Category: Spirituality/Inspiration

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Body of Water

This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt is to tell about a body of water with which you are familiar. What comes to mind is the creek that ran through the back yard of our honeymoon house years ago.

Honeymoon Creek

its babbling trickle

from the top of the mountain ~

we watched for black bears

from our wraparound

porch with fireplace and rockers

sipping fresh coffee

~ always, it seems, I

wish we were living right there

in all the wonder

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Open Write Day 3 of 3 September 2025

Today’s host for the last day of September’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com is my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. Barb and I have collaborated on several writing projects together over the past decade, most recently our book entitled Assessing Students with Poetry Writing Across Content Areas: Humanizing Formative Assessment, published Taylor & Francis, a division of Routledge Press, released earlier this month. We write together the first Monday of each month in a small Zoom group and share what is happening in our lives. She’s the friend who shared with me the cards I’ve been using from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. You can read her full prompt here today, as she inspires us to choose any text or piece of art and write about it. She models an extended Fibonacci Sequence poem form using syllable counts 1,1,2,3,5,8 forward and reverse and I’m doing the same today with the same poem I used yesterday to inspire my writing ~ Overheard on a Salt Marsh by Harold Monro. Hop on over to the prompt link later in the day to read the poems others have written!

What Marsh Nymphs Know

marsh

nymph’s

green glass

beads stolen

right out of the moon

attract the filthiest goblin

with more on his mind than those beads

but marsh nymphs know how

to handle

goblins ~

aim,

kick

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Open Write Day 1 of 3 September 2025 with Kelsey Bigelow

Today’s host of the first day of September’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com is Kelsey Bigelow, who works as a mental health poet and renowned author of books, slam poetry events, and writing workshops in Iowa. You can read all about Kelsey and visit today’s prompt and poems here, as she inspires us to think about what lives on the “good side of memories.” Today’s writing is rooted in stream of consciousness writing that can live on in that form or be the start of one that takes root for another.

It’s All in the Kneading and Knowing

the happiest thing

I’ve ever tasted was that moment

when in my grief

soul-gutting tears in a

big-enough-for-all

walls of a VRBO

reverberating sniffles

and crumpled Kleenex

and happy laughs of

oblivious grandchildren playing

with their newest cousin

trying to teach him

to walk at six months

and believing he could

the strains of Amazing Grace

sung to a guitar

by the rest of us trying

to sing with the best of us

believing we could

as we all sat piled high

on the curved couch

pajama-clad, remembering

*******. ********

then one broke the silence

asking for a happier moment

in the autumn – another together

time when smiles returned

then another added

yeah, when

any of us can

make a word from tiles in

turntable Scrabble

and another added

yeah, and only if Mom

brings the pumpkin bread

and right then

in those delicate moments

I knew three things:

that I had taken the reins

as the newest family elder and

that tradition of togetherness

lives on in food tried first

as a flopped recipe

when they’re toddlers, then tested

again and again to perfection

by the time they’re teenagers

and can’t think of gatherings

without it and

that families too

are like that ~

learning to walk

learning to sing

learning to bake

learning to live on

believing

through all the tears and laughter

that together

we can

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Three Friends

This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt inspires us to take the line of a book by Louise Erdrich, The Round House, and use this sentence to start writing. Here’s the line: I had three friends. I still keep up with two of them.

I had three friends. I

still keep up with two of them.

The other has died.

This is a true poem. Back in the early 1990s, we moved to a new subdivision full of young families. Between the time I left a job teaching preschoolers and the time I went back to school and began subbing and teaching full time, I was a stay-at-home mom. Four of us would gather to play cards and use coupons we’d clipped from the Sunday newspaper inserts as our betting money. We all had old recipe boxes we used to file our coupons into categories. Diaper coupons were the hot ones – we all wanted those! We passed the time together while our older children were at school a couple of days each week.

Two people (that I know of) from that subdivision ultimately developed MLS, and I must wonder if it is environmental with soil brought in as they graded those homesite lots in coastal South Carolina. One was a young child who is now an adult and fully confined to a wheelchair, and one was my cardplaying friend who had two young boys. She’d married her much older sweetheart in high school and smoked most of her adult life. She went back to college and got a degree in nursing, then retired from Hospice care a few years before she began experiencing the symptoms of MLS. That’s when my friend, a Hospice nurse, called in her own team of Hospice caregivers in the Spring of 2025 and died in July-only a few weeks after my father died.

