Use Your Playfulness

 

Where’s your child’s playfulness today? Do you have a fun relationship with words? 

Do you recall your childhood association with words? Did you create names for animals and plants? Did you tell stories?

Frederick Smock, a teacher of creative writing, learns daily from his students to think with a child's mind. One student astonished him with her words when she wrote from the point of view of a coconut. “I never have to go on vacation because I carry the waves inside of me,” she wrote.

Today, delight yourself with possibilities and let your words scurry around corners and under bushes. Look into the sky to capture connections. Consider all your areas of knowledge: animals, insects, gardening, travel, economics, and relationships. 

How will you communicate the awareness that makes your days and nights glitter? 

Let your words flee and flourish. Delight in metaphors to tell your stories. Return to your child's playfulness.

I have played daily with Words and Wonder since 2009. Over 5000 posts have arrived here.  

From now on I will focus on Words and Photos on my Blog that features photography.

Please join me: feathersandfigments.blogspot.com 

Sunset Delight

 

While the sun does his dance into the sea, 

benefit from the final moments of each day. 

Find a place to watch for an evening 

                                                     to enjoy the sun's play.

When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. - Lao Tzu

Visualize the color in all its depth, intensity, and discover a metaphor.

Notice how the sun wriggles to set in tangerine dreams.

Discover creatures who play and chase the sun as he rolls down the sky.

Feel grateful for each moment.

Ease the Mind

There's no way to cure worry. But we can learn to get better at recognizing it,

 and gently guide ourselves back to what matters.

- Elisha Goldstein

The brain often tricks us by amplifying the woe and minimizing the joy. Worry exists in the human condition even though it has no utility. 

We worry to anticipate and avoid potential situations and to keep us safe. Worrying ramps up our nervous system. Yet we go into an imbalance that leads to more frustration.

Feelings of fear arouse anxiety when we worry. We need to acknowledge the fear and call it out. If we resist, it persists. We need to let it be as it is. Allow it.

Ask questions of worry.

What does this feeling require right now?  Is it an animal that needs care and safety? How will it discover a sense of security?

Deepen awareness. Think of love or a kindness to shift the feeling. This lessens negative thinking.

Take a break from jousting with worry. Rather than change the way you think, change your relationship to your thoughts. 

Learn to watch your thoughts, rather than engage with them.

When a negative thought distracts, stop the runaway train. Notice sights, sounds, scents, a taste of air. Engage with a feeling.

Stay with what’s going on in the moment. Find words of admiration to discover the rightness of things. 

Observe nature with all your senses.

Create your own metaphor for struggle. Consider your greatest accomplishment and how you achieved it. Recall it in detail.

Avoid always thinking in fix-it mode.

Sing La La La and launch into a favorite melody.

Keep a journal for positive ideas and gratitude comments and write in it just before bed.

Use humor to design a defense.

Feel less reactive to the worried mind. Turn the volume down. Feel spacious, with ease and joy.