your weekly sun showers email is here
hola
Happy Sunday, friend. I’m excited to share the newsletter with you this week.
I’ll be honest—I have not been super diligent about writing regularly (yikes—that’s my forever refrain). Do you have any tips? If so, good lord please send them my way.
This week we have one reader-submitted piece. Just a friendly reminder that you, too, can send something in if you would like. Anonymously or with your name, I’m open to it all. All you have to do is hit “reply.” No pressure, though. Just leaving the door open.
aaron’s piece:
I feel a lot of a lot lately.
a lot of presumably similar feelings for most others: I feel anxious and I feel on edge.
I feel a lot of it- im living somewhere between an overwhelming urge to be neighborly and the place where my brain can convince itself that the way my shirt falls across my chest is actually a collapsed lung. its a daily juggle of pseudo-phantom symptoms spurred by refreshing the news and looking outside to find someone to wave to. a split personality of Mr. Roger's neighborhood and the bubonic plague.
I feel a lot of a lot.
but mostly, and I do mean mostly, im finding daily time for exercising the muscles for gratitude.
warm up by doing my best to ignore the tiring hamster wheel of new normals.
stretch out and reach for goals largely neglected, tasks put on hold, ideas collecting dust, and creativity smothered.
lift the positivity out from its trenches with a battle cry of your favorite records and the best jokes.
feel a little burn to lift to the fog.
treat every ache, pain, and soreness like a house warming party, backyard barbeque, and happy hour.
I feel mostly grateful and im holding that up like a knife to the throat of all that scares me most
I want to leave ice cream at front doors
cold drinks on welcome mats
tips on top of gratuity
I want to wave, say hello, give a friendly nod
and remind myself every day that I feel a lot of a lot and its a treatment, not a symptom
prompt #4 (The 5-4-3-2-1 Technique):
This week’s prompt is powerful because it is not only a writing prompt, but also a tool for managing panic attacks and anxiety. If you or someone you know is experiencing a panic attack or uncomfortable feelings of anxiety, this prompt can help ground and engage the parasympathetic (chill) nervous system.
For today, though, we’ll just use it as a prompt to get us writing.
Describe 5 things you can see, 4 things you can feel, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. (If you want to switch around the senses, that’s totally fine, as long as you get the 5-4-3-2-1 thing down.)
For today’s writing time, I suggest setting a 5-minute timer (but I also freely admit that I needed more than 5 minutes to get in all five senses). Once you’ve written, take a break. Then read over what you’ve written. Take whatever you like the most and expand it into your poem, essay, story, song, or whatever else you feel like writing.
ashley’s piece (a little story snippet):
Someone left the pants on the sofa, and they found them late the next morning after all the guests had stumbled home.
Crumpled between the middle cushions, Chloe extracted them from beneath a pillow as she lounged, head still pounding from the uncounted drinks and lack of food.
“Umm? Did someone lose their pants?”
Amanda looked over from her stupor on the easy chair and barked a laugh.
“What?”
Unlikely as it seemed, there they were, dangling from Chloe’s prim finger hold. Something between scrubs and pajama pants, they were a style the girls had never seen in their home before. The kind of pants that would be more at home with an eclectic Berkeley Golden Girl than the two college students.
“They smell a little… weird.” Chloe wrinkled her nose and tossed them. Amanda sniffed and paused, trying to place the scent.
“It’s like, fake flowers.” The kind of chemical aroma that only detergent companies could believe is reminiscent of anything found in nature. It was so overwhelming she could almost taste it. “Thrifted, maybe?”
They tried to name everyone who’d come through he night before; a mix of friends, classmates, coworkers, and neighbors. Although they lived together, Chloe and Amanda kept fairly separate social circles. Housemates of convenience, they had disparate interests.
Running through the roll call, they couldn’t place these strange pants on anybody. Moreover, they had no memory of anybody being pants-less at the party.
“At a certain point, I kind of lost track of everything,” Amanda admitted. “I can’t remember much after two.”
Chloe agreed that she, too, had perhaps gone a little overboard on the Carlo Rossi jam jars.
But the pants made no sense. Had a grandma rolled through? And then taken off her clothes? And left them in the couch?