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Better Together
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"Deep play" is what helps humans survive, grow, and spiritually transcend, according to acclaimed poet and author Diane Ackerman. Children are of course drawn to deep play--those activities that catapult them into an altered state of consciousness, where all their senses are engaged and for that moment life is timeless and fully absorbing. But few adults are conscious of how this form of deep play continues throughout adulthood.
For athletes, deep play could embody the extreme and spiritually rewarding feats of mountain climbing or scuba diving, explains Ackerman. For lovers, it could be the compelling dance of courtship. Some find the act of making soup from scratch a form of deep play. For Ackerman, deep play has meant swimming with dolphins, writing poetry, piloting planes, and making sojourns to remote locations and sacred places. "Swept up by the deeper states of play, one feels balanced, creative, focused," explains Ackerman. "Deep play is a fascinating hallmark of being human; it reveals our need to seek a special brand of transcendence, with a passion that makes thrill-seeking explicable, creativity possible, and religion inevitable."
Ackerman's writing and metaphors are most engaging when she uses her fascinating life experiences to characterize how adults can engage in the rapture and ecstasy of deep play. This is a fascinating new territory of discussion, which could forever alter your approach to play in daily life. --Gail Hudson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In a meandering meditation, poet and naturalist Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses, etc.) employs the term "deep play" to refer to a combination of what others sometimes call "flow" or "the zone" and what anthropologists call "sacred play." Her subject can be understood as intensity, or even ecstasy, those moments of heightened experience when the mind and senses are working at full capacity. Her acknowledgments page bears a portent for readers as she mentions previous essays on poetry, ceremony and eco-psychology, travel pieces on Gauguin and the Grand Canyon, and more: to fit her broad conceit, she's shoehorned in a wide range of her activities. At her best, which usually comes when she is writing about something observable (e.g., standing amid penguins in Antarctica), Ackerman can beguile readers with fine turns of phrase. But when she indulges her weakness for abstraction, she can get airy. Musing on her application to the "Journalist in Space" program and the future of commonplace space flight, she declares: "What wonderful fields of deep play await us in space!" Poetry "is an act of deep play," she asserts, in an interesting if somewhat off-point account of writing and teaching. Some of her conclusions settle for a dismaying level of generalization as when, citing her experiences with soccer players and cycling magazines, she suggests that professional athletes are businesslike, while amateurs are more playful. Ultimately, the book is more confusing than illuminating, and, oddly, more labored than playful. Agent, Cullen Stanley of Janklow & Nesbit. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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