No Life Is All Bleak: A Writing Practice on Hope with Mary Karr and Jacob Lawrence
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 30 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 10-15 minutes
How do you hope for hope?
Pause.
Take six deep breaths with a six-count inhale and a six-count exhale while looking at the art below, Panel 1 from The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence.
“During World War I there was a great migration north by southern African Americans.”
1940–41, Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1942
Prompt.
“No life is all bleak… That’s what’s so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope.”
—Mary Karr, The Paris Review
Practice.
Set a timer for 10 minutes and journal or take notes in response to the quote and art above and the questions below.
—How is life not bleak right now?
—What’s gorgeous about humanity right now?
—How do you put yourself in the way of light?
—How do you lean into love?
—What are you hoping for? Or, how are you hoping for hope?
—How does your hope or lack of hope affect your creativity and creative process?
Want More?
Watch this interview with Mary Karr on finding God in her vocation as a writer. (The segment with Mary Karr starts at the 8-minute mark.)
And return to The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence. Take some time with the images, the videos, and the words that provide more details about the art and the artist. Learn more about Jacob Lawrence here.
Read the words below from an introduction to The Migration Series at https://lawrencemigration.phillipscollection.org/:
More than 75 years ago, a young artist named Jacob Lawrence set to work on an ambitious 60-panel series portraying the Great Migration, the flight of over a million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North following the outbreak of World War I. By Lawrence's own admission, this was a broad and complex subject to tackle in paint, one never before attempted in the visual arts. Yet, Lawrence had spent the past three years addressing similar themes of struggle, hope, triumph, and adversity in his narrative portraits on the lives of Harriet Tubman, leader of the Underground Railroad (1940), Frederick Douglass, abolitionist (1939), and Toussaint L'Ouverture, liberator of Haiti (1938).
Lawrence found a way to tell his own story through the power and vibrancy of the painted image, weaving together 60 same-sized panels into one grand epic statement. Before painting the series, Lawrence researched the subject and wrote captions to accompany each panel. Like the storyboards of a film, he saw the panels as one unit, painting all 60 simultaneously, color by color, to ensure their overall visual unity. The poetry of Lawrence's epic statement emerges from its staccato-like rhythms and repetitive symbols of movement: the train, the station, ladders, stairs, windows, and the surge of people on the move carrying bags and luggage.
Following the example of the West African storyteller or griot, who spins tales of the past that have meaning for the present and the future, Lawrence tells a story that reminds us of our shared history and at the same time invites us to reflect on the universal theme of struggle in the world today: "To me, migration means movement. There was conflict and struggle. But out of the struggle came a kind of power and even beauty. 'And the migrants kept coming' is a refrain of triumph over adversity. If it rings true for you today, then it must still strike a chord in our American experience."
*
Become an SDW Insider and reserve your copyof Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life AND receive access to the All of Life Is the Writing Life Deep Dive online course—a preorder perk that explores how the mantra “All of life is the writing life” shows up in the Spiritual Direction for Writers book.
SDW Book Notes—A place for book preorder links, updates, resources, notes, and musings
Flourish Anyway with Rhythms, Rituals, & Retreats
Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon. See more from Charlotte at Flourish Anyway®.