I should know by now that I like to switch things up. My blog is named after my tendency to flit, after all.
For years, I’ve kept paper journals. Lined paper books that I write in with pens. I started out with pretty journals, some with leather covers, or with Japanese wood block art. After a while, I transitioned to 59¢ composition notebooks: they’re less expensive, I felt freer to dump my brain into them, they stack better, and they take up less room on a book shelf.
Recently, though, as I think about spending significant time in a much smaller space, potentially the size of a boat cabin, I am working to minimize physical stuff. I want to have fewer things, and I want the things I possess to be high quality and contain multitudes. For example, do I want 30 square feet of physical books weighing who knows how many pounds, or do I want hundreds of books in a single 7 ounce device I can carry in my hand?
Likewise, do I want shelves and shelves of handwritten journals that I’ll never look at again? And that when I do want pull paragraphs from, I have to first find them, then transcribe them to my computer? Or do I want to go directly to my computer, a single device that contains it all and eliminates the step of having to move words from paper to screen?
I’ve experimented lately with writing a diary directly on my computer. I love it — no mess, no bulk, no regret that I wasted a tree for something I’ll likely never look at again, and it’s searchable.
I haven’t been doing any creative writing, though. That’s what I used to use my paper and pen for. I’d use my prompt box, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, or Priscilla Long’s Writer’s Portable Mentor to get me started, and then I’d either write from the prompt or work on an exercise from one of those writing books.
It occurred to me the other day that there must be an app out there to help get writers started. What I really wanted was all of the Writing Down the Bones and Writer’s Portable Mentor exercises in an easy “tap to pull a random writing exercise” type of app, but I didn’t find one of those.
What I did find, though, was a mobile app called Prompts. I’ve been using it for a few days, and it’s mostly doing what I want. It is lightweight and straightforward — I don’t have to read instructions to learn how to use it, I just tap the + button in the app and it opens an editor with a prompt at the beginning, like “I crave.” What I love about the prompts is that they aren’t just objects like most of the prompts in my prompt box were. Instead, they are thought-provoking:
Without the Internet
Life is about
I wonder what would happen
The one thing I don’t like is that the app is mobile only, and I detest typing on my phone. I have a small phone, and I don’t want a larger one. So I’ll often read the prompt from my phone at writing time, and then do the actual typing on my computer.
That being said, when I sat in the competition pool bleachers yesterday for 5 hours, I got bored, opened the app, and wrote. So I guess it’s doing its job :-).
Right now I crave time. I want to have time to write and think and garden. I crave peace from the guilt I feel when I’m not working round the clock because I want so badly to sit and be alive.
I crave the ocean. I want to smell the salt air. I want to see turquoise shallows and swim in warm tropical waters. I crave the ripples on the water’s surface, and the delight of dolphins and sea turtles and ctenophores and flying fish. I crave warm (but not hot) sun. I crave the glimmer of salt crystals on the white deck of our sailboat. I crave the crinkle of salt dried on my skin. I crave the briny taste of the sea on my lips.
Closer to home I crave a quiet afternoon sitting in the garden and watching butterflies and hummingbirds. I crave inspiration to write. I crave that feeling I get, that satisfaction, of writing something well.
But mostly I crave the time and the freedom for all of these things before my life runs out and I can no longer enjoy them.
I’ve started using the Prompts app to write every day. This came from yesterdays “I crave” prompt.
I think a lot. My mind is always going. Words and thoughts run and run and run through my head. When I’m in the shower, ideas come to me. When I run, I turn problems over in my brain.
Tuesday, when I went for a swim, I had a couple of problems I planned to think through as my arms turned over the laps. I figured, I think when I run. I think when I walk. I think when I sit. I think when I shower. I think when I eat. So, I’ll think when I swim.
I jumped in, and started swimming. I warmed up for a couple of laps, not thinking about anything. By the third or fourth lap, I thought, “Huh, I haven’t thought about anything. What was that thing I wanted to think…”
And it fizzled out.
On the next lap, I did it again. “Didn’t I plan to…”
Fizzle.
I swam a couple more laps. I tried a couple of times to think, but ended up just feeling the bubbles as I breathed. They vibrated a little bit against my bottom lip.
Didn’t think about anything.
Blank.
Bubbles.
Hungry.
