I sidestep my skis up the steep snowbank at the top of my driveway, digging deep with my poles to prevent the backward slide into the dirty CRV. Pausing at the top, I smile at my brand new MADSHUSH ski tips sticking out in mid air. I push off my mini mountain and swish onto the trail. I love my new skis.

Do you have a transactional relationship that you need help unwinding from?

I pulled up the driveway and thought … Where's the barn?!? Oh right! It’s GONE. 

My daughter is helping out on a project of disassembling a large old barn. The last time I stood in this spot, a post and beam barn towered over me. Today, only a freshly poured cement slab foundation exists in the original footprint. Beams and boards are stacked in tidy piles and each item is carefully labeled.

Truth be told: writing is hard for me - not always, but more than I like to admit. But I just did. I said, ‘writing is hard for me.” out loud. Grocery shopping can be hard for me too - but I have to do it. 

I have fantasized about being stranded on an island with no boat home, just enough food, and an endless supply of juice for my computer battery. Island life would create the buffer I need to protect my writing projects from the countless attacks of daily life. My mind would be clear and words would flow like water over smooth stone. Every breath would birth words of clarity, poetry, and inspiration. My productivity would soar through the roof of my humble hut and I’d return home with a complete manuscript. 

When I was twelve, maybe thirteen, a tattered folder held scraps of paper that I had trusted to hold my poems, but I didn’t know what to do with them until the day my sister found the cows first. You see…after school, we would head out into the pastures to call the cows in for milking. 

When life wins, we get creative. We write. 

Warning: this essay contains references to suicide, death and stunningly beautiful writing.

In the wider spectrum of things, it's a lame example. But it’s fresh and personal, so I’ll use it:

Last week’s realization that I Wanna Dance was born after I caught a life-damning, internal diatribe red-handed and stopped it in it's tracks. It planned to snuff joy out of my life, pushing me to do something publicly that I wasn't ready to do, nor did I want to. Had I succumbed to its motives, I'd be involved right now in a life-draining project, driven by a pattern that was wired into me during my years of being a subtle, and not so subtle, recruiter.