Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about “play”—and not just because May Gray and June Gloom finally seem to be lifting—when I play, how I play, if I play:

Over a birthday dinner, my nephew shared his love for Ultimate Frisbee. After thirteen years of club baseball, with its incessant pressure to perform, he and his college buddies can now run and catch, dive and fly, without an outcome attached. “I mean, we want to win,” he said. “But no matter what, we all grab dinner together afterward and joke around.”
A brown-haired girl in an orange one-piece flung her lithe body into handstands in the shallow end of the YMCA pool, a proud “Watch this, Mom!” echoing across my lane. No tryouts for Artistic Swimming or dreams of Olympic medals could thwart her ten year-old abandon.
My friend texted me her latest oil painting. “I mostly paint over the same canvas,” she said. “I’m just fooling around with color.”
I ran my finger across the Backgammon table at my brother’s house; my father’s laughter came rushing back to me. He’d let the little white dice fly across the inlaid, walnut board with some combination of luck and skill that eludes me, still.

The truth is, outside of my Wednesday night Pickleball game, where I take too much pleasure in smashing overheads and carrying on like a teenager with new friends whose unfolding depth and wit undoes me, I don’t play nearly enough.

In my home, the chess set in the dining room gathers dust, alongside the framed prints of our children, toddlers turned adults overnight, carrying the weights we all know too well: pay the bills, make a difference, carve a path in a pathless world.

These are noble weights. But they are fraught with responsibility, expectation, and self-doubt: the antithesis of play.

Which brings me to S E E D, a new, all-day retreat I’ve co-created with Wanda Wen, my friend of twenty years and the founder and creative force behind Soolip.

The idea for S E E D emerged gradually, and then all at once: A nourishing day of imagination, creativity, and exploration, surrounded by nature.

A day of joyful play untethered from results.

And then I panicked.

Can I guide a day of creative freedom when I have two semi-adults I’m still raising and a hard time prioritizing play, myself?

I feared I couldn’t offer S E E D until my every day included some combination of silly card games and risk-it-all cakes that may or may not rise, muddy watercolors and screechy violin tunes, composition-less photographs and aimless hikes.

But we create what we most need. And I need to simply be human in an overwhelming world that asks us, every day, to be more than human.

In other words, I need to play.

If you do, too, I hope you’ll join Wanda and me in stunning Temescal Canyon, Pacific Palisades, on August 10th and again on January 25, 2025. And if you’re not an Angeleno, I promise this retreat is your excuse to come on out.

Either way, be sure to take advantage of our Early Bird Discounts!

Above all, I hope I’ve inspired you to play well and play often. I’m pulling for you.

Play.

So, You Want to Feel Lighter? Try This.

Weightless.