When he disappears, he disappears behind the walnut door to his room—the door, it seems, must always be closed to seal him in his private capsule—and then there's the sound of banging and rummaging in the closet, the padding of feet, and the sudden jangly spill of Lego bricks. And that's it. We won't see him for two, three, four hours. He doesn't eat, he doesn't drink. We'll crack the door to make sure he's alive, and there in that slim line of light we can see the crown of his head bowed in concentration. His hands read the pieces off the floor like Braille, without his eyes having to see, and a flying machine suddenly materializes, or the minifigures amass for battle or celebration. Often he is making it up as he goes, talking to this world in low, sweet tones. Until the enemy arrives, or the monsters. Then his voice gets growly and a war ensues with the shattering of brick, one of the dangerous costs of believing in the permanence of your own self-made utopia. He is teaching himself a great deal about this world of ours, things we can't teach him ourselves. So—we retreat. He builds more. Dinner now, we call five times. And again. When he emerges, he's spent but smiling, half-here. He pushes a pea around his plate, eats nothing. When it's over, and he's cleared his dishes, he pads quickly back upstairs, the door bumps shut, another jangle of sound, the colored bricks, and he's gone again.

But where?

So let this be a story about trying to find my son, and a whole lot of other kids, young and old, wherever they go, behind the walnut door. And let it begin in a storage closet in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, New York, with a massive yellow duck. It's a mini monster, this duck, almost exactly like Ernie's rubber ducky from Sesame Street, but made out of nearly 25,000 Lego bricks—and the size of a Shetland pony. When I first saw it, when I came face to face with its peaceable expression of innocent no-thought and its adorable citrine bill, I couldn't help myself: I blurted out a laugh. More like an inadvertent snort, then laughter. Who would ever think to make such a thing? The answer was Sean Kenney, a youthful 38-year-old maker with reddish hair and blue eyes. In fact, up until the duck moment, I'd been having a somewhat serious conversation with Kenney about his lifelong obsession with Lego bricks and, more specifically, about how, in his work as a Lego artist and entrepreneur, his medium—these bricks—seemed so primitive and regressive, well … so childlike.

But underneath, of course, I was also wondering: Why? Why was this nearly middle-aged man still playing—or getting to play—with Lego bricks?

"A lot of us makers are just trying to do something that's never been seen before."

Kenney didn't disagree with the bricks being childlike. He wouldn't even call himself an artist, as he feels he's still playing after thirty-something years. When asked at what age he first began messing around with Lego bricks, there was no hesitation. His earliest memory of life itself was at 2 in a New Jersey suburb, surrounded by a loving family (his dad a rabid DIYer), on the floor with them: the rainbow colors, the feel, the satisfying interlocking click. He was like a bionic person half made of Lego bricks. Or his psyche was. On his website he calls himself a professional kid. What was that? And where might the rest of us sign up?

And yet right here before my eyes was visible proof that Kenney wasn't some sort of Pee-wee Herman: this gargantuan rubber ducky, retailing for a staggering $39,000. "I compare it to getting your car fixed," Kenney said. "It's never the parts that cost that much, it's the labor."

What Kenney was so good at describing, besides this world he'd created for himself, the one in which he spends every hour of the workday behind the door of his studio assembling huge Lego models (eight-foot hummingbirds and life-size polar bears, or making little Lego lamps with the help of eleven hired assistants), what so few can put into words when it comes to the iconic building toy, is the strange thing that happens with the accrual of rectangular bricks (yellow rubber duckies! eight-foot hummingbirds!) and how evidence of these strange things can be found everywhere in plain sight when you begin to really pay attention.

"I think a lot of us makers are just trying to do something that's never been seen before," Kenney said. "Sometimes we're doing it just for each other, to inspire each other. It's like a conversation. How far can you push it? Can you surprise even yourself?"

Landon Nordeman

I knew something about surprise, for in pursuing this story, I'd already bumped into a six-foot simulacrum of Mark Twain made out of Lego bricks in Hartford, Connecticut, and a life-size Queen Elizabeth II (in snowy palette) and Prince William (in regal red and royal blue) built from the same in London. I had met a young guy—another maker—who kept building bigger and bigger robotic models, just for fun, until he was hired by various companies at the age of 24 to model factories out of Lego bricks before the companies went ahead and built them for real. And I'd bedded down in a Lego-themed hotel at Legoland in Billund, Denmark, where in the lobby there was a massive, Smaug-like Lego dragon, a Darth Vader, and Stormtroopers, and where at breakfast there was such a happy crush of rampaging runtlings, all ricocheting around with primitive Lego creations in hand, you could scarcely reach the pastry table.

