Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem about a flower. It didn’t quite go as I hoped. So I wrote about that, instead.
Category: Personal
The Heritage of Rage (NaPoWriMo 2016)
Once again, I decided to try today’s prompt from the official NaPoWriMo site: write a tritina. To make it even more challenging, I used an online random word generator to come up with three words. (From another perspective, this could be seen as avoiding the work of thinking up three words for myself.) With three words randomly generated, writing this poem became mostly an act of galumphing.
I should probably note that this poem isn’t autobiographical. While my heritage is mixed (but overwhelmingly northern European), I don’t have any particular rage connected to it, nor do I yearn for an ancestral sky.
Food (NaPoWriMo 2016)
The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today is a challenge to “write a poem about food. This could be a poem about a particular food, or about your relationship to food in general.”
Given the importance and prominence of food in all our lives, you’d think this would be a fairly easy task. Instead, I found my mind circling around the topic, jumping from one aspect of food culture to another, thinking about food in a variety of contexts. So rather than try to focus on one isolated idea, I used that jumping-circling itself as the jumping off point for my poem.
Fair Game (NaPoWriMo 2016)
Let’s say we make a game:
We create a field,
Assign positions,
Agree on the rules.
You pick your spot,
I pick mine,
Each according to
Our individual talents.
We all play our game
As best we can.
We follow the rules.
We play fair.
But the game doesn’t work.
The Cruelest Month (NaPoWriMo 2016)
The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today is to “write a poem in which you explore what you think is the cruelest month, and why.”
My Muse: A Haiku (NaPoWriMo 2016)
Waiting for my Muse
to strike (the capricious tease).
Still I wait. I wait.
For Addison, With Love (NaPoWriMo 2016)
April is National Poetry Writing Month and I’ll be participating. I won’t promise a poem a day, and I won’t always be following the daily prompts on the official NaPoWriMo site, but I do plan to write at least two or three new poems a week for the rest of this month.
Here’s my first NaPoWriMo poem:
The Pernicious Appeal of Wanting to Quit
This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
- Why I’m doing this »
- It Really Is the Little Things that Matter »
- It’s Not Just About the Obstacles »
- Your Weight Isn’t Your Health »
- The Pernicious Appeal of Wanting to Quit »
In the interest of full disclosure, getting myself back to health wasn’t as straightforward or as easy as my last posts make it sound. I faced crises on the path—several, actually, at several points in the process. Maybe it would help to share one of those crises here.
The following is something I wrote two-and-half years ago, about a month after I’d started going to the gym on a regular basis. I’d spent the previous few years slowly reversing my inertia of inactivity and had finally reached a point that going to the gym for more serious exercise was something I genuinely wanted to do.
Even then, even with all my new motivation to get healthy, I still found myself close to giving up…
Your Weight Isn’t Your Health
This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
- Why I’m doing this »
- It Really Is the Little Things that Matter »
- It’s Not Just About the Obstacles »
- Your Weight Isn’t Your Health »
- The Pernicious Appeal of Wanting to Quit »
But what if nothing much changes in your life to make you care about improving your health?
You could just keep on as you are—which means that, eventually, you could end up with some kind of health scare. Better if it never gets that far.
I think there’s a way to build up to caring about your health without a scare and without major life changes—much like how I took many small steps to slowly change my inertia of inactivity, you can generate a momentum of caring. It starts with a necessary first step:
Stop making weight the goal.
It’s Not Just About the Obstacles
This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
- Why I’m doing this »
- It Really Is the Little Things that Matter »
- It’s Not Just About the Obstacles »
- Your Weight Isn’t Your Health »
- The Pernicious Appeal of Wanting to Quit »
Getting rid of some of the obstacles that built up and stopped me from committing to exercise was an essential part of my path to better health, but it wasn’t the only factor. I need to talk about the elephant in the room:
Back in my late 20s and early 30s, when I was overweight and sedentary, my health simply didn’t matter all that much to me. I didn’t care about it.
It wasn’t just the cascade of obstacles that stopped me, it was the fact that getting healthier wasn’t important enough to me to bother overcoming them.
John the Librarian 