Monday Morning Writing Thoughts
I spent the weekend with a group of online friends I’ve had for the past eight years. We get together every 18 months or so for an “in-person” retreat.
I sat cuddled up in a blanket on the sofa taking in these faces that I don’t know as well as I do their typing styles. I thought back to the many hours I’ve spent reading their words, my only link to who they are.
The first time we met, they came to my house. There were thirteen of us and I had only ever met in person two of them. The rest had not met each other. We’d been prolific online sharing our thoughts, the things we were learning and even our personal lives. Yet for thirty minutes after they arrived, we were surprisingly quiet. Each of us simply stared at the faces we hadn’t imagined, taking in voices and mannerisms, noticing details like the color of earrings and shoe choices.
After that initial silence, the weekend flew by in a blur of words and laughter. We enjoyed it so much, we’ve continued the tradition about every eighteen months. And that’s what dawned on me on the couch in Baton Rouge Saturday night.
These women who I see very infrequently, I know very deeply because we all write posts on a bulletin board. One of our number writes in English as her second language! She speaks Spanish as her native tongue and yet she’s forged ahead in English online to make connections. Whether trained in writing or simply interested in learning, each one of these women discovered that her writing was important enough, successful enough, interesting enough to sustain friendships over eight years time without face-to-face contact.
And that struck me as the height of brave writing!
Another moment where I wanted to thank God for the Internet and the way it’s enriched my life and opened the world to writing in a whole new and relevant way.
