A few years ago, I started writing. I'm still not sure why. It was mostly when I was traveling alone that the spirit would move me, and I would get out my notebook and pen.

Maybe it was the solitude. Maybe it was the new way of looking at things that comes with travel. Maybe it was simply having extra time on my hands.

When I got home after one such trip, I gave my essays to a  friend who had been an editor. She agreed to read them and give me her feedback. She started with my favorite piece, the one I really didn't want to change at all. After reading it she said, “You have two stories here. Choose one. It will make them both stronger.”

I argued a bit, but knew she was right. And she was. Less was more, and reducing actually added to the quality and clarity of the message.

Sometimes (actually, most days) I feel like my life is like that. Too much going on, too many stories, too many characters, all of them interesting and important and valid.

On those days, I often remember my friend’s advice and just choose one thing to focus my energy and attention on, -- one at a time.  It saves me from going completely nuts, and it allows me to at least try to do one thing well.

The author, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, knew this. She called it being "inwardly attentive” in her timeless classic, “Gift from the Sea”. She also knew how hard it was to achieve in the midst of competing, valid demands, so she advised the reader to create spaces where they could be alone for a time, and to protect those spaces with a single-mindedness seen mostly in artists and holy men.

But how to do that?

I believe we all have different ways of being creative, or finding inner stillness, so we can hear the voice we are seeking.

This morning I got up very early for no particular reason and went out on our porch to listen to the rain. I now know to bring paper and pencil with me when I do something like that as it is, inevitably, where the ideas find me. The ideas that tell me how to approach a sticky relationship, or difficult work project; how to pray, or even what to write. Sure enough, they found me, and I scribbled illegible notes on a small piece of paper, forgetting all about the sound of the rain on the metal roof above me.

Lindbergh calls it being “drenched in work” and maintains that it is more refreshing than a swim in the ocean.

The harder part, of course, is doing something with the ideas that come our way. Wrestling them to the ground and holding them still long enough to brand them, or get a rope around their necks, or taking a good hard look at them and letting some go.

And today I have done just that, -- let many of them go.

I have decided not to tell you about the Black rap artist who no one sat next to on the bus I was taking until I had to as it was the last seat open. The bus I took down to NYC to see some dancer-friends and how, after sitting next to him for five hours, I accidentally spilled my soda on him, which really annoyed him. And how he started rolling a joint right there in his bus seat and when I said, “I hope you’re not planning to smoke that on the bus,” in the friendliest voice I could muster, he kind of looked at me funny, and I raised my eyebrows a bit and smiled, and we never stopped talking, or watching his rap videos, until we had to get off the bus, as friends.

Or, how when I met my dancer friend at the stage door after he had just danced brilliantly in a  production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Metropolitan Opera House all he wanted to talk about were the January 6th hearings he had been watching in between rehearsals. Hearings that had absorbed his entire attention.

Or, how the man inside the sweltering food truck where I stopped to get a cup of tea on Broadway told me he only had Moroccan tea and insisted I try it. And how I said I actually loved Moroccan tea and thanked him for his advice with a simple “Shokran” (thank you in Arabic), and how his son stopped what he was doing and looked at me with a huge smile as I said, “That’s all  the Arabic I know.”

Or, how, at a recent family reunion, I watched a young relative stand out in the humidity and wet grass, uncomfortable to be part of the activity, but willing to help her younger cousin do  a “show” for those who might be coerced into watching. Not just once, but three times!

No, I simply don’t have time to tell you about all the amazing people and events and moments I have experienced since I last wrote. They will have to wait for another time. Another morning on the porch during a rainstorm.

So, until then, I bid you “ma’aasalaama,"(my new Arabic word). And I hope you find your own time on the porch, or gift from the sea.

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