Challenge from Stacey Joy: Write a Hot Lines poem, which is similar to a Found Poem. A Hot Lines poem uses snippets from lines of text that are rearranged, added to, or changed.
To Be An Artist
Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write.
Draw near to nature. Depict your sorrows and desires.
Express the images that surround you – your dreams, objects of your memory.
Try to raise the submerged sensations over that distant past of your childhood.
Explore the depths whence your life wells forth.
Seek for the depth of things.
Live for a while in books and learn from them what seems to you worth learning – but above all, love them.
Have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to cherish the questions themselves.
It is a matter of living everything.
Love your solitude.
Be glad of your growing into which you can take no one else with you.
Your solitude will be your home and haven even in the midst of very strange conditions, and from there you will discover all your paths.
There is not more beauty in Rome than anywhere else but much beauty in Rome because there is much beauty everywhere.
Go into yourself and meet no one for hours on end.
Be alone as you were in childhood.
Think of the world which you carry within yourself. Pay attention to what arises in you.
Be without resentment.
Be glad and comforted.
To love is good: for love is difficult, and the fact that a thing is difficult must be one more reason for our doing it.
Be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things.
You must not be frightened when a sorrow rises up before you.
Most people get to know only one corner of their room.
Do not observe yourself too closely.
Do not derive too rapid conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you.
Do not think that the man who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled.
Find patience enough in yourself to endure
and single-heartedness enough to believe.
Let life happen to you.
Conduct yourself carefully and consistently.
May the year that lies before you preserve and strengthen you.
Common Threads 
scheduled the blood drives
orchestrated Christmas shoeboxes
rocked Volunteer of the Year
waved and smiled from parade floats
chauffeured the seniors
called her favorite commissioner her son
laughed over lunches at the cafe
changed the marquee
typed the bulletin
wrote the newsletter
watered the plants
tended the gardens
organized the missions
rocked the nursery babies
visited the sick
held the hands of the dying
planned the birthdays
reserved the tables
baked the cakes
talked Christmas lists in October
approved the Christmas trees
distributed farm land
doled out tree money
scrutinized the VRBOs
sanitized clean hotel rooms
when I married her son
when my mother died
when the sun was shining
when the moon was rising
when time was ticking
to scrub floors
to wash, fold, and iron clothes
to negotiate traffic
to choose steaks
to make beds
to love animals
to listen to others
and fell out of bed the next
and rushed for brain surgery
to remove what they could
of a stage 4 glioblastoma
the day after Christmas shopping
picked her own room
sent tasteless food back
then called for café takeout
got the scoop on nurses’ life stories
then s l o w l y tried to tell us each one
introduced her PT as her tormenter
bravely wore the white mask
courageously tried to smile
even laughed once or twice
before coming home
as twinkling Christmas lights
are boxed up
of the glass
sometimes transparent
always reflective
praying the treatments
buy more days that keep
passing the 2-way mirror
fingernail test…..