Along the way, too, my son—the one who'd spent his boyhood behind that walnut door building with Legos but who was now 14 and seemingly outgrowing the toy—came with me to Billund, where the bricks were first manufactured in 1949, and for the better part of a week he forwent his increasingly exciting social life and constructed stuff out of Lego bricks again. After returning home, while sifting through some old boxes, I came upon a lost photo of my son with a Lego skyscraper he'd made when he was 9, a simple tower nearly seven feet tall, him beaming just as he had when he'd shown me a spacecraft he'd built with wings and a control room a few days earlier, in our pirate-themed room in Legoland.

The same expression, the same boy.

Perhaps it takes a place as orderly as Denmark and a rather sleepy town like Billund, in the interior of the Jutland peninsula, to have given birth to the Lego legend. You can actually hear your own thoughts here among the salmon streams and beech trees. And without much else to do, the imagination has room to take its powerful precedence too.

In the case of Ole Kirk Christiansen, master carpenter and joiner, there seems to have been a lot to think about, and imagine as well. His story's been told before, and certainly burnished, but it bears repeating: According to company lore, having bought a modest furniture factory in 1916, Ole Kirk built a dairy and church for the town. And with wooden scraps from the factory, he began to make toys, formalizing the operation in 1934 with the name Lego, adapted from the Danish leg godt, which means play well. Making toys was less an act of whimsy than of priority and business proposition—and his vision, it would seem, was communal from the start. With the death of his wife, Ole Kirk was left with four young sons to educate and entertain. At first the toys were simple: a painted duck with wheels, a truck. And yet his restless mind led him to a manufacturing fair in England after World War II, where he was introduced to a device known as the Windsor SH Plastic Moulding Machine. He became the first to buy and bring one back to Denmark.

It had all the makings of a folly or a fairy tale: The widowed toymaker living in a house in the middle of town with his four boys, spending his money and time on a machine that might spit out these plastic bricks he had in mind. But by then the boys were grown and the toy company had close to fifty employees. Already Lego was playing with the idea of exporting its wooden toys, as well as diversifying—that is, making toys in plastic. Ole Kirk called his new product Automatic Binding Bricks, which were cribbed in part from the British Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks. Like the Kiddicraft bricks, Ole Kirk's were at first hollow plastic rectangles. He sold them in four colors, only in Denmark, without the interior tubes that would soon revolutionize everything.

Today the company is still family owned, primarily by Ole Kirk's grandson Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, who, according to Forbes, has a personal fortune of nearly $10 billion. (Even in the recession of 2008, as the toy industry died on the vine, Lego profits were up 31.5 percent. Last year, as further evidence of the brand's enduring popularity, The Lego Movie grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide.) In the center of town, the toymaker's original house is now a quaint museum called the Idea House, and one exhibit shows Ole Kirk's mind working on the initial problem of building a better brick. A patent application itemizes at least twelve designs with which the company was experimenting, or perhaps claiming as its own to block future competition. What emerged from this cogitation was the simple, if multifarious, Lego brick as we know it, with its familiar, almost primitive interior tubes and studded surface, which, when attached to another brick, creates instant stability and what the Lego people call clutch power. In other words, small hands can attach and unattach the bricks with this "stud-and-tube coupling system," while the bricks are strong enough to build with, sometimes elaborately.

Landon Nordeman

From the start the toy exploded in the marketplace. By 1958, the year that the stud-and-tube coupling system was patented (and the year Ole Kirk died, passing final control of the company to his son Godtfred, who was already developing a unified "system of play" for the company by creating a standard brick that could be used in every set made thereafter), Lego had 140 employees. Two years later the company abandoned wooden toys altogether, when it had 450 employees in Billund alone and eight foreign satellites. By the early sixties one employee could work two plastic molding machines at once, and production continued to expand with play kits and minifigures (born in 1978), as well as an array of new pieces, products, and eventual movie tie-ins. Today Lego employs nearly 14,000 people, is sold in 130 countries, and has roughly thirty product lines (from Lord of the Rings kits to Lego Mindstorms, from which one can build motorized robots). Having opened new factories in China, the Czech Republic, and Mexico, the company now makes more than 55 billion Lego elements a year out of 4,200 tons of ABS, a thermoplastic polymer. It's said there are about a hundred bricks per person on earth.

