The Forest in August
Guidebook
Play
by Hannah Fraser Moore
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
“The impulse to play is instinct.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Play
We tend to think about play as something that happens once all the serious, more pressing things are finished and done, but psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued the opposite.
He located play bang at the centre of psychological life, the state in which the True Self appears, in which imagination and symbol become possible, in which we can try out new and different versions of ourselves without yet having to commit to any of them.
In a similar vein, I want us to think about how play enables our development and growth to expand exponentially.
Play is innate, it’s an instinct and an essential part of being human, but many of us lose our ability to play because survival demands something different.
Survival asks for competence, efficiency, certainty, usefulness.
It wants every hour accounted for and every risk assessed.
Under survival’s regime, purposelessness stops feeling restful and starts feeling dangerous, fun feels silly and spending time lost in our imagination can feel like a waste of time.
Over time, survival trumps play. Every time.
And the behaviours we adopt to cope, eventually stop feeling like adaptations, and morph into an idea about who we are.
This is why we need to shake this up.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
When we abandon play, like all instincts, there is a cost.
A psyche that cannot play can function impressively, but it loses its range and elasticity.
Change becomes an all-or-nothing act rather than something rehearsed, so we stop changing.
We become experts at being who we already are.
Thinking goes literal and curiosity gives way to certainty.
This is why our lives can look successful whilst feeling airless at the same time.
The opposite of play is not work.
It is self-protection.
Play asks us to enter into experiences without knowing who we will be in them.
It asks us to follow curiosity without demanding a result. To be bad at something (as in truly awful) and survive it.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
To waste time. To surprise ourselves.
To entertain our souls. To follow the magic.
Without play we repeat ourselves. With play we discover possibilities survival could never imagine.
This month, our task is to waste time well.
Follow what catches your attention and play with it, before you decide whether it's worth it.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Into The Forest
These questions are less interested in what you think than in what you notice.
1. When did you last do something badly, on purpose, for the pleasure of it?
​
2. When did you last do something magical, creative, joyful and not worry about what other people would think if they saw you do it or knew?
3. What catches your attention just before something tells you it’s a waste of time, selfish or unimportant?
4. Where are you still allowed to be a beginner?
5. If no one would ever know, and nothing would come of it, how would you spend tomorrow afternoon?
Whatever just surfaced when pondering these questions, notice what came next - how fast did some part of you move to talk you out of it.
What did it say? What did it want you to believe? Who did it say you’d become?
That voice was learned, but remember, it is not the only voice you possess.
Play belongs to the wild you.
It is what you were doing before you were tamed.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Following The Spark
As the instinct to play returns, we often first notice it as a flicker of curiosity.
A thought perhaps, or an image, a hunch.
An almost imperceptible nudge.
A memory.
A conversation.
A place you suddenly don’t want to leave.
This week, your only task is to notice where your attention naturally comes alive.
Where you feel a pull.
Where you feel your inner Wild Woman wake up.
​
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The Experiment
The moment we ask whether we are doing it well, we stop playing and start performing again.
This week, choose one small act each day that serves no purpose (really no purpose) beyond the experience itself.
Remember this is not about improving yourself or becoming more productive.
We are doing this practice simply because something in you is drawn towards it.
Some possibilities
-
Walk a different way home.
-
Draw badly. Write badly. Sing badly.
-
Read a poem.
-
Wander through a bookshop, buy a book – just because.
-
Sit beneath a tree for ten minutes, imagining.
-
Watch birds.
-
Learn the name of a flower and it’s symbolic meaning.
-
Skip a stone, or better ask it a question.
-
Collect feathers, shells or leaves. Bring the outside in.
-
Dance in your kitchen.
-
Start something you have no intention of mastering.
Afterwards, ask yourself:
-
What happened in my body?
-
When did my mind interrupt the experience?
-
What story did my mind tell me?
-
What surprised me?
