance to get into heaven.  He grew depressed and started undermining his own church and message.  His wife saved him by getting him improv theater classes as a birthday present.  It changed is life.  Within a few years he was part of a Second City troope and had set aside church work for awhile.  As he talked to us, he named improv as his form of play, and emphasized its theological importance.  If we think of this life on earth as a kind of labor, as industry towards the eventual goal of getting into heaven, then we more than undervalue it.  We become unable to see it as a gift, and are little more than joyless drudges, punching the clock and trying to avoid making any mistakes.  We become mired in lives of anxiety and fear.  But when we allow ourselves to play, we open ourselves to the world that God has created and become capable of rejoicing.

Our keynote was Ben Norton, a pilgrim priest who’s part of the Church of England’s Fresh Expressions movement.  Ben has spent a decade working outside of the parish church structure.  He’s organized and worked with men’s groups who meet in bars, small house churches, arts installations, and much more.  His first career was as a barber, so when he moved to a new city the first thing he did was approach a local barber shop and ask if he could cut hair there, working for free.  He spent a year and a half listening to the people who came in, getting to know the neighborhood and understand the local needs.  I love that story, first because it strongly emphasizes the need to listen before we create programs or plan activities.  But more than that, I love it because it teaches me that this listening can take a long time, and can seem purposeless.  In fact, listening takes on many aspects of play.  Real listening isn’t goal orientated – when we really listen to someone, we don’t plot out what we’ll say next or how we’ll guide the conversation.  A deep conversation flows and moves and isn’t aware of time.  There’s a kind of joy of discovery that takes place.  And there’s a setting aside of defensiveness, a willingness to be truly open to the person we’re listening to.

The church is in an anxious moment, when many of our old ways of doing things no longer work as they once did, and many of our old ways of being seem increasingly insupportable.  That anxiety makes us want to control our circumstances, either by forcing the changing world to conform to us again, or by creating well-intentioned programs and activities that address the perceived needs of our neighborhoods and communities.  Often these activities are poorly attended or don’t generate the types of relationships that we’d like them to.  Perhaps we need to surrender our control and suspend our activities, at least for a season.  Perhaps we need to spend time listening to each other and the world around us, and moving our internal pitch to match each other’s notes.  Perhaps we need to go out into the streets, onto the campuses, into the office parks, voluntarily, purposeless, open to fun and wonder, without worrying about how much time we’re spending, and with our defenses down.  Perhaps we need to give play a chance.