In Retreat

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

—Henry David Thoreau

I am getting ready to go off on a four-day writing retreat.  Not, perhaps, into the proverbial Walden Pond shack, or the rustic bare-bones shelter pictured here, but away at least from those things that clamor in my daily life to be done, dusted, watered, fed, or in some other urgent way taken care of.  Away in mind and spirit.

I go with laptop, notebooks, iced tea thermos, a dish of leftover tagine, favorite sweaters and stripey socks, a Donna Leon mystery for the evening hours, music for Sunday morning, and the story that I want to finish, described here.

Of course I shall be near bookstores and cafes, and can go to the ocean if I want.  I will walk and dream and drift among the falling leaves and rising words . . .

image:   Oil Creek State Park Shack, Jason Pratt