King of the Hill

When I was a ginger eight my many cousins and I liked to play King On The Mountain, or at least the older and stronger enjoyed being on top of a grassy mound as lesser beings formed military alliances further magnifying their/our winning majesty in this empire-struggling win/lose game Engaged in our playful struggle so long as autonomous individuals and cooperative team members continued to win often enough to retain recreative tension about push and shove battle outcomes. Issues of patriarchy with feminist trust levels did not emerge as I recall, although this may be because we were cousins already well acclimated to our sensory/sensual diversity and recreational integrity for resilient play without anyone getting seriously hurt, emotionally or physically, spiritually or naturally. Patriarchal offenses and retaining the established King's defensive power over all comers may be more of an issue for long-exercised narcissists in immature adult full-bloom rabidity, speaking and doing viral negative degenerative pushes and shoves, name calling and invitations to go back home rather than respect for curiously light and warmly patient tenacity, trying to become King of the Mountain cooperatively together. Somehow we found enough emotional room for everyone at the top or the bottom. We came to trust each other enough to know and feel critical differences between sometimes winning and sometimes losing degenerative/regenerative in-between tension lapsing toward probable lose/lose chaos and win/win recreative intention of contests balancing autonomous competition with interdependent cooperation Creative and recreative strategies to keep our hill full of healthy opportunity to share times of aristocratic self-empowering supremacy in a challenging, yet freely engaged, game market that all my cousins would continue investing in so long as each win/lose struggler continues to feel reassured cared for and with more than plotted against dissonant, deviant and dismissed as too obvious disempowered loser. When this role play exercise ended we would all go back to becoming the same ego characters, personalities primal relatives derived from ecosystems that our mothers have trans-generationally born So we would have each other to play King of Mountains, Queen of the Romantic Ball, and Who Can Spit Watermelon Seeds furthest, most accurately, with the highest graceful arc, with the least and loudest spitting noise, etc. If we had known King Of The Capitalist Hill is the only local through global Game of win/lose power on an overcrowded planet, I wonder if our trust in win/win interdependent healthy outcomes would remain so robustly influential to our affiliative strategies, personal and communal, embracing extending compassionate cousin empowering feelings.