Shepard for the Day.7

"The play space--trees, shrubs, paths, hidings, climbings--is a visible, structured entity, another prototype of relationships that hold.  It is the primordial terrain in which games of imitating adults lay another groundwork for a dependable world. 

 They prefigure a household, so that, for these children of mobile hunter-gatherers, no house is necessary to structure and symbolize social status.  Individual trees and rocks that were also known to parents and grandparents are enduring counterplayers having transcendent meaning later in life."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p. 8