Poetry Collection: On Organized Chaotic Creativity, The Pipes of a Steady Heart, Words to Rituals, Embodied Cognition and Healing with Community
June’s Promptastic Challenge Week 2 with Know Thyself Heal Thyself
Monday: Chaos is fertile soil for creativity
In chaos you find randomness, which to someone who colour codes her bookshelf, sorts her hanging closet by season > type > colour, her sauce bottles from furthest best before date to closest, might seem like too much,
but I bask in the randomness, perhaps a little too much, internally in my mind, a writer’s city bustling a bit too loudly.
The structure might be what you see, a sort of Type A cardigan worn to weather the storms outside; but inside this brain, this noodle of mine, spins the chaos of flavours that produce the strangest of experiences in your mouth right now.
Author’s note: I actually kind of had a messy closet until reading Marie Kondo’s book, and one of the key things that stayed with me is just a better awareness of WHAT clothes I buy (and whether I’m being pushed by sales and sadness to buy things I don’t need), and how I can organize things in a way that helps me better make decisions about what I do need.
Tuesday: Fluid mind, steady heart
The mind: A bustling city of strangers, some bumping into each other, some stopping to apologize, some whisking themselves off immediately all purposefully stomping off somewhere, supposedly important.
The heart: Strangers unaware that the engines pumping the city, the pipes that guarantee our most basic needs, the pumps that fuel this purpose — lay silently, steadily, beating.
Author’s note: For some reason, this immediately reminds me of Spirited Away. For those who haven’t seen this Studio Ghibli classic, it’s a bathing house for spirits and the heart and soul of running all of these amazing baths is a spider grandpa. That’s what I imagine when I think of “the heart” of this poem.
Wednesday: Words are spells, thoughts are intentions, actions are rituals
words as spells woven together in procedure enough to become a coherent thought
thoughts are intentions over time etching into what we pay attention to, how we might perceive the world, what aspects we remember, engendering the very actions that become us.
actions are rituals done once, an action, done twice, is hope, done three hundred and thirty times — a ritual that begins to define who we truly are.
Author’s note: I LOVE the structure provided from this prompt and how it lends itself into a building of who we are. Words can be small, but can become something big if repeated day in, day out into thoughts. Those thoughts become our core beliefs, deeply hidden, deeply motivating what we do. Those actions become the rituals we do every day and who we truly become. Truly a brilliant prompt as always, Diana C.!
Thursday: Healed people heal people
Healed people heal people building a community of persons on different tracks of their journey, from those further ahead, available to offer wisdom, solace and validity to those behind; those behind reminding those ahead of their roots, their story.
Yet there is no such thing as being ahead or behind on this journey; or perhaps only in small dimensions within us, and we are composed of so many, that those moments of sharing, those moments of taking, will each have a place in each and every one of us.
Author’s note: I love this notion and it’s the primary reason I write about my pain and my joy. They co-existing within me as one story, and in editing out one aspect of it might present a false and even pressuring narrative for others to live. I’d like to take this further — sometimes healing people heal people too. I don’t know if it’s ever possible to be truly healed, as if it’s a one-and-done destination. But in others who are healing, processing and sharing their story, I have grown. And perhaps that is my version of this phrase. ❤
Friday: Washing away any trace of toxic energies
Did you know that you can wash away guilt? That by simply washing your hands or even watching someone else wash their hands our sense of guilt diminishes —
in our embodied action, we can influence our thought, our beliefs, our emotions; not just the other away around.
Author’s note: The topic of embodied cognition has always been so fascinating to me, because we as humans like to believe we have such control over our thoughts, and how we impact out environment. Yet sometimes we don’t think about how our environment impacts us, how we think, feel and act.
Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and I’d like to thank Diana C. for Promptastic June week 2’s prompts!
Here’s what I wrote last week!