PLAY WITH HER

“Can you play with me yet?”
“Not now darling, Mummy is busy.” 

That is how us women should be feeling about denying our inner child to pick up our craft and play with the ideas that flow to us. 
We put off the play, we reschedule our creation time to become a second, third, fourth or god forbid LAST priority every single day. 

When an idea sparks, we should act on them. I know it doesn’t always work out that way, But we should try more. 

This morning I had the urge to pick up one of my books, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. When I get this urge, I close my eyes and open up on a random spot. But I don’t believe it’s ever random. I believe that I open the page I’m meant to receive that message or knowledge about. And just like every other time I open that wonderful book, I landed on a very fitting topic for my current life. 

I open to page 283 where the chapter titles, ‘Cutting Loose, Diving In’. 

“What is homing? It is the instinct to return, to go to the place we remember. It is the ability to find, whether in dark or in daylight, one’s home place. We all know how to return home. No matter how long it’s been, we find our way. We go through the night, over strange land, through tribes of strangers, without maps and asking go the odd personages we meet along the road, “What is the way?” The exact answer to “Where is home?” Is more complex… but in some way it is an internal place, a place somewhere in time rather than space, where a woman feels of one piece.”

The rest of the chapter carries an abundance of wisdom over the next four pages. Explaining to me why the beach in a particular location for the last 15 years of my life has felt like home more than any other house with a painted bedroom throughout my life has ever felt. 

Home is an internal state. The self return. I need to write more. I need to read more. I need to inhale words and metaphors and meaning; and then exhale onto pages and journals and documents the findings of my meaning to things. 

I yearn for home. Home being when I am the most connected to myself. Behind the flesh and meat suit we all wear. Deeper than the reflection in the mirror. I am the same girl who looked into my own brown eyes in the mirror at five years old, now at 29. 

The exterior has changed over my life and it will continue to age while the soul inside of me will always be me. 

Is this why everyone that I speak to who is older than me always say things like, “I still feel 21 on the inside!” Or why my own Amma (my mothers mother) says things like, “Oh even if I was able to be just 60 years old again that would be enough.” What?! Here I am at 29 already on the last few weeks of my 20’s, wondering where time is going. What else is there to do? How many times do I need to remember to come home to myself when I get so caught up in the daily things.

Along with love, I believe the purpose of life is creation. However that creation is to be birthed for each person. Writing, painting, building, destroying, knitting, singing, dancing. Creation. Businesses, blankets, books, phones, instruments, movies, plays, operas, boats, motorcycles, socks, watches. The creation of everything, by all of us. 

But how do we know what to create? Everyone has the desire to create different things. 

We come home. 

By coming home to our internal selves, without being distracted by each other or our human limited beliefs and programming from the world around us. When we plug back into who we are when we are alone is when the desires for creation is sent to us from our higher source.

I’ve never had a downloaded desire to create a play. I’ve never had a downloaded desire to create an architectural building model. I’ve never had a downloaded desire to create a software program. But many people do. 

But what I have consistently had desires to create is writing. Novels, guides, bite size pieces of written help. I have had desires to create workshops for women to come and meet other women and learn how to come home to themselves too. I have had desires to seek knowledge, and share what I learn. I have had desires to tell stories and learn new words and create metaphors to help people understand complex emotions, experiences and psychological patterns. And many people don’t. 

I believe we all have a purpose (many, actually). Along with my own personal desires to write, and teach, and grow; I have desires to be a matriarch of my family and have more children to love, teach and raise into independent thinkers who can come into the world through me and bring their own desires into fruition. Above all my desires, my desire to be a good mother is the one that triumphs them all. 

Sometimes we fall into the traps of routine and we ‘reward’ ourselves with creative play after we do ‘what must be done’. 

I’ve written about this before, but the dishes will always be there. The laundry will never be complete. The bathroom will always need a scrub down. The fridge will always need to be cleared out and restocked of fresh food. The kids will always need help. Your friends and family will always have another event or place to invite you to. The bedsheets will always need to be changed. The doomscrolling will always be available when you pick up that damn phone. The bins will always need to be put out for garbage day. 

But play doesn’t always knock every day. Play doesn’t always wait around ‘to be done’. Ideas move. Ideas change. Ideas land into other peoples laps too. Someone can create what you can create, yes. But it will never be the way that you create it. 

So when you’re emptying that half finished lunch box after work, and a thought enters into your mind about your dreams, desires or a creation. Play with her. No more, “Mummy is busy”. Even if it’s just three minutes of entertainment; that is enough. And eventually, with creating that new habit of including play into all of the other shit we have to do, we come home to ourselves, and stop neglecting our inner child’s need to create through play. 

We are creators. But we need to make sure all of the existing creations don’t keep us away from our own that need to be birthed and nurtured too. 

So, play with her. 

Most ardently,
Chenise Sinclaire.