Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Wind, and Grace, and Hypocrisy
5 May 2017
Make art about what’s carried on the wind.
6 May 2017
Make art about being in the presence of Grace.
7 May 2017
Make art about hypocrisy.
Posts tagged ‘love yourself’
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 Strange Courage
29 April 2017
“It’s a strange courage
you give me ancient star:
Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part”
― William Carlos Williams
Make art about a moment calling for strange courage.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Your Song
28 April 2017
“Every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequencies, its singing.
Before we make music, music makes us.”~Joachim-Ernst Berendt
Make art about the song you recognize as yours, the song of the body.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Through the Body
24 April 2017
A prompt I do with my students, an effort to reconnect them with their bodies, and to use that beautiful sensory work in their writing.
Home smells like….
Fear tastes like…..
Beauty feels like…..
Sorrow looks like….
Love sounds like….
Make art intersecting and grounding a large concept through the body, through an unexpected sense.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Being Seen
15 April 2017
At some point every semester, I challenge my students to look everyone they meet in the eye, even the strangers they pass, to turn while standing in line and speak to the person behind them, in front of them, to make acknowledging other human beings around them a habit.
One of my current students asked me, sadness softening her young face, why other people won’t, don’t, look at each other, much less look each other in the eyes as they pass. We’re afraid, I told her, of revealing ourselves, of being seen.
Make art about seeing each other, about taking the risk of being seen.
Daily Prompt Love <3 What You Give
14 April 2017
Make art about service, about how the self is found in service to others.
Happy National Poetry Month <3 Her Kind, Anne Sexton
Her Kind
I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.
Daily Prompt Love <3 You Have a Right To
11 April 2017
One of the greatest gifts I’ve received in this life was a single statement. A wise and caring man said to me, “You know, you have a right to peace of mind.”
The simplicity of what he said stunned me in that moment. It also revealed to me how I, for too many reasons to list, more often than not, stood in my own way toward achieving that peace.
Had a wonderful and heartbreaking conversation with my students last night about just this thing, about what keeps them from ‘peace of mind.’ Worries and expectations, the fears they hold for the future, their own and the future of our planet. We talked about articulating these barriers, and about releasing them.
Make art about peace of mind.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
Recent Comments