What Are You Reaching For?

Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones Deck Prompts - What are you reaching for? Go, ten minutes. Or make your response as a list, one thing, one attribute, one person after another down the line. What are you reaching for?

In the short term:

Complete the fundraiser successfully

Finish my book project

Finish my workshop in May that will help others

My cultural values are love, truth, bravery, humility, honesty, respect, and wisdom.

Buy a lottery ticket. Live with humor every day! Do not take myself too seriously.

In the long term:

Work with others daily

Help support family and friends with recovery

Reconnect with family and friends where there is distance.

Daily, I pray with the sunrise and pray for God's will, not mine. I also am grateful for my recovery, and I speak with the Creator about that gratitude, my health, my family, and my friends. I am grateful for the help I get with all that I do today.

I pray for not only my family and friends but also their families and partners.

I hope to write every day for as long as I can. To live each day and not be stuck in the past or in the future. To be kind. Love everyone, even the ones I don't like. Those are good goals to have, although it doesn't always work out. Progress, not perfection, or so the saying goes.

It is my goal to be as helpful as I can be, and some days, it is just better if I am not involved. As we age, we don't always know this.

Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones Deck Prompts - Go ahead. Don't be shy. Reach for the moon, for both the possible and what you think is impossible. Be honest and step up. This is how you build a strong spine and understand your trajectory, your desire, and where you are going. Sure, in a year, you might change directions, but right now, where in your heart are you yearning and aiming? Don't be vague or abstract.

Get to a healthy weight so that I look good in my coffin.

Humor is so important in my life. I want to laugh every day and several times in a day for the rest of my life. I have people in my life to help me do just that, too.

I may need to make some close younger friends to laugh with too, as many of my laughing friends are older than me! That includes my husband. He is four years older.

Write more fiction. Then, I will work on books for all ages and include my art in those books.

And to consider myself a poetry writer, as others consider me that. Continue with poetry until I can consider myself a poet. I was asked by a relative artist to write poetry to go along with his art for a show he has coming up in May.

Is it common to not trust that I can do that? Probably not if I believed I am a poet as he does.