Writing Club #8 - Levels of Seeing

John's Writing Club: Towards A Bolder Eye & Pen

‘When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am,
who we are, what we're capable of,
how we feel, how we lose and stand up,
and go on from darkness into darkness.’

Maya Angelou

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Good morning

Welcome back to our writing club, where we will interrogate the present in a series of writing prompts this month. Last month, we looked at 'Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. by Jack Kerouac', to help bring some spontaneousness into your writings. This month, however, we are turning to one of the core aspects of writing and one that yours truly has pretty much made a bad career out of. If you follow this route, you quickly place yourself in outsider territory. But write we must, and read we must, and for some of us transgress the choking qualities that pass for the normative that arises from not living with authenticity and heart as a way of running the world.

Looking at the world's situation this very minute from the seemingly normative perspective, there will generally be an us or a them, or just meeting things with indifference. This perspective is monetised and brokers certain power depending on where you live within these things. Over the last week and a half, for example, I've heard the word 'peace' a lot. Especially in my Spiritual Teacher capacity, and depending on this normative layer that we are talking about, you can easily see that when applied to the word 'Peace' you get the three factors, 'We want peace - they don't', 'Why can't there be peace?', and 'I don't care much - I just want to be left in peace?'. These are three writing prompts in themselves. You could reflect on these personally, taking time to embody each one in a piece of writing. You could be reflective of the society you are in, or you could look at the deeper personal and societal layers. So, if you feel like it, have a go at these. Below, you will find a series of ten writing prompts riffing on the word peace. You will also find the audio edition of this post. I invite you to try these prompst over the coming days and weeks. These prompts follow my own thought and seeing process over the last ten days or so each time someone has brought the word peace to me. Write poetry, prose, non-fiction, or journal as you like.