What’s Your Intention? Dream it, Write it, Live it. [Writing Prompt #245]

Nothing great can happen in life without imagination and intention. Yogis know this. We set an intention for the hour or so that we clear our minds and move our bodies. Do writers do the same thing? Do you?

I’m just returning from a wonderfully overwhelming trip to Los Angeles that ended with the AWP conference. It was an incredible opportunity to see some of my favorite teachers, writers, poets and friends.  Yoga was offered each morning by Melissa Carroll, a writer, yoga teacher and author of the anthology, Going Om.  Just by showing up to class, all the writers in the room had set an intention to remain calm, healthy, open, and strong in the middle of sharing space with 10,000 other writers.

You can set an intention for anything you do. Before leaving New York, I set an intention and dreamed it into being.

So the truth is that writers do write and meditate on their intentions. Take this page from Octavia Butler’s notebook. (...

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Living the Intention in a Room of Your Own (AROHO): Writing on Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch

intention setting writing Sep 01, 2013

All I wanted was a week to write without getting up to walk the dogs, sit in traffic, clean the kitchen, or answer the phone. I had work to do and it wasn’t getting done. A writer friend told me about AROHO (A Room of Her own). She said it was a writing organization for women and that I should apply for their retreat on Georgia O’Keefe’s “Ghost Ranch” in New Mexico. It sounded fantastic. It was fantastic. I didn’t know that it would change my life.

It has been over one month since I left the desert but I’m still adjusting. It’s a good life here in NY, but I miss sunset colored mountains and breathing in readings and workshops all day long.  I bonded with more women in one week than I had during the past decade. If you met them, you would see how such a thing can be possible. We were in synch.

I took a small group poetry workshop with Evie Shockley.  I’m a fan, so of course it was very...

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