Writing Prompts
Do You Like to Think and Write Deeply or Just for MPP?
If the answer is you like to dig deeply, try responding to these spiritual prompts
I am an Illumination Integrated Publications editor. In January, I issued this story, Prompts to Illuminate Your Spirit, Food for thought to excite your creativity whether you are theist, agnostic, or atheist, with more than forty writing prompts, including:
- What does spirituality mean to you? Does it require belief in a metaphysical power?
- Can you forgive the unforgivable?
- Is life fair, unfair, or does the answer not matter?
- Can you accept the unacceptable, from moment to moment?
- If I told you that every person’s date of death is predetermined, but you would never know what the date is, yet that how we live and how we die are each very much the product of free will, how would that knowledge affect how you live your life?
- Do you fear change?
- Can you embrace uncertainty?
I also serve as an editor for Ravyne Hawke’s wonderful home for poetry, personal essays, and fiction, Promptly Written. I issue weekly spiritual prompts there, which writers are welcome to publish anywhere on Medium. In fact, if you tag us so we can receive notifications and enjoy your responses, Ravyne also features all off-pub-published responses in her weekly newsletter, thus exposing you to a wider audience.
A few of my recent prompts have challenged our readers to write a poem, essay, or fiction that comes to their minds from reading the following quotes:
- “The correct prayer is therefore never a prayer of supplication, but a prayer of gratitude. When you thank God in advance for that which you choose to experience in your reality, you, in effect, acknowledge that it is there…in effect. Thankfulness is thus the most powerful statement to God; an affirmation that even before you ask, I have answered. Therefore never supplicate. Appreciate.” ― Neale Donald Walsch, The Complete Conversations with God
- “When someone searches for something, it can easily be that they see only the thing they have in mind: they are unable to take in anything else, unable to accept anything else, because they are fixated on that one thing to the exclusion of everything else. Pursuing the truth means having an objective in mind. Finding, on the other hand, is about freedom, about being open to discovery, about knowing one’s ultimate destination.” — Hermann Hesse, from Siddhartha
- “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning
Yesterday, I issued this prompt:
Based upon your own life experiences, reimagine, rewrite, reinterpret, or, so I don’t leave anyone out, defend, any story from any religious text. Even an atheist can participate but I ask that rather than proselytizing your belief that God does not exist, please convey to us a life lesson that you can glean from such a story, reinterpreted or otherwise.
I included my own essay therein, including my reinterpretation of the story of Adam and Eve:
It dawned on me one night how screwed up the story is of the Garden of Eden, or I should say, how the interpretations of the allegory are wrong and have led to so much that has been and continues to be wrong in this world, particularly sexism. It occurred to me that so called “original sin” is quite the opposite. It is curiosity; it is thirst for knowledge not just of things, but of what is the best way to handle life, which some idiots turned into right vs wrong and good vs evil. Then it occurred to me that the tree of knowledge is Earth and the tree of life is Heaven. Then I googled and the Kabballah is the closest to my thought as it has the tree of life as “the tree of souls.” I was listening to Aloha Ke Akua and the line “in the image of God” caught my ear, and I started to wonder what the uncorrupted meaning would be. It could certainly refer to souls, and to a baby; after that life takes over — only a newborn is created in the image of god and newborns do not display any masculine vs feminine. Newborns are divine innocence.
As I see it, the creation story, particularly the part about eating the fruit and being banished from Eden, had its basis in my beliefs in and understanding of the purpose of reincarnation, which by the time the creation story got written down, had been completely mangled, as have the words “created in the image of God,” which have been misunderstood and have led to the patriarchal anthropomorphism of God, which has exacerbated male chauvinism.
You can read more about all that and the inspiration for the prompt in yesterday's story:
In Rama I create, with soul-energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