I didn’t have a lot of thoughts, but I did have feelings on my swim. Surprise for not being able to complete a thought. Relief for the same. Joy for the freedom it brought.
And that led to the one complete thought I do remember from my swim: “Blissfully blank. I should write a blog post about this.”
I put the kids on an airplane on Wednesday to fly down to Florida and visit their grandparents. Without us.
We’ve never sent them away without us before.
They’re 14 and 12 now, and they were super excited to go on an airplane alone (except for the giant badges they had to wear). As for my husband and I, we took the chance to go sailing. The Support Driven Expo I’ve been working on the past few months had just wrapped up in Portland, and the timing was perfect for us to get away for a couple of days.
Deltaville on the Bay
We found an in-law suite Airbnb — with a dock and a neighborhood boat ramp – in Deltaville, Virginia, about 5 hours away from our home in the Appalachians. On Thursday, we hitched up the boat and headed east.
There’s not a lot in Deltaville, tourism-wise, but there is tremendous access to water. There were half a dozen marinas full of sailboats in this little town where there didn’t appear to be people, and there were canvas shops and sail tailors, and even the maker of our boat’s mainsail, Ullman Sails. We stopped in to get a new length of batten, and picked up some rope too since it was on sale.
There was no wind when we arrived, so we pottered around town and got settled into our Airbnb before starting out in the late afternoon on the water.
There was still no wind. We hoisted the sails and flopped around, then motored a bit to get closer to the mouth of the river where we saw some ripples that looked like they might be wind. We caught a couple of puffs and got a little bit of sailing in before we realized, hmm, in this sleepy little town, restaurants might close at 9pm.
Sailing on the Piankatank River, VA
We were back at the dock and inside the house by 8:30, and yes, everything closed in 30 minutes and was also 15-30 minutes away. We wound up at a pizza place that at least had food that could go in our bellies. The atmosphere left a lot to be the desired, but we didn’t go hungry, so there’s that.
Our second day, though — it was glorious! We had the entire day with nowhere we had to be except on the water.
We motored out of the glassy creek at about 10 am after stocking up on lunch provisions (grapes, Babybel cheeses, corn tortillas, cherry tomatoes, hummus, and baby carrots, plus lots and lots of water). Once again we flopped around before motoring closer to the mouth of the river where we finally caught the wind.
For hours we sailed. We tacked back and forth, on long tacks in steady wind. There was chop and lumpy water and we stayed dry and Egretta handled it beautifully. It’s amazing how different it is — how wonderful it is — to sail in a steady wind that doesn’t change direction or speed and that you could just spend all day on the same tack if there weren’t land in the way.
The water slaps the hull when you’re sailing close hauled, which we were, since you’re sailing into the wind. When there’s chop, you’re cutting through it, and the sound is percussive. It smacks and claps as the boat bumps through the water. The wind is on your face, and it’s cool even when it’s 90 degrees. It feels like you’re going fast because of the wind flying by.
I wanted badly to get out into the Chesapeake. We never did on our trip last year to Wareneck, when we were on Mobjack Bay. And on this trip it was right there, we could see it. So I told Brian I wanted to get out there, like dipping our toes in the Pacific if we were on the west coast. You can’t go that far and not dip your toe in.
We couldn’t be that close to the Chesapeake and not wet the hull in it.
So we kept sailing. Out and out towards the open water. We navigated crab pots, we ate on the water, we hove to and swam, we sailed with stingrays and a sea turtle and listened to the different sounds the water makes against the hull on different tacks.
After a swim near the mouth of the river, we sailed out past both final points of land and were in the open water of the Chesapeake. There were swells and wind and the boat was beautiful and we sailed fast. It was wonderful! The swells were maybe 2-3 feet and we were totally fine in our little 17 foot day sailer.
In the open water of the ChesapeakeSailboats on the Chesapeake
We kept sailing for another 30 minutes or so so that we were good and out in the Bay, then noticed our sunburned legs and also didn’t want to run into the same problem as last night with dinner. We decided we should be home by 5 pm at the very latest, and around 2 or 2:30 we turned around to come back in.
With the wind at our backs, we flew. We surfed the swells. We ran so fast our bubbles streamed behind us. Instead of a slapping sound against the hull, the water gurgled around the rudder as we rushed through it. It swooshed and swirled, a gentle, flowing sound rather than a sharp smack. As we rode the swells, we sounded like waves on a beach, swashing as we coasted down a swell or one snuck up behind us.