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Play Leaves Clues
Like any instinct, play flourishes under some conditions and scampers off under others.
This page is about becoming curious about where play naturally appears, where it disappears, and what each might be trying to tell you.
Complete the sentences.
​
I notice play comes most easily when…
​
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
I feel most playful around people who…
​
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
​
Places that invite play in me are…
​
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
​
The things that almost always interrupt play are…
​
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
​
​
My body feels different when I am playing. It becomes…
​
​
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The time of day I feel most alive is…
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
The things I become naturally curious about are…
​
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
I lose all sense of time when…
​
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
​
Without meaning to, I smile when…​
​
​____________________________________________________________________________________________________
​
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
The smallest thing that brought me delight this week was…
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
​
This practice is about beginning to notice the conditions in which your psyche naturally comes alive. Every observation is a clue. And over time, these small moments reveal the ecology in which your own instinctive life flourishes.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The Hidden Dance
There is a powerful reason The Twelve Dancing Princesses has endured for centuries.
By day, the sisters meet the expectations of palace life. Everything appears orderly, controlled and normal - in its place, but by morning, their shoes are worn through.
Each night they descend into the forest underground to dance.
​
The dance here is an expression of vitality.
Of movement. Of their delight.
Their freedom. Their joy.
​
The dance is the place where another part of their lives unfolds, hidden beneath the demands of the day.
​
Psychologically, the story suggests that the psyche keeps something alive, even when much of life has become organised around responsibility, duty and adaptation.
Many of us will recognise this in ourselves.
​
The task here, is not to invent that hidden life and locate it somewhere out there.
It is to recognise where it already exists and to follow it with more intention.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The Hidden Dance Reflection
These questions are asking you to notice the evidence of a hidden life which may be crouching in plain sight or already unfolding.
​
1. What is worn through in you, and what has been wearing it?
​
2. Where do you lose track of time, and when was the last time this happened?
​
3. What have you returned to over the years, even when no one else understood it mattered to you?
​
4. What has always led you back to the hidden forest? What keeps calling?
At no point in the story do the princesses explain themselves.
​
Notice whether you can play freely or are already composing an explanation.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Forest Archetype: The Trickster
The Trickster is the oldest figure in the human repertoire and the least respectable.
Coyote, Hermes, Loki, Anansi, Br’er Rabbit, Baubo. She turns up wherever a system has become too settled to survive, and she doesn’t care what people think.
Jung called the Trickster a figure of the collective shadow, everything a well-ordered personality has agreed not to be.
She lies, she plays, she is undignified, she is frequently the author of her own humiliation.
She is also the only figure in mythology who consistently creates anything.
​
The Trickster is much more than her disruptive reputation describes.
In story after story, she is the one who brings fire, invents language, steals what was hoarded, opens the way.
Hermes makes the lyre out of a tortoise shell on the day he is born, then steals his brother’s cattle, then talks his way out of it and is made the God of Boundaries and Roads for his trouble.
Baubo is also worth thinking about here. In the Eleusinian myth, Demeter is inconsolable and eating nothing, and the world is dying with her. Nobody’s reasoning helps. Then an old woman lifts her skirts and makes a rude joke, and Demeter laughs, the grief moves through her.
Notice here that the problem is not solved or fixed but moved.
Creation and misbehaviour turn out to be made of the same materials.​
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
And look at how The Trickster gets things done. Not through effort, but through cunning, delight, sideways hustles, and a refusal to solve the problem by following the crowd.
This is exactly what play is: improvisation. A different way to get from A to B.
​
Improvisation only becomes possible when the outcome is not set in stone.
When The Trickster is exiled. Everything becomes literal and everything becomes serious.
​
There is one right way to do things and it is effortful. The psyche loses its capacity to be ambushed by its own life. Rigidity sets in and calls itself integrity.
​
This month’s invitation is not to become The Trickster (although by all means trick away if it takes your fancy), but to notice where you have made your life un-ambushable and to remember that new ideas and passions rarely enter through the front door.
