Hello Sunday!
I’m curious about your experience with last week’s prompt about your essence? What words did you come up with? What places do you go to? I feel like there’s some sort of link between that prompt and this one.
A lot of my essence is a mirror of the beach, but not in that Homegoods-coastal way (you know what I mean?) I’m attracted to the rawness, the harshness, the broken things washed up on the shore. The blue-grey and white noise. How there’s no apology for Her process. Water takes up space and she means it. She nurtures and storms and her quietness is just as heard as her rage.
Where we live right now there isn’t an easy way to get to the ocean, so I’ll take any water I can get. We went to a small beach where the river meets the bay and we walked. We found shells and feathers and this poem.
I don’t know the poem yet, but I took a photo of it. There’s something here and I can feel it stirring, I just don’t know the words yet.
How interesting and amazing is it that we can feel something without words, that in order to process a moment in its fullness, it requires a stillness from you, an intentional attention?
And where does it come from, these words, the poem? Is it within you, coming up from your belly making its way across the bridge of the heart to the throat? Does a poem float, hovering above your light-body, waiting for your connection to Inspiration? Is it below, like here on the ground, in the earth, within and around us, a tangible thing without words yet? And are we the bridge that links a thing, like a flower, to the above? Are we the bond that gives grief and joy to a rose?
Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s something else. But they come from somewhere and I think you’d agree that writing takes a different type of attention. It takes your willingness to tap into whatever dimension Inspiration and Magic and Metaphor reside in.
The Prompt:
Above & Below
~ Gather things from below. A leaf, a stone, a flower, a shell, a building, a shadow, a piece of trash (and then pick it up and dispose properly!!) Take a photo of something that grabs your attention but you don’t know why yet.
~ Let it stir. Keep it in your back pocket for later.
~ Sit with above. Write a poem or a few words about the photo. Or write about why it grabbed your attention. What struck you? What’s the metaphor? Let the words come without thinking about it too much.
P.S. It can be helpful to write single words instead of sentences, or a list, before trying to form the poem. Work backwards or sideways.
Share your pocket-poem photo below or the poem itself! I’d love to see what grabs your attention.
~n
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