What made you smile today even if you had to force it?

My son being goofy in piano lessons
My Tuesday women's group writing about childhood and then some
A text from a grown man with cartoon doggies and hearts
A text from P in Austin
Ma's totally mixed up/faux pax voicemail wishing me a Happy Passover and to have fun at the cousins tonight (er... we weren't invited...)
Playing Lucy in the Sky... on the piano
Stretching my poor aching calves
Sitting in the sun
All the written words
Snow troffs coming down in clumps off the brick building across the street 4 floors high
Not wanting  to stop... knowing it will be always waiting for me

When in Rome... or your backyard... or...

Happy Spring Writers and those who love them... I recently received a request from a dear student for some travel prompts. Little did I know her request would turn into a prompt! Hence what we all know to be true: everything is a prompt! Happy travels!

There are so many prompts that I can only imagine will show up every moment of your travels; if you stay open to prompts, you will see them everywhere. Notice what energizes you/charges you--for better or worse and all in between--and there you have a loaded prompt. Is it pinwheels? Elevators? Hotel rooms? Hotel lounges or pools? Is is the lone person? The happy couple on their honeymoon? Is it a know-it-all-therapist? Is it jealousy or joy? Cocktail hour? Feeling left out? Feeling acceptance? The jacuzzi? The memories of being here before? The sensory array of blooming things? THe not blooming things? Can a face bloom or not bloom?  Notice what's happening inside and write from there and you cannot go wrong.

Sit. Check in. Look around. Check in. Write. Oh, and what about "checking in"? That there is a great prompt. Especially in therapy-land. Many stories there.

Ditto walking. 

Ditto sitting in a conference hall.

Ditto the carpeting in the hotel conference hall. Oh, the memories and infinite possibilities that live in hotel carpeting.

Which has so many shades and patterns and colors, and really, can take you to drapes, which have many stories you've forgotten you've forgotten, and of course, windows and views outside of windows and.... do you prefer your shades up or down? Is your favorite color blue or red or both? And what are your memories of that color and associations with it? And what if you just write for an hour about lemon yellow? Or lemons? Or table cloth white? Or table cloths? You've got to just trust that when you give it space and time, something magic will show up and have lots to say. Will move through you and thank you dearly.  For that matter, you could write about gratitude. Or grumpiness. Yours. Hers. Theirs. The righteousness you feel when it's some unenlightened else's. 

What you hear at the pool. Or smell. What does chlorine do to you?

And of course the food. What you love. Fear. Won't eat. Can't eat. How you judge what others eat. How you hold back. How you count calories or splurge or compile recipes or tell yourself "well, I'm on vacation..." and what about all that? Or maybe you have a daquiri which you haven't had since you were 21? Or whipped cream? Or try eel sushi? Or skip a meal and write about your hunger. Hunger moves words in a myriad of acrobatic and architectural ways.

And of course... it goes without saying... what you're learning and how it moves you because most of all I think it's good and energizing to attune to what moves you, what works that incredibly receptive life giving muscle to tears, laughter, to happiness, to release, to insight, to friendship, to new beginnings, and possibly new endings... 

and before I say 'write about beginnings or endings' or meetings of all kinds or reunions, I'd better quit now before this gets completely out of hand, but for now, I'll just say "thank YOU for the prompt."

Have a ball! (oh gosh... and who doesn't have ball stories? My first ball was a soccer ball...)

Bon Voyage!

Rox 

I just got a new push broom and I am thrilled!

What are you thrilled and excited about today?

Wish I had more time to write about this. Or more time to sweep. Darn. Never enough time to push the broom across the floor. Or sweep the hand across the page. But I've wanted one of those brooms forever. Lucky me.

What do you love geeking out to?

Presently geekin' out big time to Phillip Glass. Seriously? You betcha, Minnesota. Blasting it and feeling very dramatic and deep. Feeling all proud to be a Jew. It's killing me with pleasure.

Listening to my melodramatic thoughts make up all kinds of stories about my past, where everyone is wearing serious clothing and making eye contact the way they used to do on TV when I was a kid. Taking myself way too seriously and loving every minute.

Eventually I'll just lie down in the middle of the floor. Turn it up even louder, let it replenish my sense of belonging, dissolve—with each layer of those beautiful repeating keys—the personal mythology that I don't belong. Deepen my internal grooves, weight my connection to the earth, invite my spine to unfurl, my fascia to unwind again and again.  

And then I'll turn it off, eventually, so I can go back to doing the dishes.

RISE UP! WRITE UP! What do you geek out to these days?

Was it a beautiful day?

In your neighborhood?

Write about any neighborhood you remember or want to: now, then, in between.

Write and see what happens. They may switch around. Your childhood neighborhood might show up in your dreams and spill into yet another neighborhood. 

