The newsletter I was going to write

Life is precious. Life is short.

A tragedy in my extended family this week. A dump truck didn’t stop at a stop sign. Two people died. One was a 15-year-old girl, my cousin’s vibrant daughter, whom I last saw laughing and chattering away with my own vibrant daughter. The other was her mother, a woman my age, warm and empathic and full of life.

There are no words for it. The shock and unreality. The horror. The this can’t be possible. I’ve walked around these last two days with limbs like lead, my whole body heavy with unprocessed grief. I’m aware that I’m not as close to the grief as others are, that the story isn’t mine, and still I feel it deeply.

How can this be. How can this be.

Photo by Richard Sheridan Willis

This isn’t the cheery newsletter I had planned. I was going to tell you about how I’ve been writing, sometimes with deep immersion and sometimes distractible and a little lonely in my intense creative world. I shifted from solitary writing to supportive co-writing years ago, but my usual writing partners aren’t available right now. So I reached out to some new ones, and I’ve discovered all over again how much this bolsters and focuses me.

I was going to write about that.

Also, next week my revision coaching container starts up again, the intimate community of writers who wrote the first drafts of their novels with my Novel Alchemy program and are now expanding and finessing them. More creative community. More collective energy to share and to tap into.

The other thing I’m doing is singing a lot. Just for fun with my daughter, and practice sessions on my own in addition to weekly rehearsals with my women’s barbershop chorus. I joined for an outlet, for simple embodied pleasure with no end goal, but I’m quickly taking it on as a bigger commitment. We’re preparing for a competition (“like Pitch Perfect!” says Aphra, and yes, exactly like that except not as hot) and I find myself caring a great deal about excelling. I worried that taking it seriously would leach the fun out of it but this actually increases it. I’m part of a group working toward a united purpose, making a difference inside that group, using my voice and my body, improving skills that had become rusty, and all of it brings me more joy than I had any idea it would.

That’s what I’d planned to write about. Bring it together around a theme of community. Say some stuff about how coming together in trust and vulnerability around a common goal affirms the value of that goal and of your devotion to it. How it makes hard things a little easier. How collective energy has power. I could use a metaphor: singing your part surrounded by others singing theirs creates a full harmonious chorus of sound, more beautiful than you can generate on your own.

Maybe the theme still fits. Because this week, with the stark reminder that life is precious and short, all I want is to gather my loved ones close. Keep us all safe and connected and together. Let go of petty irritations or small concerns. Let go of big concerns for that matter. Surround and be surrounded.

Life is precious. Life is short. We don’t know how much time we have.

Trite. And true. It is so true.

We are here. We are together. Life is precious. What else matters?

A lot of us right now are going through crises that make acts of creative expression feel frivolous or ineffectual. Around the world, atrocities and devastation and loss and very real fear of what lies ahead in this coming year and the decades to follow. Individually and collectively.

I’m feeling it.

I don’t know how to tie these themes together.

Maybe they’re already together.

We are here. We are together. Life is precious.