For a Weighty Week

a writing prompt for you

Welcome to Writing in Company. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points for you to write about what matters. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

Some weeks seem weightier than others.

a fresh loss

a tender anniversary

a new diagnosis

a terrorist act

a war that drags on

a disaster overnight

Trauma and grief pile up like a stack of stones. Not like those artfully balanced cairns built by soulful pilgrims. More like a haphazard pile of pebbles tossed together by half-feral children. How high can we build it until it collapses, brought down by its own weight? Better back out of the way so you don’t get your fingers or toes or heart crushed underneath.

Some weeks we carry our burdens alone, stones stuffed in our coat pockets, and the loneliness of it weighs us down with each step.

Some weeks we stumble along in twos or threes, shifting the weight between us, hoping our companions are stronger than we are.

Some weeks we groan together as a community, a planet, as human beings, trying to bear a collective weight we couldn’t possibly shoulder alone.

And some weeks we find ourselves in a web of weightiness, bearing all of those stony burdens—individual, communal, and humanity’s grief—all at the same time, and it begins to feel like too much.

Perhaps for you, this feels like one of those weeks.

In my faith tradition, it’s also a holy week—we even call it “Holy Week.” We walk with Jesus through his weightiest week, shifting between scenes of him suffering alone, with his friends, in crowds. Stones pile up, then topple, and hope ends up buried for a bit.

But not forever.

The end of the story is never with hope crushed. The end is always the stone rolled away. Suffering ends. New life emerges. Love wins.

How can we wait for hope to rise, in the middle of a weighty week?

I’ve shared before this snippet of a Mary Oliver poem, called “Heavy”:

It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it–
books, bricks, grief–
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.

The way I carry my burdens—grief, doubt, fear, anger—is to write about them. It took me years to figure it out. I still have to remind myself to pick up my pen when things get heavy.

I turn to a fresh page in a dollar store composition notebook, and start somewhere. A list, a poem, a long stream of grammarless lament. And I write until something starts to release. My grip on the pen releases. My shallow breath releases into a deep inhale. I release my back-breaking burden—whatever it is—into words that only I and God will ever see. My words become a prayer of sorts, and when I pick the heavy things back up, they are somehow lighter.

a writing prompt

Set down your own weighty stones on the page.

Start with a list of what you are carrying—the small stones in your shoes that trip you up, and the huge boulders you are balancing on your back, alone or with others. Then just keep writing. Write until something shifts and releases. Make it a prayer, or not. Just get the words out of your head, off your shoulders, and onto the page. Let your journal help you carry them today.

Then, before you pick up your burdens and move into the rest of your day, let yourself breathe deeply with these words of beannacht (the Gaelic word for blessing) from the late Irish poet-theologian John O'Donohue, read by the poet himself during his 2008 interview with On Being. Click the red arrow to listen.

Beannacht

For Josie, my mother

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

—by John O’Donohue, in To Bless the Space Between Us

a bonus throwback prompt

Here’s a look back at a prompt I shared four years ago, on our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, just 2 weeks into Covid. That makes today our thirty-first, and I am still grateful. More about what we can carry, together.

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