Apparently we all needed to hear this call because a woman named D. on the east coast was battling a recent diagnosis of Merkel cell carcinoma – a rare and aggressive cancer that had spread from a growth on her arm to a mass in her armpit and a lesion on her liver. “I have to apologize for the interruption of Monday’s Wild Writing class,” she wrote me later. “As we were writing about saving the world in small but observable ways, I was involved in huge scary steps to save my life.”

This wasn’t the first time we’d heard her talking to her doctors during class. The same thing had happened two months earlier, all of us writing quietly while she unknowingly unmuted herself and took a call from her doctor about scheduling an appointment. I was annoyed, my perfect class disturbed, but as I listened to her call I heard the words, cancer, diagnosis, time.

“I’m sorry for the interruption,” she wrote me, and she sent along the piece she’d written that day in class. “I’m just a farm wife who got cancer,” she began. “Once an invincible farm wife,” she wrote, “who could leap across bales like a gazelle, who knew where life’s edges were, now turned into a broken down, sobbing stereotype of a wounded animal with nowhere to go and no place to hide.”

So many fragile things. Is life just getting rapidly more tender? Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, Wendell Berry, Tim Curry.

And the video of the glacier falling away from the cliff in Nepal, how we watched it fall toward the earth, toward the lake, which overflowed and turned into a river that swept into a valley where thousands of people were having an ordinary day; children in school, pilgrims circling a mountain, old women washing clothes. I watched that video over and over, watched it with my friend Jeff Greenwald, who first brought me to Nepal ten years ago, and who has traveled there at least thirty times, the two of us just shaking our heads, eyes wide, speechless.

And feeling so far away.

Closer to home, a month ago, the tenderizing had already begun. It was the day after my daughter’s wedding – a perfect weekend of dancing and family and puppets in a eucalyptus grove overlooking a bay, and my daughter happier than I’d ever seen her. Now I was cleaning up the barn the party had been in, and I accidentally dropped an empty wine bottle – not just any bottle, but the one holding dozens of small paper scrolls on which guests had written wishes for the newlyweds to open on their first anniversary. It smashed to the ground and wishes were covered in glass shards and at first I thought it was an omen, but I told myself it wasn’t. And mostly of course, it was my love and my fear for these young people starting their lives together, and just as the bottle had slipped through my hands, maybe something would slip through theirs.

And later, after the family and guests were gone, the three of us – Ruby, Isaac, and myself – left the site, our two cars loaded with gifts and cases of alcohol. I followed them for a while as we wound through the country roads of Petaluma toward the highway, trailing them like some sentry. It was a feeling I knew well, that dog soldier part of me, the one who needed to see them safely home. But Isaac drove too slow for me, so after we hit the highway, I peeled off, arm out the window, waving goodbye. Time to find your own lane, I told myself, though I searched for them for miles in my rearview mirror, the distance widening.

I didn’t save the world today, but I spoke to a farm wife who was once a gazelle, I saw a river swallow a village, and I watched my daughter dancing.

So many tender things.

Wild Writing Small Group Classes

Our Fall Small Group Classes are open for registration.

Using poetry as writing prompts, each 90-minute class is made up of three writing exercises, followed by each person reading aloud.

There is no critique or feedback. It is a class where we write as freely as we can, we read, we listen and witness.