Category Archives: Life

PROMPT: Gratitude

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Daily writing prompt
How do you express your gratitude?
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I have a daily practice of FEELING gratitude for this awesome life and all that contributes to said awesomeness. I don’t place much emphasis on EXPRESSING emotion beyond the usual social protocols and niceties. Quite frankly, I think expression of gratitude is overrated. It binds the process up with ego and desire for reciprocity, and the next thing you know you’ve lost all touch with the experience of gratitude and the powerful influence it has on fostering a positive outlook.

Furthermore, when one emphasizes expression, one tends to develop a blind-spot, thinking that the only entities worthy of consideration of gratefulness are other intelligent beings (or constructs attributed intelligence — e.g. gods.) I begin (though do not end) my practice of gratitude with my body (/ mind) and its systems. I’ve been told many people have trouble fostering gratitude when they focus on their body, but I don’t think one really understands gratitude if one can’t feel deep gratitude for one’s body and mind (literal warts and all.) For the body is the means by which one experiences everything, and one can only be unconditionally grateful for it. [For those who have trouble being grateful for body and mind, I’d recommend the book, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by Jean-Dominique Bauby. It’s a short read because it was dictated using eye-blinks by a man who developed “Locked-in Syndrome,” a condition that left its author only with conscious control of an eyelid.]

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PROMPT: Daily Habits

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Daily writing prompt
What are your daily habits?
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The only optional activities I do every day are: reading, writing poetry, overhead hanging, and handstanding.

[Obviously, there are non-optional transport, hygienic, homeostatic, and metabolic maintenance activities: e.g. the breathing, peeing, pooping, walking, eating, toothbrushing, washing, etc.]

PROMPT: Outfit

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If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?
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T-shirt and sweatpants. Of course, I’d never be able to move back to temperate climes and would have to stay in the tropics. And if it was really one outfit (vs. many copies of the same outfit) I would probably end up going nude after a year-and-a-half or so when said outfit disintegrated into its component threads. So, I’d then have to join a religion, because holy men seem to be the only ones allowed to go buck naked out in the streets without consequence. This is starting to entail more than superficial change.

(Of course, I now notice that the prompt doesn’t say one would exclusively wear this one outfit. But then I think the question becomes meaningless because I think most people — except perhaps a few “fashion influencers” and “celebrities” (quote marks are intentional) — do wear a given outfit over and over [I know I do.])

Point is: it has to be comfortable, not restrict my range of motion, not result in me being a sweaty mess all the time, and allow me to blend.

PROMPT: Self-Care

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How do you practice self-care?
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1.) Move my body often and with vigor. 2.) Eat my veggies. 3.) Rest as though it’s an essential part of the process of living (i.e. not as though it’s goofing off between “doing stuff.”) 4.) Drop anything without value, making personal development as much a process of stripping away as it is of adding to.

PROMPT: Tagline

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If humans had taglines, what would yours be?
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“A life mostly sunny with a chance of hail.”

ALT: “In my mind, no one can hear me scream… but somehow they know when my fly is down.”

Out of Joint [Blank Verse Sonnet]

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My days are out of joint and shuffled up,
 and memories are pictures cast upon
  the floor, and rummaged through 'til chaos reigns, 
 and I pick random recollections out
  of all the events ever to transpire.

They seem no more my life than another's:
 a glance, a glimpse, a blank firing of mind,
 a wicked hope that truth will come to me.

But all I see are monochrome mindscapes
 that could've been wrenched out of another mind,
  or made from AI's collage artistry
 to serve some distant master's deep wish to
  learn what hot-injected time does to a soul,
  and if shuffled scene stacks can make one whole?

PROMPT: Good Life

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What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
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1.) Good company; 2.) studiousness; 3.) a sense of humor, and 4.) the capacity to let go of that which has no value.

Platform Living [Haiku]

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a family lies
 on cardboard mattresses
  to keep bone from stone.

Scarecrow [Free Verse]

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Scarecrow, n. - that which exists 
                         solely to evoke fear.

There are so many scarecrows:
   global - the end of the world
                    as we know it.
   societal - the end of the tribe
                    as we know it.
   individual - scarecrows of the soul.

Scarecrows lead us into the worst
        versions of ourselves: 
 The one who's stressed, and mean
        because of it.
 The one who imagines conspiracy
        around every corner.
 The one who sees threat in every
        change & in every difference.
 The one who wants an orderly world
        of people just like themselves -
        familiar, cozy, and lacking surprises.

Scarecrows even march us off to war,
        and war should be the scariest state
              imaginable --
        death doled out on a random basis.
 
War should be the scariest, but terrible certainties
         spur less fear than any old uncertainty.