I find it extraordinary to be one of a group of writing women with whom I have almost daily contact. We encourage each other to write and deepen our friendships. We challenge each other to grow as writers and as humans and are tender with each other in hard times. Once every year or so we meet face to face, for focus, inspiration, and connection. This year our gathering was both especially personally sweet and particularly helpful to me as a writer

. I had come up with a theme for a possible chap book, a collection of poems. I wanted to write them "deep and dark," The theme made sense to me, but I didn't quite understand it. It's not that my writing was shallow, but I wasn't quite writing about what I really wanted to write about - at least not enough of the time. The first day of our workshop, Judy taught us a technique for mapping ideas and themes and as I sketched and wrote words I made a map of what I really want to write about. When the world can never be the same again, either because of catastrophe or because of revelation, what do we humans do? How do some of is find fresh starts in desperate circumstances, and how is it that some of us never find new ways to thrive? It's not so much that I have answers to these questions as that the questions define territory that fascinates me, territory I want to explore in poems and by the way I live.

Why does this seem so important? I think because I do believe the Cabalists that every word, deed, choice each of us makes moves the world one step closer to or one step farther from the day on which we will all be able to sit under our fig trees and no one will be afraid, or one step closer to destruction of life on earth, And it is impossible to know which act, however tiny, will push the balance either way,