Stretch: A Creative Prompt

We stretch phone cords, Achilles tendons, new shoes. We stretch the truth.

Tension screws stretch wires taut. Photo by Fran Gardner

Stretch

Stretch is a curious word. It encompasses both the imaginable and the unobtainable. And it denotes a sort of comfort to be found in bodily movement.

Cats are championship stretchers, elongating their back and arching their heads while their paws knead the rug. Dogs stretch, too, less gracefully.

Humans stretch jerkily, if they are old or out of shape, or sinuously and flexibly if they are youngsters or yogis.

We stretch phone cords, Achilles tendons, new shoes. We stretch the truth and work the barre in our ballet shoes and tutus.

We stretch canvas to make a painting. We stretch our finances to make ends meet.

We stretch when we get out of bed. Before we exercise. After we swim.

Stretching and creativity

The poet Robert Browning famously said: 

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp
Else what’s a heaven for?

I love that kind of stretching, reaching for the brass ring, sometimes gaining it.

And then, of course, there’s the famous painting of God and man from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. That’s by Michelangelo. God seems to be doing most of the stretching in that composition, while the human languidly accepts the touch of the divine.

You can hear stretching in the whine of a spring, the rending of clothing stressed to the limit, the twang of a bowstring.

You can see it in the swoop of a sparrow, the ascent of a rocket, the grasp of a fitted bottom bedsheet you struggle to get over the edge of the mattress.

Stretch your imagination, we are told. How do we do that? Do we have to have a limber mind at the outset? Or can we acquire flexibility along the way?

How would you stretch your thinking? Maybe by reading something in a new genre. Trying a new recipe. Running backward instead of forward. 

Stretches come from the spine. Stretches strengthen the spine. Can you somehow spell that out, in words or a drawing, in a chart or a photo, how stretching is strength?

Stretching leads to flexibility, and our next word will be… Flexible

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Click here to read Horizon, the previous creative prompt.

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Read more from Fran at Becoming….

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