September 2024: REFLECT

Writing prompts and reflections to support you all month long

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Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

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Theme for September 2024: REFLECT

The Moon gathers light from the hidden Sun and reflects it onto Earth. As our lunar lantern illuminates the shadowy world by night, its surface becomes a mirror by which, in the darkness, we can glance toward a solar center of coherence that’s beyond our line of sight.

The scholarship creation process has its sunny moments of radiant clarity, but so many of its phases feel like the waxing and waning of the Moon. On we write in dim and uneven light, generating and revising material, feeling the gravitational pull of a thesis that we haven’t yet articulated: a golden truth that, for now, remains on the other side of the world. Eventually, we trust, it will circle around and shine overhead.

In the collage above, the Moon is both reflective and reflected. Its face in the night sky reflects the Sun’s light to Earth, and in the water below, its face is reflected on the rippling surface. The resulting yin-yang image hints at the Moon’s non-dual nature. Within darkness, illumination. Within mystery, coherence. Within process, product. A reflection of a reflection is not an illusion, but a promise that the original object being reflected really does exist. If it can’t be seen directly right now, that doesn’t mean it never will be.

This month, we invite you to REFLECT: to notice coherence, or the possibility of it, even in confusing or ambiguous times. Coherence comes from within: it’s your own inner light reflected back at you from the surrounding world. The scholarship you create is one of many reflective surfaces on which you can glimpse your light, your golden truth, made visible in the world and glowing back at you.

As you Reflect on our theme this month, ponder how your scholarship can express who you are and what you believe is true. And consider how, in the pale light of lunar landscapes, you can glimpse insights that are invisible by the light of day.

Here are some Reflection questions and experiments to get you started!

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Reflect on your current project. What truth or belief have you been trying to express? Where, or in what sense, does the truth feel unknowable, or at least complicated, nuanced, or shades-of-grey? Where does your project need you to honor its lunar (shadowy, shifting, ambiguous) quality, and where does it need you to bring in some solar clarity and coherence for balance?

2. Reflect on your body of work. In your work more broadly, what kind of phase do you feel like you’re in right now? Do you feel like you’re waxing, growing in size and building momentum with an eye toward the future? Do you feel as full of light as you’ve ever been, shining for all to see? Do you feel you’re in a waning phase, marked by pruning, purging, restructuring, and consolidating gains? Or perhaps you’re in a New Moon phase, lying in wait for the next waxing to begin? See if you can identify when your current “lunar cycle” began, and sketch out a timeline of its unfolding so far. What insights do you find when you ponder this sketch of the larger process you’re living out?

PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS

1. Waxing reflections. Jot down on separate scraps of paper 3-7 pieces of positive feedback, large or small, that you’ve received over the years about your work — that is, any intellectual, emotional, or physical labor you’ve performed, in or out of academic roles. This feedback represents various ways that your light has been reflected back at you by the world around you, and it could come from anywhere: colleagues, students, peer reviewers, editors, friends, family, etc. Next, on a flat surface, arrange the pieces of feedback in chronological order, with the oldest feedback on the left and the newest on the right. Imagine that what you’ve laid out is a record of your waxing: a process of growth, gaining strength and light. Consider what threads you see running through all the feedback, and note any hints of how you’ve changed over time. Finally, choose a word to describe what it is that has grown in you — your unique “light” that represents your self, your spark of life, your sense of identity. Have you grown in courage? wisdom? patience? subject-matter knowledge? conflict resolution skills? It could be any virtue, quality, or ability whose growth you see evinced in your “waxing” sequence. If choosing just one word feels limiting, you can create a word cloud instead.

2. Waning reflections. When you’re ready, perhaps after a break, return to your waxing sequence with fresh eyes. This time, imagine your line of feedback is a record of your waning: a process of pruning, distilling, consolidating, and purifying. What have you let go of over the course of this sequence? See if you can choose one word (or word cloud) that captures what you’ve shed, a sort of spiritual “mirror reflection” of your waxing word. Create a simple reminder of your words on a page in your journal, or a note to self that you place somewhere you’ll see it when you need a reminder of who you are, who you’ve always been, and who you’re becoming.

As you live the theme of REFLECT this month, what becomes clear to you? What are you coming to trust about yourself and your process?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

Helen Sword

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Margy Thomas

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