pre-tend-ing
on tending play and listening to the aliveness of all things
I have deeply etched memories of talking with the aliveness of all things when I was young, before language wrapped around my experiences, before I learned names like object, human, animal, spirit, before I learned categories of “playtime” and “now it’s time to work” and “this is real, that’s pretend.”
In my little sliver of the world in this lifetime, PRETEND as a word and concept has been:
Designated as a space, mostly for children, to engage in whimsical, imaginative play
Distinguished from what’s real (pretend vs. real)
Used to identify something of false pretense, flimsy assertion, or deception
For a long time now, I’ve seen and felt PRETEND differently. My spine prickles whenever I hear the word. I notice how the word is used in various contexts (including how I use the word differently depending on context), when it’s considered “acceptable” or “important” and when it’s not, how conversations about pretend often create distance from its aliveness and possibilities.
I’m not writing here to set up an argument of this is wrong vs. that is right. I’m writing to wonder, to play, to share my seeing of how it’s not so tidy, this construct of real vs. pretend, this story we tell children, this story we tell ourselves.
From word origins and dictionary definitions, I distill this:
pre: before tend: stretch ing: now
The rest (most) of what I know of pretending comes from my bodily experience, my play with children, and my listening in relationship with the aliveness of all things (including words).
The word—pretending—nudged me to write this. It presensed itself (thus, the -ing) in clearer and stronger and louder ways until I said, “Yes, thank you, I hear you, let’s play.”
Pretend opens, offers a pathway
to spread, roll, tumble, fall into the stretch of your tending,
tenderness of what you know,
what came before and what’s before you now.
Now is for listening.
Listening is not something to do. It emerges in the stretch,
tender knowing of before as toward as always.
Dream is memory, memory is dream, and it’s all of tending.
Watch a tree.
Watch a spider.
Watch a cat.
Watch a child.
They don’t need the word pretend. They’re already inside the aliveness.
The word is here for us.
Not to separate, diminish, or dilute what’s real, but
to invite us into all that’s real.
It’s all real.
Pretend is not a making of the mind.
We don’t give form to the play,
we give ourselves to the innate being of the play.
We give ourselves over to the play, the dance, the song of sky as soil,
we surrender into the aliveness of everything.
Alive as play nurtured by tended stretch of seeing and release of stories wrapped in old cloaks of this vs. that.
Pretend invites us to breathe into and be beyond,
let ourselves be formed inside the pretending,
become the forming and the form,
the seeing and the see,
the tenderness tending once upon and ever after more.
It’s all unknown.
Feathers falling dreams emerged from the fire.
Worm clouds rooting calendars of turtle and sea.
Marigolds offering moons to ancient wells, more than wish.
It’s only reverence.
Watch a beetle and you will remember.
You will remember to listen
to your daydream whispers
as memory and skin, forest and bone.
There’s a promise here.
It starts small like a carrot seed or bit of dust,
turns into a different kind of story,
and you’re inside it.
You stretch out,
spread into what’s before you now
as everything.
love+light, Melissa
tree, root, eye, ear, arm, stretch, listen, be
We don’t give form to the play, we give ourselves to the innate being of the play.
all stones see
a classroom scene
One child plays with a pile of wooden blocks delighting as the blocks talk and dance and shapeshift into forests and oceans and homes. Another child plays with the same pile of blocks, sits staring at two blocks, and asks a nearby adult, “Why don’t my blocks talk?”
If you were the nearby adult, what would you say (not say)?
What we say, don’t say, do, and don’t do, what we ourselves experience and believe about play and pretending… all of this impacts children and how they come to experience themselves as learners, as whole beings in the world.
To read more about our adult engagement in moments such as this, I invite you to join Noticing Matters on Substack as a paid weekly subscriber. You’ll have access to the full archive, including the posts on pretending during October 2023.
enchantment
Another word who shared and played in aliveness with me is ENCHANTMENT… and here is the poem.