Weekly Writing Prompts March 11-March 18

posted March 30, 2016

Daily Prompt #13
For A Nurse

In this fragile frontier-place, your kindness
Becomes a light that consoles the brokenhearted,
Awakens within desperate storms
That oasis of serenity that calls
The spirit to rise from beneath the weight of pain,
To create a new space in the person’s mind
Where they gain distance from their suffering
And begin to see the invitation
To integrate and transform it.

May you embrace the beauty in what you do
And how you stand like a secret angel
Between the bleak despair of illness
And the unquenchable light of spirit
That can turn the darkest destiny towards dawn.

May you never doubt the gifts you bring;
Rather, learn from these frontiers
Wisdom for your own heart.
May you come to inherit
The blessings of your kindness
And never be without care and love
When winter enters your own life.
-John O’Donohue

Daily Prompt #14 “I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.” –Dr. Seuss

Daily Prompt #15 “…Don’t miss anything, if you want to be a writer….I also felt, just then, that in no way did my mother-in-law’s cultivated conversation arise form a true need to exchange ideas with me. Adele intended to systematically pull me out of the desperate state of an incompetent mother, she was rubbing words together to strike a spark and rekindle my frozen mind, my frozen gaze. But the truth was that she liked saving me more than listening to me.”-Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, p. 245

Daily prompt #16 (thanks to Liz Bedell for this one) “Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you.”-Henri Nouwen

Daily prompt #17 “The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.” Tim O’Brien

Daily prompt #18 I don’t do my best work while I’m in therapy. I’m too onto myself immediately seeing meanings in things and more likely to censor myself. I’d rather find images I don’t understand. That’s what generates the work. Ellen McLaughlin

Daily Prompt #19
Sodden and spongy, the scarce-green grass plot
Dents into pools where a foot has been.
Puddles lie spilt in the road a mass, not
Of water, but steel, with its cold, hard sheen.
-Amy Lowell, “March Evening.”

 

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