If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 10/24/24 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  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

  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

My Thoughts

Window shopping is a byproduct of our given identity as consumers. Even when we don't know what we want, we can go hunting for things to buy. Consumerism has been idolized in our country as a patriotic act. It is good for the economy and, therefore, good for the country. According to historians, the shift from our identity as citizens to consumers began in the 1920s and was fully formed by the 1950s. It has only gained in strength and momentum since then. Many grocery stores and department stores even have kid sized shopping carts with a flagpole that says “Consumer In Training.” Now, with planned obsolescence, disposable goods, and 30 day return policies, we are trained to be perpetually hungry, never quite satisfied. I doubt that Rumi used the term “window shoppers” as Coleman Banks describes in his translation titled, These Spiritual Window Shoppers,  to depict those who idly dabble in spirituality, but it is a fitting metaphor for our current world of noncommittal exchange and how that might play out in our relationship with life.

These Spiritual Window Shoppers

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that? Oh, I'm just looking.”
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/75710/these-spiritual-window-shoppers/

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about window shopping.

  2. Journal or write a poem about consumerism. In what way have you been trained to be a good consumer? How do you fulfill your duty as a good consumer-citizen?

  3. In what ways might you be a window shopper in life? Or write about others you perceive to be window-shoppers in life.

  4. Journal or write poem about how you might respond if your whole life flashed in front of you. You can use the prompt: After my whole life flashed in front of me…

  5. Rumi uses the metaphor that life is a shop in which we might handle items and put them down without really “buying” anything. What would you like to find in the life shop?

  6. Journal or write a poem about how you engage with the exchanging flow of life.

  7. What huge foolish project, like Noah’s, might you start if you had the courage? What would you do, or how would you live, if it really made absolutely no difference to you what people thought of you?

  8. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.