Serious Play

I have come to believe I live my life like performance art.

Not always. Not even mostly, in the way people mean when they say someone is "performing." Sometimes I am fully inside the moment, nothing between me and it. Sometimes I stand just beside myself, watching the moment happen, curious what it will do. And sometimes — secretly, delightedly — I am experimenting with it. Turning a small ordinary thing over in my hands to see what it becomes if I hold it differently.

My most intimate moments happen alone. The ones I can share, I share only with other creatives — the ones who already see life this way, even if neither of us has ever said it out loud. There is a recognition between people like this. A secret that doesn't need naming to be confirmed. We play. And we play at playing. That doubling — that double dutching — is the whole art form.

Here is the paradox at the center of it: I can hold a thing with the most dear seriousness I have, and at the very same moment, with a lightness that refuses to take any of it too seriously at all. Both are fully true. Neither cancels the other.

This is not indecision. This is the practice.

To me. By me. Through me. And as me.

Say it slowly and it starts to sound like liturgy, because it is one. It is the whole architecture of what I mean by serious play — that something can happen to you, be authored by you, move through you like water through a channel that didn't build itself, and still, somehow, be entirely, unmistakably you, all at once, without contradiction.

Maybe this is what it means to be a bodhisattva — not the traditional shape of it, but a bodhisattva as me. Someone who stays fully in the world, plays fully inside it, and lets that playing be the vehicle instead of an obstacle to something higher.

The body already knows this, before the mind agrees to it. Somatic work has taught me that coherence isn't the absence of intensity — it's intensity organized, held, moving with purpose instead of against itself. HeartMath calls it coherence too, and measures it, which I find strangely comforting: proof that a heart in devoted play beats differently than a heart in fear. The ancients who wrote light language into sound understood something similar — that a thing can mean before it is decoded, that meaning doesn't require translation to be received.

The Vedas held multiplicity as sacred fact, not confusion — many stories, many gods, many true things at once, refusing to collapse into one flat explanation. And the texts left out of the traditional Bible — Sophia's book especially — tell of a wisdom that falls into matter on purpose. Not wisdom watching life from a clean distance above it, but wisdom that has to descend, get her hands into it, play the game fully, and find her way home changed by having played it. That is not a fall from grace. That is the method.

And this is also Mary Magdalene — kneeling close enough to catch what the crowd couldn't hear, the kind of closeness that gets written out of the official text because it can't be organized into doctrine. This is the Taras, green-skinned and quick, one foot already stepping off the lotus before the prayer is even finished, moving on you before your fear has time to organize itself. This is Oshun — river-gold, honeyed, mirror in one hand, unapologetic about her own beauty because she knows sweetness is not the opposite of power, it is one of its shapes. This is Oya, wind lifting the market stalls, graveyard dust on her skirt, standing at the exact threshold where one form of a thing dies so another can be born — the tearing-open is her weather, not an accident that happens to her.

I think of the first version of The Secret — before the channeled voices got edited out to make it easier to sell. What got cut was the strangest part, and the truest one: that none of this comes from strategy, only from consciously choosing how you play inside what's already choosing to move through you. Conversations with God circled it. The Celestine Prophecy circled it. They talked around the thing because naming it flatly kills it — turns a way of being into a technique, a secret into a slogan.

I am not offering a technique.

So this is the practice, plainly, from inside a body instead of around it: hold it with dear seriousness. Hold it with full lightness. Let both be completely true. Let your most intimate moments stay yours, or share them only with the ones who already know the language without translation.