In the poem “Night,” Sara Teasdale urges us to “look for a lovely thing and you will find it.”
Teasdale looked and she found “stars over snow,” as well as “in the west a planet/swinging below a star.”
When we begin a deeper journey into earth care, sometimes we are struck by the breadth of ruin, even ugliness, that it is our challenge to recover and redeem.
While it is very necessary to acknowledge the true problems that call on our creative solutions, a continual focus on the difficulties can damage our own souls over time. Putting into place a daily or weekly practice of “looking for the lovely thing,” can help sustain us and keep us creative—for it is in a spirit of gratitude, hope and creativity that we can maintain our energy and continue to craft better and better solutions together.
Write a poem about looking for a lovely thing and finding it. You could focus on a single lovely thing and then further describe its aspects. Or, you could list several lovely things. Either way, you might want to try the catalog form, to poetically record what you looked for and found.
Want the whole 30 poems, 30 prompts series in one convenient place?
You can get that in Earth to Poetry: A 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self and Other Care Challenge.
