How It Works:

1. Read the poem 

2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

4. Use the selection of prompts below

5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

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We need less lifeless work
and more deliberate leisure.
Less busyness and more
poetic idleness.
Less security and more
daring ventures.
Fewer possessions and
more BEING.

Perhaps it’s time to shake off
the chains of the industrialized
world and wander in the
wilderness of awe and
beauty.

An archaic revival is what is needed,
to awaken, to enliven, to finally
give in to the soul’s desperate
cry for freedom.

-- Erik Rittenberry
From Poetic Outlaws on Substack

If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

The next Read-Around is 11/20/25 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

I’ve been wandering around wondering about freedom a lot lately, ever since I set the goal of staging my inner life on the clear spaciousness of a liberated mind. It seems as if we have put freedom on a duty-free pedestal and a condition in life where we can do and say whatever we want and go wherever we wish. Even if that were granted to us, assuming it is our right, life, the world and other people do not always comply. No matter how much external freedom we may have, we are not really free as long as we are trapped inside our own mad impulses and perceived grievances, however true or correct they may be. In other words, external freedom is predicated on internal freedom. The real battleground for freedom starts inside of us. Erik Rittenberry’s poem offers a path to that inner freedom, at least temporarily, by going into the wilderness of awe and beauty where our soul finds an answer to its desperate cry for freedom by restoring us to ourselves in connection to nature.

Prompt Ideas

1. Journal or write a poem describing where you get caught up in “lifeless work.”

2. What bit of busyness in your life could you afford to do less of? Where in your life, your mind, or your heart do you indulge in unnecessary busyness? What function does unnecessary busyness serve?

3. Journal or write a poem titled, “Deliberate Leisure.”

4. How might you make idleness “poetic?”

5. Use Rittenberry’s structure and write a poem of what we should do less of and what more of.

6. Journal or write a poem about wandering in the wilderness of awe and beauty.

7. When and how do you give in to your “soul ‘s desperate cry for freedom?” What form does that cry take? What is freedom to the “soul?”

8. Write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.