60 Seconds for Story Prompt Friday: "If Each One Did Just One Thing Beautifully"

Hello to you listening in Sebastopol, California!

Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds for Story Prompt Friday and your host, Diane Wyzga.  

I have been following legendary singer/songwriter, actress, teacher, and broad-coalition activist Holly Near for decades and decades. Once upon a time I sat in on a concert she gave at the Orange Coast Unitarian Universalist Church in Costa Mesa, California. My life was never the same. I felt then that music can be a vehicle for empathy, understanding, introspection, and social evolution in a rapidly changing world.

Of her many songs that speak to me and millions of listeners like me Planet Called Home never fails to resonate. It’s the kind of earth-moving inspirational that will make your socks roll up and down and get you using your creativity to help this planet called home. How? “If each one did just one thing beautifully * Complex life on Earth might not die.”

Click HERE to listen to Holly Near sing Planet Called Home/The Souls Are Coming Back on her recording of the same name.

Click HERE to watch and listen to Holly Near’s performance of Planet Called Home given at the 2003 Bioneers National Conference.

Story Prompt: What is the one thing you can do beautifully? Are you ready to brave what it will take to do that for our  Planet Called Home? Write that story!  

Planet Called Home [Song by Holly Near]

… Can you call on your imagination

As if telling a myth to a child

Put in the fantastical, wonderful, magical

Add the romantic, the brave and the wild

… Once upon a time there was a power

So great that no one could know its name

People tried to change it and rule with it

But always such arrogance ended in shame.

… Thousands of years would pass in a moment

Hundreds of cultures would come and go

Each generation with a glorious calling

Even when they were too busy to know

… And then one day after two millennia

Which after all was a small part of time

Hundreds of souls found their way out of nowhere

To be on earth at the threat of decline

… Let's all go, they moved as one being

Even though each would arrive here alone

They promised to work in grace with each other

To brave the beautiful planet called home

… Now, there was no promise that they could save it

But how exciting to give it a try

If each one did just one thing beautifully

Complex life on Earth might not die

… And so they arrived in a spectrum of colors

The population on earth did explode

Some threw themselves in front of disaster

And others slowly carried their load

… Some adopted small girls from China

Some lived high in the branches of trees

Some died as martyrs, some lived as healers

And, some bravely walked with a dreadful disease

… They mingled among each class and each culture

Not one of them could be identified

But together they altered just enough moments

To help the lost and the terrified

… To step outside of our egos and bodies

To know for once that we truly are one

Then quickly we would forget to remember

But that's okay, their job was well done

… And earth went on for another millennium

Now its time for this song to end

This magical story of hope and wonder

Invites you all to wake up and pretend to be

… Fabulous creatures sent from the power

Souls that have come with one purpose in mind

To do one thing that will alter the outcome

And maybe together we can do it in time

… Can you call on your imagination

As if telling a myth to a child

Put in the fantastical, wonderful, magical

Add the romantic, the brave and the wild

The souls are comin back

The souls are comin back

The souls are comin back!

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Stories From Women Who Walk Production Team

Podcaster: Diane F Wyzga & Quarter Moon Story Arts

Music: Mer’s Waltz from Crossing the Waters by Steve Schuch & Night Heron Music

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