Woody Harrelson all natural.
Who knew Woody Harrelson wrote poetry? I didn’t, until recently when I ran across his poem, Alien Creature, and this line of clarity:
I feel like a run-on sentence in a punctuation crazy world.
Me too.
When do we get to free-write through life with our modifiers
dangling, semi-colons misplaced and footnotes forgotten? When did living become a series of dictated pauses and concise fragments? I get tired of living the short shelf-life answering to beeps, tweets and chimes. It is very difficult to dodge interruptions, but I’m giving it a shot. I love community, but buck being a puppet connected to stifling strings. Fluid living rather than a hyper stimulated existence of digital leashes. I want to hear frogs converse in the creek and windchimes sing in the breeze. I want Mother Nature to be my English teacher handing out assignments on patience and beauty.
Why do we micromanage our lives?
Why not leave space for introspection and ease? Julia Cameron says, Play can make a workaholic very nervous. Busy-ness helps us avoid ourselves, our relationships and our feelings.
I feel I should move from activity to activity with no rest or reflection in order to keep up with expectations. I should arrive thirty minutes early for my child’s spring concert to get a front row seat. If I was truly devoted, I’d hustle and get there early like all the other parents playing the game.
I feel I should thrive on life’s stops and starts. I should embrace a day filled with errands, email notifications and time management. But I don’t. Instead it feels like little jolts of electricity from a societal shock collar. I prefer leisure management, but alas life is broken down into fragments of time and achievement. A chain of what’s next? This. What’s next? This. This is never enough. On to the next thing.
The trouble is when I rush around like a rat in a maze racing toward the cheese I lose myself and meaningfulness. I’ve rushed around and found out as author Anne Lamott says, the cheese is just plain old Safeway Swiss. I should have enjoyed the twists and turns of the maze.
Stream of Consciousness Living
Writing goddess ,Brenda Ueland says,
These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: ‘I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget.’ But they have no slow, big ideas.
She claims the rushing around and leaving no room for imagination is why time-pressed individuals always claim they are not creative.
We are all creative. We just need freedom to make mistakes and invest deeply. Think about how creative children can be with a cardboard box. Given space their imagination soars. They don’t know yet they should be efficient and productive and perfect.
More Woody
But as for me,
I see living as loving.
And since there is no loving room,
I sit on the grass under a tree
dreaming of the way things used to be
Woody Harrelson
I will sit with Woody under a tree. I will invite the world to join us. We can create a space to live and love fully without rigidity. A loving room where living happens and nature teaches and adults play and beauty is noticed and sentences are punctuated but life is fluid and flawed and humility rules over dollars and meaning runs on and on.
How could you be lyrical rather than over-punctuated? Do you have space for living and loving?
*****************************************************************************
~Please check space2live out on facebook ! or click on the facebook badge, top right of homepage.~
P.S. If you liked this post and don’t want to miss any others, be sure to sign up for email notification (EMAIL UPDATES right hand side of the home page.:)
Related posts:
Introverts Do It Passionately and Creatively: How It’s Possible to Love Solitude and Be Popular
Moving at the Speed of Introversion: Living With a Slow Richness and Loving It
How Quiet Places Could Save the World
Live…Naturally: Less Technology, More Meaning
MAN!!!!!! The whole last paragraph, Brenda!!!! Soooo good! But that very last sentence….. I honestly pray that THAT is Heaven and that I might live there someday…….. but, for now, I will use it as inspiration to try and create some resemblance of it here on earth. Thanks, I needed that! 😀
P.S. Enjoy your vacation!!!!!!! 🙂
MAK
Hey MAK!:) I’m glad you enjoyed that. I had to re-read it myself. I wrote it so long ago. How did you find it? I still feel the same and hope for a loving room where living happens. 🙂 Thanks for your comment.
