Cloud Faces

A Ramble on Play and Imagination

When was the last time you stared at the clouds and tried to see what shapes they made? When was the last time you looked at a banana and thought, that’s a phone? When was the last time, for no purpose other than play itself, you picked up a pencil?

As kids this is, for the most part, what we did. We walked around our streets and families' homes or apartments, finding little areas we could call caves, and imagining what this world of gray carpet or wood could be. All we did, it seemed, was make shit up. And slowly, as time moved forward, and the schools gave us homework to teach us that work should always be the thing we focus on, we stopped playing. Many of us stopped asking about those fantastical worlds in our rooms. We traded play for homework, for family and school data, for menial yet fun gossip that shaped ourselves into believing this was all that mattered—who was sleeping with who, where the next party was, what the homework was. We were so desperate, all of us, to fit in that we forgot that this was not the only world that existed. What I’m saying is we turned our lives at a young age, at least where I grew up, from playing and imagining to homework and fitting in.

This inevitably stifled a lot of our play. Many of us stopped drawing or making little collages, or wandering aimlessly in pockets of woods, staring up at trees, wondering what could be living in there. We turned to the needs of school and that structure, and what our parents taught us was supposed to be the world of our future.

And it makes sense. We need to work in order to pay our bills and get food. There’s no way around that, and to some degree those things we learned in school helped, though maybe not as much as teachers and parents led us to believe. But still, they showed us what the priorities of the world are, that mostly being work and status.

So, we went to school so we could get better jobs, or we were lucky and found decent pay right after high school. We kept applying, keep applying, for better jobs so we can live in better places regardless if what we have in front of us is bad or good. In some ways, like those little kids in school, we are trying to keep up with the Joneses, or hide from that race completely. We have so much media, so much information about other people’s lives that, if we listen too carefully, we will pain ourselves in never reaching up to the made up standards of our world.

Slowly, over the decades of our lives, many of us try to fit in, to be seen as one with the group, to belong wholly with the others in the world that surround us.

But that play, that loose, inhibitionless freedom we felt as children disappears. Clothes are the brands more often than the style, or the joy that you feel when wearing it. When I was little I couldn’t take off a hockey helmet, I just loved it so much. The soft smush of the foam that held firmly onto my head, how I always felt protected, ready for anything, like some little knight wandering the commons. That kid, unencumbered by the world, had the freedom of play that is vital for sanity, for calm, for peace. For the most part he had those things. But time went on, and priorities, he was told, had to change.

Really I’ve never let go of making up shit, to play. Even as money gets tight, as time becomes to crunch with busy work, I find moments still to wonder and stare into clouds. For this, I feel eternally fortunate, that no matter my circumstances, play is never too far from my mind. There are ties it seems to dissipate from my life though, like now, and I have to relearn what it is all over again, like right now. And as I give myself space again to imagine more, play more, even little games in my head as I’m driving, or doodling in the margins of a notebook, I feel a sense of joy, of freedom, some little sliver of hope that little kid with the hockey helmet returning to me.

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Also I just wanted to share a link to a recent review I wrote about Isabella Manfredi’s newest show Wardrobe, at the gallery 1599fdt on Market Street in San Francisco until the 21st! Check it out here!

Thanks for reading!