Play is the soupy ground underneath your feet and between your toes;

Play is encumbered by our mind, but unencumbered  by age;

Play is where bounded rules bleed into purposeful mistakes;

Play is hearing “ready or not” with an anxious giggle in your heart and a smirk across your face knowing you’ve got the best spot;

Play is the smell of grass stains and bandages; of smelly shoes and orange slices; of salty tears and friendship.

I like being in nature; I like being a steward of the earth and caring for it as well as I can. Winter is in full force still, and my face still gets very cold. But I have many thoughts run through my mind when I’m outside. I feel they are child-like. Not childish (juvenile), but childlike (genuine curiosity.) I wonder if the trees and flowers get cold when the winter sets in. When the things that once made them beautiful—like their leaves—had died, if it’s similar to when we cut our hair. I wonder if the leaves grow back in the same spot in the spring. And I wonder how nature continues to be resilient knowing that only after a few months the things that (people think) made them beautiful will die. It is a powerful experience for me because I think there is a lot of lessons to learn from nature. Death comes and goes, but that doesn’t mean we stop growing. I think nature shows us that life moves forward, and we don’t move past or move on from the death, but we learn to grow with it. Life and death work side-by-side and they learn from each other.

What do you think? How do you engage your grief with nature, with play?