Playgrounds, Planetary Pilgrims, and The Hermetic Vessel

Form Sacrificed for Function, Escaping the World, and Trans-formation by Shadow Magic

I am a connoisseur of playgrounds.

A sommelier of slides and swings.

An epicure, as it were, of monkey bars, spinners, and rope ladders.

I am lettered, doctored, I mean, in all things jungle gym.

So when I take my two year old out to these parks, the green spaces that staccato my city, I do not go as some amateur or as some novice in the so-called sacred geometry of play.

No, no, no.

I arrive as a scholar of exploration and amusement. My undergrad is in see-saw dynamics, my master’s in sandbox architecture, and my post-grad work is in loop-the-loop logistics¹.

And when I heard my local playground, the one pictured above, was due for replacement, I grabbed my clipboard, my click pen, and my long nose with which to look down upon the new structures. I have the bona-fides, after all.

I was ready to see the rebirth of a my very local landmark, ready for the right kind of transformation. And what I saw was, at best, a crime scene. I got there early enough that the chalk outline of joy and creativity was still taped off. In the aftermath of one of my favourite parks was some lifeless, plug and play, made to deliver “fun experience”.

My son played there for 35 minutes and was bored.

I was tapped out after about two.

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1. Playgrounds as Third-Spaces and the Gift of Play

You might wonder why a guy like me cares so much about playgrounds; and for the last couple weeks, I wondered, too. And then, after the denial — after hoping I could close my eyes, say a prayer, and have my old spot come back — after the anger at what was taken from us had subsided, it all sort of came to me.

Why I care so much, I mean.

Playgrounds are a microcosm for the universe.

You heard it here first, folks.

Those sandwiches I had with Ransom, kicking our hanging legs over the edge of wooden bridges, turns out they were a lot more cosmological than I realized.

And as our playgrounds decay into plastic shells of life, as they are remade in a new image, it starts to make sense why people like Elon Musk want to settle some other planet, and it makes sense why the alchemists are about again.

Let me explain :

The Frontier of Childhood

I did a lot of reading on this stuff over the last couple of weeks — what makes a good park, I mean. Turns out, playgrounds aren’t some slapdash enterprise, and it got me wondering if you need to go to school to be an Architect of Play.

First, there’s these physical elements that matter.

The spaces need to be designed in such a way that a variety of play styles can be supported for a variety of ages. You want to design a space flexible enough to support games, solo exploration, and deep interaction across a spectrum of ages. Essentially, if you’re an Architect of Play, you’ve got to be asking yourself :

Will kids get bored ?

Or, does this space grow with the kids ?

Most parks have some integrations with natural elements, too — and my favourite park was circled by trees. Nearby was a river, and Ransom and I would sit on the wooden bridge that stretched across, and we would throw rocks into her depths. The swings and slides are gateways into the beauty and wonder of nature; and often the lines between the designed spaces and the wild spaces are blurred. Sorta like real life, I think.

There are social elements, as well, beyond the age accommodation. Parks used to be designed for social integration; they were spaces that encouraged kids to interact — to play and solve and be together. It’s the kind of cognitive engagement that encourages social creativity and facilitates play. Correction. Facilitates child-directed play. At least, that’s what the Architects will tell you.

You also want these loose parts, tools and toys and elements that allow kids to imagine and build and transform the world around them, together.

I could go on and on — but what I am really driving at is that these wood and metal outposts of discovery really do matter. They stand tall and tangible as the very edge of the known world to a kid. They are a microcosm of the whole cosmos — a place of social play, risk-taking, and culture creation.

Don’t believe me ? Read Lord of the Flies.

Or, go to your local park with the bratty kid who steals everyone’s toys and then gets left out of the game of “Rocket Slides” ( one of our favourites ). Those are the laws of the jungle, Jim.

Playgrounds are where I watch kids of all shapes and sizes and ages negotiate their way in the world. They figure out how to live and move and interact through their bodies, and balance and swing and invite and laugh, together.

I’m 37 and I know the rules of the park — and the main one are, whatever games the kids are playing, whatever laws they’ve set in place, you gotta abide by them, because they know best, and because that is how they learn.

Bad parks invert this.

They take kids from the frontier of childhood and scuttle them into the ever safe, overprotective arms of a bubble world — one that is barely an echo of the life around them, let alone a microcosm of it.

