I share these prompts to encourage writers and creatives of all ages to journal uninhibitedly on a daily basis. No marketing, just prompts. 

Don’t feel compelled to spend days or even hours crafting the perfect response. Write, sketch, paint, or compose your response in words or colors, musical notes or dance interpretations, and then share it with the world, in all its raw beauty. 

If you do share your writing to the daily prompt, please feel free to leave a link in the comments or use the hashtag #RVWritingPrompts wherever you might be posting your response. 

Writing Prompt #4: Write, reflect, or create an original work on the energy held in a seemingly inanimate object, such as a rock, a handwritten letter, a pressed flower.

My Response: 

For just about 33 years now, I’ve cherished a book of spiritual essays by Joni Eareckson Tada called Secret Strength. A student gifted it to me in the days following my father’s death in 1989, and I leaned on the lessons Joni shared in my toughest hours.

Joni (pronounced “Johnny”) grew up in Baltimore and lived a very active life until a catastrophic diving accident in Chesapeake Bay in 1967 caused damage to her spine, and she became a quadriplegic as a result. After battling anger and depression, she devoted her life to lifting others, and she is still doing it today.

That book, an inanimate object itself, carried great energy from the words she wrote. Just holding it in my hands – even decades later – brings me strength.

Even more powerful than the book, though, is what my student wrote on the inside cover, and the flower she pressed there to remind me of how everlasting beauty and hope can be.

Now, 33 years later, that flower (and those words) are filled with the same energy that they possessed on the first day I opened the book to find such a timeless gift.

What does that tell me? What does that remind all of us?

That it is possible to capture the energy of a single moment, bottle it in some inanimate object that miraculously cues the heart to beat a little stronger, to pulse the emotional moments we experienced so long ago as if we were there once more.

A book, a flower, and words pressed into the inside cover hold for me the energy of hope, of kindness, and of timeless compassion in a time when I was hurting greatly. Today, I still open that well-worn, gently loved book to return to a time where I was given a touch of secret strength that I would get through.

And I did.

And I do.