The Green Heartwood Writing Prompts
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Between March 21 and April 11, we're writing together every day! This is a call to everyone within Wild Soul, not just the ones who call themselves writers. Tapping into the Soul of Poetry is only one way we carry our Inner Territory work out into the world around us. So, even if it's just for 5 minutes a day, I invite you to sit down and write as a ritual, as an evolving mapline, as a way deeper into the dark green Heartwood of your own soul.
Here's what you need to know:
1. All first drafts are shit. They’re supposed to be. The shit is fertilizer, and we are looking to create something that is ALIVE and dirt-soaked and ancestral and brimming with possibilities. We are not interested in sanitized writing.
2. Early editing is weed killer to the most medicinal of our words. If we edit too soon, we’ll choke the life out of the most potent of our soul’s growth. So we’re going to do our best not to edit as we write. There’s always time and space to come back and edit later.
3. You can’t mess this up. You don’t even have to ever let anyone else read it. But there is no right or wrong. There is no good or bad. And, if you want to share your pieces inside the Signal chat or on your socials/Substack, I would love to celebrate every single word you've drawn from that ancient ancestral well. But what you do with it is entirely yours.
March 21: Touch the trees as you go and say….
There have been times when you’ve walled off this bridge, ensuring no one - not even you - could walk over it. What will you leave swaying from the branches for past and future versions of you to hear?
March 22: Where outlaws roam
We have much to contend with in the heart, but we’ll never regret it. This is where we, too, begin to find the trickster within, the outlaw who has in mind the good of the larger whole. This is where we set the inner ecosystem right again. This is where we take what was done to us - what parts of our hearts were felled into giant piles - and we start to build a new home for ourselves, for the world, and for the furious wild of love itself.
March 23: Rob from the rich and feed the poor
Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He re-oriented the world to put some semblance of power and care back into the hands of the collective. Maid Marion moved secretly, cunningly, using what secrecy and privilege she had to help him. Their love was never meant to be between only the two of them. It was meant to be a symbol of the larger whole. In what ways will you symbolically rob from the rich and feed the poor? And what will it be a symbol of?
March 24: The Being of the Green
Maid Marion’s myth, the love story between her and Robin Hood in the Greenwood of England, is a legend that calls to us, taps into something old in us, and asks us to consider how love and the throwing off of oppression are made of the same stuff. Write your own version of their story and find a way to trickster a larger story into the details. What does a love story have to do with collective liberation? Whatever you make of it.
March 25: Viriditas (green + truth. the greening force)
The greening power of nature shapes so much of how we understand the inner landscape of the heart, and it is an element in much of our European folklore. Write about where it begins every Spring and where it goes every Winter. Explore Hildegard of Bingen for more.
March 26: My heart is a land bridge
Maybe even a continent of its own. Write it larger than you believe it can be. Be descriptive, vivid, and even a tad unhinged.
March 27: In the deep woods, rebirth appears as…
Recently, I heard someone say that, to a baby, birth is a death. They don’t understand what’s happening or that there’s an entire lifetime on the other side of hard contractions, bearing down, squishing through a narrow place, and entering into bright lights, loud noises, and the seemingly aggressive first touch.
To a baby, to a beginning, birth feels like a death.
She went on to say that death, then, is a reunion.
What does rebirth actually feel like to you in silence and refuge of the deep woods?
March 28: Here, where my stories become archived lore
The heart is as careful a record keeper as any other part of us. It remembers, and it attempts to preserve that memory by continuously telling us the stories of love and loss, of grief and joy, of how goddamn human it is to be a person with an aching, empathetic, alive, and untameable heart. Write about where you’ve archived your stories.
March 29: The language of the Heartwood
There’s something as primal in the Heart as there is in the Root. The difference is that the heart has the language for it. The language of poetry, of storytelling, of songs, of shared memory. What would the heart say about who and where you’ve been? How would it say it?
