I recently took part in a writing exercise devised by a friend that I loved so much I’m sharing the results here (like myself, Vicky’s a writing for wellbeing enthusiast and her facebook page is here if you like this prompt and would be interested in future events she might run).

The exercise itself begins by generating a title randomly with the automatic art title generator and then you go from there. I found the titles generated such fun that before I did any writing at all I’d generated five titles. And it was difficult to stop there! I then used those (sometimes hilarious) titles to reflect on the busy life cycles I observe going on in my garden through a series of haiku (of sorts). It’s a tiny suburban garden but it is bursting with life and death.

creation with song

my garden is sound

scented hope variations

bursting with life song

ephemeral ego in the distance

the frenchbeans headstrong

social climbers stretching up

anxious to be seen

perception at sphere

purple head heavy

bending beneath the bounty

of July showers

rising compounds

hot compost gases

waft rise itch smite my nostrils

rich scented decay

gloomy corpse in retrospect

corpse in retrospect

skeleton laid bare to see

summer butterfly

For me, this exercise was joyful and creative and everything that I love about writing for wellbeing. It involved discovery. It allowed me to really focus on what I saw around me. It was fun. The titles themselves were hidden treasure. I enjoyed doing the writing and I enjoyed sharing my writing and talking about the process with the others in the group. I felt connected to those others (rather than alone in my socially-isolated bubble). There was laughter among us as we shared our random titles. I felt unembarrassed by my writing because the quality of the writing in a literary sense is unimportant in a group like this – it is the act of writing which is important.

Writing for wellbeing in a group is not something to be feared, it is to be relished. There is no critic there to tell you that your haiku has not got quite the right number of syllables or that your piece of prose makes no coherent narrative. It is about experiencing writing as a way of enhancing your own wellbeing. It is about sharing your words, your truth, your story and being heard in a group of others who will listen and hold those words kindly. If this sounds like something you might enjoy trying for yourself, have a look at my events page for upcoming workshops.