1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Yearning To Be

We don’t create to achieve or make history, no matter how we’re schooled or what we tell ourselves. We create because we have to. And the reward for creating, in any form, is that it keeps us alive. This is why we devote ourselves to art. It is our covenant with life. And like anything we devote ourselves to, we will in time become good at it. But we don’t do it to become better. We do it to become whole. For while we can get better without becoming whole; we can’t become whole without getting better.

Everywhere we look, life is burgeoning. Plants, trees, and flowers are always pushing up, breaking ground, and yearning to be. Like the seeds of the natural world, there is some innate impulse in each of us to break ground and sprout. But often the machinery of tradition aberrates this impulse into a compulsion to produce and achieve. And soon, we lose our lifeline to wonder.

Yet, despite the press of our ambitions, excellence is more a byproduct of immersion. A dolphin bridges surface to taste the air. It doesn’ts leap to be an acrobat. So yearn, sprout, and push your heart into the world. Immerse yourself and live. More than accomplished artists, the world needs impassioned creators to dive and break surface.

Excerpted from “Drinking From The River Of Light: The Life of Expression,” by Mark Nepo.

Please join Writing From The Inside Out by attending the read-around sessions on Friday afternoons. It’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional. If you have not registered, click the button below; and if you have registered, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read Around is Nov 12, 2021 at 4:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Mark Nepo’s “Drinking From The River Of Light: The Life of Expression,” inspired me to wonder what it means to be whole. For most of my life, I’ve confused wholeness with completion and instituted a conflicted pursuit of being complete as if I woud one day arrive finished at my own doorstep. Conflicted because I knew, on some deep level, that I am and shall always be a work in progress; that the goal of completion was my own futile effort to evolve into a final product and, in essence, immortalize myself. If there's anything I've learned in life, it's that beginnings and endings are merely punctuation, ways of organizing the ongoing flow, of giving meaning and texture to our experience, of holding the inexplicable we embody in the width of our arms and the limits of our minds.

Nepo’s prose piece reminds me that we do not know the reach of our light or the depth of our wisdom or how far and wide the ripples of our presence might spread. He suggests that concerns such as these are, ultimately, moot; that we are here to express the yearning to be by immersing ourselves in life—diving into the depths of being—and surfacing to share what we discover by pushing our heart into the world. Through the dive and surface, through our immersion in being and expression in the world, we get better and better at expressing the wholeness of ourselves. If we don’t dive, we don’t get the riches. If we stay at the surface, the story ends and we get entombed in our history. To create is to live.

Prompt Menu

  1. Journal or write a poem about what motivates you to create. If you have different modalities for creating, consider comparing creative motives in each modality. For instance, I am a collage artist as well as a poet.

  2. In what way does your creative work keep you alive?

  3. Consider something you have practiced (or devoted yourself to) enough to get good at and tell the story of that devotion.

  4. Write from the prompt: In my covenant with life, …

  5. Has the “machinery of tradition” aberatted (redirected) the natural incline of your creativity. How so? Or what have you had to do to keep true to its own destiny.

  6. When have you lost your lifeline to wonder and what restored it?

  7. How do you dive and break surface in the act of writing or creating. How do you balance the two?

  8. What does your heart want to push inot the world?

  9. As usual, write about anything else from the poem or life that inspires you