Drops of Inspira

  Hello! It's good to meet you here in this corner of the internet in the year of 2024.  I won't bore you with tired jokes about the new year. They were old five years ago.  I had intended to give you my top reads of 2023, but I need to create more graphics for that post so it will have to wait for another time.  So, in the meantime, I would like to invite you to view my word for 2024: Recently, I put out a call on social media for people to leave a positive word beginning with the first letter of their name on the post so that I could carry the words with me into 2024. This is perhaps the third or fourth year I've done this? I don't know. I lost count.  I used to do resolutions, but I broke them during the first week. I used to have a lot of goals, but after 2020, I felt like a lot of those goals were just not happening. More like wishes than goals. I still make goals, but they're not hard and fast goals, like I MUST get these done or the world will end goals (...

     Hello! Last month I talked about cultivating a sense of wonder, and this month, I want to go off of that and talk about finding magic in the ordinary.  When I was little, I loved stories of magic, of knights and princesses and epic quests. To be honest, I still do. I do wonder though, if in that search for the otherworldly magic, I missed the magic that is present in the day to day.  When the world sort of shut down in 2020, I was out of a job for months. One of the things I did was to go on more walks. It was a novelty for me to not be rushing everywhere, frantic to get from here to there. I could do nothing about my situation so I was forced to slow down. In that slowing down, I began to notice the world around me. To really notice. There was magic in every aspect of life. I didn't need a fairytale quest or magic that came with a whiz and a bang. The ordinary magic of the every day was soft and gentle like a whisper on a breeze, but it was there, and read...

  Hello! During the last post, I talked about cultivating sense of wonder.  Without wonder, we often find ourselves going about the day-to-day with a sense of rote, almost robotic-like rhythm. We don't really think about what we are doing. We just do it. Somewhere in the mix, we lose that childlike sense of wonder, hope and joy. We look forward to the weekends and then realize that they've passed before we've properly dipped our toes in their waters. What if there was a way to have that awareness, that wonder every day? I'm by no means an expert at this, but here are a few things that have helped me cultivate a sense of wonder. 1. Nature Getting outside, going for a walk, or just spending time with green and living plants, breathing in their scents seems to help a lot. Better yet, if you can plant something yourself, water it and watch it grow, that seems to give you something to root for (no pun intended). Suddenly, you are very involved in watching this thing grow and...

  Hello! We are more than halfway through 2021! *slumps over, exhausted* Honestly, what happened to the year? I'm pretty sure it was April just yesterday. Oh well... If the year is more than halfway over, then that just means we are closer to Christmas! *breaks out Christmas carols and throws a party* Okay. Okay. It may be a tad bit early to do that, but you can never start too early. I love Christmas! But that is not why we are here. (Get back on topic, Julia.) Ahem... Today's topic is the halfway point. The idea of being in between something. So, this month's poetry prompt will reflect that idea. Hm... You know, for someone that is as terrified of the ocean as I am, I sure do write a lot of ocean-based things. The wonderful thing about the ocean is that it's a place of both fear and wonder. A place of in-betweenness. A place where you can have one foot on land, and the other in the sea. As always, please feel free to use the prompt to generate your own creativeness. U...

Happy New Year Everyone!  I hope everybody had a good holiday season, got some rest and time with family. This is usually the time where people set New Year's resolutions, goals or something like them. I tend to stay away from them because I just end up disappointing myself, but I do like doing something as a sort of "banner-to-the-year." (More on that in a post later this month.)    I'm so excited about this month's creativity prompt. How many of you are inspired by mornings? I mean early mornings, before most of the world is awake? Mornings when the sky turns a soft pink and melds with a powdery blue? Mornings where the sun sets the world on fire? Those kind of mornings. The kind of mornings where you just want to sing a response to the sunrise.       I wrote this poem earlier this month, half of it in my head on my way to work one Saturday morning and just had to share it with you. I'm not often up and outside this early in the mor...