I started back with my writing group in Ithaca today. I thought long and hard about doing it this year because although I love it, the time commitment is intense: 3 hours of drive time, 2 hours of writing, lunch with Zee, shopping at Wegmans, and then home just in time to make my 5:30 class.
Where is the time for my fundies? The yoga? The meditation? The writing? The work on The Manual of Me?
(yeah. Not happening.)
So I have decided to just go every other week, instead of every week. But oh, it was such fun!! I wrote about the beach today, in a way I would never have written in my personal journal, or here.
Writing, when I know that I will have to read it out loud is so much different than writing for myself or even writing here, where I will just be read, not heard.
Writing in a group is a performance. It’s improv. It’s like that show Whose Line Is It Anyway? Zee throws out a prompt, and we scribble for an hour. When the hour is up, we read what we wrote. It’s gonzo, skin of your teeth writing. It’s SAT writing, only much more forgiving and fun. (And afterwards we get to go eat Indian buffet at Diamond’s.)
It breaks me out of my pattern; releases me from the relentlessness of my self-imposed gerbil wheel of disciplines. And that’s a good thing.
But tomorrow? Oh, tomorrow I will go running and write double, and do double yoga and catch up with all the stuff I let go today.
I will atone.
Inspiration Location 