Flo

I’m eating potato salad (batch #2) for breakfast.  Again. Meditation is done.  Thoughts are scattered.  Again.  Pulling them all together to form coherent, understandable writing is a bit of a challenge.

My friend Beth’s picture from the Gunnison Country Times hangs on the wall right in front of my laptop.  Pictures of Maureen and Ryan, sister’s Janet and Linny, Auntie Doris, friends Emma, Dustin and others surround me when I sit to type.  Pictures of Mill Creek and the Castles hang on the wall.  When I stop and look at them all, I feel a peacefulness that moves down my body and makes me feel settled in my heart.  Calmer.  Quiet.  Centered.

Most of these people and places I don’t see very often.  Most are 5 hours away and the best I can do is write to them, meditate on them, think of them.   It makes me think of a song that I don’t know who sings it and the words are something like:  ”Friends, I will remember you. Think of you. Pray for you.”  Although I can not grab all the words, in my head I hear many voices singing this song – that it was recorded by many artists at one time.   I like the way friends inspire me.  Thank you to you all.

“Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it’s something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.”

This quote was sent to me via email in the spring and I wish I could give the author credit – I have no idea where this quote originated but truly appreciate the words.  I’m trying to remember when I first started to write.  I remember a diary, lost in my parent’s divorce, that mulled over the boys at church camp and the angst of being a teenager.  I was relatively boring (by worldly standards) teenager, striving to be independent through music and religion, so I wasn’t much of a nightmare for my parents.   I was too busy trying to excel at everything, win praise for all I did, to have much time for trying drugs, sex or temper tantrums with my parents.  I’m not sure why I bought that first diary as I have no recollection of anyone telling me it might be a good idea to express my feelings instead of bottling them up inside.

In college, it became a blue composition notebook, with only 1/3 of the pages used, spanning the years of 1982 through 1985.  The writing was often done at Lake Fort Phantom, in Abilene, Texas.  I would head there to find seclusion from my roommates and this was the journal I was using when I moved to Colorado.  Gunnison was my first home after college and I stayed there for 20 years.  This is where I started exploring my writing voice.  Following 10 years of writing silence, in February 1995, in Lake City, Colorado, I met with an unfamiliar group of women for a “Journaling Retreat”.  Through the gentle guidance of Lois Sunrich http://www.storyartsinc.org/ and Carolyn Hull, my voice squeaked and eeked out of me.  Over the next four years of annual retreats, I figured out I could process an “awful lot of stuff” in my writing.  Relationship pain, family issues, abuse trauma.  It all would come pouring out and I could move on.

I guess I’ll write more on this later.  Flo