pages: RecreationandParkCommission/2019-09-12.pdf, 71
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RecreationandParkCommission | 2019-09-12 | 71 | From: Claire Mathieson To: Amy Wooldridge Subject: Please Forward to Recreation and Park Commissioners for 9/12 Agenda Item 7c Date: Wednesday, September 11, 2019 4:09:38 PM CAUTION: This email message is coming from a non-City email address. Do not click links or open attachments unless you trust the sender and know the content is safe. Please contact the Help Desk with any questions. *** Dear Commissioners, My name is Claire Mathieson, and I have been a resident of Park Avenue since 2000, when I was a student at Otis Elementary School. I love Jackson Park because it is such a free, open space; each day the park has many different kinds of visitors, and they are each able to use its blank green canvas to make it their own. When I was a child here, we did not have a playground, but we did not miss one either; we loved making up our own games. I have no significant childhood memories of playing on playgrounds; however, some of my favorite memories feature games that my friends and I invented - light stick tag, which my neighbors and I made up and played often in Jackson Park; concocting Harry Potter-esque potions from mud, grass, and leaves and using sticks as magic wands; drawing elaborate chalk obstacle courses on asphalt and spending days working through the challenges together. Jackson Park is a unique place, a park that doesn't prescribe a way for children to play but rather provides them with a perfect, natural, open space where they can bring their own imaginations together to create endless fun and enrichment in the present and wonderful memories for the future. I think creativity is one of the most wondrous traits we have, and preserving natural, distraction-free places like Jackson Park is essential to nourish creative thinking in an age when so much of what we do is fed to us through screens. Last year I participated in a creativity retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin, and one of the teachers raised a point that really stuck with me. We seem to have so many options now, with endless apps and gadgets at our fingertips. However, the teacher said, all of those things are part of a "menu" that offers us a large - but limited and prescribed - set of choices. What's most precious, most overlooked, and most worth seeking out is what's not on the menu, what we find or create for ourselves beyond the list of choices - like chalk maps and potions whose recipes only my friends and I know. For me, Jackson Park as a wide, green, some-might-say plain open space is the world beyond the menu, a world that we can make our own, a world in which children don't automatically find themselves climbing on a play structure made for them by adults but rather create a different play structure every day, every minute - one that is constantly in flux, a marvelous combination of the natural world and their own awesome imaginations. I hope that the children of this neighborhood will continue to have the same opportunities I had to use their inborn creativity to forge bonds with each other, with the natural world, and with their future selves, who - if my own experience is anything to go by -will treasure the precious memories of the time when their friends wielded lightsabers and wizards hid behind trees. Sincerely, Claire Mathieson | RecreationandParkCommission/2019-09-12.pdf |