Adapted by Marissa Lee
 
People are full of surprises! Or perhaps I am guilty of making an assumption about someone based on some of their work. Whatever the case may be, I was certainly wrong about Woody Harrelson (Cheers, Natural Born Killer, The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Hi-Lo Country, and EdTv, to name a few).

The 37-year-old actor is currently wintering in Hawaii with his family, spouse Laura Louie, and daughters Zoe, 2 and Deni, 4, in a modest, rented jungle bungalow overlooking the Pacific. Woody has three movies coming out in four months and right now he just wants to get back to what is really important – family, fresh food, nature and his own evolution.

This winter he wants to reread Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. He wants to surf, do yoga, and play his guitar. He wants to give more consideration to the possibility that a human body can “fill with light and glow translucent,” something that he's been thinking about a lot lately. Most of all, he wants to get his mind right. So he can be creative again.

Both Woody and Laura are big on healing illnesses naturally. It's clear theirs is a rare commitment to mindful, healthful living. They are self-reliant in the extreme, though Woody says they'll consult with  “Western doctors” when its something serious. 

On the kitchen counter is a pile of vegetarian cookbooks and a panoply of herbal elixirs necessary to the family's vegan “living” foods lifestyle. There is no meat or dairy in the fridge – in short, no “dead” food. “Anything you cook over 118 degrees for a minute is officially dead,” says Woody. “there's no enzymatic value left.”

A very interesting aspect of Woody's personality is his extraordinary commitment to ecology. In 1996, he scaled the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge and dangled 200 feet over traffic to protest the timbering of ancient redwoods in Northern California, a hairy act of urban alpinism and civil disobedience that got him arrested. He was also arrested earlier that year for planting four hemp seeds in Kentucky – where the plant was a major crop until the 1930's – in order to bring legalization to the court's attention (the appeals court recently sent it back to the district level). For the sake of good ecology, he wears shoes, pants and shirts made of hemp. He leases an electric car. He hasn't eaten meat in 12 years. He says people always ask him if he'll consider playing the eco-guerrilla Hayduke in a film version of Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, and he says, every time, “Abso-f__ing-lutely.”

On movie sets, he will ask others why they eat meat when meat is clearly dead food and a human body, which is living, needs life. He will say this with a smile, and you will not hate him for it.

You will not hate Woody, because with him there is no useless wall separating personal life and public persona. He explains: “I feel like Jerry Garcia, who said, 'Somebody's gotta do something – it's just pathetic that it's got to be me.' I don't like being responsible – I'm Henry Miller. That's my essence, just flopping around.”

But during the weeks before he came to the jungle, Woody did anything but flop around. He and Laura opened 02, an L.A. oxygen bar where patrons line up for revitalizing hits of the gas (“a form of dynamic relaxation,” he says), and they organized a benefit to help preserve Latin American rain forests. (The couple owns a stick hut on 850 acres of Cost Rican rain forest, where their family lives part time). He wrote a song titled “So You Want to Change the World” for the Spitfire Tour, a traveling music festival that promotes political activism. He flew to Canada to meet with industrial-hemp producers. He flew to Chicago to cohost Farm Aid. He flew to Northern California and hiked into Headwaters Forest to visit Julia Butterfly, an eco-warrior who has been sitting for over a year in a 1,000-year-old redwood she named “Luna” so Pacific Lumber can't cut it down.

How did Woody get into all of this? At 28 he went to Peru's Machu Picchu, got stoned, and “saw God.” When he returned to L.A., he sold his Corvette. He spoke out against Desert Storm. He started doing yoga. He became a vegetarian. Over time, and to all who would listen, he said such things as “I feel like there's these cosmic ears out there, but I'm not sure what kind of head they're attached to.” And “I have to evolve. I don't want to be forever uncentered and hyperactive. I want to know what bliss is.” Woody was reborn.

From that start he has gone on to contemplate what we humans are really supposed to be. His response: “we're electromagnetic fields and we get electricity stagnated in certain areas. I think ultimately we're meant to be light beings. Probably, we're meant to be translucent. I mean, if we were pure enough in diet and thought and action, why not?”

Once again the topic of Henry Miller come up. This time Woody reads one of his favorite Miller quotes. “Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong to no men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I belong to the earth!”

What is it that Woody admires about the ornery and contradictory Miller? “You could say this guy is a despicable character,” answered Woody, “but what I love about him is how thoroughly honest he is – he's shown himself to be whatever he is. He just exposes himself fully.” He's translucent. “That's it man. Why didn't I just say that in the first place?”

Original appeared in Men's Journal, February 1999. Written by Doug Stanton, photographs by Mark Seliger. Adapted for Lifelines by Lisa Rogers.