​
Notice the Trickster this month
​
· Where does something in you want to misbehave, and what happens to the impulse?
· What have you been trying to solve by working harder at it?
· Where has being good become indistinguishable from being stuck?
· What made you laugh unexpectedly this week and what did it interrupt?
· What would you do sideways, if going straight at it has not worked?
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
When the World Talks Back
As we become more conscious, the world begins to feel different – more magical, more alive, more supportive.
​
The trees can seem less like scenery and more like friends.
​
A sentence in a novel (was it written for you?), a bird that lands with a message as you’re wrestling a question.
​
You may find yourself taking a different path and stumbling across something you didn’t know you needed.
​
The same image appears in a dream, then in a conversation, then in the pages of a book.
​
The world around you feels clearer, brighter and on your side.
​
When we live in survival, our attention narrows. Understandably, we scan for threat, certainty and control. The world becomes something to get through and we tend to notice only what feels necessary.
​
As play returns, something else emerges. Curiosity questions our certainty.
We become willing to wander, to linger, to say yes to an unexpected invitation, to follow what draws us in rather than only what seems sensible.
This isn’t about searching for hidden messages or forcing meaning onto every coincidence (although it can be). It is about entering into a different relationship with life itself. One in which the psyche is allowed to meet the world with openness and intrigue rather than vigilance and suspicion.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Following the Clues
Notice what has a charge rather than significance.
​
Wherever there is a small unaccountable urge of feeling, a pull, a tug, a tenderness, an unease, a sudden delight - treat it as a clue that wants to tell you something (you don’t have to believe, you simply have to play).
​
-
What has the world been trying to tell you?
-
What image has lingered around you this month?
-
If this month were a fairy tale, what landscape are you walking through? Forest, gateway, tower, meadow, underworld, sea?
-
Who were you in that story, the eldest daughter sent away, the sleeper, the sorceress, the one carrying something into the woods?
-
Which tree, bird or animal has seemed strangely present, and what does it want to show you?
-
If the world around you were speaking in symbols, what conversation might it be trying to begin? If you could ask it, what would it say?
-
What have you been calling a coincidence that might not be one?
-
What has felt enchanted?
​
Write your answers down without resolving them.
Don’t rush to understand them.
​
An image kept unsolved for a month will tell you way more than one interpreted on the day it arrived.
​
Allow the meaning to ripen.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The Forest Tree: Silver Birch
In Celtic tradition, the Silver Birch is known as ‘The Lady of the Woods.’ She is the tree of thresholds, new beginnings and protection.
​
In Norse Lore hanging branches of birch over your front door was thought to ward off bad spirits and invite in good fortune.
​
And ancient folklore held that besom brooms made of her wood could sweep out evil spirits and repel bad luck.
​
She is resilient. After fire, the Silver Birch is often the first to return. She grows where the forest has been broken and battered, drawing light into damaged ground, and preparing the conditions for others to follow.
She is the tree that initiates the forest.
The soul returns in much the same way.
​
Recovery often begins with something almost too small to notice.
A transition away from certainty towards curiosity.
Noticing when something seemingly frivolous delights us.
A conversation that alters the way we think.
A coincidence we cannot quite explain.
A new path we decide to follow on a whim.
​
These moments can seem transitory or insignificant.
The Silver Birch reminds us that they are the beginning of something much larger.
The work here is not to force the forest to grow.
It is to notice, with delight, the first Silver Birch.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Closing Reflections:
-
Where does your life need a first step rather than a perfect plan?
​
-
What have you outgrown without yet admitting it?
​
-
What are you trying not to know?
​
-
Where has seriousness replaced aliveness?
​
-
What have you stopped experimenting with because you expect yourself to get it right?
​
-
What small act would change the direction of the next month?
​
-
If this season marked a rite of passage, what would you be leaving behind and what would you be stepping into?
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and
your life will never begin.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest