Writing Workshop Prompts – What Today Meant

Posted by Josie on Jul 4, 2011 in Moments, Writing, Writing Prompts, Writing Workshop | 1 comment

Morning you lot. Hope you’ve all had a good weekend. I have a small, naked pirate on my lap as I type and something smells funny in my kitchen, so all normal here.

While I go and have a read of all your entries from last week, it’s time for you to start thinking about your next one – this week’s workshop is going to be based on a post I wrote yesterday about finding beauty…

(For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can carry on straight to the prompt.)

Prompts

What made you feel alive today? What made today mean something?

Write about a moment, a thought, something you did, something that happened to you, something somebody said to you, that made you stop for a moment. It doesn’t have to big or impressive, just one thing that left you different because of it. Something that felt significant, beautiful, or that just made you feel something. It doesn’t have to have made you feel good, not all days bring us that, but it needs to have touched you.

Try and capture it and pin it down with the words you use.

Finding Beauty

Posted by Josie on Jul 3, 2011 in Me, Moments, Photography | 13 comments

I’m a little obsessed with the idea of finding beauty just now. It’s almost becoming like this daily personal mission. Oh, it’s hard to describe… I’ll have a go.

I can’t bear the thought of wasted days, I think that’s what it is. It’s not that every day has to be endlessly productive, although those have always been my favourite kind of days if I’m honest, it’s more the sense that every day must have some meaning. I don’t mean meaning in the wider, spiritual sense, and I don’t mean it always has to mean something good. but I do like to close my eyes at night feeling like, oh I don’t know, like my world is a bit richer, or deeper. That there was a reason for me to be alive that day and get through to the end of it, even if that reason was pain or the kind of beauty that hurts a little to look at. It’s not always sunlight through trees, my idea of beauty. Sometimes it’s the kind of beauty that looks like dead things on snow. I don’t mean always pretty kind, not always the nice kind, but still full of meaning somehow, even if it hurts like hell.

Writing Workshop: The girl with faith in her hands

Posted by Josie on Dec 16, 2010 in Me, Writing, Writing Workshop | 15 comments

My childhood self sits, bum balanced on the kneeler in front of the pew on which her mother sits, wriggly brother on lap, as she listens to the voice of her father from the front of the church.

In her careful, cupped hands sits the round orange of her Christingle, which she had helped the women of the church assemble that afternoon, one of hundreds, one for everyone, her tummy full of sultanas and raisins that she had spent the time popping into her mouth when no-one was looking. Her nose is filled with the smell of hot wax and the sharp tang of citrus as she watches the flame burn and flicker. Her father’s voice tells what each symbol represents: the orange is the world, red ribbon the blood of Jesus and others that she now forgets. But she doesn’t hear, doesn’t need to, the meanings as familiar, then, to her as the grainy wood of the church pew and the rough, worn fabric of the hymn books, more lost in the candle’s burn, for there seems to be some meaning in that, though she can’t fathom it.

She is six or seven. Utterly safe. Utterly loved. Her world is as certain and steadfast as her father’s confident sermon. That’s what faith is, I guess.

There aren’t many times where I miss the religious aspects of my upbringing. As someone that can find meaning in a dirty puddle these days, or the way the trees move, I never feel like I ‘need’ to believe in a specific religious teaching. Well, it’s more fundamental that, less that I need to believe, more that I just don’t. I’m quite happy enough feeling my way on my own and enormously grateful for the freedom and the sense of peace shaking off most of childhood beliefs has brought me. But as the daughter of a Baptist Minister, my dad later becoming a lay reader in a busy Anglican church, religion has always been something very firmly entrenched in my experience and in my memory.

Christmas is the one time I miss it. I almost ache with it. It’s not a spiritual longing, more a deep-set nostalgia, but I find myself drawn to the churches and the choirs, the candle-lit vigils and the nativity scenes. It makes me feel like a child again. Yes, I think that’s what it is. It makes me feel safe, held in a familiar blanket where everything is certain and predictable, where the sheep always follow the shepherds down the aisle to be placed in the straw filled stable, where you primary concern is whether or not you’ll be chosen to carry one, maybe even one of the more important ones, cradling the the tiny, swaddling-wrapped Jesus solemnly past the rows of the congregation  to place him in the manger.

I almost wish I could believe again, maybe even just pretend, just to have that feeling back.

So this Christmas I have a feeling that a girl, now long grown, may be found sneaking back into churches to light a candle and listen to soar of the Christmas carols, her mouth still shaping the words, all of which she remembers. Not to believe, but just to remember.

Yes, I think I would like that a lot.

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This post was written for this week’s Writing Workshop, a mix of childhood remembering and traditions.

Now it’s your turn. What prompt did you chose?

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries.

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link. Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.

Gratitude

Posted by Josie on Oct 5, 2010 in Me | 10 comments

I’m not a religious person particularly, most of you know this. I struggle to believe in a Higher Power. But there have been times when something happens to make me wonder about it all.

You could call that ‘something’ lots of things I suppose: an answer to prayer, or synchronicity, or fate, or karma, or just plain luck.

In any case, I’m getting a lot of ‘somethings’ happening right now.

I have this theory you see. It seems to have be proven in my life over and over again. It’s that if you really need something, and I mean NEED, not just want, not just the way I need the pair of gorgeous boots on page 48 of the Joe Browns catalogue, but if you have in your life a really genuine need for something in particular, and you are humble enough and open enough to see opportunities when they arise, well the Universe** has a way of way of giving you what’s needed. It doesn’t always come in the form you expect, and requires a certain way of looking sometimes, but it’s there. It finds a way to you.

I find myself in pretty genuine need of quite a lot of things.

Some of them are mundane silly things, but that still have the power to make quite a big difference to my day to day life. Just stuff that’s broken, or old and worn out.

And then there’s the bigger things. Money-type things. Worries. Shortages. Significant things missing from my life that leave a hole.

And what’s amazing is that these things seem to be finding their way to me. The little stuff and the big stuff.

And this post is just to say, to specific generous people, and to whoever it is up there pulling the strings or the strange cosmic force orchastrating it all, or to no-one at all, just random chance, WHOEVER, this post is just to say thank you. I’m grateful for it all, even the little stuff. And I won’t waste it. And I’ll find a way to give it back some day, too. Somehow.

And it’s to say thank you to you too. Because something I have been in desperate, heart-felt need of for a very long time was friendship, and connection and understanding.

And I seem to have been given that by bucketload recently. I promise to try and give that back too.

Thank you x

**I say ‘Universe’ in lieu of any other particular convincing term. You can call it God if you like. Or you can just decide I’m talking bollocks – I may well be.