Prompts
The writing prompts you will find here are offerings to help you slow down a busy mind and attend to an image with focused attention. Whether you write a poem, start a story, or simply sit quietly to consider the image and complete the suggested instructions, you can use this space for daily meditation as your mind opens to new responses and possibilities.
Here’s to your imagination!
Dale
Current Prompt
Water
Cooler temperatures initiate us into a change of season: shorter days, colder nights, the end of beach days. Water—lakes, rivers, ponds, oceans—are sites of sanctuary, sustenance, pleasure, solitude, and silence. Water is also essential to all life. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the water element is associated with the kidneys, the organs responsible for Jing or vital essence. As an archetype that is part of many religious and wisdom traditions, water represents the vastness and mystery of our unconscious minds, rebirth, fertility, and as a symbol of the flow of life.
What do you imagine is happening in this picture? What do you see? What feelings does it evoke?
Do you have specific memories about being around water? What are 5 words you associate to these memories?
Have you dreamt about water? Are they frightening dreams or peaceful dreams? What stories do they tell? Describe.
Here is a poem I wrote years ago inspired by a reflection in a lake. May it inspire you.
EMPHEMERA
Torn black sky
and through the saturnian mist
doubled in the lake’s polished silver,
a fawn of delicate proportions,
its isolate life
running briefly through ours. Impossible
that you or I should die!
As if that day will never arrive.
As if the wind rushing through the pine
could be called back
from eternity.
As if the fawn and its watery twin
live in the same world.
Please close your eyes and focus on your breath until you feel your mind and body slowing down. Open your eyes and write for 5-10 minutes without stopping.
Image: Burt Kushner
Previous Prompts
Write for 10 minutes without stopping. Your title is…
Perfume
We live in a world of objects: shoes, trees, a glass of milk. Our father’s reading glasses, our mother’s bathrobe. Some objects evoke strong feelings and memories. Some objects attract us for their beauty or convey a sense of a living presence.
Please take some time to reflect on the photograph above and consider the following writing prompts. When you are ready, write for ten minutes or longer without stopping. Let your imagination fly and be surprised by what you discover.
Does this image stir any memory?
What is the first object you remember?
Does this object have a backstory?
If this object could talk, what would it say?
Image courtesy of M.B.
Self-Portrait As Shoe
How do the objects in our lives reflect us? How do they show us aspects of ourselves that have gone hidden? The art of self-portraiture perhaps originated with the earliest cave painting smeared on limestone in ochre and blood.
What does this photo of cowboy boots evoke in you? Let your gaze wander over the collection or focus on a single pair. What story do they tell? Write a poem in the voice of a pair of boots.