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 in the column on the right

  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

A New Beginning

In out of the way places of the heart
Where your thoughts never think to wander
This beginning has been quietly forming
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

—John O’Donohue
https://www.johnodonohue.com

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Next Read-Around is:
Thursday, January 5, 2023 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Written on New Year’s day 2023: This is the first day of the rest of your life and it could be the start of something big if you don’t toss it in the waste as a cliché because it is also the first day of the year and the first day of the month and the first day of the week (for those who claim the week begins on Sunday). So, the cards are stacked in your favor for a new beginning. But why do those designations make these days any more of a beginning than any other day? It's merely a convention—a set of social agreements. It's actually all a mind trick, a useful delusion. In the world of behavioral science, these markers are called “nudges." They nudge us into action. But there is another kind of beginning: one that cannot be pinned to a calendar or planned in an app because it emerges from within, on its own, like seeds that do the slow work of transformation under the surface, unseen and unknown to us, until the new life breaks ground. This kind of beginning is beautifully expressed in one of my faovirite poems, John O’Donohue's, A New Beginning. This kind of emerging transformation truly has a life of its own, operating “in the out of the way places of the heart where the mind never thinks to wander.” And righly so because it needs the quiet darkness of the undisturbed to build the strength to emerge. Trying to direct it consciously interrupts the process just as digging up seeds to check the progress kills the growth. The best you can do for this kind of beginning is nurture the conditions for emergence. How are theset wo kinds of beginnigs operating in your life? What new beginning are you consciously crafting for 2023 and what new beginning might be emerging on its own in your life for 2023?

Prompt Menu

  1. What is quietly forming in the out of the way places of your heart?

  2. What have you outgrown but have not yet been able to leave behind?

  3. What in your current life serves as a kind of seduction of safety, or what grey promises does the sameness of your life whisper and that keep you from stepping onto new ground?

  4. Think of a time when you found the courage to make a change in your life. Write about that courage, how it formed in your body, moved in your life, and how you acted on it.

  5. What beginning are you crafting? These might be “resolutions,” or simply plans or projects that you are starting in 2023.

  6. What beginning is emerging? How do you know when you or your life is changing from under the surface?

  7. Write a letter of encouragement to the one that you are becoming.

  8. Journal or write a poem about how the soul “senses:” What kind of sense is soul-sense? How does it sense the world? How does it sense what is present, what is present, and what is coming?

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