Player Types and Celebration

I'm doing some work on play preferences and I haven't drawn conclusions yet.

But it looks like play preferences are dotted randomly around the population and are to some degree innate.

So in any given group of people you will have musicians, dancers, artists/creators, storytellers, jokers, directors and so on.

And between them, as I suggested in the previous post, they have all that is needed to create a fantastic celebration.

It helps, I guess, if people are able to know and develop their play preferences in life.

And it also helps, I guess, if tradition sets a backdrop for what to do, so that you don't have to start from scratch every time.

Christmas and Player Types

The Artist/Creators gather and make decorations; the wreaths, the ball-balls and streamers, the holly and ivy and mistletoe, the table decorations and candle decorations and long shiney lametta. Not to mention the costumes and food...

The Performers and Jokers get together to prepare the pantomimes.

The Musicians prepare and lead the singing; they provide the fiddles and the bells, pipes and drums.

The Kinaesthetes prepare and lead the dancing.

The Storytellers create the magic in the tiredness of the night around the winter fire.

The Directors make it all come together.

The Explorers come home, most years, bringing newness with them.

Let's make up some dances.

Notes from my Brazil notebook...

On the telly I’m seeing the Forro and Frevo processions, the Afoxe and Maracutu, the tribal and the samba.

They’ve all got dances! Songs, rhythms and dances that are theirs. We don’t have dances. Let’s make some dances! Let’s make them up! Let’s get people who can do that kind of thing to make them up! And then do them again at special times.

Christmas dances. “Tomorrow will be my dancing day”  - What dance was that? I’d like to dance at Christmas. Let’s find or make Christmas dances!

(Muito obrigada a Luciana Cavalcanti para o foto)

The Engineer who ran away with the circus

We ran away with the circus for a day on Saturday and identified a new player type: the Engineer.

Circus performers are engineers. They play with physics, forces, angles, distances, timing, in an incredibly precise way. Engineers like puzzles, spatial and strategic challenges, tight rules, having to work precisely within the rules in order to achieve something. I think Engineers probably like Achieving something.

Circus lovers are also Kinaesthetes, who love to be in their bodies, and Performers, who delight at their moment before an audience.

So if your child is a kinaesthete, performer and engineer, watch out, they may well run away with the circus.

Strangely, I was then sent a link to this fun blog this morning, about the Engineer who ran away with the circus.

Personally I like the look of the 'Caterpillar...'

Fasting and Feasting

I've been finding fasting and feasting fun.

I did my first fast last summer after I met a man who told me all about his fasting, and it felt like what I needed. Following his model, I just took water and green tea for two days.

I felt great.

Since then I've been doing a one day fast about once a month, and loving it. It makes me feel clean and simple. It seems to dissolve a hard cast of crap and niggles that seem to grow up around me.

Just looked it up on wikipedia, to discover a big bunch of health benefits associated with it, and to learn that fasting is a core part of Islam, Hinduism, Catholicism (funny though, when for a Hindu or Muslim a fast tends to mean no food, liquid, smoking or sex, for a Catholic it's limiting your food consumption to one big meal and two small meals in a day with no snacks...), the Bahai faith, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and an observant follower of Judaism will fast for 6 days a year.

So, in atheist western culture I guess people generally don't fast, or only fast to lose weight.

But there's something very beautiful about it when it's not about weight loss.

Humm..

Tom Hodgkinson on fun

"When competition is kept in the realm of play, then it is fun, completely pointless and enjoyed for its own sake. Who, for example, would want to give up playing darts, snooker and croquet? Games are ancient and they are fun. Thirteenth-century Catalan courts, for example, loved games and would throw oranges at each other for days on end. There is a wonderful description quoted by Linda M. Paterson in her study The World of the Troubadours:


"...[The admiral's] sailors had two armed boats prepared, the flat-bottomed kind that go up river. On these you could see orange battles taking place; they had a good fifty tree-loads sent from the kingdom of Valencia ... The celebrations lasted more than a fortnight, during which time no man in Saragossa did anything but sing and make merry and play games and enjoy himself."

How to be free p86-7

Big thanks to Fun Fever for the photos