Saturday Morning

The writerly people lined up a full 15-minutes early to enter the main hall for this weekend’s kick off last night. This crowd differed from the standard Kripalu crowd in that less of them were clad in yoga clothing & all were clutching notebooks. Also, the attendees were a surprisingly older bunch. Lots of grey heads hunched over those notebooks Friday night. The workshop is called “The Stories We Carry” and if anyone is carrying some stories, I’d say it’s people over 40. They’ve seen some shit, been slapped around by life a bit & are still standing. We meditated - which is something I love to do as a group. All that collective, positive energy being sent into the universe. It’s hard to feel negative while you’re meditating. You’re raising your own vibration and that of the group assembled with you. To get warmed up for the weekend ahead we wrote... 7 things we did 7 things we saw 1 thing we heard And we drew a doodle An exercise we will repeat each day of this workshop. We also spent 10-minutes writing sentences that began with “I remember...”, an exercise based on a book by Joe Brainard in that format. My initial conflicting thoughts were, “There is an entire book like this? 10 minutes?!” Turns out that you can remember quite a bit in 10-minutes. It was suggested we could dedicate a journal to one or both of these exercises & write in this format daily. Thanks to my home reorganization spree, I have several journals to choose from. There are a lot of people in this workshop - the leader has an entourage of 6 to assist her. The good news is we will not be sharing our writing in front of the ENTIRE group but will be placed in groups of 4. I can share in front of 3 people. I guess. One of the opening questions was, “How many of you are writers?” Hands go up. “How many of you write?” More hands. I once read something that said, “if you run, you are a runner.” I feel similar logic should apply to writers and writing. The folks in the second group should count themselves into the first group. Myself included.