Lately, on Saturday mornings when I’m sitting at the coffee shop before heading out to do the weekly grocery run, I’ve been writing on a story. This sounds normal to you, like yes Cindy, we know you write those fortune cookie stories. This is different because I’m not writing in the Fortune Cookie journal. In fact, and I feel bad about this, I have not written in the Fortune Cookie Journal in ages. Instead, I’ve been writing in a regular no prompting notebook and it’s one long story arc. This all started when I took those mushrooms on a camping trip in July. I started writing a story based on a very real dream I had had. It was one of those past life kind of dreams that played in cinemanic format through my brain. Every weekend since, I’ve spent time just adding to that story. A paragraph here. A couple of pages there. I don’t know where this is going or what my intentions are with this writing. I mean, I’m writing it out in pen and ink on paper. It’s not like it’s going to be an easy thing to polish up for an editor or publisher. The thing is, I am writing it.

This Saturday morning, I went to the coffee shop but I didn’t take that journal. I didn’t write. Instead, I worked on a Thanksgiving menu list. That journal sits on my desk under the grocery list because I pick up both of those things when I leave the house on Saturday mornings. I looked right at that journal as I set the grocery list back down when I got home and unloaded all of the groceries and I heard the tiniest of naggy voices in the back of my head, but I shrugged those voices aside. They were not very loud and easy to ignore. By Monday, the naggy voices had gotten louder and I was starting to feel a bit twitchy. It is almost like the feeling I get when I’ve been away from my yoga mat for too long. My hands and my brain are all “where’s my weekly exercise?!?!”, but also the action has a cleansing quality. It clears some words from my brain and allows for better word traffic and it wasn’t until Monday afternoon when I realized how important that weekly word dump really is.

I shouldn’t call it a word dump. There’s a real story here. It might not be a good story. It might be a far fetched story, but it is a story. It is more story than I’ve ever written before which is why I believe it might be a past life story. It’s real to me, even if I’m still on the fence about past lives. I can see my characters’ faces. I can smell the air where they live. At times, it feels more like me just writing in my diary than it feels like plunking out a tale. I’m not working and if I started taking it more seriously, it would probably turn into work. I think that’s how I’m going to finish something, by not working. Though it does require attention at least once a week because I’m more scattered today than I have been since starting this new ritual. I am surprised by this. I had no idea that the twenty minutes I spent writing on this story one day week would turn out to be such an important part of my mental wellbeing.

Maybe I should have signed up for NANOWRIMO….