On Play and Permission

There's a particular kind of aliveness that arrives when I am outside long enough for my body to forget what it's supposed to be doing. Not exercising or optimizing. Not tracking steps or progress or outcomes. Just being in motion.

I've been noticing how rare that feels. How much of life gets shaped into usefulness before we've even had a chance to feel it. A hike becomes training. Movement becomes discipline. Joy becomes something to account for.

I've been sitting with a question lately. What would it mean to let some of it go unaccounted for?

I think about following a muddy path without checking where it leads. Touching the bark of a tree without needing a reason. Letting my pace slow and my gaze wander to the birds. There is something about being in nature long enough that the body stops performing and starts perceiving. The light changes and you notice it. The ground is uneven and you adjust. Something moves at the edge of your vision and you turn toward it.

Not because you should. Just because you want to.

Nature doesn't ask anything of me. She doesn't need me to be coherent or productive or even particularly self-aware. Nature doesn't require me to make meaning out of the moment. She just holds it. And in that holding, something in my body begins to respond. A loosening… a softening. A kind of quiet curiosity that doesn't need to know where it's going. Like I can breathe… it feels freeing.

I've been thinking about how rarely we extend that same permission to ourselves.

We are nature, after all. The same expressiveness that moves through a forest in early morning, the way everything is constantly becoming, shedding, reaching, resting, moves through us too. We are not separate from it. We only learned to act as though we were. adrienne maree brown writes about pleasure as political, as directional, as something the body already knows how to move toward if we let it. I keep returning to that. My body as my compass. The wanting as information.

I think about what it means to try something on. A different way of dressing. A different way of moving through a room. Something we've been curious about but haven't let ourselves reach for yet. There's something in that reaching that can't be arrived at any other way. Not through thinking or deciding. Only through the putting on, the feeling of it against the body, the discovering of something true through the trying… acting upon the desire and curiosity.

Gender, expression, how we inhabit ourselves, these are not puzzles to be solved. They are vast spaces to be wandered. And wandering, like all of nature, doesn't move in straight lines. Queerness lives at the threshold. It is not a third option or box to be checked. We are expansive and complex beings. We are nature and nature is queer.

The same is true of desire. Of intimacy. Of what happens in the tender and sometimes fumbling space of being close to another body. So much of how we are taught to approach sex and connection is goal-oriented. There is a destination. A performance. A right way to arrive. So… boring.

But the body, left to itself, is curious. It wants to linger. To explore without agenda. To feel without immediately interpreting. Desire, at its most alive, doesn't know where it's going either. It moves the way water moves, finding its way not by force but by following what's open. What if we trusted it to wander? To flow and show us the way simply by moving with it.

CAConrad calls this somatic attention: the practice of returning, again and again, to what the body is actually experiencing, not what we think it should be. There is something quietly radical in that. In trusting sensation over instruction and letting the body's knowing be enough.

There is a thread running through all of this that I keep returning to. The body already knows. It knows how to soften when it's safe. It knows how to reach when it's curious. It knows how to rest, to move, to want, to wander. What it needs, more than instruction, is permission.

Permission to not know yet. To try without it meaning anything final. To be in process, the way nature is always in process, without apology, without conclusion.

I don't have a clean ending for this. Only a noticing: that something in me feels different when I allow for even a few moments of this kind of openness. Not transformed. Not healed. But a little more here. A little more mine.

with playful curiosity,