This week my first reflection was due for the contemplative prayer group. The assignment: a 700 word essay, a five-minute video, or an art piece with a 100-word description. My solution: a poem, A moment in prayer (on AO3).
I knew early on that I wanted to write something focused on the experience of contemplative prayer, a more sensory or emotional version of my last blog post and I thought poetry would work well for that. The issue: I had a page full of random disjointed phrases and rhyme pairs that were stubbornly refusing to work together. So I set it aside for a couple days.
During the Memorial Day weekend sales I ordered a new computer (the one I’m typing on now), so I spent some time going through programs on my old computer, removing software I no longer use and saving a list to Obsidian of the software I wanted to install on this computer, starting with Firefox and of course Obsidian.
I found two pieces of software I had used for my dissertation, Scapple and Scrivener, both by Literature & Latte. Scrivener is great for mapping out elements of an essay or story, where each element may have a lot of details. I find it easier to organize for that kind of thing than Obsidian. Scapple is designed for mind-mapping, which it does very well. It can also be used to map process flows and design layouts if necessary.
On a whim, I typed my random lines of poetry into Scapple. In my notebook, I’d written a couple possible words to provide starting letters for acrostics, so I laid out the letters in a column on the left. Next, I considered words to start lines and placed those lines beside the relevant letters. I still struggled with exact wording, keeping focus and verb tense consistent, and the rhyme scheme I wanted, but being able to move lines around helped bring everything together fairly easily. It was much easier than cutting up pieces of paper and cross out hand-written words, then revert to the crossed out words (if they were still legible at that point) when I changed my mind.
When I was satisfied with the results, copying the relevant lines en masse to paste them to Obsidian (where I organize all my poetry) and then to Archive of our own (AO3) was straightforward. Takeaway: if you’re having trouble organizing ideas for a poem, try an unexpected solution like mind-mapping, and if you want to try Scapple, it’s free for 30 days. Other reasons I like Scapple are that it’s a small file and a lifetime license is inexpensive (I am not a fan of subscription models), so I didn’t need to repurchase it for my new computer.
The next reflective piece is due in September. I’m curious what form it will take. If you’ve visited my deviantArt account you probably know my primary medium is beadwork and lately I’ve been sculpting a lot with Speks. I’d like my next piece to be visual, using one of those media, or if I’m really ambitious, crochet, which I have been learning.
The image below is a beaded rainbow-colored spider. Read more about it and see my other beadwork on deviantArt. I chose this spider partly because mind-mapping makes me think webs and partly because Pride Month starts tomorrow.
