Headlines

a writing prompt for you + March Writing Hour

Today’s headlines from my go-to news source are about war-war-war in multiple places, political bullying, debate over voting rights, and AI risks. I had to scroll and scroll to get to any kind of good news headline, which was just one article about the actor John Lithgow, followed immediately by the Opinion section, more alarm about mass shooters, a tiny bit about the Oscars, then more headlines about guns, cartels, and how self-driving cars leave riders vulnerable.

It’s rough out there. Disastrous, according to the headlines and my own opinion, much of the time.

And yet….

The sky is a brilliant blue today. A dog bounded across the grass and leaned on me, longer than necessary. The bunny in the front yard looked me straight in the eye for a full minute before streaking into the woods.

Thanks to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer for reminding me in her poem below that I can still be amazed by the world. I looked up amazement and the dictionary suggested I also consider bewilderment and I think that’s a little of what this poem reminds me to do. Not bewilder in the sense of perplexity or confusion, but bewilder in terms of BE WILDER. This week, my goal is to look for headlines out in the wild, in the natural world, as a counterweight to all the other news.

Let me know what headlines you notice out there….

a writing prompt

Look for your own treasure on the page. Find a word, a phrase, a question, an image, or an idea in the poem, and start writing there. Or begin with the phrase: Here is also the news….

Today’s Headline

And then one day, while I read
aloud to my husband the news
and felt the widening hole in my heart,
he raised his hand to quiet me.
I followed his gaze out the window
to see in the yard a small fluffy thing
with black and white eyespots on its head.
A northern pygmy owl beside our door,
stout body slightly smaller than my fist.
It turned its neck a full half circle
to look at me with bright yellow eyes.
In an instant, I shifted from disgust
with the world to awe. Awe for this
fierce bespeckled miracle, this wonder
of feather and beak and claw, this
small being in the grass looking back
at me as if to say, Here is also the news.
How surprising the world can be.
How quickly, when I let it, amazement
overwrites my fear and makes
of the hole in my heart a home.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Find Rosemerry at wordwoman.com and ahundredfallingveils.com.

March Writing Hour - Sat. March 21 | 4-5 pm Eastern

My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is this Saturday. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.