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 nervousBusy-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 SwissI 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?

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