Yesterday, I returned home after four days of a retreat with women and words. We talked of Permission and all that word can mean when we apply it to writing; we discussed stories and vulnerability and our natural desire to connect with each other; we made space for ourselves and held space for each other. And after our final dinner, it was clear that saying goodbye would not be easy.
What I love most about retreats is the community that grows from them. But I also love the quiet time allowed in order to reflect. Coming together feeds our creative spirit; retreating into solitude is crucial for our creative mind, body, and soul as well.
Each day I walked along the shore and took photos, mesmerized by the strange and beautiful landscape and the way it mirrors our work: rocky at times, sunshine in the distance, full of change and discovery within each rise and fall of the tide.
While out on the shores on the West Coast, my essay on another kind of retreat, swimming along northern shores in Lake Superior, was published on The Sunlight Press. Lake Superior and this particular beach is a favorite place of mine, but rarely do I jump in and swim (it’s average water temperatures are too cold for this Texan!). Except this one summer. And that swim proved to be more than necessary than I imagined. Read “You Have Come to the Lakeshore” on The Sunlight Press HERE. Many thanks to editors Beth Burrell and Rudri Bhatt Patel!
One last thing, a quote from Dani Shapiro that my writing retreat co-leader Elin read while we gathered outside one sunny afternoon:
We are in the ocean, yes. We are constructing the very thing that holds us. . . . If beginnings and ends are shorelines, middles are where we dive deep, where we patch holes, where we risk drowning. This is no time for half measures. We must meet the page with everything we’ve got. . . . What will today bring? I hold my breath, dive down. Come to the surface, gasping, empty-handed. I catch my breath, then dive again. Maybe this time. I reach for treasures in this underwater landscape. Ones that only I can see. Ones that, should I discover them, will be mine and mine alone.
Wherever you are today, take a moment for retreat–a walk on the shore, a moment near a window with the sun pouring in, five minutes in silence at the end of a busy day. Who knows what you will find.
