I finally did a bit of mess-making/collage today, it's been weeks. I don't know what I'm doing exactly but it feels really good to sit down with the goal of making a mess, messing up, and playing. Writing some scrawly whatevers, smearing paint, snipping and pasting scraps. I guess I've been trying to remember how to play lately. That may sound odd but I think in some ways I actually have forgotten how, or haven't really been allowing enough time for play. I started to feel, maybe in the years since I graduated from art school,(and had to start paying off my student loan) that I had to smarten up and put first things first. That meant doing things that I could earn money from.

But lately I feel an urge to do just the opposite of that: do things that don't necessarily make sense in the real world; the world that money makes go round. To do things where process matters more than product. Where I let myself be happy and messy for this while; a while where no rules are supposed to apply.

I need to unlearn some things. I need to unlearn how to be neat and not get paint on the table or on my shirt. I want to relearn how to make a mess, a mess like you make when you're playing as a kid, a mess you hardly notice because you're so caught up in building a fort, or making a book, or cutting up a million scraps and sticking them together.

What are we really doing when we play? Trying out who we can be, who we might be? Or maybe not even that. Maybe just doing the next thing that seems fun. Seeing what happens. Letting each moment lead to the next.