While grocery shopping this weekend with my friend Jenni, I told her how it fascinates me to see what grocery combinations people buy. I think I would make a terrible teller because I’d be going slowly wondering about the items. I pointed out that in my cart I had french bread, ricotta, mozzarella, and Italian sausage. Someone looking at that would think, ‘aha, someone’s having lasagna for dinner!’

When I see the person in front of me buying NyQuil and chicken noodle soup, I’m going to stand back a few feet. When I see someone buying a home pregnancy test and a bottle of wine, I’ll stand in the line wondering if the wine is for the husband, the partner, to celebrate, to drown sorrows.

When I see the woman purchasing low-fat yogurt, fresh fruit, and a large Snickers bar, I wonder if she is rewarding herself, or buying it to sneakily eat on the way home. I imagine her virtuously eating the healthy food in front of her spouse. While he’s eating a burger and feeling guilty because his wife is so healthy.

I was very surprised to hear Jenni tell me that she has never tried to figure out what the combination of people’s groceries meant. I assumed everyone did that while in grocery lines. She told me she thinks it’s something only writers do, creating stories, asking ‘why’ and ‘what if’, and ‘how come’.

So I have to ask. Is there anyone else out there who tries to solve the riddle of groceries on the conveyor belt?

Several months ago I attended Write on the Sound, and blogged about writer’s conferences. It was a nice conference and I had some panels that I learned from, like the ones by Priscilla Long and Ron Gompertz. I came away with a little new knowledge, a couple new resources, but not enough that I thought it worth the cost of the conference, the hotel, the gas.

Last week I escaped to a small writer’s retreat, joining authors Susan Schreyer and Kaylan Doyle. We got up early and spent the day writing. While we worked on our own projects, we were in the same vicinity. There was little noise as we delved into our story worlds. Every so often one of us would get stuck, would ask permission to break the writing. And then there would be a few minutes of a different sort of productivity as we helped each other figure out what was going on, brainstormed solutions, read a piece of work, received feedback. And then the silence would fall again.

I have never done something like that. Writing in a group setting never appealed to me, let alone talking about my work in progress before the first draft was finished.

So what made the difference this time? Well, first off, my writing routine has changed dramatically over the past two years. From writing at night to writing in the morning. From writing to music to writing to silence. But more than that, I think it was the safe environment. I was in the company of two writers who, while all three of us have different ways we write, were trusted. If something wasn’t working, I knew they would give me honest feedback that I could take away and use or not. And there was absolutely zero pressure to produce or to share. Several times I’d glance up to see one or the other staring out the windows, lost in their work, even though fingers were still.

In the early evening, we took a break, went for a walk, went out to dinner. Then we came back, the tea kettle and coffee pot went on, chocolate came out, we sat around the table and talked writing and swapped tales. And then drifted back to our writing.

I have learned that I can write in the presence of other writers, I can share a work in progress (at least snippets), and that I got way more value from this retreat than I did from the conference.

I’ve also learned that I need to do this again. It pays to stretch out our fingers, take a deep breath, and allow our writing to try something new.

Below is a photo of Leavenworth, WA, where we wrote..

In the previous post I said I’d just started a book called Writing as a Sacred Path, by Jill Jepson. I’m still only a few pages into the book, but I wanted to quote a passage here, that so resonated with me because Ms. Jepson put into words exactly how I feel about the birth of stories.

‘Stories are gifts. The Universe offers them, not merely to us as individual writers, but to the world. Writers are the ones charged with the work of giving stories form and passing them on to others. To receive and be open to stories, to receive them, to treat them with care and respect, and to offer them to the world is not merely our work, but our sacred responsibility.’

To receive a story, care for it, nurture it into full form, and treat it with respect. That’s the calling I was talking about earlier.