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.

 

Get Lost in Socks

Do you even wonder about single shoes? Some sit alone on the sidewalk. Others arrive in the gutter on a busy street.  How did they escape their mates? Who left them lonely on the highway?

What about socks lost in the laundry?  Some hide scrunched in towels. 
Others wrap around underwear for comfort. Should we wear mismatched socks to attract the soxes errant?

We develop comfort zones in our writing. Once in a while, we need to delve and take risks to push boundaries. Writing grows when everyone experiments.

Play. Play. Play. If you find your internal editor invading your playground, write yourself out of the judgment.

Nurture your freedom to risk and choose one of the above for a fun write.You can always write about those escaped shoes and socks.

Get lost in socks.

Body Over Mind

I begin the day with a yoga class to move past tightness and breathe beyond difficulties. By twists and turns, I ease my mind and limbs into the poses. Stretching right side, then left extends boundaries. How grateful I feel that I do not possess the appendages of an octopus today.

Remaining in each moment soothes all tightness. Strength enlivens my body and mind. The process itself unravels frustration and opens possibilities like my writing does.

After class I watch clouds clumping into animal shapes.  The wind lifts my hair in a face tickle. Spring seeps into my cells and brings thoughts of renewal with flashes of color that erupt from the earth.

I feel refreshed and returned to my true nature.

Alain de Botton writes, "We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure can anything grow." 

Consider what you find difficult today. How will you bring successes from the past to your present moments of discomfort? 

Laugh and breathe to discover and move beyond today's difficulties.

Dessert in Words

 

Add spice and imagery to your writing by avoiding worn out modifiers and phrases.When you write an overused image like blue sky, consider what else you could use in sound, scent, taste or texture to pique the reader's curiosity and gain attention. 

Notice the difference in imagery:

a broken tool          half a pair of scissors


a rusted car              Cadillac dappled with rust

beautiful woman     woman with a piano player's fingers

quiet day                  even the birds overslept

good friend              tasty as triple chocolate cake


Create descriptions:  summer day, hot morning, wet dress, cheeping bird, frustration, anger, anxiety. 

Fountain Pen Ponies

For me, a fountain pen provides pleasure more than fingers tapping on the keys. The scent and flow of a pen pony across the page creates rhythm and energy that equals meditation. Use of colored ink also enthuses my writer's mind.

I keep a full stable of fountain pens filled with green, turquoise, yellow and magenta inks. I also have red rose-scented ink. Some barrels feel feisty to my touch like Thoroughbreds. Others create the syncopated ride of a Missouri Fox Trotter. 

I have quarter horses and a Morgan or two that move my words with a pleasing gait. My Arabians kick up their heels on cold mornings. The scent of ink on a variety of papers stimulates my imagination.

Writing letters to friends and other writers encourages an action similar to free flow with a friendly recipient. 

If you have a favorite fountain pen pony, write a letter today and feel the energy.

Duty of Happiness

Robert Louis Stephenson wrote, "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. Happiness does not need to become the goal. We need a variety of experiences and moods to write about." 

In the 1980’s  Martin E.P. Seligman adopted the term, “positive psychology.” After years of studying the “learned helplessness” that characterized depression he began to study how individuals could learn optimism. Seligman felt a search for “authentic happiness” made more sense than  relying on psychology’s one-sided focus on illness and disorders. 

Study optimism, courage and perseverance rooted in social and civil well-being.

Consider how to gather simple pleasures. The process itself will attract feelings of exultation.

Awaken to positivity that explodes in blossoms and blue sky. Take a pleasure interlude to revel in the marvelous nature shares.

Stay awake to joy and appreciation for growing creatures, birds, plants and trees.