April 5, 2020 by ConTextos

Cyber Circle: April 3

Our team aims to stay mission-driven during these questionable times. While the world feels like a sci-fi movie, we continue to encourage the writing and sharing of personal narratives. We continue to support shared reading and shared writing. We continue to rely on the most important of human traditions: sharing stories, because every story contains lessons for the audience. They spark questions and curiosity. Stories teach us to love. To forgive. To be just. To strive for something better. Stories connect us, even–or especially–when we feel isolated and alone.

Each afternoon, we at ConTextos will engage in shared reading and writing to help us connect, to reflect on our pasts, to envision the future. To author a brighter future. Over Zoom, we will provide a short reading or a prompt, write for no more than 10 minuets, and share our writings as a group. Please fill out this form if you’d to join us.

Prompts: A) Write what is on your heart & mind, B) The ghosts will try to find you, C) Put those colors on.

Emma

What is a ghost? Does it have thoughts, feelings, and intentions of its own? Is it an echo of the way a person lived, or is it malleable, still able to learn and change and grow in the afterlife — maybe in a way the rigidity of human flesh & society never let it grow the first time around. 

Or are ghosts projections, wavering holograms, composites of memories and assumptions and fears, expectations, insecurities that linger in the minds of those who loved or hated, helped or harmed a person in life, once that person has moved on? 

I don’t know what ghosts are, but there are ghosts in my life. Ghosts of a person I once was, ghosts of someone I’d like to be; ghosts of friends, still living, whose bonds to me are broken; ghosts of family members I knew, but not well enough, and had to fill in the gaps for; ghosts who live in the world my parents expected me to inhabit, which I’ve shut the portal to. Ghosts of characters I’ve read that came alive in my head, chatting to one another in the ethereal auditorium of my imagination, commenting on the present, the here + now, in ways no fictional character should be able to. 

In a story by one of my favorite authors, women are disappearing, fading until they’re nearly invisible, seemingly at random, for no particular reason. They try to stay near those they love from behind the veil of social invisibility imposed on them. Living ghosts. 

What makes a ghost, when even the living are largely understood as refractions off the broken mirror fragments of others’ expectations, assumptions, projections? Hard to say, but whatever they are, the ghosts will try to find you. 

Kelema

I honestly sometimes am afraid to go to bed or at least out here in Michigan, when I was 3 I had this same scary dream I have now  but I don’t tell anyone till now and once I told people I began to take this dream in as a humorous dream instead of a scary one. We as people will never be able to let go of the demons on our backs or our ghost that seems to follow us everywhere until we are able to accept it and then we can learn to beat it or shake it off. As he sits in his room afraid to go to bed afraid of the monsters under his bed afraid of what tomorrow will bring. “Why do I have to go to bed? It’s not even late”. Why does it feel sometimes that we can’t shake or run from these monsters or the ghosts trying to find us?”will these monsters and ghosts ever go away why are they hunting me he thinks when will they stop?” I read somewhere about what our dreams mean. It was interesting because thinking about the bad dreams I had had in the past, the theories about what the dreams ment were all true. When you learn to stop running and fight to try and understand our ghosts we can learn to let go of them.