This week? Writing in the Kern Canyon, photos in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut, New Friends and Reunions with long-ago-and-into-the-present friends, the future and POETRY. Wow.
It was a whirlwind week. My daughter Katherine and I were spending the majority of her Senior Year Spring Break not in a wild party in Mexico, but instead, in a nod to her future in academia at Smith College.
We kicked Monday off, though, in a pre-flight mini-writing camp with a group of friends in preparation of my future in-person writing camps. I needed photos of people writing in a “camp like” setting, so I texted some of my friends and said, “Feel like a little writing adventure?” Seven women took me up on my idea and I staged two different “write-ins”: two women wrote in the sunrise. This gave me an idea for a weekly, in-town, “Writing in Sunrise” writing came as well as the more conventional, “mini-retreat” writing camp I had planned in the first place.
Five
women, including eighteen-year-old Katherine, joined me for our mini-writing
retreat. I wanted to give the women a taste of what we would be doing and they
gave me the permission to take their photos and use them for promotional
purposes.
As always, what returned to me was incredible – including seeing the wind become visible and getting to know my friends more deeply and in a different way. I am blessed so many times over in the friendship department.
It was also an enormous blessing to see my daughter as the young woman she is and she is becoming. On the ride to the Live Oak Day Use Campground, her poetic description of wild-flowers took my breath away – I had been distracted by the wild flowers on the curvy road and I laughed, “Someone, give me words so I can concentrate” and she swept me away with her melodic bringing to life both the flowers and the energy of the Kern Canyon itself.
In
Western Massachusetts, I visited Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst as National
Poetry Month and NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) kicked off. I have written daily but this morning’s poem
is the first that satisfies me even remotely. I loved the first comment I
received, which was slightly – well, reminded me why I don’t always like to
post poetry because when the comments come in that are… well, I won’t say, it
slices close to my core, especially after returning home to some
hyper-criticism and inner work which I approached with some art journaling…
again, which left me satisfied… which is the point, right?
I’ll make some separate blog entries this week for the intricacies of the week, but I can not express how important it has become for me to take special, one-on-one time with each child. Last year Emma and I did Disneyland, just the two of us. This year, Katherine and I did this Western Massachusetts trip. Samuel and I spend targeted one-on-one time every day. It is one of my on-going goals to do so daily, but these special, larger chunks of time never fail at creating memories.
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