Welcome to my play space

Yesterday I sat in the stacks of the University of Washington library reading a small, faded blue copy of collected essays by Alfred North Whitehead. In an essay title "Harvard: the Future" Whitehead wrote: "The important characterization of knowledge is in respect to clarity and vagueness...The world is not made up of independent things, each completely determinate in abstraction from all the rest...Our experience is dominated by composite wholes, more or less clear in the focus, and more or less vague in the penumbra, and with the whole shading off into umbral darkness which is ignorance. But throughout the whole, alike in the focal regions, the penumbral regions, and the umbral regions, there is baffling mixture of clarity and vagueness."

For many years I have been saying, "I live in the interstices, in between rather than enclosed within any particular thing..." When I was in seminary earning a Master's in Theological Studies (the impractical, academically-oriented version of seminary degree) I toyed with the idea of the Eccentric Christ. Even as a much younger person I envisioned my older age to be one of eccentricity not as a pastiche of odd and quirky behaviors but as someone who follows the different drummer into many less explored lifeways.

Now I am entering into that older age in its fullness as a 65-year-old rewriting once again the story of my life so I can understand my own map within the much larger maps of family heritage and engagement, of social movements (not only political movements but all of the shifting activity of larger human groups I participate in), of professional and personal commitments (I teach piano and am active in the Seattle Music Teachers Association and I am committed to a small group called Walk your Talk within the local integral movement within the global integral movement)... And in each of these I feel both somewhat in and somewhat out perhaps perfectly embodying the Chinese image of doubt, one foot in each of two boats floating in the ever moving water.

But yesterday I realized that the mental image I have been carrying has been that of two circles with a space in between and that even if I overlap the circles in a Venn diagram and if I inhabit the oblong intersection I am still constricted by the absolute boundaries. How excited I was to realize that those sharply-drawn boundaries could disappear into Whitehead's penumbra and that clarity and vagueness not only could but do coexist within and without. And just as important, in reading Whitehead's graceful prose and while playing with his ideas I remembered how important and how intensely pleasurable intellectual activity is for me. It is a joy to be graced with good-quality thought and to think well and I am moved.

Ah, an intersection between mind and body! A deep pleasure which unites them. It is I think this coexistence of pleasure and value which is the true context of original hedonism, not a falling into a half-sided, only body-oriented version which has passed for hedonism in a detached and materialist modern age. My play is to bring together all the aspects of my highest being into my (and our) play space, the place of the holy play we call creativity.

Welcome to my playground.