Daily Prompt Love <3 Yes, Please
7 June 2017
Feeling my Southern mama at my shoulder.
Make art about manners, having them, learning them, lacking them, using them in difficult situations.
Archive for the ‘Family’ Category
Daily Prompt Love <3 Other People's Pictures
3 June 2017
I collect photographs from thrift stores, other people’s pictures sold, I guess, in estate sales and such. I carry some of them with me when I travel, sometimes keep some of them on my night stand, wait for them to tell me their stories, or just so I can say that someone remembers them.
I scanned in some of my favorites.
Make art inspired by one of these photos.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Like A Circle In a Spiral
30 May 2017
Been hearing (and singing) this song since I woke up.
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
Make art about circles, inside circles, circling, unending spirals, cycles, the circles we inhabit, the circles we create.
Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Falling, Rising
27 May 2017
Make art about struggling with depression.
28 May 2017
Make art about learning how to rise from the ashes.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Another Time
25 May 2017
Been reading and thinking a lot lately about vintage sewing, about work done by hands in the countless generations before me.
Make art about feeling connected to something from another era, another time. Reveal this connection through a specific daily process or specific object.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Even–Especially–When It's Hard
23 May 2017
Make art about seeing the world through eyes of Love, especially when it seems most impossible.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Another Chance: A Very Special Birthday Prompt
19 May 2017
Seven years ago today, my oldest son J was in a terrible car accident, his little plastic Saturn sedan t-boned by a brand new Dodge Charger with its all-steel construction.
J, my laughing, charismatic, kind, smart son, only 22 then, was critically injured, with a compression skull fracture, subdural hematoma, subarachnoid hemorrhaging, and four feather bleeds into his beautiful brain. They airlifted him by helicopter from our small town to the major medical facility, MCV, in Richmond, admitting him directly into the neurological ICU. He was conscious the whole time, talking, joking, charming the nurses, complaining that he couldn’t look out the window on his first-ever helicopter ride, even saying things meant to reassure me, his sister, his brother, the friends who stood by us at the hospital. We bedded down in the ICU waiting room, while behind those heavy doors, monitors clicked and hummed, documenting my son’s traumatic brain injury. That was Wednesday.
Early Thursday afternoon, as I stood as J’s bedside, a doctor we hadn’t seen before strode in, his crisp white lab coat flowing behind him. He introduced himself as the head of neurological research, and after a moment, he asked us if we had seen J’s latest CT scan. We hadn’t, so he hurried from the room, telling us he’d be right back. J and I looked at each other, confused, and my son must have seen worry in my eyes, as he patted my hand.
The doctor returned, wheeling in a large piece of equipment, a medical imaging viewer, and positioned it at the end of J’s ICU bed. He turned it on and the image of my son’s skull appeared, stark in the black and whiteness of it all. For a second, we were completely silent. Then the doctor, smiling, began to explain what we were seeing.
What we were seeing was nothing: no bleeding, no bruising, no swelling. The only sign that remained of my son’s injury just 24 hours before was the spiderweb of fractures in the bone, as if a pencil eraser had been pushed into the fragile shell of an egg, a network of bone break just beneath the C-shaped wound on the side of his head. J’s brain looked completely normal, showing not a single other sign of the blow he’d taken the day before in the wreck that had left his little car mangled, left nothing but the driver’s seat intact.
The doctor grinned, saying, “We want to study you, study why and how you healed so quickly.”
That was Thursday. We brought J home midday on Friday. Six weeks later, he was back at work, then back to his last year of college that fall. We talked time and again about his miraculous healing, about why it might have happened.
J, my wise son, said, “Mom, I don’t know why it happened. I just know I got another chance.”
He now calls May 19 his birthday. His Facebook status this morning read, “Today, I am alive.”
Make art about being given another chance.
Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Sun, Rain, and Small Beauties <3
8 May 2017
End of the semester, so I’ve been drowning in final grading.
Make art about feeling overwhelmed.
9 May 2017
Had some morning company 🙂
Make art about chickens in the road.
10 May 2017
So much rain here lately. Making the local weathermen happy, with their maps and pointers. 🙂
Make art about a weather map.
11 May 2017
My son’s sweetie got a new kitten, Baloo 🙂 Between him and my GrandPerson, our lives are filled with glorious baby things.
Make art about small beauties.
12 May 2017
Hung my sheets out to dry. Love climbing into them after they’ve come in that same day from the line.
Make art about the smell of the sun.
13 May 2017
Today was my daddy’s birthday. He could find the funny in everything, and he loved my mama more than breath. He wrote us letters to tell us kids all the things he loved about our mama.
Make art about how much you love someone.
14 May 2017
Another Mother’s Day, and I can’t help but think of all the women who mother in ways other than the traditionally expected.
Make art about nontraditional nurturing.
15 May 2017
Reading Whitman before bed last night. For Whitman, not only was poetry a kind of democratic action, but democratic action should itself be understood as a kind of poetry.
Make art about democratic action as poetry.
Better Late Than Never Daily Prompt Love <3 Beautiful Creatures
3 May 2017
Every day I sling the door open to my classroom, and enter, looking across the room at those amazing students, and greet them with”Good morning, you beautiful creatures!”
I hadn’t thought much about it, until apparently I missed a day greeting them this way, and I heard about it 🙂 “You didn’t call us beautiful creatures!”
And they are–so beautiful–these young creatures striving, focusing, questioning, and reaching, always reaching, even when they’re not sure yet what it is they’re reaching for. Some stumble, and fall. Some create the wind itself as they move from place to place. Others are much too hard on themselves, harder than we old people could be, harder even than the unbelievable media and family and societal pressure they carry on their young shoulders every day. They are creatures of grace, and incredible endurance, surviving, thriving even. in the mess we’ve left them.
They are dreamfog and summer storm and mountain clay and stardust. They are every road to everywhere, every path woven of hope and young hunger.
They are miraculous, these creatures, these wind dancers and fireaters, carrying their huge hearts out openly before them in their hands, offering them like gifts, like the gifts that they are. ❤
They’re funny, and they’re compassionate, and they’re curious, and wise, so much wiser than they’re given credit for, than they give themselves credit for, and I learn from them every time we’re together in those rooms. Every day they teach me, so I never forget what it is to dream.
Tonight, we shared a meal, and I listened to presentations for projects ranging from the environmental and natural–water quality, animal rescue, waste conversion for fuel–to a cross-section of the humane–programs for kids in poverty, kids with disabilities, for educating kids in technology, free financial services for students and for the poor, projects to help the hungry.
Tonight, I saw the future, y’all 🙂 and no matter how hard it seems right now, that future? It is indeed filled with beautiful, beautiful, beautiful creatures.
Make art about young people, about what we owe them, about what we can learn from them.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Shame
1 May 2017
Read a story this morning about lunchrooms shaming poor children.
I cried for an hour. The scars of shame run so deep, follow us into adulthood, undermine the beauty and power of who we are at every turn, if it’s not healed.
“I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.”― Judy Collins
Make art about childhood shame, about seeing that hurt child in your adult eyes, about healing shame.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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