Resilience

I should write about the Omega NYC retreat I went to last weekend. As Stacey, who'd invited me to join her, aptly put it: "We should take pictures--it's blog-worthy, right?" Indeed it was: Geneen Roth, Elizabeth Lesser and Joan Borysenko led us on a magical exploration of what it means to be resilient.

But I don't feel like writing about that.

I should write about the weekend before that: my annual March retreat to Ocean City, NJ with my sister, Deborah. It was totally blog-worthy, too. Surprisingly sunny days filled with beach walks, meandering talks, fantastic food, and shared intimacies.

But I don't want to write about that, either.

Why not?

It's too hard. Finding words to express these experiences feels like an overwhelming task. The depth of emotion. The power of the realizations. The sensory overload. Exhausting!

And yet these weekends were so pivotal in so many ways. Surely they should be cataloged. How else will I remember all that I felt and discovered? And how else can I possibly share all of this amazing stuff?

Well, like it or not, blogging works best for me when there's no "should" involved. When instead of being mandatory, it's just the handiest self-expression tool in a given moment. So what I want to write about is this: When Deborah and I walk the shoreline in search of shells, she encourages me to expand my definition of what's worth keeping. To be open to the beauty in the broken ones. To recognize the potential lurking in a textured sliver or a partially-exposed spiral. To rise to the challenge of using memory or imagination to fill in what's missing.

This morning, through the lens of my camera, snapping quickly so as not to make them too precious, I saw what she meant.