June 15, 2020 A five day exercise, each day beginning with five minutes of guided meditation (don’t be nervous, it was very helpful) and then ten minutes of writing, prompts given.

So here we are, my work from day 1 and 2

Day 1 Prompt: When I walked through the open door,

When I walked through the open door, I was frozen for a moment. What will this walk cost me? What will it give me? What must I do to leave all of the rest behind me and open my eyes wide enough to see what awaits me, to hear, really hear the sounds that are meant to make me feel something? What will I feel there? Do I have the courage to step out into the water?

My child called me a water baby.

And I love the water,

to feel the late winter, early

spring water around the lake

fresh from frozen, to shed my socks

and step out and feel the energy

creep up from my toes to my legs

to my heart and I want to dance,

toes in the water, ankles in the water,

but common sense stops me from walking

into the icy ledge scarcely a foot out.

And I wonder if sometimes as I write

I see icy ledges where there are none.

Instead of the fresh clean early spring air,

I smell the muggy late summer air

with black flies and mosquitoes

distracting me from the joy of beholding

all this that I waited so long for,

the joy of striking out in the water

feeling my body slipping through

the watery air, the future.

Day Two of the Mindful Writing Challenge

Today ask yourself why you want to do this challenge.  Meditating is valuable to me because it forces me to slow down and shut down all of the distractions, the wrong or useless thoughts that shut out what could be much more important. It allows those things that are important to me to bubble up through the junk and take hold so that I can do something with and about them.

Prompts: What I knew was…… What I didn’t know was….. Further word prompts: narrow, hook, language, answer, emerald

What I knew was that I loved writing. Or maybe I loved feeling and that made me want to write. I remember often the day that we took a ride into the mountains, up a twisty road, maybe once a deer path, a cow path, perhaps even an ancient Indian path up through the narrow gorge deeper and higher into the mountains until suddenly light opened up before us. The sky opened up deep blue above us, and the mountain rested and fell away on our left side. Farms splayed out before us.

One road on tiptoes found its way into the valley and brave souls trekked into the hollow. I think a father planted a log cabin there and planted corn and wheat, and his wife in her long cotton dress planted beans and potatoes and squash and onions. And they had sons who planted their own cabins up and down the road, and they pulled out tree stumps and pulled out stones they piled into straight fences, and they bought a cow or two that grew to herds of milk cows. They filled milk cans and loaded them on the back of wagons, and horses pulled the wagon load up the side of the valley and down the mountain into town to sell, to buy the calico for a dress or shoes for the children, bib overalls for the men in the field, or tools to work the earth, those bits of life that could not be grown there in the valley.

I can see it all happen beneath the white houses that stand there now, three along that road, and the great red barns with white roofs, old rusty-red tractors and trucks and plows behind the barns, newer and shinier ones lining the road.

I want to go down the road and talk to the old farmer, the son of the son of the son who built the log cabin, but I fear they would think I was intrusive, a stranger not to be trusted, so I won’t, and I will mourn those lost stories.

What I didn’t know was that there were so many people like me, people who thought they could not write well enough to write books to be published, so it would be a secret they kept….or they taught others to write…or they coached others to write, but they thought their own writing could not really matter because no one asked to hear it again. No one wanted to listen to the heart beating in every word.