I still have the ladder back chairs she and her husband gave us one year. I painted and recushioned them to match the dining room table from my great grandmother. The kitchen spirits are alive with stories and memories. I laugh and cry when I pause and think of all the love and laughter there in six chairs at that table.

Oh, the fun we had!

I thought of her last night as my brother and I attended the inaugural fundraiser for Hospice of the Golden Isles, where my father gained his wings. Bourbon and Bites at Village Landing on St. Simon’s Island was a huge success, and I’m pretty sure there were more spirits present than just the liquid variety. Cheers to all Hospice caregivers and to our friends and family who have known their comfort and care.

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Peace

Last month, I started writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt is about what brings peace and what is not peaceful in your day. As a fan of visual poetry, I chose the form of the breathing wave today the way it may appear on a screen in a medical office (scroll fast and you can see the wave appear in the line breaks.

Where Peace Lives

I’m up at 5 a.m. writing

most days, even today – a

weekend I’ve longed for

after months of long

trips home to clean out

Dad’s house. Peace awaits

~ coffee, silence, cool gray screen

backlit keyboard, eye masks ~ where

the meditations of mind and memory

converge without to-do lists

and deadlines and data

keeping the pulse in

check, breathing

slowly, deeply

where I belong

before the clock

kicks in, governing

routine like a thief of

time, getting in the way

of the relaxed pace of

living without all the

demands awaiting

outside these

doors in the

real world

I find my

peace

here

…..

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What Did You Bring

This month, I’m writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. Today’s post inspires us to write about what we bring – in our purses, on a trip, to a party, in our suitcases, in our book bags or in our cars.

I’m reminded of our adventure book club that met at Barnstormer’s Restaurant in Williamson, Georgia the. month I couldn’t attend. You read that right. I’m reminded of a memory I don’t actually have. We’d recently finished reading a book entitled The Last Flight, where two women change identities to fly off to new lives but then one plane crashes. This inspired us to meet at our local small airport’s restaurant and actually bring a bag of only the five things we would take if we ever left and were limited in our departure possessions. They had to fit in a tote bag or small personal bag you’d carry when flying. We excluded cell phones, chargers, wallets with money/photos, and medications.

Only thing is, that’s when my father was in Hospice in his final hours and I was out of town – so I heard all about what happened at that book club meeting but was not able to attend. Today, this question for the prompt is timely. What would I bring?

5 Things I’d Bring

I’d bring the tiny obsidian dog

to remind me you knew my heart

I’d bring the silver pearl cross

to remind me you knew my faith

I’d bring the pumpkin bread recipe

to remind me you value tradition

I’d bring the bracelet with the cardinal

to remind me you know transcendending love

of motherhood

I’d bring the memories

to carry you in my heart forever

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Open Write Day 2 of 3 August 2025: Hermit Crab Poems

Hermit Crab Poem

Today our hosts for the second day of the August Open Write are Margaret Simon of Louisiana and Molly Hagan of Maine. The Open Write is a place for educators to nurture their writing lives and to advocate for writing poetry in community. We gather every month and daily in April to write together and to share our thoughts on the poems that are born of our shared prompts. Today’s prompt can be read in full here.

My friend Margaret lives on the Bayou Teche in Louisiana.  She and I made a presentation at the Faye B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg last April to share prompts from a book we wrote with our writing group – Words that Mend. She writes a blog regularly at http://reflectionsontheteche.com. Molly lives in an old red house, on top of a hill, in a small town in mid-coast Maine. She blogs regularly at www.nixthecomfortzone.com.

These friends inspire us to write Hermit Crab poems today.

They explain: “Hermit crabs are known for creating inventive homes in all sorts of surprising spaces and containers. As writers, we can use the containers of other types of writing to form inventive poetry!”  A hermit crab poem takes on another existing form, such as recipes, glossaries, quizzes, applications, etc. 

