What Happens In Texas

Is it what you expected?

I was never quite sure how to answer the question. Throughout the weekend, several people asked whether or not the writing retreat was turning out to be what I had expected. Truth was, I hadn’t known what to expect.

I knew what I feared. I feared I would have to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and try to write something that wouldn’t sound awful. I feared being surrounded by a circle of talented writers who would whip out their pens and bleed red all over my amateur efforts. I feared that the generous gift my husband had given me, investing in me as a writer wannabe, would turn out to be an unwise decision on his part.

So much of what happened at Laity Lodge, however, was neither what I feared nor expected. I didn’t expect that meeting so many for the first time would feel like a reunion of old friends. I was surprised to learn that a lovely, talented photographer from South Africa would, with a glimmer in her eye, dare to flip a colleague into the Frio River. I had no idea that a grown man with a frog puppet could move so many to tears.

Unlike many of the talented photographers present, I hadn’t packed a camera. The snapshots I took, I carried home with me in my head and my heart. With a fistbump, I was given honorary dude status. I was introduced to the best cookies one could make using four simple ingredients. During a workshop, I used the phrase “merry band of crazy.” (and am right here and now, on the internet, forevermore claiming intellectual property rights to those words) I was assigned a roommate who couldn’t promise she wouldn’t try to kill me in the middle of the night. I found people who get me.

We talked together, my writer friends and me, of our lives at home; and we wept and prayed together. I worshiped alongside a woman for whom I had prayed online. I had a meltdown in an art studio. Throughout the weekend, I received small affirmations. Before heading home, I was invited to consider pain as something to steward well.

Not real writer-ly stuff. Or maybe it was.

I’ve been reading all week, posts from others who participated in the retreat, and I keep thinking about how alike and different our experiences were. We shared in many of the same activities and broke bread together, but we’ve each come home with different stories in our back pockets. My kids’ high school youth group leader used to say that each kid who went on a mission trip had the exact trip God intended for him or for her to have. I think something like that happened at Laity Lodge last weekend.

I need to pause here and say, “Thank you,” to the beloved Swede for sending me to Texas last week, for believing enough in me to invest in me as a writer.  Truly, you are the lingonberries to my Swedish pancakes. As for return on investment, I’m not sure I come home to you a better writer. But I believe I’ve come home a better person.

And while what happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, the lessons of Laity Lodge, I believe, will continue to echo far beyond the walls of the Rio canyon. Even in the airport, as many of us were queuing in security lines, the conversation and the friendship continued. In an airport restaurant I shared a table with David before we went separate ways, he home to steward pain of his own.

Before leaving the restaurant, I happened upon Kathy, the artist-in-residence whose studio I’d fled in tears. She’d been wondering, she told me, what had happened as I sat surrounded by water colors and ink. We shared a table, and I was given the opportunity to fill her in on the rest of the story. I’d had a painful experience, I told her, but one I needed to have.

As it turns out, few things about the retreat were what I expected. And perhaps that’s the greatest lesson I brought home from Texas.