BlissQuest: Speaking Your Wish Aloud

I'm thinking gnomes prefer this weather.
(December Views)

Listening to: Giggles galore over this one -- a favorite song of mine -- and look how much fun they are having!

Bliss: The sun reflecting off the fresh snow. Fluffy, easy to shovel snow. The kind where each flake still seems individuated though it has become part of the larger mass.

A few years ago, Marcy's cousin was visiting from England, where he has lived since his college days. We went out to lunch and then walked down to the bay and sat on the dock, watching the water and the boats and the gulls. At the time, he and I had been sharing our writing projects. Mine were mostly poetry and a children's book; his was the start of a novel.

So we got to talking about the writing life and the isolation aspects of it. He was figuring out that he did not like the isolation and was uncomfortable enough with it that he was perhaps going to hang up his quill and move onto other things.

He asked me if there was one thing I felt like I was really needing, here, in this small town, away from the hustle and bustle of New York City and its publishing industry and universities and writing programs.

Yep, I said immediately, a little time with other writers.

I, unlike him, do not mind the isolation, and actually, I can go a little batty without a fair dose every day. I am part hermit but also part social butterfly. Yet, the hermit is a wee bit larger than the butterfly. (I think I hear my partner laughing over the "wee bit" of that sentence.)

But to write and write and write in a garret (both literal and metaphorical) and never to have a reader besides someone who loves you (as discerning and critical and helpful as she may be), that can get a little wearisome.

So that day on the dock by the bay (yes, yes, the song...sorry), I put out that need and the universe responded almost immediately.

Before I knew it, I was teaching creative writing at the art museum, and not too long after that, I had a group of wonderful people coming to my house every week, and I, too, was handing out my stuff. Because of my acknowledgment of that need that day on the dock, I was suddenly writing a novel...and suddenly finishing.

In the meantime, life intervened, and the writing group broke up.

But we are back! There are just five of us (including my partner now who is a wonderful painter and writer), but these other three...well, they are wonderful people and enthusiastic and committed writers, and I am lucky to have them helping me cut my novel from an unbearable 500 pages to (hopefully) 300.

I think if I had not spoken that secret heart wish out loud that day my life would be so different.

I would not have a complete manuscript to be cutting.

I would not know these people.

I would not have started blogging.

What secret wish do you need to speak aloud?

Share it here. To say it to another gives it power.

I have witnessed firsthand the truth of that.

An updated version of that mini juniper:
a mere 24 hours later.