Hello Lovelies—
Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I am grateful for your readership. You keep me writing. To support my work and get access to all of the Living Wild Creativity and Writing Prompts, including the one found here, please consider a paid subscription.
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There is a lot of sadness in my home right now. I wrote recently about thinking about my mother, who passed January of 2015. This week, I crossed the year anniversary of my dear Aunt Mary Ann’s passing, the day after Greg and I had to let River go.
I know when grief comes, it’s the last thing we want to shake hands with. Instead we turn away, bury ourselves in the distractions of work, food, mindless videos. But I’ve found that writing helps me make sense of what has happened, helps me pay attention to the details and form a story that holds the grief.
Writing through the tough times gives us resilience, gives us access to the choppy waters of emotion, allows us to see the beauty and richness of the many faces of our lives.
Natalie Goldberg advises students to “Go for the jugular.” When we harness our most difficult experiences—particularly if we can offer them up as a piece of beauty (a dance, a poem, a story, anything you do to create), then we transform. I believe deeply in creative acts as ways to help us metabolize even our darkest moment.
And this helps
So, yes, I will be writing about River and hiking the trails we hiked together and I will also joining my friend Joanna Rotkin, (whose substack The Sky Inside is a revelation), for movement workshops this spring. I will write and move through my grief.
This week I offer a discussion on the difference between therapy and therapeutic writing, between catharsis and cathartic creativity and then offer a few exercises for Writing Through the Tough Times.
Big love, and thank you for your support.
Karen
For access to all the prompts:
Living Wild Prompt: Writing Through Tough Times
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