January Challenge Day Five - The Golden Conversation

Today's Challenge - Go to the fifth text in your inbox (if you don't use text, use an email, or a sentence of your choice from a book.) Write down the first sentence of the message on the right hand side of a page vertically, using a line for each word. Now use the page to write a poem with each line ending in one of the words.

I'm not feeling Great,

the world feels so loud; I'm

looking for a quiet stillness and glad

to escape the daily panto

of work that is

wearing where it should be fun

looking to fill days with meaningful silence, or even this

moment alone, stretch it to fill a year.

(this challenge made me think of subtext, hidden meanings, masks... the pleasantries I say to friends that often hide what I'm really feeling)

January Challenge Day Four - a deeper shade of blue

Today's challenge: Take a walk and see how many shades of blue you can see. You could do this in a concentrated period over 10-15 minutes or try and spot them throughout the day. Make a photo collage or a real collage if you can collect them.

I love challenges like today's, the ones that make me go about my day with a different level of observation of the world.

January Challenge Day Three - Seeing is Believing

Today's challenge: Draw what you can see from your window. (This could be your bedroom window, the window next to you at work, the window on the train.) If you like, see if you can do it from your imagination, or sit and draw. 

I drew what I think I can see from my bedroom window. I did it from memory, sitting at the dining table. I've not checked to see if I was right.

January Challenge Day Two: Up in the Air

Today's challenge: Build a tower as tall as you can from whatever you can. Make sure it doesn't fall over (or at least photograph it before it does!). You can use whatever is to hand. Make it beautiful, or just make it functional. Work as a group or on your own. See how tall you can go.

I made a tower out of loo roll. This was my third attempt (the other two fell over before I could take a photo). Loo rolls do not make solid construction material. I think I could have gone higher, however, but I ran out of rolls.

January Challenge Day One: have you heard the news?

Today's challenge: Draw or write the front page of a newspaper that you would like to see in 2017. What headline would you like to create? It might be something very personal to you, or something bigger for the world. Dream big - who knows what might happen?!

Credit to Rebecca Solnit for inspiring me on this one - I've just finished reading her book Hope in the Dark, which I strongly recommend, and this is an image that she describes at the end of the last chapter.

"...I began to contemplate how human beings half a century or a century from now will view us, who lived in the era when climate change was recognised and there was so much that could be done about it, so much more than we have done. They may hate us, despise us, see us as the people who squandered their patrimony, like drunkards gambling away the family fortune that, in this case, is everyone's everywhere and everything, the natural world itself when it was in good working order. They will regard us as people who rearranged the china when the house was on fire". Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.