This is what they replaced my playground with

A Plastic Apocalypse

There’s forums where you can read about this, and there’s surveys too, where kids talk about parks designed by adults. The kids describe these adults, the one who order the elements of the playground out of some catalogue, as taken in by the flash and curve and showiness of it all.

Kids understand aesthetics, I think. Adults are often propagandized and they’re suckers for a slick marketing campaign. Kids intuit what they need, and what makes sense, and they are drawn to it. I mean, call this anecdotal all you want, but when I’m at the beach with my sons, it’s mostly the kids in the sand and the water, and it’s always the parents drowning in doom-scrolls, chained to their phones. Mud-pies on the shore, I think, rather than adventures at sea.

My local park had metal grid gates placed all around it when they started the demolition. I watched them tear down the wooden bridges, fold up the metal ladders, and crumple up the shining slides. Ransom was enthralled, at first, because he’s a sucker for excavators and bulldozers.

If you sort by most expensive, you can see what musk wants to settle Mars with

And then the catalogue choices, the ones picked out by sophisticated adults, were delivered and put in place. We’d check up on the construction, week after week, as we hiked to the river and the turtle pond. And day by day, and with each passing moment, it became proof that adults were all to ready to sacrifice the kids on the altar of sterilization. Oh, and focus groups.

Like I said, we went to that park once it was finished, and there were three kids there, other than us playing — the rest were in the river and were throwing rocks and playing tag on the muddy banks.

You can ask the kids, and I have, why they don’t care to play on these new, plastic, focus-group monstrosities, and they all answer the same :

They’re not fun.

You see, kids aren’t as mesmerized by the flash and showiness of playground advertisements — they’re suckers for the aesthetics of play, and against such things, there is no catalogue.

These new parks are obtusely safe; and the vertical and spatial complexity of climbers and bars is replaced with low, round, safe plastic. And save a rattled remnant, the rest of the kids venture off into the trees or onto the picnic tables or up to the bridges over troubled waters to find some remaining sharp edge of their childhood.

I don’t know what those olden days Architects of Play understood — but I wish a few of them would grab this new school by the collar and shake some sense into them. The new catalogues are so over-engineered, that nothing is left for imagination or invention or risk. It’s micromanaging the cosmos.

At this new playground of ours, there’s a loose area that has some standing threaded bolts and washers placed around them. You raise the washers up the bolts, drop them, watch them spin in circles down around the bolt, and you do it again.

Ransom did it maybe five times. And that was it. There’s nothing left to do — it’s a one trick pony. The engineers sucked the magic and make-believe right out of the park and in its place put a few prescriptions. A pile of rocks and a batch of sticks and shovels and buckets can become new worlds, but bolts and spinning washers are, sadly, doomed to be just that.

When I said aesthetics before, of play, I mean, there was more that I was hinting at — namely actual aesthetics. There is something truly beautiful about the wood planks and cotton ropes and steel bars and old boulders that made up our third space. At our old park, rest in peace, when it rained, the wood-chips that scattered the ground were like incense, and you could smell the cedar rise up when you splashed in puddles.

Now ?

It’s rubber surfaced. And it smells like old erasers.

And listen, my park is a symbol of my city. I watch the old buildings get torn down, too — I see brick houses obliterated in favour of some copy-paste, medium-density-fibre-board, click-in-place dwelling without an ounce of care for the actual people that will live there.

It’s focus groups squeezing out every bit of beauty for drips of profit margin.

Sacrifice the person for a bigger pay-check.

It’s just more sad when it’s kids — when their spaces are sacrificed, when beauty and connection and fun are wiped out for convenient, profitable mollycoddling.

Third Spaces and Could You Be My Neighbour ?

In those old playgrounds there was an almost otherworldly gravity. I know because as I played with my son, other kids and other dads would gather around. Soon we’re all swinging, all sliding, all learning how to climb ladders, and build inukshuks on the river bank. We’re all singing with the Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

You come into this shared space and you share a story.

A few days ago we were at some park pretending to cook sausages ( they were sticks ) on a barbecue ( a steel sheet with honeycomb holes in it ) and we served them up on a wooden plank. Kids gathered all around, giving fake money to my son, who pretended to eat it. Once he had his coin in hand, mouth, he would pass out sticks both big and small as he saw fit.

