3 February 2018
Make art about visiting family.
4 February 2018
Make art about driving in the rain.
5 February 2018
Sometimes, limitations can inspire and surprise.
Write a poem limited to six lines, or a story of no more than six sentences.
27 January 2018
When I was a child, my parents, who very much lived lives of service, took us little kids with them when they volunteered, at migrant farm camps, at the soup kitchen, while working with refugee families or others, wherever their volunteerism took them. Today, I was blessed to work with amazing parents who are teaching their children by setting the same examples, modeling for them lives of service. The children worked with us, learning what I learned as a kid—that we are, in fact, our brothers’ keepers, and that, yes, a single act of kindness, of service, can make the world a better place.
Make art about what we teach children by our actions.
28 January 2018
Make art about feeling unsafe, about steps you take to make yourself feel safe again, about taking down your own dragons.
25 January 2018
Some people’s need runs so deeply that, no matter how you might want to, you can’t fill it, can’t help them.
Make art about deep need.
24 January 2018
“Dogs are minor angels.” – Jonathan Carroll
Mine sure watch over me, and I’m so grateful.
Make art about a four-legged angel.
13 January 2018
Thinking a lot about the ancestors, about how my DNA report reads like a mini United Nations, about the courage and desperation and desire they must have felt, possessed, to leave their homelands, from eleven different regions of the globe, leaving all they knew, for all kinds of reasons, some forced and others willing, escaping starvation, violence, but all without any idea of what lay before them.
Did they all know they would never go home again? What will it must have taken to survive. Do I carry that same strength of will? Do I honor what it took, what they went through. with my own life? A life I owe them?
Make art about who dances in your blood.
19 December 2017
Dreamt my sweet daddy last night, and man, did we laugh! My daddy could find the funny in anything, and I mean anything, sometimes to the point that Mama’d swat him on the arm and scold, “Hugh! Stop it!”
He often laughed to the point of tears, his capacity for joy and laughter ‘gettin away with him,’ as we say in the South, and more than once, we kids found ourselves laughing to tears right along with him.
What a gift that was, his humor, teaching us the freedom and power of laughter, of seeing the funny in whatever we found around us, that teaching us to laugh, especially at ourselves.
Make art about someone with that capacity for humor, about laughing, about the power of laughter.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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