“When you
start on a long journey, trees are trees, water is water, and mountains are
mountains. After you have gone some distance, trees are no longer trees, water
no longer water, mountains no longer mountains. But after you have traveled a
great distance, trees are once again trees, water is once again water,
mountains are once again mountains.” – Zen teaching
I
know there are Big Things to Fear in Life. But there is also so much fear in
the smallest corners of the world, of our days. I wonder why. What on earth is
at stake?
In
the classes I teach, I watch people navigate their fear of looking foolish,
their desire not to admit that they don’t know, their need to be in control, to
know, to have the right answer, to say what teacher wants to hear, to focus on
something “out there” and not “in here,” to get the “A” or, at the very least,
to leave without being changed in any significant way by their interactions
with new knowledge or insight.
What if there are no right
answers, just mud balls?
This
image of spheres from Bruce Gardner’s website
gives a hint at the artful beauty of the objects he creates. Is he
sculpting these highly polished orbs from marble? No, he is creating hikaru dorodango (shiny balls of mud) from pure, simple,
common dirt and sand lovingly caressed into these desirable and oddly soothing objects.
He has perfected the art, but it took a lot of trying. “Even my rough, malformed first attempts grew
precious to me as I worked with them,” Gardner writes. “This curious
attachment to the dorodango…is
part of what make hikaru dorodango so
special. As I've experimented with dorodango,
I'm struck by how these objects, created from such humble material, are nearly
the perfect expression of process refinement.” Author William Gibson has said a dorodango is an “artifact of such utter
simplicity and perfection that it seems it must be either the first object or
the last, something that either instigated the Big Bang or awaits the final
precipitous descent into universal silence. At the very end of things awaits
the hikaru dorodango, a perfect
three-inch sphere of mud. At its heart: the unthinkable.”
They
are heavy and cool to the touch, satisfying in their heft and texture.
Children in Japan are fixated on these mud
balls—or at least they were five years ago;
creating hikaru dorodango became a mania there. Professor Fumio Kayo of the Kyoto
University of Education, a psychologist who researches children’s play, was responsible
for the craze. He first encountered dorodango
in a Kyoto nursery school in 1999. As he made mud
balls with the children, a teacher said, “I’ll show you a real dorodango,” and created a shiny mud ball
for Kayo, who was intrigued and wanted to outdo the teacher. Through 200 failed
experiments and an analysis using an electron microscope, Kayo devised a method
of making dorodango that even
children can learn. The kids spend hours creating and polishing balls of mud;
they grow attached to and treasure their mud balls even if they are not perfect, even if they do not shine.
According to the Japan Information
Network, Kayo was interested in watching the children at play—and they
surprised him. A two-year-old would walk behind him, imitating his actions. At
three, children tried to snatch his dirt. Four and five year olds pretended to
ignore him, but afterwards were working with determined expressions on their
faces. Children shared information on where to find the best dirt—and sometimes
they kept that information secret. As adults, we aren’t much different, are we?
Developmental psychologists have long studied how children
engage in role play and drawing and other “creative” activities; Kayo believes
we’ve overlooked the creative experimentation children do in their daily
activities. Is making shiny mud balls a good insight into the essence of play
for both children and adults? The joy of hikaru
dorodango is twofold: the sheer pleasure that comes with creating, that
meditative and wondrous place we go sometimes in the creative moment—coupled
with the desire to create the shiniest ball.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(pronounced “Cheeks sent me high”) has studied “flow”
for many years—the condition these kids appear to reach when creating their hikaru dorodango. There are eight
hallmarks of reaching “flow”—I’m left to ponder what activities I do that meet
these eight conditions:
A Clear Goal - Knowing what you want to do in any given moment
is a key element of the flow experience.
Feedback - You need to be able to tell if you are getting
closer to your goal or not.
Challenges Match Skills - It is important that
what you do matches your ability to do it.
Concentration - Total attention onto one task.
Focus- Focus on only one task.
Control - When you are in flow you feel that you can be in
control of your actions and experience.
Loss of Self-Consciousness - There is no room for
relentless self-monitoring.
Transformation of Time - Time seems to adapt
itself to your individual experience.
Writing
37days is the thing that comes
closest. What is it for you that brings you close to “flow” and why aren’t you
doing it more often? If I fear that my dorodango
might crack, I won’t create it in the first place, now will I?
From Art
& Fear comes this insight:
“The ceramics
teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.
All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on
the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its
quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in
his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ‘quantity’ group: fifty pounds of
pots rated an ‘A’, forty pounds a ‘B’, and so on. Those being graded on
‘quality’, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get
an ‘A’. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of
highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It
seems that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work—and
learning from their mistakes—the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about
perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than
grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
I see the pottery metaphor play out at conferences.
Some speakers are buttoned up, flawless, measured and practiced, with an answer
for everything in a world that is expert-focused. They don’t risk much or,
ultimately, give much. They are too involved in relentless self-monitoring,
creating the perfect pot. Others learn as much from the people they are
speaking to—they give and they take, they ride the wave that is in the room at
the time, not the one they hoped might be there or the one they planned against
as some do; instead, they stumble over new insights and acknowledge the stumble,
they co-create meaning with the people they are engaged with, they are
subject-focused, along with me as I watch them—they make a lot of pots, taking
me along for the ride, letting me see myself in their story.