Other kids wanted to cook, too, so I gave Ransom, our head chef, an army of sous chefs to help with the demand. They sang songs, they made sizzle noises with their mouths, and even the reluctant parents came by to place orders and dole out fake cash.

Mr. Rogers would have been so proud of us, rag tag buncha neighbours.

These new designs don’t have the same gravity, the centripetal force, that pulls you together. They have no weight at all, and so kids sort of float around in an aether, and parents stand on the side, half supervising and half chained to their phones.

I watch kids look for where to go, ponder what to do, and when Ransom and I invent some game, they all want to join in and show me that they can do it, too. Why ? because they’re bored as hell in a space that has no glory.

I use that word intentionally, glory, because the hebrew word for it in the Old Testament means weight. So real, so enormously alive, you can feel it, and it crushes you.

And this, too, is a microcosm of civilization.

Third Spaces, places to go outside of home ( first space ) and work ( second space ), places that allow you to be, to exist and enjoy, those spaces are being erased because of cost and liability and digital displacement and blah blah blah.

And you know what’s getting erased with them ?

The glory.

The weight.

The kind of gravity that pulls people together into a shared story.

Don’t believe me ? Look at your country, and look at mine.

Fragmented and floating around in some nebulous aether of nothing, just waiting for some archetypal dad to tell us he’s proud of us.

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What I am trying to say is that playgrounds are the first third space a kid really gets to enjoy — and they exist in a way that brings almost all of what it means to be human to bare. There’s this edge where danger and wonder mingle, where aesthetics and architecture offer a haven and joy, and where something real pulls you together and into creation in a way that awakens the soul.

And when we lose those things, we lose, at least a little bit, of what it means to be alive.

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2. What is That Musky Smell on Mars?

Yeah, that’s a stupid pun — but I think you catch my meaning. We’re talking about the subjugation of the stars, talking about breaking free from this hunk of rock we call Home, and setting off into galaxies far, far away.

Well, actually, our planetary neighbour — Mars.

And who’s gonna bring us there ?

This guy.

The Good News of Escape

Everyone is looking for salvation, especially the naturalists and the technocrats. The thing is, they’re so dog-gone stuck with matter that any transcendent God just won’t fit in their tools for data collection. Turns out, the stuff that saves you, doesn’t really fit into test tubes and databases. Who knew ?

And when you look at this hunk of rock, the one we call Home, with the half-cybernetic eyes of a technocrat, well, all you see is depleting resources, wars and rumours of wars, and cataclysmic world-ending events. And when you see them, you take out your artificial-neural-net-processors and start crunching the numbers and you realize, hey, humanity ain’t gonna make it.

“That's one of the benefits of Mars, is life insurance for life collectively…So, eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun. The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multi-planet civilization, because Earth will be incinerated.”

-Elon Musk

And so our hero begins his mission of Good News : if humanity is going to survive the coming apocalypse, we best become an interplanetary band of star-trotters, best get the Hell outta dodge.

Except dodge, you know, isn’t just a playground; it’s the whole damn planet.

Every fire-and-brimstone preacher, Elon included, has to show the people the writing on the wall. And so Musk will tell us that, if his calculations are correct, earth has only got about 10% of its life left, before we run her dry, before it gets so cookin’ hot the oceans start smelling like microwaved shrimp and the boomers complain on facebook that this new generation can’t take a bit of ultraviolet radiation.

And so he offers salvation :

Run away.

Jet propulsion and terraforming.

My guess is, give it a few kajillion years, and the Muskian Martians will have to get the Hell out of that dodge, too.

Sell me a new Eden all you like, Elon, but don’t sweep the mistakes of our current method of operations under the cosmological carpet. Escaping the planet is, on the grand scheme of things, a very short term solution for the cosmos.

Eventually, we’re gonna run out of planets to drain, and our kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s are gonna have nowhere to run. They’re going to have to do what we should have done however many aeons ago :

Figure out what matters most.

Or, in the Christian dialect, repent.

Run from the mess all you want, wipe out the parks all you want, drain earth dry and cook her like a Hot Pocket in the microwave of your convenience — it’s all a microcosm of our hierarchy of values. And man, is it dire.