Place – Unaware

She was born fierce, never knowing her place whether that be her position, her race, her size, her gender, her skills, or her economic status.  Wherever she was, whoever with, her place was there, in that moment.  She vaporized boundaries on a minute by minute basis, unnerving most everyone she came into contact with. It was only after she had confronted the hoodlums that night, in the darkness of her own yard, that she would sit in wonder at her lack of awareness of the limits of her power, and a shiver ripped through her at what might have happened.

My pick of the week is newcomer Daddybookins.  We found each other on Twitter and he was excited to try his pen at the 100 word challenge, and he immediately set to work with his young son to create a whimsical 100 word poem on Place.  Head over to PeasandBananas to check it out, and remember to give him some extra special blog love.

In other words…

• The torture of not feeling place…(I,Rodius)
• If anyone has figured out how to see AuroraLee’s entry, please let me know.
• Give me the shivers… (Angelgal)
• “He needs a place…” (Lceel)
• She’s so not a chicken… (Patsy)
• The places you don’t want to go… (Laura)

That wraps up last week’s challenge.  For those of you that are new, welcome!  And for those of you lurking, visiting, or serendipitously stumbling your way here, speak up, we’d love to hear what you have to say in 100 words.  (If you need a debriefing on the challenge, go here but ignore the timelines in there.)

Between building a new website, starting a new business, working on a re-design of Velvet Verbosity (I’m so excited), and the general chaos of life, I’ve had no time to read anything this week.  In fact, do you hear that?  That’s the slow silent scream of all my plants drying up.  So this week’s word comes from an oldie but goodie, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach.

Falter

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go water my plants before they stage a coup.

With love,

Rain – Lets Get Cozy

Sunday rain.  Bring out the tea, the blankets, the knitting and soft lights.  Bring out the apples and flour and brown sugar.  Bring out the warm socks, the fuzzy robes, and the old slippers.  Bring out the books, the fairy tales, the mysteries, and the legends.  Bring out the crockpot, the beef, the celery, onions and potatoes.  Bring out the spices and let’s make delicious smells and joyful noise in the kitchen while the rain sogs all the fallen leaves.  Tonight, while we sleep with the lingering smells of warm food, the rain will turn to snow. Let’s get cozy.

I did actually wake up to a rainy Sunday today, and while I didn’t do all of the above, I did do some housekeeping, some cooking, and some blog design updating.  It’s still a work in progress, as always.  My pick of the week is Angelgal.  She’s building a story and used the last two challenges to add to it.

In other words…

• The ironies of being God.
• When all hope is lost…
• Physicists in the rain (welcome newcomer Laura from Down Under!)

That wraps up last week’s challenge.  For those of you that are new, welcome!  And for those of you lurking, visiting, or serendipitously stumbling your way here, speak up, we’d love to hear what you have to say in 100 words.  (If you need a debriefing on the challenge, go here but ignore the timelines in there.)

This week the writing challenge comes from Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories – Kurt Vonnegut.  Haven’t read the whole thing. This is one of the many books that sits on my bathroom book shelf for bath time reading.

Place

See you soon!

With love,

I have been wanting to return to my own writing, so this week instead of a quote, my own 100 words on the challenge.

Lemonade – The Sweet and the Sour

They are 10 years old, the best of friends, still in overalls and pigtails, running a lemonade stand out on the front walk.  They sing to their customers hoping for big tips, and they are rewarded.  Everyone loves 10-year-old, blond, blue-eyed, budding entrepreneurs.  It’s sort of like puppies, or kittens, or baby coos.  Something about getting close to that innocence from which it is still possible to experience unfettered joy.  In just a few short years, these girls will shift hard into adolescence, and hurricanes of hormones, and clouds of self-doubt will begin to creep in.

It’s always hard to make my pick of the week.  Often it’s more about what kind of mood I’m in and what resonates with me more than anything else.  Sometimes life throws us curve balls, and in the wake of life altering events we search desperately to make sense of things, to go back in our mind again and again to find the moment where we could have done something differently.  We need to feel we have some kind of control over our fate, and that we aren’t just puppets knocking about on Fate’s stage.   Patsy captures this well with her piece this week.

