The beauty of solitary play
and being
my unpressured self.
Of submerging
in the repetitions of ritual.
Arranging toys
over
and over.
Two armies,
the dissatisfaction
of one side winning.
Divots, half bricks in the backyard-
crumbling war landscapes.
Fights, I knew nothing
and felt everything of.
Big Ape Diary 
Proof of archetypes? The Warrior in us all. Feelings turning into actions….or not, depending on our ability to manage them.
I certainly didn’t know I was managing them, or what I was acting out at the time. I was enthralled as an only kid, with playing out both sides of a battle, both armies, secret favourite sides, letting the less favoured side occasionally win. I wonder where tactics like outflanking came from at that age? The Warrior? These battles would be played out for days, soldiers in position dead or alive unmoved, and never unrealistically resurrected. Two halves of me fighting it out, never knowing until the end which side would win.
I know now what the two sidedness, evenhandedness was a commentary on. If only my parents had read some Jung!
Have you heard the story the Cherokee grandfather tells his grandson about the two wolves inside us all? The grandson asks, “Which one wins?” And the grandfather says, “The one you feed.” I think you chose to feed the right wolf.
P.s. I’ve given up on the Karen Barad book on quantum physics for the moment and am wending through The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters which I find a bit woolly on some of their analogies and logic, but both hold the gist of what are my own leanings in all this. When I’ve finished them, then I hope to read Jean Emile Charon’s “The Spirit: that Stanger inside us” which seems extremely promising. Then, maybe Barad. Needless to say, I blame you for all the expense of expanding my library, Jeanie.
Well, it may be an expensive hobby, but maybe your contribution to posterity can be willing your library to your children and grandchildren! 🙂
I remember being totally absorbed in childhood play too, Brian. Just reading this brings it all back. If not the details, certainly the feeling. so invested in creating scenarios to literally be in, not just act out. Good times! I think it’s a skill we came in with.
We certainly did come in with it, Jana. Active Imaginings immersed in it. The overarching memory I feel of those days is the surprise I had when a certain “side” would perform actions I was barely aware of, tactics,moves I couldn’t see coming! I’d play Japs v Americans, North v South, World War One French v Germans . I loved all my little soldiers.