Do it! Do it in secret or in the open, do it with your heart.
Share what you care to share and process the rest into more writing, or painting, or dancing, or living your everyday life.
Don’t worry too much about a final product, there isn’t one, even when you call a piece done and, say, publish it. It could always be refined, rewritten.
Get on to something and pursue it as many times, in as many ways as it takes it for you to feel done with it—for a while, at least—decide if and what you want to share, when and how, and start a new one.
Christine Renaudin lives, writes, and paints in Petaluma, CA. She is also a dancer and performs occasionally in the Bay Area. She likes to mix art forms and makes a living teaching literature, creativity, and performance.
Memorable writing that sparks imagination. Lean in. Hear the writer’s voice on the page.
Water
By Susie Moses
All summer long I yearn to be in water.
First choice – A freshwater lake, cool and clear, minerally, soothing to the skin. Quiet, still. Maybe at times a whitecap or two, but no big waves, just gentle undulations, giving the swimmer a sense of massage. A tickle of weedy underwater growth against a foot, a small fish swishing by a shin. Avoiding the mucky bottom.
Second choice – An East Coast ocean, edged by wide white sandy beach stretching for miles along the shoreline. Sweet breezes, bright white pelicans in formation against the stunningly azure sky. Watching them drop like stones into the waves to spear a fish each had been keeping an eye out for.
Venturing into the water as it laps onto the hard sand, toes tickled by the searching wavelets propelled by the incoming tide. The zing of the chill, a thought of recoiling immediately overcome by the desire for immersion, the feel of the briny liquid fully enveloping the cranium.
Muffled underwater sounds create a sense of otherworldliness, a retreat from the cacophony of life above the surface—squealing toddlers, mothers’ warnings: “That’s far enough!” Squawking seagulls, shouting teens as they hurl frisbees at one another. Momentary peace—but only for as long as a breath can be held.
Third choice – A small river, where I found myself last weekend, immersed in green water flowing between old beech trees, tulip poplars and sycamore arching above the waterway, gnarled ancient roots exposed along the eroding muddy bank.
I lie prone in the water above the massive rocks that pave the river bottom, face skyward, reveling in the flight of the great blue heron soaring overhead as it traces the path of the flow. I hang on to a silty stone to keep from being swept downriver as I feel the steady pull of the moving stream. The shore is rocky where we emerge and retrieve our beach chairs, wedging them amongst stones, a bit of a wobble inevitable as we balance them on the uneven surface as best we can, and splay ourselves out to dry off in the sun’s strong rays.
Did I say this was number 3? At that point, lying in the bracing liquid caressing my body, hot sun warming my upturned face, my hair pulsating with the water’s movement, taking in the wonder of the great blue making its way upriver, I think it simply can’t get any better than this.
Summer at its finest.
Nestled in a body of water far from human development, noticing an iridescent blue dragonfly waft about. Noting a doe and her fawn far downstream crossing to the other side. No sign of another person for miles, save the one dear friend who floats nearby.
This is nirvana. Cool water, clear light, brilliant sky.
Nature. Respite. Peace.
Susie Moses is a generative writing junkie, enjoying the process and dreaming of actually doing something constructive one day with the piles of papers and notebooks she has accrued, that are spilling out of closets and off shelves and out of drawers.
But for now, just getting words down on the page is an accomplishment and a delight. She spent the year of Covid in Marin County to be near her daughters, but has returned to her beloved Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, at least for a while.
You can read Susie’s dream of living in a cabin in a forest, by the edge of a lake here.
Nepal suspension bridge. Photo by Mick Truyts, Unsplash
Writing Prompt. Choose one and Just Write.
I could never get rid of . . .
I could never like . . .
I could never go to . . .
I could never eat . . .
I could never get over feeling guilty about . . .
I could never forget . . .
Pick one or make up your own: I could never . . .
This writing prompt is from “The Write Spot to Jumpstart Your Writing: Discoveries” along with 57 other writing prompts. Discoveries is on sale for $6.99 at Amazon for a limited time. ereader is $2.99 or free on Kindle Unlimited.