We stayed completely dry in the boat, and rather than a boring run back inshore, as we expected to experience on a hot day with the wind at our back (because you usually can’t feel it like when you’re pointed into the wind), it was thrilling. We were riding the water, riding the wind. We were with it, we were part of it. When I looked over the beam, the swells, which had turned to chop, were alongside us, running with us. It was beautiful.
After washing up at home, we dressed for dinner and drove to Merroir, an outdoor oyster restaurant on the Rappahanock River. We ate ceviche and grilled oysters and drank a bottle of cold white wine that we kept in a metal bucket of ice on the table. We were back home and asleep by 8:30pm and slept all the way through until 8 the next morning.
We had one more day of sailing but this post is already long, so I’ll stop with the words and just post the pictures and the 6 second video.
Egretta from the stern
Dolphin 🙂
Dinner on our evening sail
My crew station
On the bow, under the jib
The waters treated us to a double rainbow as we closed out our last Chesapeake trip. On this one, the waters treated us to dolphins swimming alongside our boat and playing in our bow and stern wakes.
What better way is there to reflect than to go on a hike? The day after Expo ended, Support Driven organizer Scott Tran and I wandered the Portland International Rose Test Garden while we thought about what went well at the conference and what we will need to improve on next year.
What a treat! June is peak rose season in Portland. We were surrounded by hundreds of rose bushes, row upon row down the slope of a hill. Every bush was drenched in blossoms, in white, yellow, peach, orange, red, pink, lavender. The only color not represented was blue, and the blue Hydrangeas made up for that.
Fluffy yellow rosePeach colored roseLavender roses 😍So many rosesMaybe my favorite.Rows of rosesSo pinkI love the backdrop hereMore peach rosesMore lavender rosesA whole hillside of rosesAnd a blue hydrangea
After reflecting quietly among the roses, we hiked through Washington Park to talk and plan. I had no idea there were even more treats in store. I’ve always wanted to go to northern California to see the redwoods, and it turns out there are redwoods right there in Portland. We hiked through a grove of them, and I was awed. I wish our son could have been with me to see them. He loves rain and trees. He’d fit right in in Portland.
I leave tomorrow for Portland, Oregon, where we’re producing Support Driven Expo, a conference for support professionals. I’ll be in a cab on the way to the airport at 5am Eastern, hopefully with completed slide decks on my computer and an agenda for the two days post-Expo where Scott (SD owner) and I will be planning for Support Driven’s future.
I’ve been with Support Driven for three months today, and I’m amazed by how smooth the transition has been. Maybe it’s because I was already involved with the community and helped organize the first two events, so it’s not something I had to learn from scratch. Or maybe it’s because I’ve worked with Scott before, so there wasn’t a huge learning curve with figuring out communication styles. Or maybe it’s because my primary focus is communications, which, 😍.
Whatever the reason, I’m in my element, and am feeling a wonderful balance of freedom, opportunity, and challenge. When I joined Support Driven full time, Expo planning had already begun, so I had some catching up to do. But I also got a chance to dig in and start organizing and documenting to make things easier for ourselves next time around. I’ve gotten a chance to write — a LOT — and I’m proud of the weekly Expo Updates we’ve been posting on the SD blog, the program of 80+ speakers we’ve put together, the comprehensive Expo Guide we compiled to help with any questions participants may have, and the app content we assembled to help more than 400 attendees navigate a schedule that includes talks, workshops, Support Bars, a Career Fair, and a Career Unconference.
And that’s just Expo. I’m vibrating with anticipation of helping organize Support Driven itself, which we’ve begun work on, and that I hope to accelerate progress on after Expo. I started a Support Driven LinkedIn page, which I’m super excited about. I totally lucked out on my first hire (Hi Sarah!), and I can’t wait to work with her on our next event, which is a Leadership Summit in the fall. We’ve started a new Groups section of the blog to help give some of the rich content from our community Slack a more permanant home.
The really cool thing is that while we’re doing all of this, I also feel a balance in my life. I spend time every day in my garden. I have space in my life for errands, for taxiing the kids around, for swimming and running taking breaks when I need them. After Expo I’ll take some time with my family, and go on a sailing trip with my husband.
But right now, I need to get back to the slide decks, schedule tweaks, attendee communications, packing…
Butterfly Mind 