Prosperity, lurks in our minds, we think it means money but it doesn’t really. It is the general success – health and abundance and an endurance in these things.
What are the ingredients needed to make you happy?
Make a list and now pretend they really are ingredients for a cake and get writing!
Grab your book or laptop top or what ever you write with and just start writing, what ever comes into your head – all of it, get it down on the page. Even if it is just lists. Keep writing, keep the fingers moving or the pen flowing or the voice talking, just keep going.
Let the spontaneity of the moment fill you up.
Do this for half an hour then go back through and see what you’ve got – there will probably be at least one fledgling poem in there, extract it and work on it.
Poems can be all sorts of lengths but for this exercise we are aiming for a short as possible. Japanese styles can be good for this such as haiku.
Remember this means exact as well as short, and shorter poems can pack a powerful punch.
Do you know someone full of energy and get up and go?
Write a list of things you find brilliant about them and another list of things you find really annoying about them (don’t let them see it and don’t use a name or actions that can be recognised or you may upset them!).
Now try and write a poem were each stanze or verse is an aspect of this persons vitality, sandwich the bad between the good and see what you get.
Life is complex, how we interact with each other, the world around us, how the stars pinwheel over our heads in the sky. All the interactions and history of what’s gone before.
Within the complexities balances are shifted by the smallest of actions with far reaching effects.
This on these things – maybe go and look up chaos theory or read a history book. Let the ideas settle in.
Draw the word complexity in the middle of a piece of paper and then write five words around it that you now associate with complexity. The use of boxes or bubbles around the words can be very helpful as can coloured pens. Around each of the five words write another three words that you associate with that particular word.
If you have space you might want to do another set of words.
Now look and see if any of the words are connected to each other and not just the word that made you think about them. Draw the links – you are creating a complex word web.
Once you are finished use this as a map for creating a poem.
Look at the words and how they interact with each other – now write!
Continuity – the thread that connects this bit to that bit in a smooth progression. Do you like the seeming unchangingness of the continuity?
Or do you hate the deception of slow change and crave the landmark events?
Does continuity really mean safe and stable?
Think on these things and make yourself a mobius strip out of paper – cut a strip and put a half twist in it and join the ends. What you have is an object with only one side, run your finger along it – see?
Imagine yourself on this mobius strip, do you know what it is? Or are you desperately trying to run away from a stranger who is running behind you? That stranger could well be yourself in this looping landscape.
Now start writing. If you want to make something more visual perhaps the poem could be written on a mobius strip itself.
We are rare, each and everyone of us, when all of existence is taken into account we are hardly here at all. That may make us seem insignificant but it also makes us precious and rare and we have worked out how to work out that this is the case.
In the words of Carl Sagan we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Check out Melody Sheep’s Science Symphony for inspiration and too see just how rare and wonderful and small and insignificant we are.
Now take pen to paper or fingers to type pad or voice to recorder and away you go.
Ability to do things is central to our sense of self.
People each have their own set of abilities, sometimes due to accident or illness there has to be a shift in what those abilities are sometimes in good ways. Sometimes with practice new skills are achieved or old ones revised.
Think on an ability you had but do not anymore, or one you wanted but never managed.
Write for 20 minutes.
Though as mentioned in a previous exercise clarity is an important tool for writers so is ambiguity.
Old viking poetry took great pains to use it too create rude sounding poems that were really about mundane everyday items. Why not try to describe objects as if they are something completely different, do not lie just be misleading in what you focus on.
Vitality – as writers sometimes the physical health can be neglected but for this writing exercise you should go for a walk, even if it is drizzling, put a coat on and off you go into the elements (obviously extreme weathers should be avoided!). Look around you at the landscape be it town or country.
What is vital to the way it all works? Are the streams or roads arteries? Is it healthy or unhealthy? How linked is it’s vitality to the world as a whole? To you?
Drink in the outside and feel your blood pumping and imagining the recharge of vitality on this walk.
One you are returned and have thawed hands out and maybe have a hot beverage in hand – begin to write about vitality and what it really is.