Memorable writing that sparks imagination. Lean in. Hear the writer’s voice on the page.
What Energizes You?
By Bonnie Koagedal
Energy is everywhere. We are made of life energy. A person can influence their life, health and others by sending energy through thought. I call these thoughts: prayers without movement.
Still mindfulness is a prayer. Thoughts are energy similar to words. They carry power and pain.
These teachings came to me recently as the pandemic shutdown escorted me into quiet times in one place called home. These teachings were told to me years and years ago. I did not grasp the fullness or capacity of energy through thought until the shutdown. This time was my vision quest.
When we can become no thing, no place, no thought as Joe Dispenza teaches we can affect our energy above and beyond our bodies. I was fascinated and obsessed for several months about these teachings.
As a child and into young adulthood. I felt I had too much energy for my own good. I bounced off the walls of my life and experiences. I pushed myself to have adventure after adventure and not stop. Like many people who experience trauma or tragedy, a dramatic circumstance sends us to another side of our life energy.
I learned to pray and turn my worry over to a universal God when I experienced the trauma of having a premature baby at age 38. She was born at 24 weeks gestation and was given a 5% chance of survival on the night she was born. She is now 28 and an amazing human.
What this experience led me towards was an ability to stop and enjoy the universe rolling on in my favor, whatever my favor was. I learned to clear my worried mind and let the universe provide. Inner mindful energy is a space I enjoy immensely now as much as being out and about meeting people and doing energetic hobbies. What energizes me is drastically different from what energized me early in life.
I gain great energy communing with my soul, my spirit animals and nature.
I am over the moon grateful for the authentic me that was able to emerge in this marvelous life. The art of “Be Here Now” is my mantra and way of living my life to its fullest.
Bonnie Koagedal moved to Sonoma County in 1986. She lives in Petaluma with her husband and fur friends. Bonnie enjoys soul seeking hobbies which include writing. Bonnie works in Senior Support Services part time. She tours families to board and care homes for a placement service. Favorites: Travel in her motor home and trips to her home in Arizona
Memorable writing that sparks imagination. Lean in. Hear the writer’s voice on the page.
Mycorrhiza*
by Patricia Morris
I live under the canopy of a grandmother valley oak. It grows in what is now called “my neighbor’s yard,” due to the way we white settlers swept through this what-is-now-called a nation over the past 300 years and took over everything. Massacred people who were living here, infected them with deadly diseases, tried to re-make them in our image. Declared that we “owned” the land, bought and sold it; built structures to live in, structures that got bigger and more permanent as time passed; built fences to delineate MINE.
But before all this, there was the valley oak. Like all oaks, it began as an acorn, scrunched into the dirt next to a small seasonal creek. Its roots sank deeper each year, reaching for the water. Its mycorrhizal fungi spread wide, linking fingers with the grandfather sycamore nearby, and the great buckeye at the deeper part of the creek. They grew up together sharing food; sharing information; sharing tenants such as woodpeckers, scrub jays, red-shouldered hawks, squirrels, and woodrats.
The grandmother oak watched placidly as the Coast Miwok women gathered its acorns, ground them into mush, and fed them to their families; as the Spanish and then the white folks pushed in and planted crops and orchards, grazed cattle and sheep; as roads were laid down and houses sprang up, displacing meadows and pastures.
Fifty-one years ago what I call “my house” was built beside the oak out of dead redwood trees. The oak, by this time the oldest living being in the area, grew protective of this redwood structure, and even of the humans within it, despite all the destruction they wrought. I’ve had no doubt, since first setting foot on what I now call “my lot,” that the tree is protecting me and sending me love. Its ever-expanding canopy of leaves covers over two-thirds of my house in the summer, keeping it cool on even the hottest days. In the autumn, as its acorns hit the roof, the deck, sometimes even my head, like small exploding artillery shells, I give thanks and gratitude for the way it shares its abundance.
On a cold, dark winter night, silver stars glitter through the outline of the oak’s bare black branches, its ancient arms reaching to the cosmos. My tiny form sits in a tub of hot bubbling water. Boundaries between me, tree, and twinkling stars dissolve into emptiness.
