Friday happy hour: What filled my cup this week

This week, connection in many forms: a virtual playground for writers on Substack, leaps of faith, defying ageism, and knowing we're not alone as caregivers.

Hello friends!

Thank you for being here with me.

This week I looked to Substack, favorite podcasts, my reading and conversations to quench my thirst on the theme of Connection which, along with Clarity, Community and Creativity, are the four guideposts of my life. Hope you’ll find some inspiration here. As my paid subscribers, I appreciate you more than you know. Living in 3D is crafted with care and hard work and paid subscriptions help this endeavor continue to grow. Whether you are a free or paid subscriber, your support means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

If you have a book, poem, podcast, film, series, ritual or practice that is bringing more clarity into your life, I would love to hear about it in the comments. To leave a comment, click on the headline to jump to my Substack page and scroll to the bottom. Connecting with my readers is one of my favorite parts of writing these posts.

So here’s what brought CONNECTION to my mind, body, heart and spirit this week:

Finding connection in writing as play

Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette

is full of rich connections for the solitary and often lonely and self-doubting pursuit of creative writing. This week we subscribers marked the conclusion of the 12-week seasonal intensive Story Challenge where we dove into a whole range of storytelling craft principles—character, place, image, desire, voice, the narrator’s promise, conflict & stakes, dialogue, aboutness and this week, appropriately, endings.

What I love about Jeannine and this community—well, there are many things—but chief among them is the sense of play. It is amazing to me how connected I feel to this group of writers. In sharing our 100-word exercises each week we reveal the most vulnerable parts of ourselves and we are met with only love, support, compassion and celebration for each other’s creative play. As Jeannine says: “Playful is the portal to the profound.” To roam the hundreds of comments each week is to find writing of every hue, a rainbow in all its radiance. I suspect that the connections I have found here will live on in Jeannine’s next 12-week seasonal intensive, The Visceral Self, and I can’t wait to see what unfolds there. Writing, at its core, is a deep and continuous connection to self and to others. As Jeannine writes:

Where we struggle in the writing, we struggle in the living. Where we can find more ease in the writing, we find more ease in the living. There is no other way, because we are narrative beings. The way we understand stories and the ways we allow ourselves to shape and reshape them is the way we understand life, and the ways we allow ourselves to shape and reshape it.

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