Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Play and Spontaneity
St. Patrick’s Day
Bluebonnets peeking through, as are light green leaves. If you look just right you’ll be able to see the elves awakening and frolicking! I can’t bring myself to shout at them, “Hey you kids, it’s not even springtime—yet—but pretty soon. Well, anyway, hello there all, ye known and unknown to humankind.
Teasing: Another Spectrum
Teasing can range from mild joshing to outright sadism, really nasty mean. The other extreme has nothing indirect, just people being kind, tactful, appreciative. There’s a good deal of communication that’s in-between. Some people feel anxious about being perceived as being “soft” by others. Others are are coarser: they interact by introducing an an edge […]
Tell Me About Your Play Experiences
I’m preparing a revised edition of my Art of Play book. So, trying to update my background material, this is an open letter to those interested in the phenomenon of play, and mainly more improvisational and imaginative types, pretend play, etc. I’m interested to hear about a number of things: – people doing research […]
That Explains Everything
“A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” So it has been said. I was pondering the mysteries of the universe, the riddles of existence, and my friend Zordak (the extra-terrestrial buddy who visits from other dimensions, too), reminded me of Universe #9&$(x-1)! , which, he assured me, was not a cuss word, but […]
The “Physiology” of the Ultimate
Not that I have a clue, but yet, yes, some hints. The following mandala expresses this intermixing of order and disorder, structure and chaos. The cosmos celebrates spontaneity and diversification. It mixes DNA in a profligate fashion. (What a great word, “profligate.”) This intrinsic, organic reality needs to become a core part of a more […]
The “Real” Easter Bunny
The real Easter Bunny is a Christianized image of embodied Grace. In itself, it is neither a small furry rabbit, nor does it lay or give eggs. What it is, I imagine (and you must realize that I am only imagining and have no factual knowledge of which I speak), is a visualized archetype, an […]
The Boze Higgs-on
If you haven’t heard of the Higgs Boson, it’s the particle representative of a theoretical field that gives the cosmos its mass. Never mind the near-inconceivability of this. Some very clever dudes conceived it and we are inclined to believe they know what they’re doing. Truth is, though, that they do and they don’t, in […]
The Bunny Blatners
Tumpy Bumpkin and Bumpy Tumpkin are the Bunny-Blatners who live in a little tiny house under a tree next to a meadow by some trees bordering on a sweet little stream with froggies and such living in it. That’s their address. You ought to be able to find it. Sometimes, though, they forget who is […]
The Dream Factory
We know that biological phenomena—DNA replication and such—that occur at rates far too rapid to be even sensed. There is an in-between rate at which dreams are constructed—far more quickly than we-of-little-brain can even imagine—but slower than cellular physiological activities. Being part elf myself (a literary conceit), I was privileged to perceive the dream factory, […]
The Dynamics of Play
In this other world, play functions as a way to open the forebrain and mess around, and opening thus invites inspiration from the transpersonal dream world, a rich meadow of possibilities. The function of play is to gently entertain these and maybe make something useful or amusing. I have another world that I plug into, […]
The Gremlins
Related to my interest in fantasy characters, I was reading a book about the art of the cartoonist, Walt Kelly, who created the Pogo comic strip, I also noted that in the late 1930s and early 1940s he worked as a Disney artist. (The publishers of this book, Hermes Press, also do many other books […]
The Lowdown on “Flying Saucers”
My imaginative soul invites me to share with you the foollowing (sic. Which means: I meant to spell it that way) “truth” (note the quotation marks) as a form of tall tale: Of course flying saucers are real, or almost-real, or seem to be real, or definitely appear in people’s minds. That’s mainly how […]
The Minions, Gib-reesh and Taboo
You don’t really need words. There was a movie in 2015 titled “The Minions,” a sort of cartoon movie about those cute, diminutive medicine-capsule shaped little guys. They were sidekicks to a villain in the popular movies around 2012 and got their own film in 2015. They speak in a kind of gibberish that, with […]
The Relevance of Play
Play is not just a bit of frivolity. It is deeply connected to psychological freedom, spontaneity, and creativity. To illustrate the power of overlapping properties of a dynamic, consider electricity: In the 19th century electricity was found not just to “flow,” but also to have many properties not envisioned at first, such as its relationship […]
The Roots of Spontaneity
It occurred to me that spontaneity is a natural drive that emerges when in healthy infancy and childhood kids can enjoy the innocence of feeling (1) the freedom to take it over, to do it again and again until one “gets it”; and (2) the freedom to not feel at all ashamed to ask for […]
The Spectrum of Pretense
I saw the cartoon-graphic movie, The Rise of the Guardians, yesterday, and something in it repeatedly brought tears to my eyes, especially in the second part. At first I didn’t know why it touched me so, and then these thoughts came to me: I have preserved a capacity to imagine and pretend, what some might […]
The Twenty Basic Whatevers
I enjoy making lists, and part of that is an archetype. There’s a saying that there are two kinds of people: Those who divide things into two kinds, and those who don’t. Ha ha. But I realized that I tend to divide things into multiple sub-groups and often sub-groups of the sub-groups. I realized just […]
Through the Cosmoscope
People don’t realize that the internet is permeable to other dimensions. As this picture shows, yes, we can be seen, and we can also get a glimpse of those who see us. Electromagnetic radiation at certain wavelengths can be detected by the cosmoscope, an instrument that allows for inter-dimensional perception. The beings in other realms—some […]
Vitality Enhancement
Aha! So that’s what I’m really about! I must confess, though, that this term is just a fancy way of saying “having fun.” Maybe in some circumstances we need to pretend to be a bit snooty to appease the demand for functionality, for higher purpose. But really, we don’t need an excuse. If you think […]
Vitality Enhancement
I am concerned with the gradual growth and seductiveness of an increasing number of media that make it easier to “veg out” as a “couch potato” spectator. To challenge that, I want to remind people of a category of “folk art” activities that can happen in neighborhoods and communities of all types. This may include […]
Vitality Enhancement
This is my term for a very valid activity. This phrase is needed. Of course it’s also recreation, but that category has been co-opted by two activities that may offer illusory gratifications. One is competition, which often is so focused on the winning that the fun is lost. The second gratification is vicarious. There’s a […]
Ways of Growth
This anthology is matched by a website for others to write about their non-psychotherapeutic applications of psychodrama, drama therapy, applied improvisation, drama in education, Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, and other forms that overlap with the expressive arts therapies. It has occurred to me with increasing vividness that much that began as "therapy" need not […]
What Are Old People For?
That’s the title of a book written in 2004 by Dr. William H. Thomas, subtitle: How elders will save the world. (Acton, MA: VanderWyk & Burnham, 2004). He brings up many points that I find important. I have become interested in subtle forms of oppression—including overt and subtle forms of age-ism—a theme that has become […]
Where “They” Come From
Mooshie-Kapooshes are sprites that attach to whatever and make that whatever “cute.” They relate along multiple dimensions to the neuro-peptide oxytocin, the mind of the beholder, neotenous qualities of the beheld, and whatever the angels intend. They develop as shown on the left, below, in a soulstar womb of potentials; then below right, they are […]
Where the Weird Things Are
When my son David was little he had a fear of monsters for a while. To treat it—this was when he was about half-past-2—we role-played a book he enjoyed, Where the Wild Things Are. I worked on the key element of the book, looking into their yellow eyes without blinking once, and saying firmly, “Be […]