Starting by starting

Time to write. Not sure if a story is about to bloom or simply a practice session with my ideas and iPad. Either way, here it comes.

Home from a day in the travel business, I am tired and thoughtful. Thinking about my last trip and the next trip and thinking about trips I have booked for others and stories of journeys already taken. Imagining a move to a less stressful part of the country to steer my life in a different direction. Looking over my travel boards and vision statements, and I reach out and select a book from the shelf.

Longing to be read since 2005, the receipt just tucked inside the front cover. I feel the texture of the paper cover, some raised bumps. I decide this was more than a bargain book. A favourite author and mentor leaves hints of what is still to be written…. An invitation to honour the craft.

Feeling the urge to eat something sweet, I resist the old yearning and decide it is time to draft a few lines. An adventure may unfold and then perhaps just the rambling mind wanting to find a river to follow. I take the step.

What are my discoveries today? My “ah-hah” moments? What am I grateful for? Questions, not answers fill the lines.

This is, after all, a conversation. Every writer knows it.

What is my story and how is it woven ever so gently into yours? If you don’t find yourself in my journal, then it is a monologue with limited value.

However, if the rich descriptions of my carefully selected dialogue touch a memory for you, and send a vibration to your brain, and your senses wake up to the view, then I have written a fair piece and I am pleased.

I feel already like my energy has been well spent in the movement of joining our two hearts today as one even for this very brief moment. My journey joins with yours, we are one in the river.

Writing is surely about story telling. A shared experience that takes us both to a similar place, at a different moment in time. I love travel, through time and to foreign lands. I love to drive across the country and imagine how it must have been so many years ago as people found their way walking and hauling all their life’s belongings with a horse and cart.

Today, I want to offer a sense of being together, whatever the story. Wherever you are at in your life and where it joins with my journal … Let’s sit just for a moment, together and apart.