How It Works:

1. Read the poem 

2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

4. Use the selection of prompts below

5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Until I thought of myself as the sea

I used to separate good days from bad until 
I thought of myself as an ocean. I used to 
split times I felt strong from when I felt weak 
until I imagined myself as the sea. Calm and 
rocky, wild and soft, still and powerful and vast 
and more than any one thing. In the ocean it’s 
hard to divorce one mood from another, one wave 
from the next. Now, on my worst days, I think 
of how good life is too, how I still can greet joy 
while swimming through grief. How fragile 
strength feels. How I’m not any one thing in any 
one moment on any one day. I’m all of it and 
all of it is me. 

– Hannah Napier Rosenberg
https://medium.com/@hannah.n.rosenberg

If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

The next Read-Around is 11/6/25 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Whether blue or gray, whether clear or cloudy, my skies do not sort good days from bad. The sky holds no grudges, passes no judgment, remains true to itself through solar flares and raging storms. In this regard, there is a correspondence between my sky and Hannah Napier Rosenberg‘s Ocean: each is a vastness we can occupy that holds all contradictions. Each offers an ecosystem made more beautiful by its jarring aspects and dark contrasts. Each reminds us that every thing in the light has its shadows just as every day its night. Each puts the curses we cast over ourselves and the world in perspective where the hardened thought is no more than a pebble in a worn out shoe, a habit that long ago lost its purpose.

Prompt Ideas

1. Journal or write a poem using the prompt: until I thought of myself as… And describe how a new perspective changed your way of thinking or being.

2. What makes a good day good? Journal or write a poem about a good day

3. What categories do you use when sorting your experiences into good or bad. If you were to sort your days into different categories, what categories would you choose?

4. Journal or write a poem starting with an irritant in life and zoom out to a larger perspective (zoom out to other things you see and hear in the context; zoom to include other contexts in your life, zoom out in time, etc.)

5. Journal or write a poem about moods using metaphors. What moods do you generally occupy? What evokes you moods? How do you navigate them or exit from them?

6. Journal or write a poem describing ways to balance the good and the bad. or grief and joy, in life.

7. Write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.