Today's "And Now You Write" Prompt is an Invitation to Enjoy Change & Celebrate Being Perplexed. Yippee!

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Today's Writing Prompt: I will ride the rapids of change and enjoy when change makes me feel ______ because instead of becoming afraid, I will ________

Before you read the lesson, allow the prompt of the day to seep into your mind. Don't actively seek the words yet, instead allow it to just be there, settling into your mind, as you go through the lesson itself.

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How does change make you feel? Nervous, bewildered, perhaps perplexed?

What about when someone suggests you change something about the way you write or how you write or the tools you use to write?

Last Summer, Kahlil Gibran reminded me "Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."

What is your opinion of "being perplexed?"

There are seasons I feel as if I am in the path of a constant, relentless flood of knowledge and insights bursting to rock my world at any moment. Being blissfully perplexed has, in these moments, become a way of life for me.

This morning I read about those first days of practicing yoga last Summer. I was trying to crack myself back open and into a regular practice. I was doing well until recently when I cried for what felt like hours during one session.

Since then I haven't been willing to bring myself back to class. I keep finding excuses to not go.

Last Summer everything was more beautiful it seemed. It was that season of bursting through, blissfully.

One night I got out of the car and said to Katherine, "The air smells so sweet tonight!"

She put her nose in the air and simply said, "Hmmmm" which is the eighteen-year-old equivalent of "I don't smell a thing, but Mom seems happy so I'm not going to say a word!"

We had just gone to Yoga class, or what was labeled Yoga class but was actually what my friend Kama, who just happened to be teaching last night, a "Tai-Chi, Pilates, Yoga class mix" so I was leery at first. I trusted I was where I was supposed to be so I just went with it, especially because Kama, who I barely know, was so pleased to see me and did exactly what I had hoped a teacher would do - guided me into the poses I wasn't doing just right and helped me achieve them more accurately and more... balancedly - if that is a word.

Katherine loved the class and it felt so grand to do it with her.

I remember I fell back into the "new found awareness zone" the next morning, because I am very tuned into feeling the strength today in my torso. This has continued and improved since then. It is as if I am sitting up straighter, feeling more connected in my backbone. I am intrigued.

I could also feel where my stretch has been worked and where my body is most out of whack. Even that felt good because I felt the sense of awareness wash over me in quite
lovely sensations. It was like taking an awareness bath.

Yes, blissful - an awareness bath, even a perplexing awareness bath - is blissful when experienced in a space of increased openness.

In fact, as much as I whine about my body not looking exactly as I would like it to look, when I am honest about it, she and I get along fairly well. We know who we are and after
last night, it is as if she is saying to me, "See, you can work me more. I can take it and in fact, I think we would both enjoy it...a lot."

I started to write a poem with the theme "change" with these words and it quickly turned into a rant:
I create my life to be
a relentlessly changing
landscape … and then, may the rant begin:

(what a trite
word to use and one I
don't mean except I have
heard, somewhere in my
recollection, somewhere,
changing and landscape
together... what else can
changing be? I'm just going
to play with that here…)

Changing face - aging, wrinkles or sunburn and weathered compared to winter grey no outdoors face. Smiling face, frowning face, puzzled face.

Changing seasons - leaves green and lush or red and orange or missing completely. Buds, bushy, skeletons, perhaps the rape of the trees. Sounds: empty void of sounds, baby birds
singing, protective squealing Mama birds, pad of cat's feet, children saying their goodbyes to Mama in the morning when school is about to start... September through June sounds...
early morning door slams and running feet, late feet.

Changing in the scope of life passing? Sounds of baby strollers wheels or walkers or bouncing basketballs on the way to the park sounds. Sounds of swishing short skirts and cat calls, sounds of polyester pull on pants because fingers can't bother with buttons or snaps anymore.

Changing in romance: in the beginning the hunger for the lips, the skin, the new love making technique racing to show the new idea for the bedroom, the new way of eeking out
another moment of pleasure, the not wanting to let go giving way to "just get this over with, please, I am so tired" feeling.

Changing in the community. The quiet of some cars followed by the increase or decrease of cars. The sound of motorcycles. The sounds of push lawn mowers being replaced by gasoline lawn mowers and the exchange of rakes for leaf blowers. The change of the neighborhood from newlyweds to newlymoms and dads to elementary kids to empty nest to all of a sudden, everyone is grandma and grandpa.

What evocative, sensory stories can fill in these changing landscapes so much more than "changing landscape"? Trite, overused, humdrum.

Not for you, not for me. Bland, done, ridiculously void of your unique voice.

So here I offer to you a perplexing combination of words and a diverse set of paths I followed during my adventures last Summer. It makes me wonder and then smile and I think
I head the tiniest guffaw leave my belly – what cartwheels and stretches and slightly off balance turns does your writing take?

Often times it is those slightly off balance sessions that net the most alive writing and the most awakened, "awareness bath" experiences.

As for the knowledge rocking our world? Let's sit with Kahlil and be on the look out for how to balance the "slightly off" with moments of heightened awareness.

Think back to a moment of heightened awareness. Think back to a moment of being perplexed. Imagine enjoying being perplexed, enjoying being off center, enjoying being confused instead of trying to fix the confusion or "make the off center upright."

Stay with me today: let's write our way through this.

What if we said: "I will open myself to experiencing change in a new way today by being purposefully confused by this prompt." Let's try that on for size as we write today.

Today's Writing Prompt: I will ride the rapids of change and enjoy when change makes me feel ______ because instead of becoming afraid, I will ________

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10/25/2010