In other words…

• More sweet and sour metaphors…
• A lemonade ghost story.

That wraps up last week’s challenge.  For those of you that are new, welcome!  And for those of you lurking, visiting, or serendipitously stumbling your way here, speak up, we’d love to hear what you have to say in 100 words.  (If you need a debriefing on the challenge, go here but ignore the timelines in there.)

This week the writing challenge comes from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold again.  I just finished the book a couple of nights ago.  It was stunning, really.  I’d love to hear what you think if you’ve read it.  If you haven’t, don’t be scared away by the subject matter, just read the first chapter and you’ll be hooked.

Rain

I’ve been doing some other writing lately, and I may start sharing it here, so check back!

With love,

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” ~Martin Luther King Jr.

Feeling a little, no, a lot overwhelmed this week, and it’s only Monday!  Oy.  Not to mention I’m one of those people that suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and it’s already starting to kick in.  But, the good news is that I still have a hard drive!

Last week the word was BEAR, which has a few different meanings.  I was curious to see which way you would handle it.  LouCeel is my pick of the week, with his interesting and moving piece on “This I Cannot Bear”.

In other words…

• Beware the morning bear.
• What a bear won’t do for….
• Bearing witness to self.

That wraps up last week’s challenge.  For those of you that are new, welcome!  And for those of you lurking, visiting, or serendipitously stumbling your way here, speak up, we’d love to hear what you have to say in 100 words.  (If you need a debriefing on the challenge, go here but ignore the timelines in there.)

This week the writing challenge comes from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.  This has been out for a little while and I had heard a lot about it, but hadn’t yet read it.  I came across it while grocery shopping and decided to pick it up, and now I can’t put it down!  I don’t know what to tell you about it, except READ IT.  NOW.

Lemonade

Not really the season for it, but let it bring some cheer as we begin the descent into winter.

With love,

***Update: My hard drive had some file corruption but no reported failures.   Nevertheless, I added 1TB to my storage arsenal bringing my total external hard drive space to 1,750 GB, plus another two free GBs from soonr.com, you know, just in case.  I spent 12 hours today between the Apple Genius Bar, choosing which kick-ass external hard drive would be my back up puppy, and then setting up some various back up solutions.  I already had the most important stuff backed up, but holy heck, you don’t know terror until you’re staring a potential hard drive failure in the eye.

So, all that to say that the new 100 Word challenge will be up by tomorrow night.  I’m reading a great book so I’ve been excited all week to choose a word from it.

In the meantime, why don’t you spend this unexpected free time backing up your hard drive like your Mama told you, eh?

To inspire you:

“…when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.” – Sogyal Rinpoche

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The post 100 Words Challenge first appeared on velvetverbosity.com.]]> 108 https://velvetverbosity.com/2020/10/03/100-words-on-moral/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=100-words-on-moral Sat, 03 Oct 2020 09:36:16 +0000 http://velvetverbosity.com/?p=391 This one is a quickie.  I’m about to watch the VeeP debates and I’m all set with my nachos, chai, and an ice cold beer.  This is a spectator sport.  Isn’t it?  So let’s roll out the submissions. Lessa slid in past the deadline, but I forgive her because she… Continue Reading 100 Words on Moral

It’s Wednesday, and I just wanted to post briefly that I will be back later tonight (or by tomorrow morning) with the roundup, the pick, and the new challenge.  My last two weeks have been brutally swamped with post-holiday stuff, and year end wrap up for work and I’ve been too exhausted to write much.  But I’m here, and I’ve been reading your 100 Word pieces (even if I haven’t yet commented).

Lou, your book is almost ready to go out and I hope to get it to you before you leave on your trip.  It’s not so much the mailing as that I’m working on designing a little write up that goes inside the book and haven’t had a chance to get to that yet.  But it’s sitting here right in front of me to remind me.

So, ciao for now!