when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty*
(John Muir)

(We recall Plato’s conjecture that the origins of play lies in the need of all young creatures, animal and human, to leap.**
(Johan Huizinga)

There is something more primal and truthful in play than in the earnest stories we have come to tell ourselves.  Play connects us with the universe of which we are made, Martin Buber claiming:

‘The You knows no system of coordinates.’^

I read “coordinates” to be the stories we tell ourselves and live within as cultures and societies.  Johan Huizinga holds that these stories have arisen from play but then have lost their playfulness.

Without playfulness, they become our prisons, at worst dictating our places and functions, at best, limiting these.

But the universe has given you the capacity to leap and you must leap – each of us in our different way.

Don’t wait to be picked.  Pick yourself.

(*John Muir, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Universe as an Infinite Storm of Beauty.)
(**From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)
(^From Martin Buber’s I and Thou.)