I just found this in an old blog post. I was about 25 weeks pregnant at the time:
“I must do this for my daughter. I must show her that you can do what you love, that you don’t have to settle. That money isn’t as important as happiness. I want her to know hard work, when applied to the things you love and hold dear, gives great rewards.”
It makes me happy that I’ve stayed true to this. It has definitely not been easy but it’s been worth the journey. Every day my path feels a bit clearer and more focused. Of course there are still side trips, but I move in the same direction.
This weekend I’m in a writing retreat lead by Sarah Sentilles called the WORD CAVE. I’m getting back to a practice of writing. I’ve collected a million sources and today I will focus on just writing, not worrying about my sources. I’ve started to feel like I have to back up every sentence with facts. But I know I am an authority, I know what I’m talking about, and I offer plenty of sources to back it up. SO I need to let go of feeling like I have to prove myself.
Today’s meeting was beyond intense. So much hard work is being done this weekend. People are digging deep, writing hard things. I’ve thought about all the hard work I’ve been doing over the past 5 years. I want to go through my private writings and make some of it public, or at the very least revisit it. That might be a good project for the week, now that PSU is ramping down. I feel like this week will feel like a release of tension. Sarah said we should expect the regular post-intensity crash, so I promise to be kind and get lots of rest. Tom’s not drinking until his birthday so he’s been reading in bed and going to bed early. I’m excited to join him. So many good books are on their way to me now and the library is opening back up.
I wrote this today in our morning writing exercise. The prompt was “question and answer”. To simple ask a question and answer it. We’d had just an intense check-in, I couldn’t imagine writing even a single word, but the first thing that came out was, what is an ocean? I liked the question so much I decided to stay with it to the 7 minute exercise.
Here’s what I wrote, unedited, so you can follow my journey with the writing:
What is an ocean? The earth is an ocean with some islands on it. It is water, we are water, we came from water. The islands are made up of pimples erupting and crusting over. The earth is a ball of fluid with rock and fire inside, keeping it from freezing, like a heart pumping blood. We are all water too. Our organs keep things moving. The land masses give the ocean shape and change its flow into beautiful, intricate patterns. But the earth is water. The surface land is inconsequential just as our solid parts are inconsequential. Our spirits rest in water. The ocean talks to the sky. They are lovers, as we are lovers to the sky and universe. We are tiny oceans born from the mother ocean.
And in my email this morning was this: