The Rooms We Carry
Each Saturday, I share a thought-provoking journal-writing prompt here on the blog. These weekly prompts offer a specific topic or question to encourage you to explore your thoughts, emotions, and experiences. You can answer them exactly as they're written, or let them serve as a starting point for a larger, more formal piece of writing. So long as you write something in response, anything goes. But by giving yourself a specific focus, you can delve deeper into your writing and uncover new insights along the way. Feel free to personalize the prompt and make it entirely your own.
This week, I want to focus on the idea of home—but not in the way you might expect.
When you hear the word "home," you probably picture an address, a front door, the house you live in now. But home is so much larger than a place on a map. Home is a feeling, a memory, a smell, a season. Home is the people we return to and the ones we've had to leave behind. Home lives inside us as much as it exists around us. This week, let's map the geography of home in words.
Use these questions as starting points for your journal entry:
1. Start with the literal. Describe the place you call home right now. What does the light look like in the afternoon? Which room do you gravitate toward, and why? What sounds fill the quiet—a ticking clock, a purring cat, the hum of a refrigerator? Paint the space you actually live in.
2. Go backward. Think of a home from your past—a childhood house, a grandmother's kitchen, a first apartment. What single detail brings it rushing back? The pattern of the wallpaper, the creak of a particular stair, the taste of something cooking? Write about a place that shaped you before you knew you were being shaped.
3. Go inward. Sometimes home isn't a building at all. Is there a person who feels like home to you? An activity, a ritual, a corner of your day where you finally exhale? Describe the home you carry inside yourself—the one that goes wherever you go.
4. Go tender. Is there a home you've lost—to time, to distance, to grief, to change? What did it hold that you still ache for? And what parts of it did you manage to keep, tucked somewhere safe within you? Write gently here. Write only what you're ready to.
5. Be creative. Imagine building your ideal home from scratch—not the house, but the feeling. What would live there? What season would it always be? Who would be welcome at the table? What would the air smell like when you walked through the door? Design the home your soul is quietly homesick for.
Take one of these prompts, or weave them all together. Or simply hold the word "home" in your mind and free-associate across the empty page. You might let the art images guide you, too. So long as you're mapping home in words, anything goes.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required—just your creativity. 🌻
