Saturday

In some ways this feels like the first real day of the retreat. I wrote yesterday, a little, but most of what I did was think. I pressed my back onto the warm boards of the deck and imagined scenes floating in bubbles above my head, imagined how they fit together and built on one another, and I picked and prodded until I had a new opening chapter for the Peru book. It’s a much stronger opening and does a better job setting the tone for what the book’s really about. That chapter, I wrote, all three pages of it.

And then I had to go through the same process for what should come next.

It’s such a glorious thing to have hours of silence and solitude in which to recreate this story into something closer to the ideal that’s in my mind. Today, I continue that process. I’m sitting on the porch, computer plugged into the wall, while rain chatters against the tin roof overhead and drips from the eaves in front of me. The sky is gray, the air is chill, and for the moment at least I believe that I’m a writer and that beautiful things are going to pour forth from my fingers.

Every writer needs a time like this, a time when there’s enough quiet to hear what’s in your heart. I feel incredibly lucky to be here.

:) Cheryl

PS—I’m posting my accounts of the retreat a few days in arrears, because we didn’t have Internet access at the retreat house.