* fungus which grows in association with the roots of a plant in a symbiotic or mildly pathogenic relationship. Oxford English Dictionary
Patricia Morris lives under the trees in Northern California and writes on Monday nights at Jumpstart Writing Workshops. She dates her love of stories to being read to while sitting on the lap of her Great-Aunt Ruth, a children’s librarian. Her writing has appeared in Rand McNally’s Vacation America, the Ultimate Road Atlas and The Write Spot anthologies Possibilities and Musings and Ravings From a Pandemic Year, edited by Marlene Cullen.
Very recently I leapt into the world of backyard barbecuing. For years I have secretly wanted to learn to barbecue. In my family it was always my Dad’s domain. However, I love grilled foods and got tired of waiting for Mr. WeberRight to BBQ for me. I proudly acquired a very big, shiny new Weber BBQ. It came with a grown-up sized grill width of twenty-two and a half inches. I dubbed my new friend “Big Boy.”
Unfortunately, for me, Big Boy came in a big box with far too many pieces. It was with a definite leap of faith to undertake putting Big Boy together. He did not have written directions, nor a you-tube video and I have no degree in advanced “IKEA.”
Instead, Big Boy came with an inscrutable line drawing and lots of lines leading to alphabet letters. Still, I have my own Phillips’s head screwdriver. I used to call it the star-thingie until an old boyfriend corrected me. But I digress. Suffice to say, after trials and even more errors, I constructed Big Boy.
Okay, so it took me three hours instead of twenty minutes, but Big Boy was upright and proud. I just wanted to admire my handiwork by this time and Big Boy was clean, so very clean. In fact, he was too clean to use. I postponed the baptismal fire and nuked my dinner that night. In a couple of days, after repeated trips to the store for important and essential tools of the trade: A cover to keep Big Boy dry and clean, real mesquite wood to feed him, and long-handled tongs. For my own protection I bought massive mittens. I was almost ready to launch Big Boy.
A few forays into the garage for additional must haves—my landlord’s trusty but rusty charcoal chimney fire starter can with a grate on the bottom and handle on the side and a dusty, spidery partial bag of charcoal in case my mesquite wood failed to turn into coals. I was finally ready to light up the barbecue. I chose to inaugurate Big Boy on a humid, somewhat breezy day. No gale force winds were predicted. As a precaution, I hosed down the backyard weeds. I found matches from the previous century and a full Sunday paper for starter fuel. The directions to stuff the bottom of the charcoal chimney can with crumpled newspaper and then load up the top part with either charcoal or wood sounded easy enough.
I chose to use the mesquite wood based on advice from Barbecue Bob, a friend of mine. I lit the chimney and soon had enough white smoke to elect the Pope. I waited the prerequisite twenty minutes for coals to appear. Nada. Nope. No coals in sight. The wood had not caught fire, although the paper left a nice white ash. Hungry, but not deterred, I re-stuffed the bottom of the charcoal chimney with more newspaper and set the whole chimney on top of a mini-Mount St. Helens pile of newspaper. I found smaller bits of wood since the lumber did not ignite. I lit the new batch of newspapers again. After a second dose of copious white smoke, miracle of miracles, the splinters of wood caught fire. Finally, it produced enough smoke for the oleanders to start talking.
“You do know it is a red flag day.” I know bushes don’t really talk, so I assumed the warning came from the owner of the fish-belly-white legs and flip-flops standing behind the tall, overgrown oleanders.
Having no clue what Flip-Flops meant, I explained that I was trying to learn how to BBQ. I asked what she meant by red flag day and she said that it was extreme fire danger in the hills. Aside from the fact that there was not a hill in sight, I told her that I had the hose at ready. I also asked Flip if BBQing was banned on red flag days. She didn’t know, however, I think I heard the word fire bug. Perhaps she just wanted to let me know that she knew who was playing with matches on a red flag day in case the fire department asked.
