Day 24 prompt for a creative pause
Day 24 Prompt
Draw and write. Something(s) you know to be true. Option: Trace your handprint and write in and around it.
xo, Carrie
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Day 22 prompt for a creative pause
Day 22 Prompt
Draw yourself doing something hard in the past 24 hours. Write about this in the 2nd person, describing yourself.
Notes: You found it hard to go back out into the world. You’ve been inside for too many days and not talking to people and you felt exposed and dull in the natural light. You found it hard to talk to people, especially the social small talk. Your feet were once again drawn proportionally much larger than the rest of you. You decided this means you are rooted to the earth or to this place. You feel like you’re almost 50. You feel somber and older than you’d like to feel.
xo, Carrie
Day 20 prompt for a creative pause
Day 20 Prompt
What’s a belief you’re fully committed to? Write first. Then draw. Or vice versa.
Notes: I wrote first. Mistake. Now I don’t feel like drawing. My beliefs seem to be all quite pessimistic, and to be honest, I’m not fully committed to what I’ve written, except for the opening two sentences: “I am. I believe that I exist.” Okay, good start, Carrie. Well, here are my excuses. I’ve been sick. I’m still tired. But I’m on the mend! I’ve made a to-do list! And here’s a belief that I can fully back: it’s dark by 5:30PM and I believe the light will be coming back soon.
xo, Carrie
Day 19 prompt for a creative pause
Day 19 Prompt
Draw and write. Something you used to love that you now feel differently about.
Notes: This prompt sparked nothing I could think of. Inside my imagination, inside my mind, lives the possibility of everything I’ve ever loved, even those things I haven’t partaken of for decades and never will again (like smoking cigarettes), or habits long broken (like sleeping till noon), or claims of who or what I am (like being a night owl). I can still remember loving those things, or claiming those things as mine, and therefore, though I no longer love nor make such claims, I cannot say that I feel differently about them — what I felt remains in me. If I’d need to access it to write a story or empathize with someone else, that love is etched in me. Or that complicated tangle of emotions, of which love is a part. What I drew has nothing to do with this. I just had fun drawing it.
xo, Carrie
Day 18 prompt for a creative pause
Day 18 Prompt
Draw and write. Something you received that you did not ask for.
Notes: Well, my RSS feed does not currently have enough credits to send these posts to my lovely mailing list, so they’re living here, and a version of them lives on IG and FB, and there’s no way I’m solving for this between now and the holidays. I drew a picture today! So I’m on the mend. Praise be! I reflected on my body — this amazing container I was given, the gift of life on earth in human form. Sometimes a hard gift to accept, being mortal. But it’s how we come to experience all that we get to, here, through our senses, and filtered through our heart, our guts, our mind, and maybe (I believe this) our spirit. Also, I don’t know why I have long dangling blue frog legs in today’s drawing. It’s weird. I let it be weird.
xo, Carrie
Day 17 prompt for a creative pause
Day 17 Prompt
Visualize someone who is gone. Draw them with you now. What are you saying to each other?
Notes: Still too sick to draw. But it wasn’t hard to visualize my mother-in-law Alice. She’s been on my mind often, and we will be marking our first Christmas without her soon. I keep hearing from her bits of wisdom won by hard suffering. She also said some of the kindest things to me. Once when I was fluffing her pillow, she said that I would make a good nurse. Seeing as she herself was a good nurse (and a tough critic), I took this as the highest compliment. If she were here right now, she’d be asking for a glass of wine. I’d say no, because it mixed badly with her meds. And we’d go round and round.
xo, Carrie