How do you catch a crrl, you ask? With a hot iron? A set of hair curlers and a blow dryer? Maybe, depends on the kind of crrl you’re after. The tropical crrl is a lifestyle that, though seemingly elusive, is readily available in one version or another to anyone who chooses to live slowly, at your own pace.
We were inspired to catch a crrl by the CURL creators of curlers.wordpress.com who tell us that CURL is an acronym for Contemporary Urban Retirement Living. To learn more about it, you can go to their website. We consider it the mothership of Curl Nation.
There, a group has convened to celebrate a lifestyle started in 2001, when they were twenty-somethings. Now in their thirty-somethings, these experienced curlers are perfecting their technique – the perfect chair ride, the instant campsite, the easiest home-baked bread.
For us, the tropical crrl is like surfing the perfect wave (in this case, small, slow, and shallow). It doesn’t just come to you. Nope, you have to work for it, first driving around to find the perfect spot, waxing your board (or putting on your fins as the case may be), paddling out, waiting and enduring a wipe out now and then until it comes. Then, all that hard work pays off. In that moment when you take off on the wave and feel yourself flying, you’re in the crrl.
Crrling is life as freedom, however fleeting the feeling of liberation. Perhaps more accurately it is life in pursuit of freedom – slow, easy pursuit, mind you.
Crrl is an adjective, a verb, and a noun all in one.
It is for the self-employed, under-employed, and unemployed, whether by choice or by circumstance, who embrace leisure, in my case as an opportunity to work; in the case of my partner in crime, Curly-Joe Larson (you’ll be hearing from C-J now and then, too), as an opportunity to play.
Of course, I mean to work at my vocation, the work that calls to me, not the JOB that calls you, and way too often. Heavens, no!
And we both mean to have fun – to cook sloooowly and eat with gusto, spend time at the beach, play tennis, water my one tomato plant, and devote hours each day to slow, inconsequential rituals like baking, sweeping, mopping, reading, writing, stretching, ruminating over which bottle of wine to open, or whether it’s a beer day instead, and just watching the sky from sunrise to moonrise.
And to blogging, of course – to sharing the crrl, cuz that’s half the fun.
Now, the anthem of Crrl Nation. Feel free to sing along.
Nobody can tell you
There’s only one song worth singing
They may try and sell ya
Cause it hangs them up to see someone like you
But you’ve gotta make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along
You’re gonna be nowhere
The loneliest kind of lonely
It may be rough going
Just to do your thing’s the hardest thing to do
But you’ve gotta make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along
So if you cannot take my hand
And if you must be going
I will understand
You’ve gotta make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along
You’ve gotta make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Talk again soon,
Lil’ Brown Crrl
I saw this picture and had to post it. It’s a wig named “Captivate.” It’s not curly, but the expression on Raquel’s mug brought a smile to my face. I wonder if she’s really that happy? I guess that depends on how many of those babies she’s selling.
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tropicalcurl 