I STARTED WRITING regularly during a difficult period in my life. It started in earnest a dozen years ago after I read Spontaneous Happiness by Andrew Weil, MD. The book was a self-help guide for someone like me; it recommended journaling thoughts but moving on to recording positive thoughts was its prescription. As I proceeded “with pen and paper,” I was able to weave humor into my writing delivering a light-heartedness that began to make me feel better. These recordings turned into essays that brought great joy to this old boy.
We write to taste life twice,
in the moment and in retrospect.
A Nin
My first book of memoirs resulted from these efforts. A weekly writer’s blog came next. A couple more books came after that. I wrote each morning and expanded on my thoughts throughout the week. I am grateful for this daily habit which is a most rewarding exercise that produces results.
In this writing endeavor, I also became a student again and read several books on writing. I am most thankful for Julia Cameron’s lessons and advice from her famous books The Artist’s Way and The Right to Write. More recently, Traverse City's National Writer's Series featured Anna Quindlen promoting her newest book Write for Your Life. Her evangelical call is to all of us to write at will as it is most important to record one’s views of what’s on one’s platter.
On My Walk has recently become a byline on my writer’s webpage. My regular walks have evolved into writing about nature’s gifts that arise by simply taking a few steps outdoors. The idea came from watching Charles Kuralt and Steve Hartman famous for their featured lifestyle pieces over the years on CBS that offered a welcomed contrast to hard news. This has transformed into my favorite feature of the video CBS offers in their ending pieces on their Sunday Morning signoffs.
They know how powerful the videos are. No verbal overlays are needed. The reverence obtained from a camera’s eye recording Nature at work is simply awe-inspiring.
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