Yes, I found a unicorn head in the sand, strange broken mythical beast, just the head with bright pink lipsticked lips, seaweed curls, a purple eye, a horn of white. Where its body lives I will never know. Enchanting. It was a bright, clear morning; I walked south in the surf before my busy day of writing webinars. Breaking from my Farm Pond Writer’s weekly Wednesday mornings was difficult. I didn’t want us to be away from each other’s writing lives for so long. So, about half the group agreed they’d like to meet in a few webinars while I am here, and today was our first. It felt almost like we were in our writing studio overlooking Farm Pond. The prompt I created was writing a braid in poetry or prose from three photos each had chosen to write from. To open the session, we read a marvelous poem, The Braid, by Susan Stewart:

Shoulders knobbed against

a slat-backed chair,

the temples tugged, a pull

 

at the nape, you felt the up-

sweep as she smoothed the fine

wisps back and tucked

 

yank into yank

and a third into that

until the consecutive

 

dodges of thumbs and first

fingers gathered,

fraying and filing. . .

Today, I realize, I made a kind of braid for myself of writing webinars: after mine, I produced the third week of my friend Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey for the IWWG, and she was teaching, this week: The Descent, and told the Demeter/Persephone myth. Tonight, my third strand: meeting with my monthly Wednesday night writers. It was the first time we were together again since last month when a conflict surfaced that was challenging. How exhilarating and satisfying it was for me tonight to have us back together, working so effectively, so respectfully and generously and astutely commenting and supporting each other’s writing and process. The perfect example of how conflict can, when handled thoughtfully and patiently, can be a catalyst for greater cohesion. It was a deeper process tonight. Trust in each other, in the group, is growing. And then, I closed the third strand, the third writing group of my day, and opened my door to my sister, my older sister, who arrived and had eaten the dinner of chicken and pasta and salad and carrot cake I had left out for her arrival. It was dark when she arrived. Tomorrow, she will see the beach. And perhaps, she will find something whimsically enchanting as a unicorn, as today, I did.