It’s the classic writer’s exercise: set a timer and write without picking up the pencil. It doesn’t matter what you write. It doesn’t matter if you have a plot, a character or a whole lot of nothing. The point isn’t for a story, the point is to clear your mind and make room for the story.

Making room for a story…

That sentence feels both foreign and familiar. Foreign because how do you make room for something that is carved into the fabric of your DNA? Every thing I encounter is fodder for story. A random encounter at the grocery store? First, I’ll excavate the underlying meaning, assign it to a comparable character and then plop the whole thing into a book. Feeling lost or alone? It’s not that—it’s just a scene in a story in which a better tomorrow is just two pages over.

Make room for a story is familiar, too, though because when I put pen to paper, I take a broom and metaphorically sweep out every cobweb a hard day has built in my mind. Clearing my thoughts and feelings so that the voice of whatever character haunts me that day can speak and revive the ghosts of my past.

Once, years ago, I sat at Cheekwood Botanical Gardens by the pond while my girls were in the pottery camp there. The gritty dirt beneath my legs, the rough bark against my back, the comforting notebook with its blank pages on my knees—these all felt like home to me.

Home.

It feels like I’ve been trying to find home most of my life. The skyline of Nashville will always be part of home for me, but even that city with its undercurrent of country music and great food and Southern hospitality isn’t all of home. Home is also the laughter of my daughters and our chatter chats. It’s standing in the middle of the kitchen baking bread I’m watching my oldest take joy in it as I do. Home is watching my youngest get excited about my little pony, conventions and trading cards and knowing that those ponies are her characters, just as Ash, Daphne, Landon and the others have been for me. Home is not four walls. Instead of bricks, it is built with a collection of memories.

Still… There is a part of me that longs to return to a summer day, sitting by a pond, watching dragonflies skim the water’s edge and listening to the splash made by frog leaping from a mossy rock into the deep. The chatter of birds, the distant rumble of a lawnmower, the sound of laughing children, and the quiet crinkling of turning pages provided the soundtrack for a peaceful day. A few hours where time stand still and the hustle and bustle of a busy life felt as if it faded to a distant memory.

In high school, I read Thoreau’s Walden for Dr. Estes’s class. She assigned each of us a chapter on which we had to give a presentation, which required a visual aid. My chapter was the pond. Do you have not read that book, this chapter is as boring as watching paint dry. It describes the measurements of the pond, how deep it is, the life within it, how far it is from his cabin. At the time, I was very intimidated. How was I supposed to create an entire presentation with a visual aid over the mathematical dimensions of pond?

And yet, today, a pond has been the setting of some of my most at rest moments. Life is a circle for I’ve been trying to find a path back to Walden’s pond ever since.

.

The timer goes off, telling me that it’s time to stop the train of consciousness exercise. I find myself ignoring it, though, as if by staying in the world I’ve built in my head I can opt out of the busy life I lead by day. Seems we are often controlled by alarms and calendars and appointments and all the things we fill our lives with, but it does not exhaust me because living with the alarms gifts me the ability to truly soak in and appreciate the quiet moments.

Maybe even find the meaning and pleasure in the measurements of a pond.