Returning from vacation often brings me face-to-face with that moment when the world pricks hard enough to make me sit up and notice that I’m no longer in that carefully constructed bubble of paradise geared to distract me from my life. And this time felt harder than usual. The daily news, successfully willed to a microscopic wisp at the edge of my consciousness as I lay in a hammock overlooking the mountains of Kings Canyon National Park, started to burn at my skin again, its smoky haze penetrating the air like the remnants of a wildfire. And my to-do list, which I could easily reduce to a vague thought and make it sound almost pleasurable in my mind while walking through a grove of foggy sequoias, now felt gargantuan–a tottering avalanche ready to tumble at any moment and bury me in its angry cascade.

Usually I can counteract these post-vacation moments fairly quickly by pivoting back into routines, but for some reason, this time it took over a week to get my bearings. I just want to get back to my life, I kept telling myself, feeling more and more frustrated as the days slipped away but the tasks on my plate stayed constant–or grew. And that led me to question, What was this thing I was referring to as “my life?” What was it I was trying to get back to that wasn’t happening?

On each of those initial post-vacation days I was doing familiar things: walking or biking, gardening, cooking, catching up with friends I hadn’t spoken to or seen while away. And on the days I took the time to assess whether I’d enjoyed my day, I could clearly express gratitude for the many parts of it that pleased me.  So what was missing?

Note: I did not put “writing” on the above list.

However, I was writing on many of those days. Mostly, I was pulling out half-finished poems and chewing on them, making a few tweaks, and putting them away again, not feeling very satisfied, or, more importantly, connected to what I was writing. And because I had such a long to-do list, it was easy to get up after a few minutes and do something else, before giving myself the chance to really revisit what I’d been writing and reset my creative clock.

And being disconnected from my writing made me feel disconnected from my life.

A week after returning from my vacation, I had a writing date with my friend, Lanette, which meant that for two whole hours I had to sit with her on the porch of Barstow’s Dairy Store (a great place to write, if you’re in western MA) and keep at it. I highly recommend writing dates with friends (either in-person or on Zoom) as a way of getting going. In addition to enjoying a brief visit before writing, I couldn’t just tweak a poem or two and then get up to succumb to the call of the unpaid bills or the weedy garden, because at the end of the session I knew we’d be reporting to each other on what we’d done and possibly sharing some of our work. Even as I flitted from poem to poem and took several breaks for Wordle and its Dordle and Quordle variants, not to mention checking email and social media, I kept coming back–until I could look at a poem and remember why I wrote it and why it might still matter. And that helped me finally make the shift back to my creative center.

Since then, I’ve been just as busy with tasks, social and family stuff, but I’m feeling totally differently about my life. I’m now connected to my words and my reason for writing them–even as I might continue to sift through and change them. And that means I’m home.

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