Our lives present us with births, deaths, marriages, anniversaries, and other beginnings and endings. The following prompts excerpted from A Year in the Life: Journaling For Self-Discovery can help us focus our attention on our joy or grief and keep us from the stumbling block of thinking too hard instead of just writing for awhile.

Birthdays
I remember reading a few years back that someone owned the rights to the song “Happy Birthday” and day care centers that were singing that song to celebrate children’s birthdays were being fined for not paying royalties (the money exchanged for permission to use material owned by others). Every time I sing that song at a birthday parry now, I feel like I’m getting away with something. It makes me think, too, that having a birthday is itself a little like getting away with something. We have used our bodies to accomplish work or for craft-making, lovemaking or childbirth; our dreams to help us find our way; our minds to make informed decisions and discoveries and our love to connect us with family, friends and community. Choose one: body, dreams, mind or love. Think about what you might owe for your use of it and its properties. Write about this. If you were to defend yourself as a day care center might, what would you say about your need to use your mind, body, dreams or love without penalty? Write about it, and you will pay tribute to yourself and your life on this planet.

To pay tribute to someone else on their birthday, imagine your time spent as parent, grandparent, teacher, friend. Write about what the person has used of it and why there is no payment due.

Marriages
Author Bharti Kirchner opens her colorful novel, Shiva Dancing, with the wedding of Meena, a seven year old in Karamgar Village, India. She and her childhood friend Vishnu and eight other pairs of village children will be married this day in a traditional Hindu ceremony. Meena is thrilled to be marrying her childhood friend. She won’t go to live with his family until she is fourteen. After the ceremony, the village mothers begin a “ululation of joy, punctuated by the ringing of cymbals.” Ululation means “a howling.” I think howling helps us discharge feeling when we are overloaded, either with joy or with pain or with both simultaneously. A marriage involves, as Meena already knows, the happy and the sad, for it is about change-seeking and going forward as well as leaving.

Now is a good time to write a ululation for the time of marriage.

You might want to repeat the sentence “I enter this marriage (or ‘you enter this marriage’ if you are writing about someone else’s marriage) and I howl out about …. ” As you finish these sentences write the images of what you (or the person you are writing about) are leaving and the images of what you are moving toward. Make the words bold and loud as well as specific. Put in the ringing of cymbals here and there throughout the writing-maybe in the form of lyrics from a wedding song or prayer or words from a friend or relative. In Meena’s case, the cymbal sound could be her aunt’s words, “Big green eyes … Shiny black hair. A face like the goddess Sita’s.”

Divorces
In the anthology Here Lies My Heart, twenty-one writers tell about their marriages and divorces. William Morris writes in the title essay, “With divorce one gives up a whole way of life-friends, routines, habitudes, commitments. You are on your own again, and in diaphanous territory, and for a while your most fiendish habits may worsen.”

Diaphanous describes something characterized by an extreme delicacy of form, something that can be seen through as well as something that is insubstantial and vague. Write a meditation on the word diaphanous to focus thoughts about a divorce, yours or that of someone close to you. Start with the word, diaphanous. Let yourself free associate-I hear the sound of “die after us.” What dies after the “us”? Certainly the routines and habits of the marriage; it is hard to break those just because the marriage is gone. Write about those habits; write about a state in which you are a “see-through” person, write about what it means to be suddenly vague rather than substantial look at the sky. Determine whether it is the day sky or the night sky. Write what the person who has died would find in the sky. Why would he or she have stepped outside? What land or water or building is the sky above? What would the person be reminded of looking at stars, clouds, moon, sun, airplanes, birds and bobbing satellites?

If you are writing about someone else’s divorce or want to write more about your own, describe the diaphanous garment of this divorce, its delicacy of form. What is the garment of this divorce made of? What color is it? What is its function? If you were to put this garment in a store window, what store would it be? What else would be in the window dressing? Who would come to view it?

Deaths
When someone who mattered to us dies, we may more than ever need to find reasons to believe in what contemporary philosopher Sam Keen calls “a deathless and kindly higher power.” If we lose someone we feel we shouldn’t have to lose, it can be hard to look for and find reasons to believe. In After Death: How People Around the World Map the Journey After Life, author Sukie Miller quotes Keen:

One morning as I walked to work through a park, in the middle of a large field the sky seemed to open. A voice from the infinite silence within and beyond me said: “You don’t have to know.” I was flooded with an immense sense of relief, as if a thousand-pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders… My mind reveled in the knowledge that I could never have certain knowledge of the ultimate context of my existence.

