18 Inch Journey Update
a close to an incredible season
Family and friends, It’s day 56 of the 60-day 18 Inch Journey. I would love to share a bit on what the last month has held and what God has done!
My 21st Birthday!
Spending my twenty-first birthday here at A Place for the Heart was an amazing gift! Fellow students and staff each made me feel incredibly loved and cherished and I had the privilege of asking large handfuls of them for words of wisdom for my twenty-first year.
We celebrated that day with surprise cupcakes, I got to pick wildflowers with my farm chore crew, received a flower crown, blew out candles on an incredible chocolate, espresso cake and we spent the evening hearing words, stories, and songs from our 18 Inch Journey family.
Thank you for all the beautiful words from home and around the globe!
Writing Collective
I journeyed with eight other students through the writing collective throughout the entirety of the 60 day school. These times were some of my favorites here in North Carolina. Twice a week our collective would gather to engage insightful writing prompts, discover the wells of creativity inside of us, and walk into the authority of each of our individual voices.
This past week we each crafted a story reflecting our journey through the school and boldly shared them with the entire school as our collective presentation.
On an amphitheater stage surrounded by the trees beneath starlight and strings of lights, we read our stories and championed our fellow students in their voices.
photos credit: Ella Roselt
Art Class
One of the most impactful things in this school has been art class. As a school, we enjoy six hours of developing our artistic eye, technique, and expression per week. We do this through guided exercises and inventive “history book” prompts.
An exciting surprise our school enjoyed a few weeks ago was visiting the Raleigh Museum of Art where we brought our art books to sketch two works of art we saw in the museum. After sketching it, we would react to the artwork through free write or poetry.
I drew an ancient urn, writing a poem as my response and then I did a blind contour (drawing an image without looking at your paper) of a painting I saw from the 1800s and was affected by the emotion it provoked. This was my favorite museum experience.