Penny Post #37: Green Valley Lake
This goodness could not wait to share.
Hello friends,
For those of you who have been with me a long time and have read every single penny post (this is number thirty-seven), WOW. Thank you for endlessly showing up for me. Thank you for taking the thing that is closest to my heart and bringing it ever so slightly closer to yours. My gratitude for you is beyond one sentence (see here) and my gratitude for you is beyond words (which, for a writer, is virtually impossible).
For those of you who have dropped in when convenient and been moved by one thing or another, I also have tremendous gratitude for you. Despite all the people I named above, it is actually you - the occasional readers, the semi-interested, the maybe-not-subscribed - that brings my writing anywhere. Elizabeth Gilbert once wrote, “We write only the books that we need to write, or are able to write, and then we must release them, recognizing that whatever happens to them next is somehow none of our business”. Oftentimes that is how I feel with this blog.
There are those that comment, those that like, those that reply to the email, those that text me separately. There are those that read, take what they need from the writing, and leave it (and me) alone. Whichever camp you happen to fall in, I’m grateful for you. Although I can’t be responsible for how my writing makes you feel (I have enough emotion to sort through myself), I can be responsible for my writing. Period. I write what I need to write, release it, and then whatever happens next is simply not my responsibility.
Understandably I am in a great period of reflection. A new year has just begun, I’m about to turn twenty-three, and I am sitting in a log cabin under several blankets tucked into the San Bernardino Mountains. A Penny For My Thoughts is also one month away from celebrating its first birthday! So much goodness in so little time.
Cameron and I are celebrating all that goodness in a little mountain village about 100 miles east of Los Angeles. I have been here less than twenty-four hours and I never want to leave.
This place feels as if a whisper. Too beautiful to name. Too cozy to share. Too wondrous to know. The environment is so loud in its silence that there is no room for your voice, and you don’t care to interrupt it anyway. This place feels like a secret which we stumbled upon without knowing what we would find. Yet what we’ve found is breathtaking:
If you’ve read any of my last few posts (The March of the Ants, My Modest Resume, Happily Ever After), you would know that I’ve been a dark period of discernment. I’ve wrestled my way through discomfort, hopelessness, and failure only to be led down the ever-so-windy roads into the mountains where hope seems to shine through the trees and into my eyes, blinding me from anything but it. Little darling, here comes the sun:
Until next time,
Kiera