On a soupy hot recent Saturday morning, four women ducked into the shade of the Gwynns Falls Trail to play in the woods.
Sheltered by the trees from the world outside, they looped string and copper wire through the branches, marked boulders with chalk and clay, and knotted pebbles into the foliage and arranged them on rocks. Using their creative intuition, the women decorated their corner of the woods, sometimes together and sometimes alone.
They call it the "stone game," and they play to create art and to connect with each other and the environment. And they play because they know that when their creation is complete, they can look at their artistic choices and learn about life.
"It slows you down and helps you see relationships," said Leslie Schwing, 56, a city artist and one of the game's inventors. "They say to bring out the brilliant mind, you have to put the ordinary mind aside."
The process and materials vary, but since Schwing and a friend first played the game in 1994, it has developed around a basic procedure. The players ask themselves a question, as specific or as vague as they choose. Then they collect objects that look interesting to them and arrange those objects on a board or in nature, often adding chalk marks to their designs. The players avoid metaphor and symbols -- such as hearts and stars -- that mean something. After they decide their work is complete, they stand back and see what insights they can glean from what they have created.
Sometimes the insights come unsolicited, such as last summer, the first time the game was played in nature as part of the Gwynns Falls Trail's Art on the Trail exhibit. The players asked no questions before arranging sticks, stones and sand by a stream. But when a violent storm washed it all away, they found plenty of answers.
"You have no control," said city artist Laura Vernon-Russell, 48.
"It's kind of a cosmic joke," Schwing said. "It helped us not be so identified with our games in the future."
Schwing and a friend, Janet Young of Highland, came up with the game while house-sitting for a friend on an Accokeek farm. They were discussing the nature of energy -- Young, who works with AIDS researchers at the National Institutes of Health, from a scientific point of view, and Schwing, from her artistic knowledge.
"We had done a meditation before, and so we did a walking meditation," Young said. Strolling along a trail leading to the Potomac River, the two began to pick up interesting stones, something they had always liked to do.
Arriving back at the farm, they put their stones on a picnic table and drank chardonnay as the sun set over the river.
"The fact that we were in that meditative state still, the stones seemed like they could be in a better position in relation to each other," Young said. "It was just a perfect time to open another part of ourselves."
They returned to their complex discussion while moving the stones around in what they later realized was a metaphyical process of their own.
"It seemed as though the stones were speaking to us and telling us the position they wanted to be in," Young said. "It wasn't magical, you know, it wasn't hocus-pocus, but it did bring out another side of us that is different from when you intellectually analyze something."
Neither can remember what answers that first game gave them about energy. But they do remember that, after they were done, they had a deeper understanding of the idea.
"We both just started thinking, 'I wonder if more people would be interested in this?'" Young said. And the stone game was born.
As the two started inviting their friends to play, it became apparent that the game was different from shaking a magic 8-ball. Schwing prefers to say that "it generates insight."
Joan Bull, 53, a computer programmer and musician from Kensington, said the kinds of questions she has asked before games are big and personal -- and so are the answers.
"It's never been, 'Should I buy that house?' and at the end, 'Yeah, I should,'" she said.
City architect Beverly Eisenberg, 54, said she often asks about directions she should take in her life and work. The game does not give her specific instructions, she said, but it clears her mind and helps her think.
"It would be great if you could look at the game and get all the answers," Eisenberg said.
The meaning doesn't just come from the finished product. Sometimes the game ends with players taking pieces away in reverse order, reliving and considering each move. The choices and conversation each player makes during the game is often more informative than the end result, players say.
"It gives us a greater understanding of each other," Eisenberg said.
Nor does all the meaning come at once. Players will sometimes e-mail one another for weeks afterward, discussing a particular game. Sometimes they will bring up games from years ago as they see new layers to what happened.
After the game started to stick, it was introduced into more circles, including city art galleries, artistic workshops and art classes. But the games with non-artists have been among the most memorable.
Schwing recalls a game with a group of managers in Washington's Dupont Circle. True to stereotype, the businessmen could only make squares with their pebbles and chalk.
"And then one of them made a bold move, and then they all started taking risks and stuff," Schwing said, laughing.
"I'd be interested to find out if insurance salesmen would like this game," Eisenberg said.
Players have also experimented with materials, at times using magazine cutouts, rubber stamps or, once, objects on the table at a Fells Point restaurant.
That time, the waitress came over to find the silverware artistically arranged with the salt and pepper shakers, Young said.
"The woman thought it was really funny," she said. "We told her about the stone game, and we had a good laugh."
The game is expanding. Young is creating a Web site, helped by the game's core players. Vernon-Russell takes photos of each game for a book the group is planning. Some players have been approached by outsiders -- a few colleges, nurses at a local hospital -- looking to use the game as an ice-breaker or a team-building exercise.
"All these people say, 'Oh, you could make something commercial out of this,' " Schwing said. "It's a cool process and it should be shared, but we don't want someone to lift it and run off with it and turn it into something it's not."
As the game has changed, so have some of its players. Young, who is used to thinking in scientific terms, says it helps her connect with the other side of her brain. Bull, who is used to expressing her creativity through music, says it helps her think visually. Vernon-Russell says the game's collaborative nature has helped her get along with other people. "I got kicked out of Girl Scouts," she said. "I mean, I'm not a group person."
After she started playing the game, she joined the same artists' cooperative to which Schwing and Eisenberg belong.
"That was a big step for me," she said as she stood among the Gwynns Falls trees, contemplating her next move as the recent Saturday morning game wound down.
In this particular game, the others' personalities and passions became apparent. Admitting that she had broken the prohibition on representation, Bull strung some copper wires she identified as guitar strings. Schwing, who makes jewelery, twisted the copper into circles and then realized she might have been thinking of bracelets.
They had not articulated a question before the game, but this one was about understanding and explaining why they played, they said.
"Every move that was made here was meant to facilitate that understanding," Vernon-Russell said.
And afterward, they said there was not one concrete answer, but part of it was about understanding each other's backgrounds -- the guitars, the bracelets, the Girl Scout fiascos.
They're all busy with jobs and families, but the women will try to play the game at Gwynns Falls once or twice more before the exhibit ends in September, they say.
"It has been for me an endless fascination," Schwing said. "I have never gotten tired of it since I started the first one."
alia.malik@baltsun.com