This is the view from my balcony at the Write by the Water Retreat in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.  I am looking at the very scene pictured above as I sit at my little desk and write this post.  When I go downstairs, I can walk to the left on a little private road called Seaward Lane, down some wooden steps over the dunes and walk for miles and miles on white sand beach.

This retreat has helped me immensely. I feel like I know, really know, what I need to do and how to move forward in my writing. Jack Riggs has cracked open his heart and mind to share what he knows and best of all has really listened to each of us with one-on-one discussions.

It has been lovely to stretch out on a sofa with my laptop and write with two or more women close by and writing as well…each respectful to not disturb the other. It is such a comfort to write and hear other keys clicking too. It is a solidarity and community that is so hard to find in my at-home life.  Though, maybe not? I’m starting to think of other options. This has just opened up the sense of the possible for me somehow.

I think it’s sort of like yoga. I have the book, probably still have the old VHS tapes somewhere that I never watched, if nothing else I know all the moves from yoga classes…but when I’m in a room with others, I hold the poses longer, more correctly and stay in tune with the process better. In short, company creates a nice pressure to keep up. In a yoga class I can’t just get up and go throw in a load of laundry or run out to get some groceries. In a class/community like this, we are moving forward together.  Supporting each other in a silence that doesn’t feel onerous, just mutually shared.

And then when it’s time to shut down the laptops, close the writing journals, stop listening to some of Jack Rigg’s suggestions, then I’ll tell you what, it feels like we’ve been living together forever, in the best sense of forever. We have forged a community here of people who ‘get’ it.

People who don’t need to go on about the writing process…but certainly can and will if it’s time…but it’s the camaraderie of shared experience, quite a ridiculous number of wine bottles and piles of food that made last night especially, feel like we were living something very special.

Write by the Water will likely be looking for an endorsement from each of us for their website. No problem. This has been really quite perfect, the location, the sense of community, the weather, the discussion, the structure and the shared times and alone times of no structure.

Thank you Gwen Morrison and Linda Sands of Write by the Water. This has been too cool.

I’m savouring this to the last minute.