Perfection is a tough road. I’d rather have fun,
get clay slip all over me, and learn from the process of making all those pots.
You? We need to play more, people. As Charles Schaefer has said, “We are never more fully alive, more
completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything than when we are
playing.” Play is significant—it is voluntary and free and outside of “real
life”. As Johan Huizinga told us in Homo
Ludens, we access reality by playing with it; we know by entering contests of knowing, not by refusing to enter
them.
And so, what if our lives are curious dorodango, enigmatic glistening spheres,
with dents and dings, a
constant forming and reforming, adding fine sand to our surface from time
to time and smoothing it out, the sphere made by the accumulation of grit and
dust and experiences both good and bad, our shine metric a measure of how much
we have played, how often we have reached “flow,” how boldly we have formed
that sphere knowing, full well, that it might crack as it dries. A dorodango requires pressure to form, and
yet we resist pressure and discomfort almost universally. What are we afraid of? Those children love
their dorodango even when they crack,
when they are not shiny, when they aren’t perfectly shaped.
“About three inches in diameter,” William Gibson
wrote in TATE magazine, “the surface of a completed dorodango glistens with an illusion of depth not unlike that seen
in traditional Japanese pottery glazes. A dorodango
becomes its maker’s greatest treasure.” He concludes: “just as a life,
lived silently enough, in sufficient solitude, becomes a different sort of
sphere, no less perfect.”
As the Zen teaching says, “When you start on a long journey, trees are trees, water is water, and
mountains are mountains. After you have gone some distance, trees are no longer
trees, water no longer water, mountains no longer mountains. But after you have
traveled a great distance, trees are once again trees, water is once again
water, mountains are once again mountains.”
Mud
balls are at once mud balls, and not. As Csikszentmihalyi reminds us, “A person
who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.” We constantly
create meaning out of our encounters with the world, with the soil of the
spheres on which we journey.
~*~ 37 Days:
Do it Now Challenge ~*~
If you can, watch this video about
making hikaru dorodango.
Then play. Make a mud ball.
Name it, talk to it, roll it in your hands, show it off, experience “flow,”
take good care of it—lose yourself in that mud ball. Shine it. Love it even if
it never shines, even if it cracks. Be loyal to your mud ball. Play.
Don’t fear
the dirt.
Throw more
pots. Make many mud balls. Or translate this challenge
into your own terms--if you’re a writer, for instance, follow Gail Sher’s
advice in One
Continuous Mistake : write on
the same subject every day for two weeks. Ready. Set. Go.
Technorati Tags:
dorodango, mud balls, flow, csikszentmihalyi, bruce gardner, William Gibson, Fumio Kayo, children's play, Art+and+Fear
This is great stuff Patti. Thanks for reminding me of these...something to settle into with my kids to explore and cultivate flow.
Posted by: Chris Corrigan | 02 October 2006 at 16:19
I'm thinking an interruption of the 'flow' describes the discontinuity expressed in your previous post.
...and the eight steps may a reminder of the route back to the place where we can do the things that allow us to reestablish the outflow of that which is trapped inside us.
Or: "All work and no play..."
Posted by: dan | 02 October 2006 at 19:43
Dan - your insight about discontinuity is an important one for me - thank you...
Posted by: patti digh | 02 October 2006 at 22:03
Chris - enjoy the mud! thanks for writing!
Posted by: patti digh | 03 October 2006 at 09:50
"You learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." - Plato
Posted by: Betsy | 03 October 2006 at 10:25
I've felt flow at times, but, never really thought to break it down into four parts - truly interesting and inspiring.. a good guide to get to the flow with tasks that seem to lack that possibilty...lovely
Posted by: grace, T | 03 October 2006 at 15:08
how do you do it? i have been contemplating the idea of 'play' and what it means in relation to my daily life for about 2 weeks. i swear sometimes you get inside my head and write about what you find there! thanks for the added insight-- i love the mudballs. you have given me more to think about, again.
Posted by: jylene | 04 October 2006 at 06:42
Betsy - one of my favorite quotes - thanks for reminding me of it! And perfect in this context...
Posted by: patti digh | 05 October 2006 at 08:11
Jylene - I love the image of me inside your head and rolling around in there as you make your way through the universe! Enjoy the mudballs - I'm thrilled that next month I'll be in Albuquerque to speak at a conference and have been invited to meet (and hopefully make dorodango!) with Bruce Gardner, the man I wrote about in this essay whose dorodango are the opening photo!! What a treat! And won't New Mexico dirt be beautiful? Thanks for your note!
Posted by: patti digh | 05 October 2006 at 08:23
Grace, T - I'm glad it was helpful to you. Thanks for your insights, which helped me, too!
Posted by: patti digh | 05 October 2006 at 08:30
I like what you said, "What if there are no right answers, just mud balls?" You are Zen!
Your big fun, Miki :-)
Posted by: Miki | 04 August 2007 at 02:49
mine was really shiny. and i dont polish some of them. they just look to cool to make shiny. :)
Posted by: Dan h | 24 July 2009 at 15:31