paradise in the playground

Last week, I spent large parts of my time crawling around the floor in a classroom at the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired as a worker at for a program called Opening Doors. Opening Doors is a four day long camp for kids with visual impairments ages 0 to 6, any siblings that fall into that age range, and their parents, serving to connect these families with the appropriate knowledge and resources they need to support their children.

The classroom I was in was the temporary home to six kids of varying ages, some with disabilities and some without. Although the lead teacher had prepared lesson plans and activities, our scheduled time together was mostly filled with play. 

A four-year-old was playing with a set of small, plastic animals, taking them out of their bag one-by-one. "What's that one?" I began asking. Bear. Dolphin. Owl. Once all of the animals had been identified (with some help of course), I looked for different questions. Seeing a lion, tiger, and cheetah mixed in, I pointed to the lion. "Where are the lion's friends?" Together we grouped these animals, then made other groups. Some of the animals were friends because of shared characteristics and some were friends because "they live close to each other."

A three-year-old who only spoke in smiles and exaggerated reaches sat by himself a few feet from toy cars he seemed uninterested in. I sat down across from him, took a car, and rolled it so it bumped into his tiny, outstretched legs. He looked down and, after a moment, hit the car on the side. It fell over. I picked it up, and pushed it from the end closest to him. It rolled. I rolled it back. After a few rounds of car tipping, something connected. He figured out where to push the car to make it roll, and we sat rolling back and forth, back and forth.

Two kids were playing on different sides of a play kitchen set, unaware of or just indifferent about the other's presence. I went over and asked the more talkative one: "What are you making?" Then: "What is she making?" Not knowing the answer, he asked her. After she responded, I said something like, "Wow, you two are making really good stuff. You should make something together! What are you going to make?" Something was decided on, I said it was a good idea, and walked away. I watched them join their imaginary worlds together as they passed plastic lettuce and apples and cups to each other, chatting the whole time.

These moments of play were constant. And in them, something strange happened. Even though this was a camp at a school for the visually impaired, disability seemed to disappear. School doesn't always allow that, focusing on performance in a way that pushes forward those who are "able" and leaves behind those who are not. But in play, ability and disability don't really matter. They do, in that kids do things differently and need different supports. But because the people who were there knew exceptionalities as a normal part of life, they didn't feel the need to rank anyone based on these differences. In this camp with these people, ableism (for the most part) left these kids alone.

It was not as if ableism outside of the camp ceased to exist. Ableism will always exist in a world that places our worth on our productivity and independence. We were just letting this be a time of God's favor, a time when ableism wasn't in charge, a time when we didn't need to address it because being together and being joyful and being whole was enough. 

You could say we were choosing to be blind to it. 

But actually, don't say that. Blindness is not a synonym for ignorance and it shouldn't be thought of or used as one. And even so, ignorance was not the aim. We always know, in part, the way the world should be and the way the world is, and there is always this tension of trying to live into one when we know we live in the other.

One way to live in that tension is to look for places that are beginning to look like the Kingdom of God and just rest there. Just let yourself celebrate the imperfect moments that give hope for coming perfection. That isn't to say there isn't work to be done, but we cannot always work or we will miss out on enjoying the fruits of our labor. And in that enjoyment alone, the work is being done. An insistence that we have joy as we are is a defiant act against a world that tells us we must change to find it.

The goal of those playtimes was not to ignore ableism or ignore disability. The goal was to play. The point was to not have a point outside of the enjoyment of those kids then and there. We could have only worked, only forged ahead towards some elusive Paradise. But doing so would have robbed us of seeing moments of Paradise in the playground, or in the classrooms, or in movement and friendship and laughter. 

Of course the camp also had assessments for kids and training sessions for parents. There is always both a focus on working and changing and a focus on the present, a mix of knowing that things need to be done and knowing that they don't all have to be done right now. 

Sometimes a balance within the tension emerges as the knowledge of needed action and the knowledge of present joys are woven into each other, moments where play is unexpectedly joined by pedagogy. The kid playing with animals was learning to find similarities and differences and about the natural environments animals live in. The kid with the toy car was learning how wheels and force and motion work. The kids at the play kitchen were learning how to collaborate. Play-based learning is nothing new.

But we fall into a dangerous trap when we deem moments of joy as disposable if they do not have something concrete to contribute to what comes next. Life has meaning now, right now, and that meaning is so much more than what it may mean to us in the future. 

Yes, there is work to be done. The world we inhabit is not yet the Kingdom of God, but his breath is everywhere within it. Heaven is here, breaking through, like water rushing from an opened fire hydrant. Sometimes we just have to play in the fountain.