"People will tell you they have their own path to playing with Legos," said Michael McNally, a company spokesman. "Everybody has different sets. I began with Legoland, the town, and I love Lego Architecture. Someone else loves Star Wars. Or Mindstorms. People like to talk about the infinite with this system, but it's also very limited because [the brick] is a rigid geometric form. So the idea that you can look at something finite and see infinite possibilities in it, and believe you can make something round out of it even though it's square, is very hard to explain. I think in other cultures we might have rounded the edges because someone wanted them round, but I think there's something to this idea of discipline and restraint that almost liberates these forms. Lego bricks can be anything you imagine them to be. That's really their appeal."

It's said there are about a hundred bricks per person on earth.

This not-knowing-the-mystery, as well as the creative act of bending the material, or reshaping its shape to match the one in mind, may partially lie at the heart of Lego's greater addictive appeal too. And perhaps it's a Danish diffidence, an under-assumption about what the company is really meant to do for its customers (after some dangerous years of over-assuming, years that nearly led to bankruptcy during the early 2000s), that leaves an open space for us, the makers.

During my visit to world headquarters, in Billund, I repeatedly met with people—make that employees who've made Lego bricks their life work—who also struggle to understand the exact algorithm for the brick's ubiquity. Headquarters here are modest-looking, low-slung buildings made mostly of yellowish brick, and because the town is so sleepy, many of the employees commute up to an hour each way from bigger towns. The company culture is decidedly unpretentious—and employees really do seem to subscribe to the 11 Paradoxes of Management listed on a placard hung in every Lego manager's office, these three, among others, calling for individuals "to be a visionary—and to keep both feet firmly on the ground. To be self-confident—and humble. To take the lead—and to recede into the background."

Landon Nordeman

Lego clearly isn't an oblivious collective of elves making a magic toy. "This is our heart and soul," said Roar Rude Trangbæk, Lego press officer, while giving me a tour of the factory, a fully modern, automated, fifteen-acre warehouse replete with 750 of the latest versions of that old Windsor SH Plastic Moulding Machine. Working off computers, the machines purred in a low hum, fed by pipes teeming with ABS pellets. When heated and liquefied, the material fills a mold, cools to its particular shape, and then is ejected in that jangle of color, cheap jewels filling bins until they're swept away by robots, destined for whatever particular set will excite its clamoring fans or offer complete satiation on Christmas morning. But even in its unceasing production, the Lego brick is animated by ten tenets, first codified by Godtfred in 1963. It seems a lot to put on a piece of plastic, but in boiled-down corporate bites these are:

1. Unlimited play potential

2. For girls and for boys

3. Fun for every age

4. Year-round play

5. Healthy, quiet play

6. Long hours of play

7. Development, imagination, creativity

8. The more Lego, the greater the value

9. Extra sets available

10. Quality in every detail

In the conversations that ensued at world headquarters, I noticed some recurring themes: Most employees claimed an early love for playing with Lego bricks (that they, too, were the boy or girl behind the walnut door); evoked their bosses, the Kristiansen family, with glowing, if slightly cultish, praise; emphasized the low-key, inclusive company philosophy that continues to highlight the educational rewards of playing with Lego bricks; and spoke to the need for corporate secrecy regarding future plans and ongoing research ("We don't necessarily feel we're competing with other toys or games," said one employee, but he clamped shut when asked with whom or what Lego was competing, then); and ended each conversation somewhere between the twenty-third and thirtieth minute with a somewhat brusque insistence on how busy they were. At a company in forward motion, and with pressure to produce during the relatively sane number of hours in the Danish workday, there seemed little time for floaty reflection or declarative me-statements here. The folks at world headquarters are happy to leave that up to others. Meanwhile everything's on an egg timer, and you can almost hear the sucking sound of an incredibly lucrative enterprise needing their attention to maximize profit. If there was a disappointment, at least for me, it was that, except for the designers, none of the adults here seem to have any real time to play.

