So I read sociology, education, social work, psychology, psychiatry, but I never read anything in all that stuff that described what I was experiencing on the ground. Then it dawned on me. Of course, they don't play. They write about play, they watch it, in order to keep their objectivity they need to be separate from it. And that very separation, and of course raised in cultures that are contests, they missed the entire thing.

I didn't know how to move. I thought I did. I was an athlete, even into adulthood. So I thought I knew something about moving, but I found when I came to very young children who knew how to play, I didn't know how to move at all. I knew how to collide with things. I knew how to move in straight lines. I didn't know how to be round. I didn't know how to do that. And I didn't know how to use full body energy with another human, not to bounce off of, but to really be together in a way in which I didn't have to guard my energy. I didn't have to kind of gear down. I could keep it full. I could be full and still be 6'4", 200 pounds. I didn't know how to do any of that stuff. When I first went to play, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't come thinking oh, I'm going to learn to play and this will be really neat and they'll teach me. I came to young children with the idea that I wanted to be with humans who were learning and it was learning I was going after.  I didn't want to teach kids anything. I wanted to be with them and find out what is it that they're learning? What do they have to teach me? 

What happened was that it taught me how to play. I just didn't know that would happen and I didn't know that that was going on at the time. For five years I never talked to an adult about what was happening to me on the ground. I was too afraid because things were happening that I didn't know how to talk about and I thought wow, how do I talk about this? Adults are going to think he's silly. Well this grown adult, he's just playing around with kids. That's a waste of time. And I said wow, maybe it is, I don't know.  What the heck is this about here? I felt different. I felt something was happening but I couldn't ground myself in anything that was tangible to me because tangible to me at that point meant intellect.  I was a university product.  And then I read a thing by Bateson and he said something about a pattern that connects, that he was looking for this pattern to connect. And I thought God, this is it. That's what I feel. I feel connected. That's what's going on. And I thought, maybe I'd better read about play. I don't know anything about play. 

So I read sociology, education, social work, psychology, psychiatry, but I never read anything in all that stuff that described what I was experiencing on the ground. Then it dawned on me. Of course, they don't play. They write about play, they watch it, in order to keep their objectivity they need to be separate from it. And that very separation, and of course raised in cultures that are contests, they missed the entire thing.  So I said forget this. I'm not reading anymore. I went back to the ground and began feeling what was happening and there were two rules that came up, but no one ever said this to me, I was just getting these two rules. One was that there was no contest. The kids never competed with each other, nor did they compete with me about anything, and it wasn't that the kids were making ethical judgments about well let's see, play is bad, contest is bad so we won't do it, we'll do something else. It just never came up. It was never an issue. It was irrelevant. So I thought, well, that's interesting. I don't know that I've ever experienced that in life, that I know about. And the second one, rule or pattern, was that there was a pattern to touch.