Newsletter – April 2021
Hello Global Play Brigade!
Our newsletter is out today, April 22nd, which is Earth Day. I’m quite happy to be greeting you all from a beautiful part of this earth: Sedona, Arizona in the southwestern United States. The physical terrain here is beautiful, as you can see. It’s also personally beautiful for me because I am seeing my 94-year-old father for the first time in over a year because of the covid pandemic.
We’re at a difficult point on Planet Earth these days. The Covid-19 vaccine is becoming more and more accessible in the richer, western countries, even while more people are becoming infected with new strains of the virus. It’s a bleaker picture in poorer countries. From Brazil, where political corruption is breeding a health crisis that is a crime against humanity, to India, where shortages of the vaccine are shutting down health centers routinely. Nearly 130 countries with 2.5 Billion people have not gained access to the vaccine at all. Today, as I make this video, almost 3 million people — that we know of — have died from Covid.
How do we stay sane, be healthy, be together during this frightening climate? This climate of uncertainty, loss, abandonment, and grief. How can we deal with this emotionally or spiritually?
Is there a vaccine or medicine for our spirits? For our mental well being?
There is a medicine; it’s called Play. We played as kids, and we play in sports and other organized forms of play. There’s also playing with how we feel and how we treat one another — playing with our pain, our love, and our creativity. Play doesn’t take away our loss, or our fear. But playing with other people — laughing together, making up stories, or improvising together — can inject us with hope. With a little bit of joy and imagination. With development.
Is Play a bandaid? No, it actually isn’t. Rather, it’s a life-affirming performance of possibility. It’s a way of saying to ourselves and one another: we’re not giving up. And so, in India, Brazil, Nigeria, the US, and elsewhere — amidst these challenging times — people are using play and performance to look up and reach out — building spaces for our human creativity and our social connection. That’s what the Global Play Brigade, and all of you, are giving to our fellow human beings. Today’s newsletter shares a little bit of what that looks like. So, let’s inject ourselves and each other with the play vaccine. It’s free, and it’s available to all.