I chose an Amazon Review for my Hermit Crab Poem. I spend time there whenever I’m about to buy a product and thought of how apt it would be to combine the book The Gift of Nothing and an Amazon Review only without the book part. First thing: Pull some of my old Amazon Reviews off of Amazon. I’m sharing them below:

5.0 out of 5 stars Works for my Hard-to-fit-Ears

Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2024

Verified Purchase

I don’t usually have such luck with earbuds. They don’t stay in my ears, most of them. These have the ear hooks so that they don’t have to shove all the way in to be effective. I can even wear them with my glasses. And the charge life is unreal – it lasts for weeks.

5.0 out of 5 stars Every Color

Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2024

Size: 7.5Color: CharcoalVerified Purchase

I have them in every color. On my feet all day, I find comfort in these shoes that offer support and traction. Having them in every color takes the guesswork out of what to wear. It may seem boring, but there is a lot of reliability in a dependable shoe that doesn’t rub blisters and offers enough support and comfort to get through the long work days.


5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect comfort
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2024Size: 7.5Color: Obsidian Verified Purchase
You can’t ever go wrong with a pair of Tevas. They are like a little cloud of heaven to walk on.

Next, I took some of my actual words from these reviews and applied them to a review for Nothing in a prose poem review-style fashion. Here is my Hermit Crab poem, Amazon review style in a prose poem:

5.0 out of 5 stars: Nothing

I give nothing five out of five stars. It comes in every color and brings traction and support. It may seem boring, but there is reliability and dependability in nothing to get me through those long work days. Nothing is something that doesn’t have to get shoved in to be effective – it works with or without glasses, and the charge is unreal – – it lasts forever, practically! You can’t go wrong with nothing – it’s like a little cloud of heaven, and exactly what we’ll all take when we go there one day. So think ahead: get your nothing today – you will be glad you did!

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Being

This month, I’m writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. The prompt today captures the essence of what it feels like when you are all set to write, new journal and pens, time on your hands, the perfect chair, and nothing comes to mind that you feel like writing about. Today, Goldberg asks us to just write who we are, what we are feeling.

Layers of Being

when Dad woke up

after the shock

he announced he was

surprised to be here

and declared, I’m different

and it has me wondering

whether we exist in layers

of being

and when several get

torn away at once

we feel the going

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Favorite Cafes

This month, I’m writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. Today’s prompt asks to tell about a favorite cafe, diner, luncheonette, or coffee shop. One comes to mind before all others: The Midpoint Cafe in Adrian, Texas on Route 66.

This little retro cafe is not what you’d expect. There’s a lady in there who makes the pies, and she’s the aunt of the young mom who was our server, who told us all kinds of stories about growing up right there and how she’s climbed the windmills before. She took the time to tell us about life in Texas and how she’s from a long line of Texans right there in that town.

I was listening, watching intently, savoring every sense of this place (especially the pie, the pie, the coconut cream pie) and thinking, even as I faced going back to school as an educator, that life right there is some sort of splendid destiny. How many people get to serve their aunt’s delicious pie in a cafe and meet people from all over the world, traveling to see a slice of America? It sounds like it should be the next Hallmark Christmas movie, really, this young single mother swept off her feet by a lost Texan who moved to Chicago to be some kind of an architect and got swallowed up by the CEO and business types but is called back to his home state to design new rodeo grounds and has a flat tire so he stops by for a piece of pie……or something like that.

That’s a place I need to return. I wish they shipped those pies and I could have a slice for supper. Best. Pie. Ever. And….did I mention that I don’t even particularly like coconut? Never have.

But that pie!!!!!

Chime in with your favorite cafe. I’d love to visit all the good ones and know just what to order.

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Writing Down the Bones: Tough Thoughts

This month, I’m writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. Today’s prompt asks this question: What will you have to say goodbye to when you die?

Breaking the Glass

one day on

Michael & Kelly,

Strahan said

if you stay ready

you don’t have to get ready

and I think it applies to

Heaven too

so after losing Dad

who could never say

goodbye to seven storage rooms

and a house full of stuff

I started pitching things

so I won’t have much to leave~

maybe I’ll break the last wine

glass right before heading

into the light….

or maybe I won’t