Reassuring Neighbor Fire Watch, I carefully emptied the chimney’s coals onto Big Boy’s smaller, lower but still sparkling clean grill. Using my mitts, I gently crowned Big Boy with the very clean, shiny huge upper grill. The sacrificial chicken had, at last, a final resting place. Whoosh! The previously white Pope smoke was now black and voluminous. Turns out olive oil makes lots of good smoke and less-than-helpful flare ups of flame. With my hands still ensconced in bright red mittens and using a very long tong, I turned the chicken. Only slightly blackened. I kept turning the chicken every five or ten minutes. More black, but not at the briquet stage—yet. I figured I had better recheck my BBQ Bible, the thick one with pictures so you can compare your results with theirs. Their advice was to cook the chicken until it had an internal temperature of 189 degrees Fahrenheit. I hoped Fire Watch was not watching because I dangerously left my BBQ unattended to go rummage through my kitchen drawers in search of an instant read thermometer. I knew that I would need it someday when I bought it a decade earlier. I inserted it and watched it slowly rise to 145 degrees. Only 44 more degrees to go but I was starving and the coals were cooling! I knew this because according to said Bible you hold your hand above the coals and count three Mississippi’s for good heat.
By the time I had counted “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . . fifteen Mississippi,” even I could tell the coals were dead. I pulled the chicken off the grill. The skin was definitely done. Delicious? No. Blackened? Yes. Delectable? No. Vaguely resemble the BBQ Bible’s picture? Not at all.
So for the lesson summary: Two hours of perseverance resulting in one hardly edible, even when finished-in-the oven chicken. Adding insult to injury I had a very dirty, sticky, greasy, too-large-for-my-sink grill to scrub.
Lesson learned: find a home for Big Boy and call take-out.
DS Briggs resides in Northern California with Moose, her very large, loving, and loud hound/lab mix. She has been privileged to contribute to Marlene Cullen’s Write Spot books: Discoveries, Possibilities, and Writing as a Path to Healing.
Crab Creek Review was founded by Linda Clifton in 1983. The publication is a perfect-bound print literary journal featuring poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.
Reading period: September 15 through November 15.
The editors seek original, unpublished poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Only original, previously unpublished work will be considered.
Send up to four poems, no more than eight pages total.
Fiction Send one piece up to 5,000 words or up to three pieces of flash fiction/lyric prose fiction. We are interested in all types of stories, though sometimes suspicious of those in which genre conventions overshadow literary concerns. Still: please surprise us.
Creative Nonfiction Send one piece up to 3,000 words or up to three micro-essays (750 words max) per submission period. We’re looking to publish fresh perspectives from diverse voices. We want to read exceptional narratives that illuminate the range of bitter and sweet that is human existence.
Regardless of topic, Crab Creek Review is looking for well-crafted prose that exhibits depth and nuance, a clear voice, personal reflection, and vivid scenes. Experimental and non-traditional forms welcome.
Note from Marlene: I have wondered why we humans seem to easily focus on the negative and sometimes have difficulty seeing the positive.
The following from Qi Gong teacher Lee Holden explains why we tend to think about things that cause stress and anxiety:
The nature of the mind is to dream and wander. Even when the present moment is completely perfect, it’s normal for thoughts to run off into the past or future.
Sometimes, daydreaming can provide valuable insights that lead to joy. However, most of the time, the mind isn’t quite so generous. More often than not, the mind’s natural tendency is to ruminate on thoughts that produce stress or anxiety.
Luckily, Qi Gong provides powerful tools for calming the mind and returning to peace. In this article, we’ll discuss the nature of human thinking, as well as share three techniques to quickly calm your busy mind.
Understanding the Human Mind
Why is it that humans tend to think about things that cause stress and anxiety? Why can’t we naturally gravitate toward thoughts that bring us to a place of joy?
Back when humans faced life-threatening situations on a regular basis, it was helpful to have a mind that could quickly identify unwelcoming circumstances. As such, the mind evolved to constantly look for signs of danger and plan for the worst.
For hunter-gatherers who lived in cold climates, it was necessary to consider how much food they needed to gather before the winter. Without thinking about the future, they might not reach the spring. Naturally, this created a tendency for the mind to constantly search for possible threats.
