Daily Prompt Love <3 Where You Came From
20 July 2019
If you live in the United States, unless you’re Native American, your people came here from somewhere else.
Make art about your immigrant ancestors.
Posts tagged ‘ancestral memory’
Daily Prompt Love <3 She
11 June 2019
Make art about the wisdom of old women, about the dangerous old woman.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Monday Must Read! Dark Roots by Caroline Malone
Caroline Malone was born and lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee. A graduate of The University of Tennessee with a B.A. in English and Classics, she earned the MFA in Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Dos Passos Review, Women’s Voices, Women Period, Heartwood, and others. The collection Dark Roots explores the meaning of family, heritage, and identity. Currently, she teaches writing and literature at South College in Knoxville, TN. She also plays Irish traditional music on the bouzouki, mandolin, guitar, concertina, and fiddle.
“Stark and haunting, these poems dig deep to the roots of identity and the self.”–Julia Watts, author of Gifted and Talented
“I know how things sink in;” drawing deeply from the ancient land, the collective soul that hums beneath her feet, and in her words, Caroline Malone does, indeed, know, and reveals to us that knowing, of fear and prayer and loss, of the paths we make to seek—and find—our own souls, even when they seem to flee from us, into the history of the secret city of Oak Ridge, to the rubble at the feet of the Parthenon, into the arms of the Civil War ghosts who linger at the shoulders of every Southerner. -Mary Carroll-Hackett, author of (Un)Hinged, Death for Beginners, A Little Blood, A Little Rain, and The Night I Heard Everything.
Daily Prompt Love <3 The Procession
12 May 2019
Make art about the procession of women, about women ancestors, about the shoulders we stand on.
Image by Richard Mcall from Pixabay
Daily Prompt Love <3 Blood
18 February 2019
There is blood, there, he says
Blood here too, down here, she says
Only blood, the Blood Mother sings – Juan Felipe Herrera
Make art about what the blood remembers.
Daily Prompt Love x 3
17 March 2018
Make art about the ancestors.
18 March 2018
Make art about a chance encounter with a stranger.
19 March 2018
Make art waking caught still in a dream.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Ancestral Traditions
1 February 2018
“Celebrating Imbolc, the day of the Celtic goddess Brigid that marks the beginning of spring.
Imbolc, also known as the Feast of Brigid, celebrates the arrival of longer, warmer days and the early signs of spring on February 1.
It is one of the four major “fire” festivals (quarter days, referred to in Irish mythology from medieval Irish texts. The other three festivals on the old Irish calendar are Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain – Halloween).
The word Imbolc means literally “in the belly” in the old Irish Neolithic language, referring to the pregnancy of ewes.
St. Brigid is the patron saint of babies, blacksmiths, boatmen, cattle farmers, children whose parents are not married, children whose mothers are mistreated by the children’s fathers, Clan Douglas, dairymaids, dairy workers, fugitives, Ireland, Leinster, mariners, midwives, milkmaids, nuns, poets, the poor, poultry farmers, poultry raisers, printing presses, sailors, scholars, travelers, and watermen. Here’s a busy saint!
One folk tradition that continues in some homes on St. Brigid’s Day (or Imbolc) is that of the Brigid’s Bed. The girls and young unmarried women of the household or village create a corn dolly to represent Brigid, called the Brideog (“little Brigid” or “young Brigid”), adorning it with ribbons and baubles like shells or stones. They make a bed for the Brideog to lie in…..” (from Irish Central)
Read more traditional ways of celebrating Imbolc, St. Brigid’s Day, here
Make art about ancestral traditions.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Diaspora In the Blood
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.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Hands, Remember
12 January 2018
“Muscle memory has been used synonymously with motor learning, which is a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition. When a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort. This process decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency within the motor and memory systems….”-Wikipedia
Make art about what your hands remember.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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