Lest this blog go rusty and unused now that book promotion for S&E has mostly ground to a halt, I thought I’d start using this space to fill you in on some of the stuff I’m doing as I marinate and research the next book project that I’ll hopefully be heading into this year. I started the new year by getting away to read and work on the book proposal — with the spouse and a huge pile of books up the Northern California coast to Gualala, a spot I’ve visited two or three times a year for nearly a decade and hold dear when I need a shot of no email, no phone, and nobody who knows me. Then home again, then off to a three day silent retreat. The only real weirdness about keeping the silence comes during mealtimes. It’s odd, to say the least, to be among 30 odd women eating and not talking, pretty much the opposite of mealtimes in my family with three vocal sisters. I don’t want to reveal exactly where I was, but suffice to say they do treat you very well while you’re meditating, reflecting, and stewing in your thoughts. I’ve become increasingly interested in monasticism over the last couple of years, and this was just a tiny taste of what it’s like to live that way full time. Thomas Merton called living in silence being “in the grip of the present”, and this turns out to be true. When you’re not speaking, you have to turn what would be chatter or the banal commentary we fill our days with into something else, and after the initial frantic feeling that something is wrong, that nobody will hear you, you begin to realize that the chatter in your mind is actually, finally, slowing down, and you’re forced to pay closer attention to what’s going on in the moment. By the time the final day rolled around, my voice came back painfully, like some small creature had been nesting in my throat, and I immediately burst into a rolling monologue of f bombs and s bombs, like I’d been saving them up all along. That’s just how it comes out, sometimes.

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