writing 100 things

(five days a week of writing ten things a day for two weeks, together we write 100 hundred things.)

A hundred revelations and ways of return and not having to get a single thing right or rush or know the way. To set performance and pleasing down and write for you and your own hunger and curiosity and care of attention. A hundred moments of finding refuge in words and anchoring in the devotion of letting life matter. A hundred ordinary and sublime real life writings in which you were here, paying attention, awake and showing up and letting the language happen. A hundred things, small things, which is no small thing at all.

From this, a real and solid writing practice begins and anchors and takes up residence.
From this, ideas begin to emerge and take root.
From this, a way of being with yourself also has a way of finding its way to form: without expectation and demand of outcome, without insistence on content and writing everything and all at once, without requiring we be only extraordinary, something like curiosity and attention and real freedom has space to breathe where we let ourselves be. There is an art here all its own.

There is much in this world that cries out in urgency. And much that clammors for our attention, telling us everything is immediate and leaving us scattered and numb.
To resist the constant consuming and consumerist pull for more and more takes real work, the kind that asks us to slow down enough to know what matters and to live and learn at the pace of the body's heart beating. To take back our attention and offer it to real life, to what matters, happens as we learn to listen to our lives and write our way toward attention in the slowness of body's breath. 

We do this together, slowing down into our own body’s knowing, attention as care, writing our worlds, offering our attention to what is here and now.

I will be here with you. I will be creating and honoring this sanctuary,
showing up with the questions (writing prompts) and present to read and receive your every word. 
I will be there to share some of my own lists of listening and writing, my way into the haven of being held by the container of daily practice.
Because this is my own writing practice. I write these every day. I live this and I love this.

LISTENING

Monday - Friday there will be an invitation of a question, a musing, food for thought through which we might write the nuance and intimate particulars in real life and real time. You can think of them like the bread crumb trails we might follow as we settle into the care of this devotion in showing up  to write for ourselves wherever 
the words take us. 

They are open and generous and by this I mean they are not prompts designed to take you in particular places. They are doorways intended to open toward listening to your days and own interior in all its specificities and happenings, its questions and sensate knowings and needed articulation and ordinary noticings. Life being life, asking us to pay attention.

Writing to tend to our own knowing and naming. Writing to feed ourselves and see clearly the world around us.

WRITING OUR WAY TO ATTENTION
TEN THINGS AT A TIME

We commit to a daily writing practice those five days of the week of writing ten things with that day’s prompt. Just ten (or two or seven. This is for you.)
A list of sorts of paying
attention. However short or long 
you want and need it to be. 
Ten can be ten words, ten sentences, ten pages. But just ten things. We are here to listen. To pay attention.
Nothing too small or irrelevant or irreverent or
unwelcome. You can time it if you want, to honor this as a super doable
writing practice of a set amount of time, allowing you to keep a writing
practice that feels good, that sustains. 

CONNECT

Come write and/or share your
writing, your listening, your art of attention in the writing santuary collective, so we can be in this practice and devotion together.
A private mighty network group is available for all those who want to share their writing with others and receive words of care and support in their writing practice.

all are welcome

Pay what you can.
All writers, humans, magic makers, trouble makers, lovers of life and this being human thing welcome. 

The captialist hellscape we find ourselves in says that only some people can have things and at the expense of everyone else. 
We're not about that here.
Writing sanctuaries are for everyone, and they are share what you have, with the understanding that it takes time, attention, and real care for the facilitation and crafting of space and words that brings us together. I trust everyone to offer what feels right and good, in the spirit of collective care and sustainable support.

Pay what feels right

$88 -Thank you so much for supporting this and making it possible for everyone

$44 - Let's write together and make magic 
{use code: MAKEMAGIC}

$7 - writing is for everyone
{use code: HEREFORTHIS}

remember how to pay attention to what matters
slow magic

come write with me
December 7-21

ABOUT ME: Isabel Abbott

I am here for the stories we are socially and culturally told we are not allowed to speak or know or claim as our own belonging, and the transgressive act of centering such narratives in both discourse and art.

l write the corporeal, the wonder and mess of the human experience being embodied. I write about medical anthropology and the wandering womb, living with chronic illness and disability, casting spells and breaking spells, the mytholgoies we live and the ones we untanble, legion hearts and the mystery none of us can ever really know so we just keep threading words together into ink and paper arrows, hoping they will somehow light up like neon, illuminating the broken and beautiful. I write secular prayers and about what the living do, and sometimes I write about violence and sometimes I write about lilacs.

My writing over the years has been published in a variety of publications in print and online including a collection of poetry "Salt + Honey: secular prayers to the human and hedonistic hearts", Ars Medica, Bellevue literary Review, Calyx, Crab Fat Magazine, Tattooed Buddha, Brain Child Magazine, Body and Soul: Narratives in Healing.