Friends!

Since we’re at the start of a new year, and I promised you an update, I’ve decided to share my biggest personal lesson of 2023…which doesn’t really have anything to do with writing. 

Or maybe it does…

Some of you might remember last January when I was in Puerto Rico, scouting retreat venues, and my phone was swallowed by the ocean.…which turned into a huge but necessary metaphor for my life. Now, one year later, I’m in Costa Rica, halfway through an amazing retreat week of creative work and play with some of my favorite writer people…and feeling all the morphic resonances of one year ago.

Maybe that’s why we love anchor dates like New Year’s Eve or birthdays–they’re familiar catch points along the wheel of the year that help us remember who we were from the vantage point of who we are. 

For me, 2023 was an extremely full year, rich and dense and flavorful and unexpected and marked with nearly every life milestone or transition: I lost two of my most important people. I moved houses and cities. My youngest child graduated from high school. I fell in love, got married, and gained a stepchild. And I finally published After the Rapture, a book I’d been writing since shortly after my accident in 2016.

Wait–hold up. You got married?  

xoxoxoxo (!!!)

During a year of such intense change, I had two guiding principles: radical honesty and claiming desire.

Radical honesty as in the hard but necessary truths with myself and others. Whew. Big sigh. And claiming desire, which turned out to be the same thing as following the breadcrumbs of joy. 

These may sound like common platitudes, I know, But in 2023, I learned the difference between idealism and execution. I learned how to save myself, find one more reserve of courage and swim instead of drown…even when there was no island in sight. 

I’m not the first to do this. But I have to tell you this in order to tell you what I really want to tell you:

Happiness is possible.

Not happiness as in the absence of pain, or happiness like a new truck, or happiness as in pretty good, but radical, ridiculous happiness. The kind of happiness we might have once believed possible as children, a limitless joy and wonder and delight that we may decide is too immature to bring into adulthood. Too silly, those fantasies. Not practical. Not realistic. After all, nobody is deliriously happy, right?

But…what if real happiness is actually closer to our true nature than any modified adult compromise we may have been living with?

I want to tell you: Real happiness is possible.

It doesn’t happen on accident. If you aren’t radically happy right now, there’s a reason, and untangling that reason or reasons may require some radically honest inventory-taking, maybe even some painful letting go.

Last year I joked that I had to sacrifice my phone to the ocean in order to open some sort of portal…and in a way that was true.The sort of happiness I’m speaking of couldn’t have happened without a sacrifice of the old life, including all the many ways we don’t listen to our own truths or the radical desires of our hearts.

I’ve learned much from grief, shock, despair, illness, loss, and maybe even more from a nagging mediocrity. I had to ask myself: what would it be like to believe in happiness again?

I don’t know how to get you there; I don’t have specific steps or a signature method--all I can offer you is this message if you need to hear it: Happiness is possible. 

By the way, my new words for 2024 are dwelling and devotion. I take this to mean: I swam all the way to an island of joy, and I will remain here and become a student of happiness. I will apprentice in this place, introduce myself to the trees and learn the landscape of joy. I will build a house of devotion on this island, and I will lower the white flag (and the red one) and I will discover what it is to dwell here.

And I will also build a lighthouse, in case you need a signal. And the signal will say:

Happiness is possible, my friends.

And as I sit here, still uncomfortable at times in the gentleness of ease but learning, learning, I half expect that one day my old phone will wash up on this beach, strangely uncracked, and the locked screen message will say:

ah…I thought I might find you here.

To your radical, ridiculous happiness,
xoxoxoxoxo

P.S. Write with me! spots still available

February 12-23: Launch Your Flash Novel 10-Day Intensive *Online and asynchronous but I am “live” and active during the workshop 

March 4-May 24: The 12-Week Flash Novel Mastermind *Online with both live (zoom) and asychronous components