the frog pond

Writing, as much as I can, has helped me navigate life and all of its intricacies. Blog posts here have been a creative outlet for several years and recently, as in the last four months, I’ve been taking pen to paper and writing things down in long-hand, three pages a day, having read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. 

In fact, my daughter Sarah and I have been working this program together, she is being steadfastly consistent, me fitting it in here and there. She has found the page to be a safe place, a place for her to explore her life-threatening experience with anxiety and depression. 

We talk about writing together, and often share with each other some of our more intimate work. Writing has been therapeutic for us both, and for the next four nights we are sharing a room in the countryside of Spain practicing our craft. 

Below is a short piece I wrote yesterday, after a long walk, one of my favorite things to do settle the mind, soothe the body. 

The children were all playing in the garden while I prepared lunch. The boys digging holes, the oldest daughter doing whatever she does and the babe poking things with a stick, at the side of the small pond. 

‘Lunch is ready’ I would call. Maybe I would bring it on a tray, and we would have a picnic. ‘Lunch is ready’ I would call again. 

Everyone all immersed in the outside world while enclosed in a garden with a fish pond. Isn’t that how life should be?

Outside, enclosed, immersed. Years went by and the garden was abandoned, we all got busy. 

And then she fell and fell hard. Not in the garden but outside in the world. She immobilized our family, our hearts stood still. 

Doctors and pills and pills and doctors. Journals and writing and writing and journals. 

Time travel and a writing retreat and a walk up a hill in silence. She finds a spot at the corner of the pool, the only corner with sunshine, and then pokes things, and gradually stirs…