Mother on Mother’s Day
- At April 18, 2022
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
14
Mother on Mother’s Day. How can I possibly write about her? Create something with meaning? Hold her in my heart? Mother-daughter relationships are dynamic, created and recreated over time like an artful layered painting. Our canvas, my mother’s and mine, was brushed with light and shade. Yet, I found there was richness in both.
What Do You Know: This is what I know.
I was aligned in the same orbit with her. We were intertwined with an energy force that allowed me to develop independence and Mother to see with new perspective—giving each the power and space to grow and transform. My relationship like most mother-daughter bonds was complex and layered, creased with the places and depths of our living, and filled with fragile things and other things that mattered. There was synchronicity and love between us.
Read More»Coming of Age: Becoming Creative
- At February 21, 2022
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
- 16
“Walls turned sideways are bridges.”–Angela Davis
Openness, curiosity and, yes, change spark creativity. Sometimes, change arrives because of something we’ve set out to do. Often, though, it approaches us sideways like a sudden flash of light, and, suddenly, we’re thrown into cold water. Transitions like coming of age experiences drop us like a stone into the swirling eddy of our lives. They are wild places where we are challenged, left naked and afraid. At least a rise in blood pressure. We can either sink or use our arms and legs to reach a farther shore. Becoming creative helps us navigate. Here’s my story.
The Sweet Smell of Remembering
- At August 16, 2021
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
- 6
The Fire Inside: A Companion for the Creative Life
Chapter Five: Wooing the Muse
The Smell of Remembering
“Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifting across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street.” —Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers
Ahh, the sweet smell of remembering? Have you ever encountered a scent that takes you back to a place or person? A whiff of Old Spice, for instance, and you are a little child sitting beside your grandfather at church. Or the sweet perfume of cinnamon and you’re back in Aunt Mary’s kitchen licking the bowl while her head is turned. Smell triggers memory. As children, we notice scents and associate them with certain people or experiences. Years later, when we encounter the scent again and the same associations are aroused, memories return.
Read More»What Can Cranes Teach You?
- At April 12, 2021
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
- 10
“Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”—Mary Oliver
Photo by Jeanne Dill.
The cranes’ visit.
Last week, on a side road off Nebraska Interstate 80, I heard them first, the “music of an angelic avian chorus” as naturalist Paul A. Johnsgard describes the strains of the sandhill cranes. For more than a thousand years, five hundred thousand cranes have come to Nebraska and refuel in the harvested cornfields along the Platte River Valley consuming corn and other grains.
The cranes’ thin, pointed black bills move up and down like pistons and, while their heads blink red, they pick clean the harvested fields. When you see them from a distance—all those legs and elbows—they look like the moving parts of a great overheated threshing machine.
What can cranes teach you?
Read More»Books to Inspire Your Best Writing
- At January 18, 2021
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
- 11
With the new year, one of your resolutions may be to get to your writing desk more often, and write faster and better, and more! If you’re like me, it helps if you have a little inspiration to get going. I believe in reading as preparation for writing, and want to share with you some of my favorite books for getting the writerly juices flowing.
Read More»Exciting News for the Writing and Creative Life!
- At September 21, 2020
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
- 33
Exciting News for our Writing Community!
from Lucy Adkins and Becky Breed
Hello friends, we have some exciting news to share! Since the publication of our first book, Writing in Community, we have become more and more interested in all the ways we and those around us express our creative powers. Not only in writing (which is still our creativity “go-to!”) but also in painting, making music, all the traditional ways we think of creativity, and in the very way we live our lives. We use our creativity every day. To solve problems, to create more beauty in our lives. To find the right words to say to a friend who is hurting. Our creativity is vital, essential to who we are. And the good news is that we are all wildly creative, each and every one of us. Let us repeat that. We are all wildly creative, each and every one!
Kindness in the Time of Quarantine
- At April 20, 2020
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
- 2
Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most underrated agent of human change.—Bob Kerrey
Lately, I have been thinking about “Kindness,” the moving poem written by Naomi Shihab Nye and published in 1995. “Before you know kindness,” she wrote, “you must lose things…” For this is a time when we as a world and we as individual people are going through loss. For some, it is deep heart-wrenching loss when a loved one passes away. For most of us, it is loss experienced in other ways–loss of financial security and loss of freedom of movement, loss of the loving contact of friends and family, the solace that comes from talking things over.
Read More»
Recent Comments