Play: to engage in sport or recreation: FROLIC

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Walk past any playground and you will see a choice to be made.

An empty bench says, “Sit here. Observe.”

An empty playground says, “Come here. Enjoy.”

The choosers are easily distinguished on such grounds: onlookers and partakers.

Onlookers usually consist of adults: parents, grandparents, and babysitters. They watch, sigh, shout warnings, soothe ouchies.

Partakers usually consist of children: tall, short, small, big, but always wildly active children, in full swing, joining in the frolic. They wiggle, scoot, sing songs, laughing as they go. On rare occasion, an adult or two crosses the line from onlooker to partaker.

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Even before the final spring snow, across the way, the farm-turned-botanic-garden-country-version began creating a playscape for autumn adventure. John Deere green-and-yellow tractors plow spring white snow, upturning chocolate-dark soil. Upturned soil, furrowed into precise rows, produces tiny lime green seedlings. Abundant summer storms, purpled and silver-streaked, join mile-high sunny days to lengthen seedlings into stalks, knee-high, waist-high then over-my-head-high green sentinels. By September, teeth-chattering nights and apple-crisp days dry the green to golden brown. Tasseled corn stalks rustle in gentle autumn’s breezes.

Through bare spring into lush green summer then into golden fall, from our back deck we sit and observe as bare dirt transforms to a corn maze. From this perspective, the old farm trucks and new tractors remind me of sandbox days. My then-three-little children imagined new worlds among mounds of sand. With the help of Matchbox cars, Brio trains, sticks for railroad ties, pitchers of water that created mudslides, and Fisher-Price figures, stories sprung to life among mingled stones and leaves. Play provided space for imagination to grow, for delight to transform the landscape of the heart. 

Gazing through our bird-watching binoculars, I watch farm workers haul wooden poles and rolls of wire, creating small haddocks for pony rides. White tents pop up, covering picnic tables. Bales of hay are stacked like blocks here and there for ambience and crowd control. Trailers unload draft horses, ready to pull hayride flatbeds around the ponds and fields. Out on the roadway, just south of a major Denver interstate perimeter highway, green and gold signs announce Corn Maze dates: Come. Enjoy.

Play invites us to step aside, to come away, to discover, to delight. 

At sunrise, and again at sunset, my husband and I observe vast brown fields as they change. Behind the newly-painted red barn and its sidekick brick silo, a once-calm hillside buzzes. It sparkles with canary yellow school buses, dust-covered minivans, and family-sized SUVs. Empty paths winding through old cottonwood forests are now thick with children intent on making their way to the start of the corn maze. At night, glow sticks shimmer silver, pink, neon green. We hear laughter wafting across the open space between our back deck and the distant farm.

One Sunday afternoon we can stand it no longer. We leave our comfortable observer post to become partakers. We join the throngs, paying our way into the playscape of corn. Red-faced children run full force, panting parents trot to catch up yelling, “Hold up.”

Overhead Canada geese soar from field to pond, moving a bit further south, reminding us that snow is soon to change the landscape again.

Though our deck view is a tiny bit elevated above the farm in the valley, it’s not high enough to see what shape the maze is. You’d need a helicopter to gain such perspective. But, as we enter the corn maze, a printed map captures the farmer’s creation: a giant butterfly…fore and hind wings, abdomen, antenna, swirled among soil and seed into a bushel of choices to be made.

****

Here in the middle of the corn maze, choices crop up fast.

• Right, left, or straight?
• Follow the crowd?
• Follow my instincts?
• Follow my husband?

 

Even with a map, we quickly realize that there are no markers, no directional signs to help one orient. Which way is north on this map? Which way is west? The design on the map is no help. We are so far down in the corn maze we can’t gain any perspective.

• Are we at the outermost loop of the butterfly wings?
• Are we walking an inner wing that will send us back around to the start?
• Are we at the dead end of the antenna?

Letting go of our prescribed way of doing things, we simply play. We savor the wildness. We notice the hawks soaring overhead and a field mouse who scurries through the cornstalks, in search of shelter.

Ahead of us in the maze, a couple argues over which path to take. Their children don’t wait to see what the grown-ups decide. Half their kids run one direction while half take off in the other direction. Playfulness takes over. I like the left path; my husband prefers the right path. This time, I choose to go along with him.

The sun’s intensity warms us less and less as the shadows begin to fall. Two ducks fly by overhead. We walk and walk and walk some more. We’ve been going in circles as it turns out. He grins and shrugs as we hit a dead end. We are dazed in the maze, unsure of which way to go now.

Laughter accompanies play. 

Joy is always a good companion to have along for the journey.

Children zoom back past us, shouting at their parents to join the fun. Bewildered faces mirror our own. We come upon another junction with fork after fork that probably leads to yet another loop. “Do you know the way?” the youngest of their brood asks as he points at a forbidden shortcut through the forest of corn. Just a few feet away, we clearly see another path but we can’t get there from here. The temptation is to cut through…yet signs warn us of the dire consequences of shortcuts….and I’m reminded of a few shortcuts that tempt me beyond the corn maze.

A late afternoon breeze rustles huskily in the dried corn. An ear of half-eaten corn, a squirrel’s afternoon snack, sits abandoned under the shadows of stalks. Next to it, an abandoned plastic cup, still full of lemonade. The path, strewn with trash, reminds us that civilization is just steps away from this corn crop puzzle. Bright yellow police tape cordons off the shortcut. A rabbit scurries through the tall rows, right under the tape. He takes any shortcut he desires. He can’t read the signs. We are frustrated that the rabbit can find a way through when we cannot.

On we wander. I go one way, my husband another. We find each other again at another dead end. We laugh and sigh at the same time. The beauty is literally all around us. Blue skies above, dark soil beneath, golden brown stalks of corn lining our path, merriment among children of all ages stuck in the wonder of a maze.

High above the field, a man oversees the entire maze from his perch in the metal cherry picker. At another fork in the maze, I look up, hoping for guidance. I catch his eye and he nods, a subtle reassurance that we are choosing well. When he nods, he seems like my best ally. Yet, at other times, he won’t even make eye contact. I feel caught in an endless knot of wrong turns.

Eventually, after an hour of dead ends, right turns, rabbits and kids hopping across the paths, wrong forks, loops upon loops within loops, we emerge at the maze’s exit, not even sure how we got here. We are, however, most certain we couldn’t easily find our way back through the maze again.

About sunset, we sit again on our deck, observing the corn maze in the distance.

Having partaken of the maze itself, the entire scene looks different.

We’ve engaged playfully among stalks and loops, under a blue October sky.

Deep in the maze, we know firsthand about the sound of corn husks in the breeze, dead ends on dusty paths, tempting shortcuts, disorientation from no landmarks or perspective, a sometimes present/sometimes silent overseer, and the pull of the crowd mentality versus going it alone or with just a few others. We also know the frolic of play, finding our way among corn stalks, which we so long only observed at a distant.

*****

Play: to engage in sport or recreation: FROLIC

*******

Walk past any playground and you will see a choice to be made.

An empty bench says, “Sit here. Observe.”

An empty playground says, “Come. Enjoy.”

The corn maze is but one of the playful adventures I’ve had lately with God.

What about you? What would happen if you had an afternoon of play with God?