Oops, I vaguely remember something like, “Don’t forget to respond to Brenda @ Space2Live re: how I found her ‘Woody and Me’ post” (since it had been 5 years since you wrote it!). But, apparently, I didn’t plant that reminder deep enough and it blew away with the next breeze, until now….. LOL, so sorry! 🙂
Anyway, I didn’t find your website until about a year ago, I think, and I immediately started thinking about all the past posts and valuable info I had missed, knowing I wouldn’t fully rest until I was able to go through, at least, a big chuck of them! Sooo, now when I have a little free time, it is often spent clicking on the highlights from the sidebar or helpful links at the end of most of your posts in an effort to play catch up. On that particular day back in August the right succession of clicks brought me to ‘you n Woody’! Oh, man! It really was ‘heavenly’! I had to let you know! I actually didn’t realize it was written so long ago until I saw your reply. LOL
So, that’s the story! Of course, it didn’t end there…. A link from that post allowed me to find ‘Steven Tyler and an Introvert: Expanding Through Music, Stillness and the Inner Garden’ from 2012 and as a fellow musician and rabid music-lover, I didn’t (and still don’t) have the words to express how I felt reading that one! Phew! I’ll save that for maybe another time….. 😉 Just thanks for them all, Brenda!!!! 🙂
MAK
You’re so welcome! I love it when my writing hits home with someone.:) The two posts you mentioned are kind of different in that I quoted from celebrities. I love the Woody poem and the Steven Tyler autobiography. Such interesting artists. What kind of a musician are you? Music is a big part of my happiness.:)
Love this post. I want off of this merry-go-round. I want to write. I want to read. I want to spend my days in quiet, peacefulness. Maybe someday? I used to be a teacher and my students did not like awkward silences in the classroom. I said to my class one day that they didn’t like the silence because they were afraid of what they would hear. Only one of them got it. We have become so used to the rush of constant activity, that some can’t tolerate the quiet, while others crave it. I crave the quiet. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. They inspire me every day to work toward the quiet, peaceful life I so desperately want.
That is interesting about your students squirming in awkward silence. My own children can’t even sit in the car without something to do (electronics) or something filling the silence. I would love it if we could just all get lost in our own thoughts or at the very least have a nice conversation while riding together.
Quiet is good. Stillness primes the creativity pump and rejuvenates our spirits. May you find more quiet and stillness in your life.:)
Great article, thank you. Can relate to it all, and I am blessed to be at a point in my life to be living that dream. I can really relate to the analogy of the “shock collar”, oh my. If I run too many errands in one day, this is the feeling exactly. I am overwhelmed and feel as if I have PTSD, in some ways. I finally get home and it takes me awhile to recover. And i think how grateful I am, I got through it, and got enough supplies so I don’t have to do it again for awhile, and can relax, in the knowing of that….
I always try to bundle my errands so that I don’t have to run here and there every day. My kids don’t understand why I don’t want to go to Target every day. Draining. I want to go once or twice a week and get everything. Thanks for your thoughtful comment. We are definitely on the same page.:)
I think this is my favorite so far. Love the poetic language and message.
I do think this piece is one of the shortest and the most like poetry. You have a poetic eye and heart.:) Let your modifiers dangle and your spirit leap dear Shannon. Woody and I are behind you! 🙂
I need to take the time to turn off my clunky, batteryless computer and move it to another space and wait the twenty minutes for it to boot up, so I can write in different environments. Writing stimulates me but moving around stimulates the thoughts I want to write about. (I don’t write on the more mobile medium of paper because I HATE typing it into the computer later.)
Everyone else is overpunctuated right now. I am the opposite…underpunctuated. I get a lot of people who say they are jealous of me, but they shouldn’t be. Both can prevent us from tapping into our creativity and healthy flow of life. Underpunctuation can cause lethargy, among other things. Reading a book, talking to just one interesting person at a party, eating new foods, having lunch with stimulating friends, taking a drive, hanging with family, taking a weekend vacation, going to a Tiger’s game can all lead to wanting to stop, be in the moment and soak in the little things in life as well as tap into their creativity. Underpunctuation can cause the blocking out of being in the moment and noticing the little things and increasing creativity. I think people need to have a balance.
You made a very good point Debbi. I agree underpunctuation is not healthy either. We need a balance of living and pausing, but some would say there is life in the pause (ok, yeah I say that all the time;). I am learning that moving my body does help me create. Always something new to ponder… Thanks for your insightful comment.:)
I believe that you, you specifically, have the right balance of pause versus moving. You are constantly in motion, so when you take your set pauses and random opportunities to pause, you need them. I believe too that there is life in pauses when, like you, you have the right balance. My goal is to move to that state. I am in general more productive with open time when I’m busier.