SOLSC: Images

Today I was poking around online after work and found a website that offers different kinds of writing exercises for different days of the week. Today on the site is a poetry day, but I was particularly interested in the image task from yesterday (Tuesday). So I'm taking it on!

The task: write about this image:

Two hands, two fists, two words. Rage: an anger of the fiercest sort, the kind that provokes people to act far beyond their normal boundaries. Love: an emotion of the highest intensity, the kind that provokes people to act far beyond their normal boundaries. Who would have thought these words have anything in common? And yet, they do.

Rage and Love are two words that come to mind when I think of so many hot button topics in our society today. Same sex marriage brings people to raging righteousness while others argue that it's really about love. Abortion causes people to rage against the opposition, while others choose love as their course of action. It's interesting to note how evenly these words are leveled on the hands in the photo, too. It's as if they have some kind of ease or fluidity.

What else are these words saying? Separately they can have so much in common but paired together they can say so much more. What if, instead of rage, we let love rule more of our emotions? What if our governing instinct relied more on love than rage? Either of these emotions can create strong rhetoric, but what if we channeled the energy of rage into love? Would we be better to each other? Would we actually, in spite of the image above, use our fists less and our words more?

Is love positioned on what is the "right" side of the image for a reason? Or is it because it's on the left hand where we wear wedding rings? This image really pushed me to question its composition on so many levels. I'm thinking that writing about images would be a great break from my students usual journal topics and get them thinking outside of the box. I know I enjoyed thinking this one through.

What do you see?