Is Play the Creative Process of Our Universe?

"Love isn't a state of perfect caring," wrote Mister Rogers. "It is an active noun like struggle."I hate to quibble with the great man, but love and struggle are also verbs. The English language is already largely comprised of nouns, which is, as Robin Wall-Kimmerer commented in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, "appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things."Physicist Carlo Rovelli tells us that the theory of quantum mechanics, the core theory of modern physics, "does not describe things as they 'are': it describes how things 'occur,' and how they 'interact with each other'." In other words, our entire physical universe is not comprised of things at all, but rather interactions, processes, and systems, which is to say verbs. We don't live in a world of objects, but rather "a world of events."The language of the Potawatomi people of what is today the Great Lakes region of North America, is a language of verbs. It's estimated that 70 percent of their words are action words. "When bay is…