Pen to Paper to Keyboard to Blog

Happy Monday friends!  It's October at camp, which means the flannels are being dusted off, the traffic in Nashville is horrendous, and we are super busy!  I was lucky enough to find time in all of the wonderful chaos to attend my very first writing circle this past Saturday.  I've never gone to an event where the whole point is just to write and find inspiration for writing.  I got to be with a group of awesome women in the woods and just write whatever moved me.  I truly, truly loved it, and since I haven't had a ton of time besides then to put in a lot of writing work to this here blog, I thought that I would share a piece of my writing from that day.  It's pretty stream of consciousness, just me writing whatever came to my mind and I'm just transcribing from my notebook to this blog post, so it's pretty rough.  Our prompt was to find something in the woods and write about it and describe it.  I found a geode.

Geodes

How wonderful that we find geodes with their interiors still hidden.  To the unaccustomed eye, geodes appear basic, clunky, even ugly.  There is not much that distinguishes an unopened geode from a dried ball of mud: the brown mottled color, the lumpy surface.  And yet, geodes are special.  We hunt for them.  We sell the.  We give them places of honor in our homes.  Why not present what makes them so valuable to the world from the beginning?  Why conceal what makes it special?  Probably why many people feel the need to hide what makes them special: protection.  A crystal exposed to the lasting torment of nature will not retain its brilliance for long.  No, better to cocoon this spot of brilliance and reveal it to those who put in the effort to make it shine, to see what's underneath that exterior.  And yet, what makes that interior so special?  The mystery, the potential, and even the surprise.  Imagine the first person to discover the inside of a geode.  Imagine their joy.  Imagine their shock.