Hi, I‘m Lorena and welcome to The Stress Less Pencil. Together, we create art to make us feel good, not to make it look good. All weekly prompts are designed for total beginners and experienced artists alike, so come join us.
Sunday evenings are a liminal time between times. The weekend is practically over, but the new week has not yet started. It's feels like the 10 minutes before an important meeting. You don't have enough time to start anything new, so all you do is sit and wait and worry.
We call this feeling the Sunday Blues or the Sunday Malaise, and I used to suffer from it a lot. Even though you've had a nice weekend, you finish it feeling restless and anxious. You start thinking about your work week, the things you'll have to do, sort out, organise. But you're not actually putting that energy to good use, because we also don't want to start working Sunday night.
So today, we'll try to channel this energy into something a little more creative, that will help us get over the Sunday Blues.
The Activity: Write a motivational haiku
Step 1 - What makes a Haiku?
A haiku is a traditional Japanese form of poetry. It consists of three lines, made up of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. The lines don't have to rhyme, it's much more about capturing an idea or a moment.
Here is a beautiful example I found:
Blow dandelions
and watch a thousand wishes
scatter in the wind.
or this one, which is also excellent:
Haikus are easy
but sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator
Step 2 - Try it yourself
Get out a piece of paper, or your phone and try writing your own haikus. Since we want to chase away the Sunday blues, let's focus our poetry on how amazing the next week will be.
Here's the energy we want to channel into our Haiku:
Through our poetry we will manifest the shit out of next week. With our pens, we will bend the universe to bring about the best week ever. Next week will be full of happiness, success, love, and joy.
Just start scribbling, and you'll soon find that it's a bit of an addictive activity. Once you're done, write down your favourite one(s) on a new piece of paper and put it on your fridge. Then ride that wave of positivity all the way into next week.
My Example
I write a lot of words, but I don't consider myself much of a wordsmith, let alone a poet. So I really surprised myself with this gem:
It will be awesome
you simply need to show up
and reap what you sowed.
Have a fantastic week, my friends! And feel free to share your haiku with us in the comments!
Love, Lorena