This is the beginning of Keen’s understanding of hope, a know­ing “that we can not know the limits of the Ever-Creating Power that has, is, and will bring all that is into being. And beyond that, we must trust that the inexhaustible mystery we touch when we discover our soul-spirit-freedom-capacity-to-transcend provides our best clue to the nature of Being.”

To write about a loss due to death requires an abandoning of oneself to hope. Imagine the one you have lost going outside to look at the sky. Determine whether it is the day sky or the night sky. Write what the person who has died would find in the sky. Why would he or she have stepped outside? What land or water or building is the sky above? What would the person be reminded of looking at stars, clouds, moon, sun, airplanes, birds and bobbing satellites?

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” William Wordsworth wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Hope as Sam Keen writes of it is our antidote to this forgetting. Writing on the skies from the point of view of the deceased is such an antidote as well.

Births
The birth of your baby, grandchild, cousin, nephew, niece or child of a friend makes the heart bubble with the newness of the new, the ongoing nature of nature. Here are lines from William Words­worth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Read them aloud and hear joy:

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;–
Thou child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts ….

Welcome the new child into the world as Wordsworth does but write longer. What in nature came to tell you of the birth of the child? Were there specific flowers blooming, a soft rain shower softening the seeds that needed to sprout? Did you notice a butterfly or hummingbird on the child’s birthday? Did a ladybug land on your arm? Did storm clouds disappear or drop their rain with force and winds? Did a rabbit hop across the road? What did your cat or dog do? The fish in an aquarium? After you have explored the specific responses of nature to this day of the child’s birth, write the shouts you want to hear. What will this child shout and laugh about? Write as lengthy and specific a list as you can.

Anniversaries
In writing about an anniversary of a thirty-year marriage, Helen Trubek Glenn says in her poem “Negative Space”:

What can I do tonight except
slowly stir the soup to keep it from crusting,
place round spoons on linen napkins,
pull the bread into pieces.

The images and actions of daily life speak to the work of keeping a relationship. On the anniversary you are writing about, describe what you will do this day of the anniversary. Use particular details and information that comes in through the senses because they will ultimately do the emotional informing. Like Glenn, you might want to use a question. You can repeat this question to keep yourself writing whenever you feel you need the impulse to go on in the writing: “What can I do today except … ?”

Endings and Beginnings
Since change is what we can count on in life, times of endings and beginnings are sprinkled through our days. Jobs and projects, honors and titles, visits and travels all begin and end, and new ones come and go. Here are two exercises you can do when an ending or a beginning fills your mind.

• Upon an Ending
  All good things must come to an end. Everything has its life span. What goes up must come down.As much as we might not want something to end, it will end. A job ends because the company changes or we get fired or retire or move away. A relationship ends because one of the parties decides it is over or someone dies or moves away. Things fall apart and things go wrong and accidents happen. We all deal with endings, big and small, and more often than we’d like. And we all hope to see the phoenix of new possibility rise from the ashes of what has died.
• Sad or Bitter Ending
  To journal upon the occasion of a sad or bitter ending, build a metaphorical bonfire and sit by it a while. The kindling, the logs and the hot coals can each be memories concerning what has ended. Bring them to the fire, arrange them and make a big blaze. Where are you building this fire? What do you think as you are preparing it? What do you wear as you gather the wood and arrange it and then sit there? What needs stoking? What do you add to the fire? How long does it take until the fire goes out? Look at the ashes. What do you see there? What do you wish to rise from them?
• Poignant or Gentle Ending
  To journal upon the occasion of a poignant or gentle ending, write about a scrapbook you could make of pictures and trinkets from the event or relationship that has ended. What does the scrapbook look like? Where will you keep it? What is in it? Tell why you are placing particular photos and objects into the scrapbook. When the book is finished what will it be called? Can you find a title that tells the most important thing you get to keep from this collection of memories and experiences?
• Upon a Beginning
  All during our lives new relationships come into being; we start new jobs, projects and responsibilities. Longed-for vacations or living situations arrive. Imagine each beginning you want to write about personified and talking to you across a table, over drinks in the living room, on the front porch or deck or patio or in a restaurant. You are the host. What beverage does your guest want to drink? What food does your guest like for dinner or what have you pre­pared and why? What does “new relationship” or “new job” or “new friendship” or “trip to Italy” have to say? Is your guest happy to be with you or nervous? What are you and your guest worried about? What are you happy about? If you were to make up a toast what would it be?