I declared a writing retreat for myself this weekend.

A conspiracy of seemingly unrelated events was to leave me home alone from Saturday morning to Sunday evening and I had little choice but to make good on my blah blah blah for why my writing over the past few months has been mostly emails and to-do lists.

“I just feel overwhelmed.  Full.  I am full up with other people’s stories, their birthdays and graduations and weddings.  And I’m full with their troubles and heartaches and regrets.  I’m full of friends and family and clients and I’m full of politics and earthquakes and violence.  There’s no room for my own words, for my own stories.  I can’t write because I can’t even feel my own self.”

And then the world around me emptied out.  And what was I to do.

Well, I did what many of us writer types do; I dressed for the occasion, (taking care not to leave the closet door open after going in there to get my writing shirt, lest I use this gift of time to do a suddenly much needed sorting of summer vs. winter clothes).

I’m onto you, I spoke out loud to the closet, and I closed the door.

I made writing tea (aka Magic Potion), I put on writing music (this morning, Gregorian chant), and I gathered pen, paper and laptop all to the dining room table that looks out onto the back lawn and the pond.

And then I went fishing.

I don’t mean the metaphoric kind of fishing that you might imagine where one baits the creative hook with some plump juicy prompt.  I don’t mean throwing out a proprioceptive net and then verbally picking through what come back caught in it.  I mean I got up from the table, went to the garage, grabbed my pole off the nails where I hung it when I moved here and my tackle box from the box marked play stuff and walked across the road and through the woods to the river.  I found a rock in the sun and commenced fishing.

So now I’m back, a few hours and a rosy glow later, and I have this idea that while I was down at the river (not catching any fish) that my mind was writing, maybe writing about writing and how it’s like fishing.  Obvious analogies abound:

– the solitude required for both

– the equipment

– the bait

– the way you’re reaching underneath the surface for

– things you can’t see

– but you hope there’s something down there and

– you hope to catch a keeper but if not

– to at least catch something

And somewhere in the naming how much this thing about fishing is like that thing about writing, I feel a peace settle over me.  I feel the warm on my skin and I see the spangle of sun on moving water and I hear osprey and finch and chicka dee dee dee even as I sit at my laptop ready to write now.

It is so easy to get caught up in outcomes.  We’re so grabby.  We want what we want and yet it seems that the most precious moments come from just being able to appreciate what we have.

So here I am, writing about that.

I stopped fishing this morning not because I was tired of fishing and not because I was compelled by the impending flow of prose.  I quit after losing my last lure on some underwater treachery.  I gathered up my pole and my tackle box and my empty sheets of paper and, as I stepped onto the path toward home, a keeper-sized striped bass flipped her shiny body out of the water to my right.  She balanced her self there just long enough to be noticed, turned and winked at me, and then returned to the flow of the outgoing tide.

“Very funny,” I said to her.

“Come back anytime,” she said to me.

So now I am settling down to write.