Afterward, several Lego employees asked me if I'd cried on my visit there

At one point, back at the Idea House, I was led into what the Lego people call the Archive, but it might best pass as the Stacks of Past Memory. These are huge, hand-cranked bookshelves, more or less divvied up by decade, containing almost every Lego set ever made. It's an astonishing thing, really, and some of the most obscure kits were bought on eBay. Found down here are the first Lego Mursten (or Building Bricks), and the Big Town set from 1961, and the automated Lego train and Lego Space from the 1970s. The stacks from the eighties and nineties bring an assortment of Duplo products (the bigger Lego brick) and Lego Mindstorms, while the 2000s lean more heavily on the action figures and movie tie-ins, from the Vikings sets to the Harry Potter set scenes. And let there be no doubt, somewhere in this plastic cornucopia is the game or set that once belonged to you too.

It's said that people get lost in the Archive for hours. In fact, afterward, several Lego employees asked me if I'd cried on my visit there. (I hadn't, but when my son came upon the Millennium Falcon in the 2000s stack, the first big Lego kit he ever completed on his own, he gave a little yelp of joy.) They asked because either they themselves had—or they'd heard the many poignant stories of others who, when confronted with the Lego set of their youth, had had a sort of Wild Strawberries moment, powerfully recollecting the hours spent lost in the pure pleasure of this particular kit or remembering the person by whose hand they'd been given the gift … and then they'd found themselves absolutely overcome by this wave of strange joy/sadness, or grief/elation, or whatever it was that only a simple, infinite plastic brick could mysteriously evoke in a person reaching backwards in time for something there/not there, namely his childhood.

Landon Nordeman

A few weeks later, back on this side of the ocean, I took a New England road trip. At each stop—at MIT's Media Lab to meet with renowned educator Mitchel Resnick, at the bustling Lego Model Shop in Enfield, Connecticut, and in New York City, hive of Lego makers—I was met with a blast of effusion. Though I was talking to grownups, it felt over and over again as if I were entering through the door of some geeked-out kid's room, one towering with Lego inventions and scattered bricks everywhere and the breathless monomania of perpetual youth. There was something in the primitivism of it all, the clicking bricks and blocky figures, the sophistication and simplicity, the splendor and rusticity that links the present and the past, that created some deeper disturbance of comfort.

Situated near the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT's Media Lab is a glass-and-metal building where Resnick, perched on the fourth floor, resides in a world of inquiry meant to lead today's kids to new, sticky learning experiences. Among other things, he and his team have developed a computer program called Scratch, which enables children to make their own video games, animation, and interactive art. "We're always about kids creating, building, designing, and inventing," Resnick said. Dating back to 1985—when Lego first struck up a partnership with MIT—the Media Lab has made the Lego brick one of its primary focuses. In fact it was Resnick and his research group who came up with the idea of the programmable brick, which contained an embedded computer capable of controlling a Lego model. They created bricks with chips. The result of their work, in turn, led to the first iteration of the Lego Mindstorms line.

"What I think is special about Lego is this idea of structure plus freedom."

(The agreement between the corporation and the university appears clear-cut: Lego donates an unspecified amount of money each year—beyond the $5 million it earmarked in 1999 for Resnick's connected Lego Learning Lab—while having access to the research that comes as a result of its investment. That is, beyond Lego's donation, MIT doesn't benefit from any applications it develops for, or with, Lego bricks, though Lego supports the lab's research into, among other things, smart materials, embedded computing, and attempts to understand how and what children learn through play and develop new ways to make their playtime more expansive. The company also provided seed money for the Playful Invention Company, founded by Resnick's colleagues, in order to test more ideas in the marketplace.)

As part of the partnership, Resnick finds himself in Billund four or five times a year—and guides his own research by the Lego mantra of "Joy of building. Pride of creation." "What I think is special about Lego," he said, "is this idea of structure plus freedom. You can have fun with modeling clay, but Lego provides structure. The material itself—a 2×4 brick—is freedom and structure. It's not absolute freedom: Here are the bricks, build anything. And it's not: Here are the instructions, you can only build to the specifications. That's not great either. We want kids to imagine new worlds but have some structure in order to build them."

Landon Nordeman

Resnick continued, "One of the things I like about The Lego Movie is the core message: Don't just follow the instructions. Be creative. The best learning experiences will come when the kids are the designers, when kids aren't just watching and listening but creating. Of course we always learn from watching too. If a movie is inspiring kids to become builders, creators, designers, I think there's a great role for it. One thing I worry about with new technology—computers and gaming—is that people talk about interactivity, but if interactivity is just moving a joystick and pushing buttons to control a character on the screen, that's not joy of building or pride of creation."

