The Uterus Project: Milepost 17

Prologue

Writing is like a job. Or a marriage. Both must be tended to in order to thrive. The tending needn't be tedious, least you think I am saying marriage is a tedious enterprise, or writing is tedious, for that matter.  Though sometimes the commitment to showing up is a discipline, even if you, as most people do, enter the commitment with much passion.

It is this commitment and a dear friend's reminder of what my father said with much admiration, from his hospice bed, when he deemed it time to write his eulogy, "You are the writer."  So it was this weekend, at Milepost 17, on a writers' retreat off the Crooked River, high above 30,000 acres of ranch, I was reminded.  I am a writer. 

"Honor it!" my new fairy grandmother, admonished, as if channeling my father, "Honor it! Don't diminish what you are, by calling it something else, or treating it like anything other than a job [or a marriage] - commit to it and it will commit to you." 

So here goes: my mission for the next 125 days is to commit to writing.  Every other week I'll post something in service to The Uterus Project, the treatment of my memoir which is about the intentional curation of a family.  I'll use different forms and work through a series of memories, all in search of an idea that for me has felt illusive since the age of 9 - how do we make family?  How do we form it? How do we cultivate it? How do we let it take it's own shape, even when we see so clearly, what we think it should be?

I would say let's begin at the beginning, but that would be too linear, so I will begin, instead, with a haiku.

The caul of the wild 
Big sky country, still, awaits
Land to call one's own
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