Skip to main content

Feeding Your Soul


You spend the school year feeding your tribe. It seems like all you do is pack lunches and make dinners.
But that’s not entirely true—you also spend a great deal of time in the car and quizzing math facts and helping create a whale-on-stilts costume. You attend concerts and track meets and recitals and musicals and field trips.
And you write. You revise. You revise some more. You revise until you're sick of revising.
By the end of the year, you are drained. Bone-dry drained. Nothing left drained. Drain-o drained.
You need to feed your soul.
IMG_1805So you go to Istanbul. You see the Hagia Sophia. You see the Blue Mosque. You visit a Turkish bath. You eat something called "The Imam Fainted." You climb a mountain and visit a monastery. You bike around an island.
IMG_3443You go to Greece. You see the Parthenon. You visit the Delphic Oracle. You climb to more monasteries. You swim in the Aegean sea.
You loved Istanbul and you loved Greece, but you come home and still feel drained. Drained and jet-lagged.
IMG_4379So you go to Vermont to visit your alma mater. You hug dozens of people. You meet new friends. You give a reading. You talk shop. You go to lectures.
You love VCFA and you love your writer buddies, but you come home and still feel drained. Drained with a whole lotta laundry to do.
So you go to your in-law’s camp, a place with no wifi, no cell phone reception, no television, no cable. You canoe, you hike through the woods, you build bonfires and create the consummate s’more.
But when you come home, guess what? You still feel drained. But at least you have hot water again.
You do laundry and repack, this time for a yearly tradition: WTHS, the What the H(eck) Sabbatical.
Karen, Beth, Heather, Ginger, Frauke, Joy, Lisa
Karen, Beth, Heather, Ginger, Frauke, Joy, Lisa
There are occasions when you need an unknown something, and no one but a sister will do. Though you only have one biological sister, you were lucky enough to pick up six more along the way, sisters with a varied and long history joined by parentage, schooling, marriage, and friendship.
And once a year, you check in.
hershey
Lisa, Heather, Joy, Karen, Beth, Frauke, Ginger
You see your sisters on the second weekend of August, the weekend of WTHS. It is a weekend sans husband and children in which the answer to any question is "What the h(eck)!" It is a weekend in which you doff sense, and don sensibility.
"Do I want ice cream for breakfast?" What the h(eck)!
"Should I buy these shoes?" What the h(eck)!
"One dessert or two?" What the h(eck)!
glasses WTHS
Heather, Joy, Ginger, Frauke, Karen
This weekend is no span of simple gluttony; you also wear tiaras. You carry wands. You laugh. You laugh some more. You laugh until you cry. In fact, one of you is an academically trained humor specialist and comedian. You laugh until it becomes an aerobic activity, and you can justify that ice cream for breakfast.
You return home and you no longer feel drained. And it doesn't matter how much laundry you have to do, because you have a tiara and a magic wand, and maybe it'll just get done all by itself.
liberty bell photo bomb
Beth photobombing Ginger at the Liberty Bell
Everyone should belong to such a group. It's good for the soul.
And the funny bone.

(Cross-posted at www.quirkandquill.com)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sky is Everywhere Contest!

I first heard Jandy Nelson read an excerpt from The Sky is Everywhere during her graduate reading at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The words absolutely sizzled from her lips, and I couldn't wait to read the whole thing. Unfortunately, I had to wait until the publishing world caught up. When I read the finished book, I started it over and read it again. Then I bought a copy to give to my sister. (Yes, I GAVE it to my sister.) Now, thanks to a pay-it-forward contest, I am soon to have my very own copy and give away yet another copy. Casey McCormick began a pay-it-forward book contest for The Sky is Everywhere in an effort to spread the love, and to generate new sales for a talented author. Her contest inspired other contests, one of which was sponsored by Melissa Writes Fiction , and I won that contest. Yippee! So, to make good on my promise, here is my own pay-it-forward contest. Please read the rules below, because this contest is a bit different. The most important condi...
5 comments
Read more

The Greening

Sadness spreads like a sower scattering seeds. The seeds find fertile ground in her and land there, burrowing into her skin, into the deep down places where they sprout, nurtured unwittingly by blood and bone. Shoots spread forth growing both inward and outward, and she wonders if she will ever be able to root them all out. It is like pulling at a dandelion only to have stem detach from root and downy fluff fly off, enabling dozens more dandelions to take root. There is no cause for the sadness; it just is, like cold in winter, like leaves in fall, like rain in April. It sits there, within her, growing bigger each day, a pregnancy gone horribly wrong, and she feels the shame of it. But a breeze blows by, bringing different seeds, renegade seeds, hopeful seeds. They sprout in the midst of all the sadness; they choke it out. When she looks out the window today, she realizes that the world around her is greening. She decides that she will too. She will choose joy.
3 comments
Read more

I Think I'm a Grown-Up Now

I'm reposting something I wrote on my personal blog two years ago. I can laugh about it now that I don't feel the need to visit the guidance counselor's office anymore. The answer to my question was so obvious--had been obvious for years if I had taken the time to see--but apparently I had my blinders on. Or my rose-colored glasses. Or my peril-detecting sunglasses. One of them, at any rate. ***** Mid-Life Crisis The question of what I want to be when I grow up is plaguing me again. Sometimes I think I want to be like Mrs. Murray in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle---a brilliant scientist with a lab in the barn, cooking stew over a bunsen burner. But then I feel too old to go in that direction, not smart enough to be able to pick up and retain that scientific knowledge quickly enough, and not balanced enough to do it all gracefully. Inevitably, I would poison my family with an accidental slip of something into the stew. So I'm back to wondering what I hav...
4 comments
Read more