Tag: writing prompts

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forgiveness Lord's Prayer

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a dog sitting at the top of the stairs looking cute waiting to be hugged after he has just trashed the couch and put all the cushions on the floor!

In my last writing group I ran only one lady turned up. Her and I have known each other for a while so we got chatting about more than just writing. Slowly it emerged about how forgiveness, of ourselves for being hurt as much as for others who have hurt us is important.

In fact Jesus says in The Lord’s Prayer

Forgive us our wrongs as we forgive those who wrong against us

[paraphrased]

So we are asking to be forgiven as much as we are asking to forgive, I think. There will be follow up post to this in May after we have done these phrases with the youth group because we all know these lovely young people seem to get to the heart of things.

But as we chatted I thought more and more about how can we understand forgiveness. So I set the challenge with the lady, which I am also going to share with my writing group mailing list for making Forgiveness some solid, giving it a personae, a personality, making to tangible. I think too often we try to understand abstract concepts but we need to make them whole and real.

For me forgiveness if a warm friend, but not the sort of friend who agrees with everything you say but who challenges you when you tried to get round things. I have a couple of friends who are like that. I’ll get into moan mode and they’ll got “yes I see where you’re coming from but have you looked at it from this side.” Now to me that is forgiveness. It doesn’t say you’re wrong but it says you have to move on.

This picture I saw on Facebook this morning says it all for me. Forgiveness is the challenging friend who says “let it go, you don’t need to carry this. Get off the track”. I did also discover that as well as forgiving I need to put in something more than to make it move from an empty forgive to a positive space. Perhaps I need to explore whether forgiveness walks alone or has a friend?

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Everyday Wrods writing prompts

Speak Simply

Pensarn Beach strand. Photographed by Diane Woodrow
Taken this morning [27th April 2022] on my early morning beach walk with the dog

There have been a few ups and downs clouding my outlook and stopping me looking forward to my holiday. One of them, which might sound trivial, is these prompts from Everyday words. As I have said before they are so full and there is so much to think about that I have been doing them slowly. But they are now filling up my inbox and my “get it done” nature is struggling with them all. So I decided to take a new tack and am doing the ones that are most recent. So today I have done today’s prompt even though I still haven’t done Day 10’s. Coming from this approach has stopped me feeling so overwhelmed. I am learning too that sometimes life in general overwhelms me and I have to find a way out.

Preparing for a holiday can overwhelm me. I feel like there are so many things to get done – packing, sorting and preparing things for the animals that are either staying [the cat] or coming with us [the dog]. I feel like I need the house clean and tidy and all the washing done. Some of that comes from wanting to be kind to my future-returning-from-holiday-self, but it does make me panic a bit. This morning I was really pleased when my husband hugged me and thanked me for doing the washing so that there would be clean clothes for the holiday. It is probably from those words that the inspiration for this poem comes from.

Even though the PDF says one thing I am renaming it “Simple Things“. So the prompt comes from my friend Victoria Field’s poem ‘Dandelions’ which can be found in her new book A Speech of Birds. and Sarah’s suggestion of taking the line “Dandelions speak dandelion…. write about what they might say to each other”

My dog walk this morning was filled very much with the simple things of a dog enjoying being on a walk, of the sea and these lovely plants that grow on edge of the shore, of chatting with fellow dog walkers and a friend giving some wise advise. In my preparations for my holiday I need to keep the simple things in focus and not get all ‘Marthaed” and do what doesn’t need to be done.

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change everyday words

Neglected?

View of sky, sand and sea with awesome lines and colours photographed by Diane Woodrow
View on my dog walk this morning

The prompt for Day 9 of Everyday Words 30 days of prompts is from Alison Brackenbury’s Mr Hill and Me

Interesting things stood out for me. The first was the line about how the school ‘knew no one they might ring‘ back in 1959 when this poem was set and she has to walk home alone with measles. It made me think of how we take this constant communication for granted. We all, or at least most of us, have mobile phones constantly on us. And those who don’t are seen as odd. In fact you cannot get on to your bank or pay by Paypal or other such things without a text from your bank. We are constantly in communication – texting, phoning, social mediaing, Instagraming, Whatsapping, blogging our thoughts :). It is hard to imagine a time without being able to contact someone in an instant.

I remember when I was about 9 or 10 being in charge of my little sister. My mum worked part time and during school holidays we would go off with our friends for the morning, the older kids keeping an eye on the little ones. We were all primary school age so no one over 11. Not a mobile between us and even if we did have most would have had no one to phone anyway.

But my first thought when I read about her walking home alone and not knowing who was there was that she was neglected, that she had no one to care for her. Because I am putting my 21st century lens on this 1959 time of life.

The next bit that jumped out at me was about Mr Hill. The poem unfolds with her getting weaker and weaker as the illness of the measles takes over and then we have Mr Hill sweeping. Now for some reason I picked up something ominous about Mr Hill. But I think again this is because my 21st century lens has seen and read too much in which the single men, especially older single men, are to be watched out for, that they are going to grab the child – Pedophile? Child catcher? Murderer?

So I read this poem as one of child neglect and was waiting for child abuse but this is not what this poem is about. It is about how life was back in 1959. Men swept the road, parents could not be phone up to pick up their children from school if they were sick, kids were expected to be able to walk back and forth to school.

Was it safe then that it is now? Who knows. Were children back then more neglected than they are now? Who knows. But what I do know, and it is similar to yesterday’s post, is that not everything is as I see it. And also that in 60+ years things have moved on and changed. I need to read things from the perspective they were written. But also to be aware that everything I read, see, and even do is view through the lens of where I sit now and my experiences.

[I haven’t written a poem from this prompt. Only this blog post]