Why are we here?

On stacking words with substance

Is this another playground Substackers,with rules and expectations, I was hoping to be free, to do me in all my absurdity and curious wonder.

At first glance I thought I’d entered a writers cafe’, shelves overflowing with the vivid, the flamboyant, the agonising, earnest, waiting to be tasted morning, noon or night.

Yesterday, I used more energy scrolling, among the new and found, in corners displaying talents, waiting to be seen, screaming to be heard, validated for their existence. I was curious, maybe I’d taken the right at the last cross roads between the popularity of Insta and the addiction of crackbook, when I should have veered left.

I kept wandering with my finger tips and mouse.

No, it was right.

I stepped inside and reminded myself, I am curious Tully and I am free to stay or leave, maybe there is more between the sheets of pages and I have found my playground; to be alone, to be loud, soft and without permission, to sit quietly under the Australian Willow tree and do nothing except stare above the Geijera parviflora and wonder why we must rename every beautiful botanical word to make speaking it ordinary, when it’s birth is extraordinary.

Don’t get me wrong, a writers playground with every behavioural need, a place to be noticed, a screen and keyboard to escape, avoid which cannot be said out loud; a sensory, tactile symbiotic movement of our body to thoughts on knees, synapses firing at speeds where mouths are silenced and pen no longer exists. We write, for some of us, because we must avoid the extinction burst in order to remain who we are. We write to breathe.

Here are my playground rules.

I will not ache for your acceptance, I opened the gate to watch flowers bloom and phoenix rise and rise.

I stroll across your pages, I smile, I wave, I stop a while to listen and learn. I will not beg for your friendship, this is a place of gratitude and appreciation.

I will not wear on pages what you expect, to fit a writers mould, unless of course it is with ease against my skin or softens a wrenching heart and offers food to my soul.

I will not injure nor scrape my knees for your likes, subscriptions or to hold my hand in the early hours before even the sun has formed its first curiosity about the day.

I am curious about the texture of sheets, the preference of threads, the marketing of more and more as if to sell the same rhetoric, more is better. The sleeping bag on a hilltop, feels more and I will write about the magic of wild camping.

Analysts over think, I’m here to let my creative brain rewrite my academic history and welcome the unruly teen, odd child, who didn’t care for popular and learned quickly not to try.

I am here to release the hurt woman, the grieving mother, the tired human, to welcome others on a track of substance.

I refuse to buckle under the weight of an epigenetic curse of dysfunction, of patriarchal power and control (I stand and type as I write these words). I am.

I will not lower my tone to please or is it appease or both?

I write because I have no other means to take the stories from my hardened chest before it beats no more.

I write in solitude.

If you find me here, in my moment of vulnerability, left arm, right arm, across the monkey bars, alone or swinging and sliding, there is no need to push.

I will notice you alongside and return our meeting in forward motion.

I will welcome your observance at a distance or where your comfort serves you best.

That is what authenticity is for, acceptance and still we don’t need it.

Our stories, our existence.

So let’s play with all our uniqueness, openness and receptivity.

After all, Parten Newall in her 1929 dissertation on stages of play does mention six, the same expectations playgrounds expect in their observations today.

I am curious however, are you like me? Does it resonate? Did you ever meet, fully, the expectations of others? Why start now.

While Ms Newall understood the development of play as sequential, I am curious was she misunderstood, not unlike the many who referenced the stages of grief as a linear path, when Kubler Ross herself, declared there is no order or requirement to sit, stay or remain stuck with one emotion, so why with play?

Solitary, onlooker, parallel, cooperative, you decide.

I welcome you to the unravelling of my curiosities when fuelled with the freedom to take any path and play as needed.

Stay a while, sit at my table or by the window, watch the ongoings expressed from inside.

Then write what speaks to you in languages no one else can hear and tell us all.