The year I turned into a river.
A thick white rope tied to the end of a dock. (Photo credit: Matt Seymour, via Unsplash)
I was just thinking how much I wish I could send the Firefly workshop list back to my 24-year-old self and say— all this will exist for you some day.
That year, writing was a dinghy on a rushing river of tears.
I was heartbroken, which was actually a relief, because it turns out I had a lot of un-cried tears behind the dam in my chest. Getting dumped (then fired for crying so much at work) sprung everything open, and I was pitched downstream, feet first.
I found some major shit in that river, but wow, some great stuff too. Therapy. Take-out. Mornings. A roommate who would slip Mary Oliver poems under my door when I wasn’t getting up. But mostly, I found the page.
This is how it is for so many of us — we want to write. We can almost feel how good it will feel if we just do it. But it’s non-urgent, a quiet tug in our heart muscle, a song we used to love coming from across a lake.
Then there’s a break of some kind, and just like that, it saves us.
These days, writing can still feel like a dinghy, but mostly it takes other shapes.
Sometimes it’s an invitation to sit in a pool of light on a Saturday.
Sometimes it’s a mine shaft to yell my rage into.
Sometimes it’s a portal to a softer logic.
Most of time, it’s a way of joining the conversation — of being in connection with myself and with the world unfolding around me, a conversation which feels increasingly confounding, and important.
This summer, my rock star colleague Asifa and I are each creating new classes to help us join the conversations we care about most.
We’ve taken the things that fascinate us — courage for Asifa, community for me — and turned them into mini classes to bring the conversations to writing, and to groups.
Asifa’s new class is Letters to Courage in Uncertain Times (such a beautiful title!), which will bring together meditation, poems and open-ended writing prompts to let participants sit with uncertainty in new ways, with grace and good company.
Mine is called Writing Our Way Back to Each Other, where we’ll use writing to explore our histories of belonging and solitude, and how creativity can lead us back to human connection right now.
Asifa’s is online, mine is in person this summer, with a longer online version in the works for this fall.
Whether it’s one of these new workshops or our many others, I hope you can feel it today… how writing is always here for us — a dinghy, a fresh raspberry, a sudden sunset — a way of joining the conversations that call us, of moving through whatever comes.
Is there a prompt for you in here?
Maybe now’s the time to do some writing. I said at the top that writing has been a dinghy, a permission slip, a portal. If you want to reflect on your version of this today, here are some prompts to get you started.
Writing has always been my…
In those days, writing was a…
These days I want writing to be…
Wishing you connection, awe, and green winks of spring this week.
In it with you,
