write-your-own friday : silence.
Here are the instructions, posted a few weeks ago:
How about a writing exercise every Friday, one that–over time, if you do them every Friday–will leave you with a pile of 89-cent composition books from the Piggly Wiggly full of you. Your story. Your life. Your fears and laughs and thoughts. Something to leave behind, something to re-read when we're 110 years old and living in the Tybee Island Senior Citizen Fun Hut in adjoining rooms.
So, every week for "write-your-own Friday" (an idea I must credit to Mr Brilliant who–after all–is brilliant), I'll provide a simple writing prompt. Spend just 10 minutes a day on this prompt FOR A WHOLE WEEK! A whole week on one simple thing! Ten minutes a day for seven days! Miracles will happen! Threads will be pulled.
If you'd like to make drawings or paintings instead, you go on ahead and do that, sugar. Each day, a clarification, a ten-minute meditation in color. Whatever rocks your boat rocks mine.
Each day, read what you wrote the day before, circle a "hot spot," a word or phrase that stands out to you, and write for 10 minutes on that. Get a timer, set it, write and stop. Close your notebook, make the kids' lunches, feed the pets, do the laundry, stalk Johnny Depp–all the miraculous actions of every day–and then do it again the next day: open, read, circle, write, close.
Just ten minutes a day. Lock yourself in the bathroom to do it if you can't get time alone otherwise and make hints about some kind of intestinal disorder that might cause you to do so regularly. Do not wait until you have the perfect notebook, no. Pick up a slightly used receipt and use the back if you have to. This is not about perfection, people of the earth. It is about process. Your process. No one but you.
Each assignment won't seem like much…by itself. But life is an accumulation, isn't it?
[To see past assignments: Week 1, Week 2]
Writing prompt: A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski
Listen to this piece of music by John Cage (below). As you listen for four minutes and 33 seconds each day this week, write down what you hear, the ambient noise that is around you, everything. Write it down. Hear it. Is there something in what you hear that reminds you of something else? What is it like to sit and listen, simply listen? Give yourself four minutes and thirty-three seconds each day. Silence is not silent.
[photo from here]
