Writing From The Inside Out: Week 3 Prompts
Based On A New Beginning by John O’Donohue
Read the poem
Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you
Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…
Use the selection of prompts in the column on the right
Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…
Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes
A New Beginning
by John O’Donohue
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.
Seas
By Juan Ramon Jimenez
(Robert Bly Translation)
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing,
And nothing
happens! Nothing….silence…waves…
—Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
If you wish to attend the April 2020 Friday read around(t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional)
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My Thoughts
This weeks prompts invite you to engage with your own process of becoming and to tell your own tales of transformation. John O’Donohue’s New Beginning is one of my favorite poems. It captures the idea that there is something transforming, some “becoming” hidden away in our depths, gathering force until it is ready to break into our lives, and to bank us on the shore of a new world. Juan Ramon Jimenez’ Seas aptly expresses how that nascency often occurs under the surface and with such subtlety that we completely miss it or we dismiss it as a sidetrack while we are carried along by the momentum of our lives. We might actually already be standing in the new life but do not know it because we are looking through an old lens.
Prompt Menu
What is quietly forming in the out of the way places of your heart?
What have you outgrown but have not yet been able to leave behind?
What in your current life serves as a kind of seduction of safety, or what grey promises does the sameness of your life whisper, that keep you from stepping onto new ground?
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, and moved in your life, and how you acted on it.
How do you sense that “your boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing?” Think of times when you had a sense something important was happening inside or in your life, but you did not know what it was. Write about the tension between the ambiguity of the feeling and the desire to know or act on it.
Imagine this COVID time as a cocoon. Describe your own (perhaps hidden) process of transformation.
Write a letter of encouragement to the one that you are becoming.