In modern life, most of the threats we face aren’t nearly as severe as those of our ancestors. Instead of fighting off jaguars, our stressors usually take the form of traffic lights, long lines at the grocery store, work meetings, and getting our kids to school on time. However, internally, we still respond to these “threats” in a similar way as we do to those that are truly life-threatening.
While it’s certainly a good idea to get your kids to school on time and prepare for important work meetings, most of the stress and busy thinking we experience doesn’t actually help us.
More often than not, stress and busy thinking make it harder to concentrate and cause emotional fatigue. Not only does this feel uncomfortable, but it also reduces our ability to function at a high level.
In order to experience inner peace and outer resilience, it’s important for us to not let stress and busy thinking get the best of us.
Fortunately, as conscious creatures, we can choose to work with our mind and body to let go of patterns of stress and overthinking.
Three Qi Gong techniques to Quickly Calm Your Busy Mind
1. Slow Deep Breathing
In Qi Gong, the breath is seen as an important gateway between the mind and body. Breathing is an opportunity to use the intention of the mind to work with the body, and the presentness of the body to work with the mind.
The quality of your breath is closely linked to your level of stress and the busyness of your thoughts. When feeling stressed, breathing becomes quick and shallow.
When you’re relaxed and calm, it slows down and becomes deep and full.
One of the quickest ways to calm a busy mind is to take slow, deep breaths.
To start, sit upright in a chair. Bring your full attention to your breath and inhale slowly through your nose, allowing your abdomen and chest to fill up with nourishing oxygen.
At the top of your inhale, hold your breath for two to three seconds.
Then exhale slowly through your nose until your lungs are completely empty.
At the bottom of your exhale, hold your breath for another two to three seconds.
You can do this simple breathing exercise for as short or long as you’d like. If you’re busy, perhaps just take five to ten breaths in this manner.
If you have more time, follow this breathing practice with some physical activity.
2. Engage Your Body
Just as breath and thinking are closely connected, your body and mind often reflect the quality of one another.
When your mind is racing with busy thoughts, the body often becomes tense and tight. In turn, this causes energy to stagnate, which creates additional discomfort and propels the cycle of busy thinking.
When you move your body, you’re able to release tension and tightness, which allows your mind to relax and become calmer.
There are many different kinds of physical activities you can do — hiking, running, walking, pickleball, or… Qi Gong.
3. Focus on Physical Sensations
In addition to moving your body, it’s often helpful to focus on the physical sensations that you experience in order to calm your mind.
Why?
Your body is always in the present moment, but your mind is not. By focusing your mind on physical sensations, you’re able to use your body as an anchor to bring your mind back to the present moment.
Focusing on physical sensation can take many forms. One way is just to sit still, take some deep breaths, and pay attention to whatever you’re feeling in your body.
Another way is to practice Qi Gong, which combines all three of these qualities to help calm the mind.
In Qi Gong, we often start with slow, deep breathing to relax the body and bring our attention to the present moment. Then, we work with a variety of movement exercises to release tension and circulate energy throughout our entire being. And throughout the entire practice, we cultivate a deep awareness of the physical sensations we’re experiencing.
Lee Holden has devoted his career to helping people learn the powerful principles of Qi Gong for over twenty-five years. Anybody, at any age or fitness level, can use these moving meditation techniques – not only to improve physical fitness, but also to assist in recovery from injury and illness, to achieve a deeper sense of calm, and to relieve tension and stress. Through my DVDs and Public Broadcasting television specials, in-person workshops, and teacher training, I have helped more than 10,000 students:
Heal from injury and disease
Slow the aging process
Feel better than ever
Maximize their energy
Many people tell me they don’t have access to a Qi Gong teacher in their area, or that classes aren’t at a convenient time. That’s why I’m now offering fresh classes streaming online, every week. Now, thanks to the internet, you can finally take my classes from home, whenever it’s convenient for you. It’s also why we’re producing brand new Healing Series programs to help you solve your most pressing problems. Whether you’re just getting started, or have years of practice under your belt, I’m confident that you’ll find my style of Qi Gong practical, effective, and harmonious. Looking forward to working with you!
