I am here with my pencil alongside parallel, as being—idea, word, echo, heartbeat, friend. Some beings fly through quickly or push with insistence. Others linger softly, ever-present, phantom limbs of remembering.
Parallel has been lingering—speaking to me in wisps, revealing her fields, threads, and pores. Her voice and offerings have become clearer over the past few years. Or, as she tells me as I write this, I have become clearer (and emptier) so I may listen.
Parallel is a lifetime being for me. We all have these—the words, glimpses, places, creatures, objects, sounds, wishes, and questions who were born with us and stay with us. The through-lines of a life in a body in a place in a slice of time. Often obvious and ordinary, they live in the words we speak so frequently that we hardly know we’re speaking them. Beings like air—essential and invisible.
Invisible until we listen. Until we attune to them and bow in praise to them and unfold what we think we know of them. Until we pause and say hello and let it be the first meeting with a new friend. Until we surrender to revision and let the being guide us to resee ourselves.
I am telling you a story.
I am telling of process that is real and true and tangible. I am telling how I know parallel to be as material as my pencil and as alive as you.
I’m not writing about parallel play as an intellectual idea.
I’m writing about parallel from my experience of parallel. From my experience playing next to children, my experience noticing children play parallel to each other, and my experience living and creating alongside other beings.
The term “parallel play” has been, and continues to be, used in contexts of learning as a phase of child development, as if playing side-by-side with another being is a step along a continuum of engagement or interaction. I’m not writing against this contextual use of the term, either. I’m writing because I know from the deepest layers of my experience that…
parallel play is more than this. Much more.
I’ve learned that telling stories of expanded ways of being is essential for how we work with more-than-human-beings as they breathe, spiral, network, and root. When I began to speak aloud about pre-tend-ing a few years ago, I felt a rising well of reciprocal energy between my being and pretend, and expanded access to the aliveness (the real-ness) of everything. It also felt risky at the time, as if notions of real vs. pretend were stabilizing beams in the architecture of our world(view).
Parallel feels similar to me in its openings and the collapse of worldviews it potentiates.
Side-by-side. Next to. On the same plane but never meeting.
Notice what this means to you. How you observe it as physical matter or mathematics.
Let this be what it is. There’s no need to justify or explain.
Take a breath. Soften.
Sense yourself as a point of matter on a plane.
Sense any other point of matter anywhere near or far from you—perhaps a bird on a pole outside your window, your dog at your feet, memory of your grandmother, a crack in your teacup, the sound of a neighbor’s door, a dream of another house in another place, the voice you hear in your dreams.
Maybe close your eyes.
Stay with your sensing of each point.
Stay in the space between.
Notice here.
Parallel opens the space between two points.
It expands the near and far, the in and out. Plane as field as flame as mist. Endless and defined. Alive and unholdable.
Let us spiral back to the parallel play of children.
Attune to a memory of a scene of two children near each other, maybe building with blocks, drawing, or digging in soil. Notice what you see and hear. Notice what you don’t see or hear.
What we don’t see or hear externally is the matter that matters most for meaningful engagement and connection.
Notice how this sentence feels in your body. Notice what you see and hear. Notice what you don’t see or hear.
What we observe in any scene is barely a whisper in the rich landscape of engagement. The interconnection between two children (or any beings) emerges through multidimensional threads. The shared space within a parallel frame allows each child’s inner threads to weave and play freely from the wholeness of who they are.
Parallel is inviting us to notice what we don’t yet see or hear or understand of a parallel frame.
Parallel is guiding us to revise ourselves and deepen how we notice scenes of engagement.
I’m inside this revision, too. I’m only now finding the language to speak and write about layers of parallel that I’ve been wondering about, and playing with, for many years. And I’m curious about how parallel is interconnected with the potent alchemies of the toroidal field, the consciousness of water, the strength of triangles, the science of awe, the power of our attention, and the infinite aliveness of every small thing.
As the world is breaking… we are dissolving and we are emerging.
How we attune, and how we support children to stay attuned to what they know, is everything.
For the rest of February, I’ll continue to share wonderings and stories of parallel in various contexts, including children’s play and learning engagement; adult-child and adult-adult connections; community gathering and collective work; and individual (“solitary”) creative process. If you’re interested in such explorations, I invite you to join as a weekly subscriber.
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as listening awe, Melissa
Learn more about me and my work: melissaabutler.com
Let’s work together: parents | educators | community leaders | 1:1
If you aren’t already listening to The Telepathy Tapes, I highly recommend venturing into the landscape of this beautiful podcast of stories.
A course to explore and practice ways to more deeply listen to children and attune to liberation.
Join anytime. We’ve had our opening online gathering, but we’ve only just begun. The primary material of the course is asynchronous and layered for you to explore on your own. Each week adds depth and nuance, but there’s no way to ever be “behind” or “miss out” because we’re working with frequency and the aliveness of spirals. No matter when you join, you’ll have access to everything that’s been shared so far (including relevant audio excerpts from the online gatherings), so you can jump in, explore, and follow your intuition where you’re guided. Our circle is open… come on in, if you feel called.
Learn more: Children Whole and Free
If you’d like some support for your nervous system, I recommend the Radiant Rest Podcast with Tracee Stanley. Here’s a recent episode with Tracee in conversation with Octavia Raheem.
Together, we are creating a more beautiful world.
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Who knew parallel play could be so powerful. I think we all know this intuitively, and to your point, when this happens between two kids. But maybe we’ve forgot to rely on our intuition?