A friend of mine who is also a writer shared with me a few years ago that I use too many exclamation points in my writing. Her thesis was that when you use repeated exclamation points they lose their emphasis and become ineffective as a tool of punctuation. As I both love and respect this individual as a writer and as a friend, I contemplated her council and allowed it to be in my awareness as I wrote for several weeks if not months. It in fact will pass through my field of awareness to this very day. While it was perhaps helpful as a useful criticism in my literary efforts, it made more of an impact as it began to infiltrate how I had and am living out my life experience.
If I were a punctuation mark in the story of human life, which one would I be? I love dancing with that inquiry, though it leaves me without a definitive answer. I know for sure I would not be a period, and I feel no real infinity with being a coma. I have felt most of life as if I were a question mark in search of being an exclamation point. Yep. That is it. A question mark in search of being an exclamation point. Am I sure? Yes I am!
Even in what appears to be a constant quest for happiness human beings have an emotional set point that prevents an extended experience of joyfulness and bliss. We tend to avoid both ends of the emotional spectrum. I know for sure that I was programmed to stay in the middle of the road in terms of felt-sense living. There was no encouragement to actively and freely feel the darker emotional movements, nor was there affirmation in vibrating at a frequency too close to rapture. Not too happy, not too sad was the acceptable range of expression. This was augmented by the admonition to not express too boldly, too vividly, too passionately. Do not shine too brightly. Do not love too radically. Do not praise too relentlessly. Why? Why? Why? I feel within the depths of my Soul a longing to exclaim life in shouting and resounding tones! I feel the call within my body to jump and leap and dance and bound! I want to passionately give my love beyond any reason and without a trace of withholding! I want to praise life blissfully and all that it contains! I want to vibrate at a frequency of gratitude and thanksgiving for the deliciousness of simply being alive! Why? Because I can! Because I choose to show up fully, passionately, powerfully! I want to ask into every single moment of every single day: what is possible here? How might I show up in a way that makes the greatest contribution that I am capable of making to this human family? How may I use my relentlessly questioning capacity to free me from the bondage of living in a perpetual semi-colon? How may I use this choice point moment to exclaim that only Truth is True in me?!?!
I am profoundly grateful for the moment in my life when by grace I began to question my own tale of Taylor. I bless the quantum leap that questioning provided in the emergence of my consciousness. I give thanks for the many exclamation point moments of my life that have followed the question mark around what had been in the past. With continued love and respect to my friend I do not believe I can use too many exclamation points in my writing and certainly not in my living. In this Thanksgiving season a period does no justice to my gratitude! I am dwelling in the question of how much good will I allow? How much joy will I express? How much blessing and praise will I shine upon my world? Unlimited ecstasy! Unlimited thankfulness! Unlimited blissfulness!
In choosing to question so called reality I become an exclamation point of Light within this world. I am a question mark in search of an exclamation point. And this is the moment. And so I question, and so I exclaim. And so it is!
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