Prompt: new chapters

Today is the ides of December and for me, in six days, the beginning of a new year will have arrived. New year, new light, new chapters, new ideas, new beginnings, new life. This past year has been a time of rumination, chewing over my old ideas, wondering if they've served me well and if they haven't, it's out with the old, but not necessarily in with the new. And there's been quite a bit of out with the old: old clothes, old ideas, old odds and ends. I'm not ready yet for new chapters, I'm still editing the old ones. I'm so surprised to find my self doing this kind of editing at all, but it's strangely freeing to let things go I've never before even questioned. For example, it never occurred to me that I would not want to make art. I must have just assumed it was part of my DNA. How strange to find it isn't. Last year, this would have made me sad, but this year, it feels so liberating. So much less baggage to carry with me. Literally. Instead of seeing everything as something to be captured on paper, on canvas, in clay, the world is now more of a place for gallivanting, not for pinning something down for later reference.

Prompt: things to keep

caveat: even in writing, it's difficult to decide what can remain and what will be relegated to the backspace button

Someone recently said to me that the first forty years of your life you spend collecting things and the next forty years of your life, you spend giving it all away. And that's how it's been for me, although I've lagged maybe a decade behind.

Is it living in a dreamworld to believe there is an abundance of beauty and beautiful things in this world? To listen to the radio or read any news outlet, one would be hard pressed to imagine there is anything lovely to dream about. But look around, it is there, always there, waiting to be noticed.

Sometimes, lately, I think if instead of collecting or harvesting or hoarding, or even making things for someone to buy, what if instead, we created and curated and tended what is already around us, without price tags, without "exclusive" or "limited time" offers? Lives could change. When did generosity become a radical idea?

Wouldn't it be incredible to see everyone, regardless of their ability to afford it, living in beauty, bounty, surrounded by lush gardens, picking fruit from lovingly tended trees? But what would you or I have to give up to make this happen? What things would we keep and what would we give away?

Prompt: Magic

Caveat: random and silly

If you just cannot believe something that your eyes are seeing, does that make it magic? If you have to suspend disbelief to continue to accept that same something, is that something possibly magical? What is magic anyway? In this short moment of considering what magic may be, what does define magic? Rainbows seem magical, but then again so does Siri, who has no actual substance yet can grant wishes much as any genie from a bottle. Mushrooms that suddenly appear after a rain, especially a "fairy ring", seem to have sprung up as if by magic. Of course there are magical mushrooms but those are for another prompt.