If we are headed toward a future in which increasingly complex digital–physical integration will become the norm in play, Lego officials seem unfazed. "The way we look at it is simple," said Lego spokesman Michael McNally, picking up two bricks and sticking them together: "This is the same as this." He pretended to swipe his finger over a glass screen. "The user is still a kid and a creator. We have a more profound understanding of the digital than we did ten years ago. Instead of panicking that the tactile toy will never survive, we realize that kids want the tactile and digital to work together. It's not discrete, it's complementary."

Nowhere is this symbiosis of digital and tactile clearer than when one scrapes the maker subculture that barnacles the hull of the Lego enterprise. In some ways it's the most exaggerated actualization of Resnick's clarion call for active players—and refutes the notion that Lego bricks lose their primacy when kids develop typical teenage interests, or that there's some predictable demographic for enthusiasts. If anything, Lego makers are fully grown adults, and the culture thrives both inside the company and out, at conventions and online fan sites and in places like the Lego Group's U.S. headquarters in Enfield, where up to two dozen model builders work to fill company requests from around the world. Among the deadlines of the moment when I visited in the fall was a massive Lego model of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., that will be more than twenty-five feet long and will be displayed as part of the traveling Lego Americana Roadshow, which will also include a sixteen-foot Washington Monument and a sprawling White House with both East and West wings. The master builders, as they're called, are of a kind: happy to bounce between working at the computer, where they design and "concept," and building with the bricks themselves. And way more than happy to dedicate several months of their time perfecting, say, a life-size Buzz Lightyear or rakish Jack Sparrow.

"We realize that kids want the tactile and digital to work together."

"I get to be a rock star without the hassle of people knowing who I am," said Pete Donner, the design manager here, with a playful smile. His computer screen showed a koala bear that will attach to a thirty-foot Lego Christmas tree to be sent to Australia as part of a holiday show, then in what Donner called "low poly phase." He began his Lego life being into "giant gorillas, dinosaurs, and all that sci-fi stuff like robots and spaceships." Seventeen years ago, in 1997, he heard they needed extra hands at the workshop. At that time everything was analog. "People would grab a bunch of bricks and just start building," he said. By 2001, however, the switch to digital brought the use of 2D and 3D images to help the modelers. "It suddenly became more like sculpting with clay," said Donner. After eleven years of building, he was elevated to designer as well, a job he claims to be the best in the world, something you hear often among those who make their living working among Lego bricks.

"I go to Disneyland and see people—parents and kids—who are really excited about what we've built," he said. "And I get to spend my life chasing the creative urge. I used to go out on the road a lot, and, inevitably, a kid would come up to me at this or that show with the same ten bricks that sit in front of me every day, and I'd be like, 'How did you know those could go like that?' "

The infinite again. (Or at least the multimillionite, as it's been calculated that there are more than 900 million possible combinations for six eight-stud bricks.) "I marvel every day at how much can be done with something relatively simple," Donner said. "But you also have thousands of elements that all work together. It has transcended being a toy into something else, which is anything you want it to be."

And this is exactly what lies at the heart of what Sean Kenney—he of yellow rubber ducky—said is the maker's drive "to create something that's never been created before, just because it's a cool thing to make." Forget the cost of the sets or the corporate billions made, all the numbers and studies and thinking on it, all the people at headquarters working the spreadsheets and future plans and origin stories. This is what it always boils down to: mind, fingers, bricks. A lightning storm in the left lobe. A compulsion to build and express.

In the end it's the bricks that speak.

Sean Kenny Landon Nordeman

Kenney remembers a time when he was 20, when his mother was cleaning out his childhood bedroom. He took all of his Lego bricks back to college, and in his dorm room, with two other roommates, began building an elaborate city, mostly like the one across the river: New York. "They made fun of me for about two days," he said. He started giving himself all sorts of rules. A building couldn't be wider than it was tall, for instance. "Then when I'd return from class, I'd see they'd been playing too. There were alien invasions. Or I'd find the heads of all the minifigures in a pile, and just crack up."

