My children are always asking me to play. They long for me to get on the floor and engage with them fully in whatever imaginative world they’ve created. Most of the time I feel like Bluey’s parents are much better parents than I will ever be.
These are parents who help to create this world with their children. They create games. They enter into the drama and they relish in it. When I created December Threads earlier this month, I wondered if I should include so many actual crafts because it feels like something that is easy to dismiss. It requires supplies or even extra headspace and maybe it’s just easier to skip it.
It’s not worth the risk.
It falls to the bottom of the list like exercise and prayer but what if play is actually prayer. To Dr. Stuart Brown who wrote the book on play, it’s as simple as “stepping out of a normal routine, finding novelty, being open to serendipity, enjoying the unexpected, embracing a little risk, and finding pleasure in the heightened vividness of life.” In his TEDTalk, he describes play as an altered state which to me sounds like prayer. And so, maybe the crafts are too much but perhaps it is worth the risk to step away from the chaos and busyness of this time of year to claim playfulness for your spirit.
This play-full personal retreat could be used in multiple ways throughout the season of Advent. It could be used as one whole retreat to be used in one sitting or it could be divided into pieces to explore each week. You may even decide that some of these practices are worth exploring more than once.
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