Over the next few months I’ll periodically share excerpts from Writing the Sacred Journey–I’m taking a break from writing about writing to actually do some writing!

When I was attending Sleepy Hollow High School, I’d occasionally forsake the rowdy bus ride home and walk two miles down the steep streets of North Tarrytown, New York, over the infamous bridge where Ichabod Crane is said to have disappeared, and down to the Hudson River… Once I reached the beach, I…ran to a log polished silver and reclining on the sand.  Here I could have the river to myself–the murky water and the private tuck of shoreline that lay flat like a vast, open palm.  In that rare moment of solitude I felt a terrific ache.  I wanted to cleave my heart to that dynamic, undulating force that smelled of sea salt and spanned boundless distances.  My teenage life was small–fretted with self-consciousness and my peers’ misguided expectations.  Still, I knew the passion buzzing in my adolescent body was also rolling in that tide.  I watched the waves push and pull, and the coarse sand simmer before absorbing the water.  I breathed the moist, kelp-scented air.  Passion fused me to the river, but there was no release.  I was still my lanky, lonely self.  I could never dissolve into such magnificence. Continue reading