Prompt for Oct. 8, 2014
“Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul that art the Eternity of Thought!
That giv’st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! not in vain,
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of Childhood didst Thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human Soul,
Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man,
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature, purifying Thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”
-William Wordsworth
The art that still lives
What is it you love to do?
There is danger in this question, because we think we don’t know how to answer it.
But we do.
We do.
We have known it since the first moment we took a breath, when that passion beat through veins too tiny to find. It was always there, deep down inside, just waiting to be found.
And we found it as children, when we spread those blank sheets of paper and filled them with words and pictures and stories like the ones that fill us now. We found it in the sketchpad we could never put down, even when the teacher said there was more important work to be done. We found it in those moments we could not keep our hands off that old guitar sitting in the corner of a room, even though it wasn’t ours.
The art has always been in us.
Some of us knew from that earliest age that we wanted to be teachers, and some of us knew we wanted to design buildings, and some of us knew we wanted to dance.
And then we turned to adults, and those passions turned cold under the vulgar weight of a man’s world, money and responsibility and transaction that left no room for the passions we loved, the passions that did not make money or take care of responsibilities or offer a neat and clean transaction. So we set them aside.
But they are still there, if we dare to look. They are still there speaking truth and granting beauty and offering to sanctify a whole world with the light of heaven. It’s just that sometimes we have to dig, because they’ve been buried for too long, and sometimes we have to chip away the armor protecting them, and sometimes we have to remember.
Those passions hold fear and pain, because they are a part of us, and if we give them away, sign them off to the world, we could be hurt and ridiculed and hated, but those passions also hold the grandeur of a heart made truly and fully alive, and we can never, ever know how we will come right back to life once we uncover them again.
So if we sit and we wonder and we dream, then we will know, because those memories will visit, and what we did as children tells the truth.
And once we know, we must give. We must give that passion. We must give with no thought of return. We must give with no thought of emptying, because in our giving we will be filled. In our giving we will be made alive.
In our giving we are made brave.
Link up your contributions below.
Welcome to The Ink Well Creative Community.
This idea was adapted from Lisa-Jo Baker’s Five Minute Fridays. Being a creative writer, I needed just a little more time than five minutes, so I decided to tweak and begin my own community for creative writers.
How It Works:
Life can get crazy, making consistent writing and creating a difficult-to-attain dream. But 15 minutes a week isn’t too much to ask in the name of creativity.
Every Wednesday at 10 a.m. CST, I will post a word/quote, either by itself or with other parameters (like a specific word count or a word that must be used somewhere in the piece). Your challenge is to expand on the word/quote, writing for 15 minutes without stopping. You can write a short essay, a poem, a story or whatever you feel would best express what you want to say.
Once you’ve written your piece, come back here and comment with either a link to your (mostly unedited) work or, if you don’t have a blog, post your entire piece in the comments section.
The only rule for participation: Visit the link (or read the piece) of the person who posted before you and encourage them in their writing. This is how we learn from one another and build relationships and become a supportive creative writing community that offers each individual’s unique beauty to the world.
If you don’t think you’re a creative writer: We are all of us creative, and we are all of us writers, which means we are all of us creative writers. If you feel like you don’t belong here, please let us show you that you do. You are a creative writer.
I hope you’ll join us!
Add this badge to your site to encourage others to join us!
Copy the code below and paste it to your website to add the badge to your page or post:
<a href="https://racheltoalson.wordpress.com/category/the-ink-well-community/"><img src="https://racheltoalson.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/inkwell-graphic.jpg" height="250px" width="250px" /></a>
