Mess making

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. Everything had to become something, be worth something.

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 without rules, deadlines, pricetags, justifications. I have to let go of the to do list and the should do feelings and that is never easy because I can't justify playtime as being necessarily productive or worth anything, except for myself. Although if I'm honest with myself I know that is reason enough.

I want 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. I want to unlearn what writing should be. Unlearn how it always has to make sense. Simply spend some time with things I love: words, colours, scraps.

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. Enjoying the feel of paint sliding across paper more than the look of the marks later. Needing the release of emptying words into a notebook more than it sounding good later.