Goodness, Grounded
An Invitation to Write Through the Month of November
I love a good writing prompt.
A good writing prompt helps me move from my over-worked feeling muscle to my imaginative, thinking one. It helps me remember things I thought I’d forgotten. Like last week, when I wrote a rambling post listing 46 things about myself. The list making prompted me to dig into a cabinet of old photos to find pictures of myself and then the pictures I found led me down another rabbit hole of remembering things I’d forgotten.
That one prompt- Make a Birthday List About Yourself- took me to places that, left to myself, I likely would not have gone.
For the last few months, I’ve been collecting writing prompts. Some of them are mine and others are phrases I’ve picked up from people who make me think, but they all come a place of desiring to ground the goodness of God in words. I’m sharing my list of prompts in hopes that some of you may like to write along with me during the month of November. Although they’re numbered according to the days of the month, the prompts themselves are in no particular order; there is no secret plan to try and get us to arrive at some hoped-for vista by the end of November.
The plan is to just write what you can, as you can. I’ll write here on Substack and over on Instagram, with the longer-form writing being shared here. I’ll also be using the hashtag #goodnessgrounded on social media to name this season of writing. If you choose to write along, please feel free to use the hashtag, too. It will make it easier to locate your posts. If you write a long-form piece on Substack or some other medium, please add a link to your post in the comments of my post for the day- sort of like an old school link-up! Can’t wait to read all the creative ways we approach the prompts.
Say the quiet part out loud
The place you understand best
Three words for the season (a phrase from my friend Terri Conlin)
First thought in morning light
Things I am trying to accept
Take and eat
Liturgy of the ordinary (your regular old life in words)
Art as a portal to seeing God
Honor the stream (a love song for your faith tradition)
The aroma of love (tap into the memory of smell)
Old things recently forgotten (Dallas Willard)
Embrace the wound
A prayer haiku
A grief observed
If your spiritual pilgrimage is a place, where are you today?
A blessing for your body
Go through
A gift given away
A childhood memory in words
A recipe, a meal, a blessing
Tuck away the day
Ceremony, ritual, or tradition as the sacred way to belong
A Thanksgiving Address (grateful praise of thanksgiving to things often left off the list) - from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
An epiphany of joy
Things I know
Hush
I want
Thin space
A season changing
Advent as a gift of time
Happy writing, friends. I hope that by receiving our November prompts a week early you feel set up for a month-long journey of good reflection and honest response to God. May you be pleasantly surprised by what the Spirit moves you to write!
xoxo-
Lori
Thank you Lori for this very accessible invitation into writing along with you in November. I'm excited to join in around the 6th! (I get to travel a thousand miles and visit my daughter and son-in-law next week)
I so appreciate your generosity in sharing the prompts and also ahead of time, as it has inspired me to begin writing offline in my journal while I'm away. it's been such a long time of neglect, my own writing, that starting again has been difficult.
Thank you for sharing these beautiful writing prompts and inspiring us to write. I appreciate you.
With gratitude,
Tricia Harris