Shavuot Prompt 2023: First Fruits - Creating a Sacred Offering
Shavuot is not only a holiday of revelation and receiving of Torah, but it is a time of offering out. Agriculturally Shavuot is when we celebrate our first fruits — those tender buds turned beautiful flowers turned plump, delicious fruit. We honor that first yield from the garden which emerges despite our thoughts that perhaps nothing might come up — that perhaps all that watering and tending, all those prayers and all that care might have been in vain. On Shavuot we take this early soft, shiny, colorful bounty and we offer it up as a gift — an act of surrender, of humility, of love — rather than indulge or devour. Shavuot is a holiday of generosity and reciprocity, through which our relationship with life is renewed. This Shavuot, we can experience new revelations and respond by offering out our gifts of gratitude.
MATERIALS
Any! Pen and paper, drawing/painting supplies, found/natural objects, to name a few!
CREATIVE PROMPT
Tapping into the "first fruits" of your creative process, create something to be offered up. Whether you think of this as a gift of gratitude to God or to the Universe, to the Earth, to your community, to ancestors or to your own deep soul, we invite you to engage in creative process with the intention of making something as a gift to be given, and then to give it! This might mean arranging sticks, stones and leaves you find outside as an offering to the natural world, sending a drawing to a friend, writing yourself a thank you note, or painting a picture for the Divine.