March 30: To return and risk again
There is no way to enter the Green Heartwood without taking a risk. Or even a series of risks. We’ll find elements of our stories there that we buried long before the descent - any attempt to avoid the vulnerability of having wanted something or someone that slipped through our fingers. The injustice of inequality. The loneliness of traveling alone or with the wrong person. The disruption of wildfire, of people who came in swinging axes that we didn’t ask for or consent to. Write about a wound. Write about an attempt to try again post-wound.
March 31: This heart is no pretty garden
Your heart is a tangled, overgrown, sometimes dark, and definitely wild forest. Do not try to turn it into a garden or into something more palatable for others. You can hide people in the overgrown parts, ferry them away to safety when they’re being chased. You can build bonfires in meadows and feed everyone who finds their way to you. You can build treehouses and rope bridges so high up no one even thinks to squint hard enough to see them. You can become an outlaw in the best way - in a way that insists you are brave enough, curious enough, certain enough in who you are and what you’re capable of - to change the very system you were born into. Write about how uncultivated, feral, and messy the heart is.
April 1: Fern Gully Guide
The Heartwood cannot be destroyed. It cannot be claimed. It cannot be enclosed. It cannot be torn down and turned into condominiums. The Great Green Heartwood of your being will regenerate faster than any bulldozer could move against it. It will just keep swallowing anything that threatens it. It will just keep reclaiming its ground. If you grew up with Fern Gully, write yourself into the story or create a new one.
April 2: Where Solar Plexus meets Heart
Heart Chakra work is a bridge because it begins to change the shape of who we are now that we’ve left the dark underworld, now that we’ve awoken The Erotic, now that we’re itching to create again, but to create in flow with intuition. Write about where the two converge and about what happens in the friction of contact.
April 3: In my belly are rings of years
The higher we went in the journey, climbing up a massive tree, the more we saw that the branches of the tree began to spread out wide, slowly creating a nearly flat inner circle where stories and memories are still alive. Write about or from the rings of your long story.
April 4: To reclaim what I buried
There are great loves within your Heartwood. And there are great losses. There are vows made in pain and vows made in pleasure. There are hungers for a different world. There are memories of ease, of bliss, of hope. Most of what you will find in the greenwood of the heart is story. What did you bury before the descent? What will you reclaim now?
April 5: The heart is truthful above all things
Unlike the male-centered religion of El and Yahweh that saw the heart as deceitful, we’re so bound to the earth, and we know now that becoming more and more embodied can show us the heart as a wise elder. Write about the dark woods that Nat spoke about in the Healing Germania class - a place we are told to be afraid of, but that is actually home.
April 6: Ecosystem of a heart
It is so vital that the heart is in good health - that the regenerative, cyclical ecosystem of its realm remains intact. It is so important that we tend to it, spend time in it, learn its secrets and wisdom. It is so necessary that we learn to trust it. What needs to work in collaboration to help that process?
April 7: Decompose
We’ll just keep decomposing, feeding into the whole, and re-emerging when the conditions are right again. Both with the many lives our souls incarnate for, and within each life we live. We’re not meant to be static, certain, so steady we don’t bend or reach or snap or dissolve. We are nature itself, and all of nature exists within a regenerative force. Write yourself as an element of Nature.
April 8: ‘To try softer’
-Andrea Gibson
The work we do within this landscape so naturally flows from the descent, the transformation, and the return. It is the next step. To enter this work is to stop trying harder, to start trying softer. Write about a way you have been trying harder and are now attempting to try softer.
April 9: It’s the risk.
To try again. To try differently. To try with courage and a spreading, greening softness. Write about the return of vulnerability, not as a way to weaken yourself but as a way to grow larger and freer - a giant in the woods.
April 10: What lies between the trees?
What parts of you remain so wild they won’t ever be seen? What parts of you move quietly, stealthily, cunningly on your behalf, but choose to forever stay in the shadows of the heart’s trees?
April 11: The smell of river and forest
Here, where Heart Chakra meets Throat Chakra, tilt your head back, feel the cold spray on your face. Smell the river, the forest, the mingling scent of memory. And maybe, what you write today is an invitation to a part of you to weep or laugh or scream or rest. Maybe you allow the expansive forest behind you to place its support at your back and the raging force of the river at your front to summon you awake. And maybe you let it all just be.
