(Daily writing prompts are posted Monday through Friday at 7am on Facebook. This is the weekly roundup with a few excerpts from my personal journal. The goal is to write for at least 10 minutes without stopping, regardless of what ends up on the paper. Feel free to share writing in the comment section. Write on!)
Prompt 41: Pick one word from the list and write to wherever it takes you:
MUD PIE
SCALE
HURRY
FENCE
From my journal: I weighed myself today: 154 pounds. That’s what the scale said. A few years ago if the scale had been anything over 145 pounds I would have felt depressed. At 154 I feel strong and healthy. I lifted 50 pound bags of concrete the other day with no problem. I helped dig 2′ deep post holes and moved a mountain of dirt. How does someone get a place where weight doesn’t matter anymore? I’m trying to backtrack and figure that out.
Prompt 42: “I saw a ______ today.”
From my journal: I saw a vine today with berries of more colors than I could count. I saw a ginormous train turntable just like the ones from a century ago. I saw a sunset behind the idle train that took my breath away. It looked like a painting.
Prompt 43: The value of an hour.
From my journal: If I started counting to 3,600 I wouldn’t expect that it would take an hour. 3,600 seconds doesn’t seem that long, maybe because a second seems so short. The value of an hour is nothing where there is no attention. It slips by without notice into an abyss where old hours go to die or disappear. A large landfill of hours, I’s, X’s and V’s, piling high and old ones rotting into non-existence. Who remembers a specific hour?
Prompt 44: A prompt from the book Page by Page by Heather Sellers: Write your autobiography in a list of the activities that absorbed you completely. The times when the clock stopped, and you lost all track of everything, except the activity at hand. Start from your earliest memory.
From my journal: Boating on the lake, playing in the sand on the beach, making tiny paper houses in Kindergarten, building a fort in the woods, cleaning out my horses’ stalls, grooming and riding my horses, building a model car for dad, painting in the art studio, organizing and cleaning out art supplies, writing and reading in the library…
Prompt 45: Deepak Chopra says that “happiness is the goal of every other goal.” Make a list of goals and write about them until you find the ultimate end goal for each one.
From my journal: My goal is to parent in such a way that my daughter doesn’t need to be parented. Non-interference and less helicopter parenting. The hardest part is letting go of what other people’s expectations are for a child in public.
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