Richard Donner movies (writing prompts!)

I was in a Donner mood, so here's some inspiration from Goonies, Scrooged, Lethal Weapon, and more...

We'll begin with a reading. This is Thomas Merton:

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint. For many absurd reasons, they are convinced that they are obliged to become somebody else who died two hundred years ago and who lived in circumstances utterly alien to their own. They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems or possess somebody else’s spirituality. There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular - and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”

There's a lot to unpack in there! The line that sticks with me the most is "hurry ruins saints as well as artists." Let's all remember to take our time this week. 

Today’s prompts were inspired by Richard Donner movies.