Today we made a difficult journey towards our awareness of suffering in less privileged parts of the world. This might usually be considered an armchair approach to altruism, but the unfolding implications of Coronavirus on international economic activity are devastating. I guessed, correctly, that these concerns would be lurking among Water Story writers as much as they are with me, waking me in the small hours with fathomless despair.
Writing prompts drawn from the anthology POEMS FOR REFUGEES (Jarvis and Haywood) were called on to help us invoke such worries in the hopes of pouring positive energy towards situation so far from our control:
by W. H. Auden - 1907-1973
from which we used the prompt
children afraid of the night
by Wendy Cope
from which writers chose their own prompts
Midway through the session Tara led us through a 5-minute mindfulness session; these have become part of our regular Monday mornings and go a long way to stopping the slosh in our brains! Thanks Tara!
To ease out of the intense emotion of today's subject we noted some trivial afternoon activities only to discover some concerted insustry:
Tara will clean the fishpond for Samuel the fish, Aileen begins art journalling! Helen has some serious sounding dyslexia reporting to do but will reward herself with the last brownie, carefully hidden from her husband and son. Sandra will deal with some clutter and Sheila, an abstract painting... I was mortified to confess my much lesser ambition of eating a roll and sausage till Giovanna joined me in the realms of humdrummity with a clear determination to do no more than make a coffee. Kay will lie on the floor and Pat will exercise for just two minutes while Mary cuddles her cat.
Now that's more like it!
Word processing skills came up and it occured to me that zoom might be a handy opportunity to show some basic settings... which I duly did while sharing the wrong screen. Rather than create a fact sheet I will zoom this in another session soon.
Finally the group asked if I would share my blog about Peccadillo's journey to capture waters of the 5 canals of Scotland.... here it is. Thanks to one and all for another rich session.
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