I should be getting my dirty laundry downstairs to sort and start washing. I should be getting into the shower because we have a graduation party to attend today. I’m not doing any of those things so now I have to type fast because right now I need to write.
I’ve kind of pushed writing aside these past few months. Last year, I created an online account with 750 Words. It’s essentially a writer website that holds you accountable to write daily using the “Morning Pages” concept from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. I participated for a year. For a few months though I began to realize that writing everyday sometimes felt like a chore. I get up at 0415 to get to my 0600-1530 shift at the hospital so I physically can’t get up any earlier than that. Morning pages out the window. In the evening I’m not always at my best to write something. I wasn’t feeling inspired anymore and I often didn’t have anything pressing to say. I used it as a journal basically. My blog posts because infrequent as well. In April I decided to drop it all together. My daughter’s track season was in full force and both kids had a lot going on. It was also in April that I decided to share my love of essential oils with others and educate them into a more a healthy life style. Thus, I took a Business Academy course with Young Living and am trying to build a business. I don’t want writing to feel like a chore to me. Ever. I want something to trigger my inspiration and then I’ll push everything aside when I have a burning urge to write, as I am doing today, right now.
Ironically this morning the inspiration returned, hence the quote I have posted. I woke up, checked my phone and there was a notification from WordPress that a person that I follow on WordPress mentioned me in his post. I read his post and the post that I’d written a year ago when I’d met him. Below is the link to his post.
https://brothersontheat.com/2018/06/09/day-93/
To summarize, June 8, 2017, my husband and I drove 70 miles from our home in a suburb outside of Baltimore to Pen-Mar County Park. Our mission for the day was to provide food, “trail magic” for Appalachian Trail Thru Hikers as they hiked through this park to get into Pennsylvania. We met some really nice hikers. We fed them, we talked to them, we wished them well and left the park smiling. I’m fascinated by the idea of thru hiking so trail magic was something we chose to do “just because”. Because I’m Italian and I like to feed people. One hiker invited me to follow her on Instagram which I did but as the summer ended I grew curious to know if the hikers we’d fed that day reached Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. I follow various Appalachian Trail pages on Facebook and was eventually fortunate to see that more than half the thru hikers we’d met and fed that day had completed their thru hikes. Coincidentally on an Appalachian Trail facebook page, I ran across one hiker’s blog on WordPress . He’s writing now about his 2017 thru hike. Yesterday marked a year that my husband and I met that group of hikers. So this morning I discovered that he’d written about his hiking day on June 8, 2017 and referred to the blog post I’d written that day entitled, “Just Because”.
So my point of all of this is that inspiration comes from different places when we least expect it. That’s how I like to write. That’s how I always wrote papers during my academic career, when inspiration strikes me. I think about those hikers from time to time and wonder what their post trail life is like now. I didn’t forget about that day with the thru hikers but I hadn’t given much thought to the blog post I’d written to share. Reading the hiker’s post and then my own from a year ago made me realize that I still have things to write about. So, thank you Straps for that.
Now I really need to shower and get on over to this graduation party. More to come.
thatnursewrites 