Kenney's obsession carried through, even when he was working a six-figure office job. "I gave myself a $200-a-month budget to spend on Legos. I made a deal with myself that I'd spend it all or lose it. If I had $30 at the end of the month, I'd just buy a bunch of doors and windows and see what I could do with them." What he found was that there was a not-so-underground community of others exactly like him, posting their creations to the Internet, people who blew him away. One guy named Mike Doyle was building a mystical world called Odan, with a master plan calling for 200,000 Lego pieces. In order to fund part of it, he raised almost $10,000 on Kickstarter. "He's created some unbelievably beautiful things you've never seen before," Kenney said. "It's inspiring. Some of them are like oil paintings." That, he said, is a large part of the maker movement, throwing stuff out there in hopes of moving people somehow "with the purity of interlocking bricks."

And when you delve a little, all kinds of people, it seems, are on their own interesting Lego trip. The White Stripes have a music video for "Fell in Love With a Girl," all in Lego stop-motion animation, while one of The Guardian website's most popular sections is called "Brick-by-brick," in which sports highlights, mostly soccer related, are re-created by stop-action Lego figures. Another maker, David Pagano, has created his own acclaimed animated franchise of "brickfilms," called Little Guys!, while Brendan Powell Smith has authored a book called Assassination! with the subtitle The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve U.S. Presidents. (Its high/low point is a scene-by-scene re-creation of the Kennedy assassination, ending with Lego Kennedy grasping for a red blotch at his neck while Lego Jackie clambers to help.) On YouTube there are Lego reimaginings of everything from World War II battles (one D-Day video has over 10 million views) to cool skateboard crashes (nearly 5 million views).

"I get to be a rock star without the hassle of people knowing who I am."

So why does Lego, the name and the brick itself, lurk in the imagination, and in our lives, long after toys like the Yo-Yo Ball and Micro Machines Zbots have faded? And in an age of Xbox and PS4, in the Time of Our Digital Panoply, why are those simple bricks more popular now than ever before, racking up more than $1 billion in profits for the Lego Group in 2013?

I wonder too: Does the answer partly lie in the work of a German artist named Jan Vormann, whom one can find online, roaming the world, spackling holes in crumbling city walls with rainbow Lego-brick constructions? Is that the reason that Legos resonate for us—because we need rainbow patching too? Is it that life isn't this precise Pixar rendition, but blocky and striving and shape-shifting, and in the simplicity of the Lego brick we find a certain physical, intellectual, and spiritual release?

Sean Kenny Landon Nordeman

Kenney, for his part, seems to believe there is something cosmic at work. "For some of us, it's hard to imagine anything but this," he says. He holds up two Lego bricks in yellow and blue. "These are puzzle pieces, and this is how everything connects. It's like this little atomic block of the universe. Sometimes I think, what if I couldn't do this anymore? What if Lego has a CEO years from now who says we have to stop, who says we're infringing on the company's copyright? I don't know what I'd do. This has been my whole life. Would I go back and make toys? Or real houses? I don't know." Kenney grows pensive, glances at the floor-to-ceiling shelves containing his world, thousands of Lego bricks, some from his own childhood.

"I love slogging through all the creative problems," he says, lighting up again. "We were doing a hummingbird recently, and we were, like, three weeks behind, and I was up on a ladder building, in the thick of it again, something was squirking out here, and over here we had to lift and support and shim things.

"It seems weird to say, but I was in heaven."

So, where is he?

Right here, it turns out, behind the walnut door again, where he's always been. The time is right now, today, and my son just turned 15. Fifteen! He will soon have his driver's permit. He's interested in many things besides Lego. And yet here he is, making a Lego forest, enacting a chase scene. When I knock, he allows me in. He's happy to share what he's made, tolerates me fiddling with a few bricks as he adds to the forest. Besides the mechanical exercise of attaching brick to brick ("the interlocking principle," as Lego has it) and the unknowingness of what will happen (the thrill of discovery and invention), something else comes out of this exercise and these seemingly fugitive hours on a Saturday afternoon: I'm moved by memory and engagement into a timeless space, a place where thousands, nay, millions of other ghostly Lego-brick players already play, and where that sort of invisible interconnectedness lends its own meaning to the lopsided pterodactyl spaceship I make, the one that evokes laughter from my son and takes its place in the same world with his forest and Lego Mark Twain, with big Lego rubber ducky and Darth Vader.

But for the moment it's pretty simple. We're just playing. And the thing is this: We have no idea what might happen next. We're building a secret that we ourselves don't know yet. There are bricks in our hands, a universe. We keep building it into being.

Landon Nordeman

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