This group brought me back to a writing practice. It taught me something I learned when I first fell in love with writing but had forgotten over time, bit by bit: that writing is an action to become absorbed in, more than it is a product. It takes time and effort, but artistic work is different from domestic or professional work. If we develop the connections or rituals to nurture a real artistic practice, we get to immerse ourselves in an exhilarating creative concentration. I think of the darkness of the pandemic, the sense of being disoriented and lost and afraid. And I remember the feeling when I was new to the group, of walking to my desk on a winter morning, knowing that these poets had gathered and would welcome me in, through the glowing portal of my laptop. When we write together, I feel like a nun, praying with my sisters in our convent. This is not the only time I have been saved. But there’s something very special about a group like this, a group of poets, women, witches, nuns, lighthouse workers, whatever we might be called, who have done so much of the repetitive and isolating work of caretaking. We’ve found a method of tending the light together, for ourselves. I hope that if you ever feel far away from your own creative practice, you can find people or rituals that point you toward the light. Each week with my fellow poets, I feel the relief of someone on dark water seeing a blaze on land. Here, like this, this way. {read}