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- đź’ś[12/05] the creativity for good friday five
đź’ś[12/05] the creativity for good friday five
this week’s highlights on creativity for good
Shelly Jay Shore
December 05, 2025
Welcome to December, dearest ones!
December is a fascinating month. Socially, it’s often busy — there are cultural and religious holidays of various levels of stress and importance, gatherings, commitments. It’s busy mentally and emotionally, as well — planning and organizing and endless lists (shout-out to my fellow parents of December birthday kids), a constant barrage of “best of” and “wrap-up” and “look-back” articles and recaps and prompts in the news and on social media, mounting questions about year-ahead plans and resolutions and goals.
But in the natural world around us (at least, here in the northern hemisphere), things are quiet. The temperature drops, the days get shorter, the remainders of our gardens are blanketed in snow. Activities out in the sun are replaced by cozy days by the fire or under mountains of blankets. As our social and mental calendars ramp up, the rhythm of the natural world reminds us, tenderly, to slow down. To pay attention to the settling of the snow, the pattern of the seasons. To remember that there are times when we, just like our gardens, need to rest.
I read poetry all year round, but as I’ve gotten more thoughtful about tracking my reading over the years, I’ve noticed that I read it the most when the seasons are turning — those strange, transitional weeks between autumn and winter, winter and spring, spring and summer, summer and autumn, as the wheel of the year turns. I’ve noticed, too, that while I often reach for new books of poetry in the spring and autumn, summer and winter are often full of old favorites.
This was a poetry week for me, so, in that spirit — continuing with our experimentation of Friday Five themes and formats — it’s now a poetry week for you! Enjoy some of my personal favorites, some questions and prompts, and (as always!) feel free to reply or comment with anything that particularly fills your creative well.
your friday five!
this week’s highlights on creating for good
“The Patience of Ordinary Things” by Pat Schneider
Do you base your creativity around the ordinary, the extraordinary, or some combination of the two? How do you use your creative work to find the wonder and magic in the everyday, or to explore the little mundanities of the fantastical or strange? Are there moments of fantasy that make their way into your literary fiction? Simple techniques or pleasures that appear in your most elaborate creative works? How do you turn the everyday into something precious — not just in your art, but in your approach to the world?
Prompt: Choose an ordinary action — drinking your morning coffee, washing the dishes, making your bed — and spend an extra two to five minutes doing just that one thing. (Think: “Washing the dishes to wash the dishes” by ThĂch Nhất Hanh.) What do you notice? What is different? Create about it.
“Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris
What role — if any — does kindness play in your work? Do you look for ways to bring small joys, small sweetnesses, small moments of caring or tenderness into your characters or worldbuilding or plot — or the similar equivalent in your creative medium? How have the small kindnesses you’ve been shown in your creative life made their way into your approach? Your work? The way you share your own wisdom with others?
Prompt: Take five kind actions this week, whatever that means to you. Reflect on what it feels like to be kind with intention, but without expectation. Distinguish between “kind” and “nice.” Create about it.
“If You Asked Me How to Live Forever” by Nikita Gill
How do you feel about immortality? What comes to mind when you think of the concept? Fantasy or horror? Metaphor or ambition? How does the way you think about immortality come through in your work — whether literally, in the work itself, or through your process, approach, or goals?
Prompt: Make two “top ten” to-do lists: One as if you had a thousand years to live, one as if you had one. How are they different? What do they tell you? Create about it.
“Untitled” by Andrea Gibson
How do you feel about the way you experience the world? Do you approach each day with cynicism, or are you a determined idealist? Do you create from a place of jaded exhaustion? Of hope? Of a desire for a better world without the belief that that world is possible? How do you engage with creative work that takes the opposite approach from yours?
Prompt: Spend half an hour this week looking at the world as if you were a small child, a curious animal, or a visiting extraterrestrial. What does it feel like to experience the things you take for granted as something new and wondrous? Create about it.
“Meditations in an Emergency” by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Do you create from a place of heartbreak, healing, or both? How do you respond to Rumi’s oft-quoted words, “the wound is the place where the light enters you”? How do the sources of your heartbreak and your healing appear in your work, and how do you treat them? What are the wounds — your own, someone else’s, the world’s — you are trying to heal through your work?
Prompt: Imagine a healed world — whatever that means to you. What would be different? What, if anything, might be the same? How would you be different? Create about it.
See you next week!
đź’śShelly