Enjoy running into old neighbors and expect many surprises. Personally, when we did this yesterday in my monthly Memoir/Creative NonFiction Group, I was delighted to run into my old love, Joe D, whose last name is so dang literary I long to share it, but alas... even my first love with the pompadour and Buddy Holly glasses deserves his privacy. Especially since the writing and running into him yielded some yummy memories and that felt really good to write about; not because I long for him, not because I wish I still lived in my childhood neighborhood in Los Angeles with the lemon trees and Olympic Blvd, with its 12 lanes of traffic. Not even because some of my happiest memories live there and daily beckon me back to the ocean. 

It felt good simply because in the mysterious ways that writing together works its magic, I was full as I could be to unexpectedly remember and write about that pale, aspiring actor, with  his green cardigan and white pick up truck, his face in the jasmine bushes in my front yard, breathing deeply, not a care in the world for that summer moment, despite the gridlock he'd just battled all the way from Carson.

Rise Up: Your Neighborhood

What do you love?

Happy Valentine's Day writers! 

"What do you love"? is a great life giving prompt any day, any time. Give yourself a love wash, a love bath inside and out as you write out the little details of the big things and the big details of the small things and see how size doesn't matter when it comes to love. It's the spirit of the love muscle pumping all that juicy gratitude through your body and out your pen that you'll come back to again and again, weeping through it with joy and nostalgia and who knows what else.

Or maybe today it's just one thing you love and you linger there and grow that love. Like: your aloe plant that keeps on making babies and healing your wounds and lifting your heart. The little aloe that could that you got downstairs at Hunt n Gather (or was it Ikea?) because way back when you needed houseplants. And what was once a teeny spec of green life, is now an aloe tree leaning into the daily light. It doesn't ask itself of it's worth or whether or not it should grow; it just does its thing, leaning into life, neck and neck with the geranium plant.

Lingering with the details of what you love on the page is an awesome way to grow that love outwardly and inwardly. oxoxo

Rise Up: What do you love?

What did you play as a child?

Today in Friday Writers. Boy that was fun! 

We played school, Four Square, marbles, teacher, home-maker, Star Wars, nothing at all, in the sandbox, in the attic, with our kids, alone, in Minnesota, Los Angeles, in the fifties sixties, seventies, and eighties, etc, etc etc... until, like Jacki Paper to Puff, we stopped coming out to play. Stopped believing. We lamented that, wondered about it, knew we couldn't stop it from happening to our kids... wondered why suddenly things get and look so flat and real. Buzz kill: party's over.

But it was fun to play. Felt reeeeallll good! Like playing again. Writing does that!

Try: What did you play as a child?

Writing Kindness: Glimpsing Good at The Dollar Store

Today as I was leaving the Dollar Store, a signature bag containing two long loaves of generic white bread blocked my exit. I flashed on the man in line before me, who was one of those dudes who talks loud and talks to everyone, not a care in the world. The woman behind me inline had a duo of tantruming toddlers, whom she was trying to soothe with platitudes, and he looked at her and said,"What's he so upset about?"

Big lipped, the kid looked at the man and said through tears "bbaaabaa Valentimes," to which the man nodded and smiled, unarmed with an answer. The boy calmed.

My heart swelled with my love of the dollar store: where else can you get batteries, white bread, brown rice, a mop, reading glasses, a pregnancy test, a statue of the virgin Mary, a figurine of Bart Simpson, and a helium balloon? Where else can you see people unlike the ones at Target?

Well, lots of places, but not for a dollar a Bart.

The point of the this story is not to tell you that I am awesome for grabbing up that bag of loaf and running it out to the kid calming, talker guy down the street who was using his walker as a shopping cart, where multiple bags full and empty flagged his ride. "Oh, yeah, " he said, smiling with a quarter row of teeth, "my bread. I was looking for that. Thanks."

For an infinite moment, that smile on that sidewalk near the corner of Nicollet and 46th in the freezing cold under that noon-thirty juicy sunshine was a succulent painting. I drank.

"Can't get too far without that!" I said and we went on our ways.

The point of the story is that it's nice to go to The Dollar Store and write about it. And feel happy as I write it. And I suppose kindness, or being neighborly or human or however you want to call it, goes a long way. On and off the page.

So you can write about a kindness exchange or The Dollar Store or anything from your day or moment where you might, however momentarily, see the glimpse of good. Er... the glimpse of life, but you know what I meant. 

Fourth Friday Write OUT! "Confessions"

Friday February 24, 2017
1:30-3p @ The Beach
A Writing Cleanse to remember... and forget! 

"Confessions"

Come clean as you write out your deepest burdens, baggage, quirks, tricks, surprises, unspokens, hard truths, or whatever else heeds the call to let that one fall from the tree! Free that fruit before it goes to seed!

"And what I really want to tell you..."

Monthly Writing Cleanse/Write Out this Friday January 20, 2017!

Second Monthly! 
Writing Cleanse/Write OUT: "Despair"
@The Beach 1:30-3 p