Janet Muirhead Hill tagged me for this "Happy Meme". As she says, "It's simple. I only have to list six things that make me happy. Well, maybe not so simple when there are so many to choose from. Hmmm. Let me think."

1. Completing my Homecoming Pilgrimages back to places of my heart in 2008.

2. My father coming home from the hospital healthy and happy and almost as lively as ever.

3. Jazz conversations with close friends like Nana and Stephanie and Alan and Ofosu...the story within the story approach of Southern storytelling traditions in which you can draw the genealogy of the story.

4. Good books...and even "trash" reading...that my recovering English major self has learned to love.

5. Having the chance to be a devoted daughter.

6. A good balanced day of intimate connection with others mingled with creative production.

As Janet says, "the list above is random, not necessarily prioritized as I chose from so much that makes me happy"...places of my heart, family, intimate connection, and satisfying creative work.

Thanks, Janet, "for the chance to think of 6 happy things, for it opens the mind to boundless gratitude".

Now, I'm supposed to tag someone else to list 6 things that make you happy.

Susan J. Tweit, you're it, on your newly launched blog "Walking Nature Home."

Susan Tweit and I have been continuing our conversation on returning reverence and creativity to your daily life. Particularly, we've been chatting about why symbolic actions, like earth hour, have power and meaning...why symbolic actions matter and are part of the change we seek.

As Susan says on her blog, Community of the Land:

Such "Earth Moments" can nurture our heads and hearts, and fill our souls with peace. With grace, with joy. To observe an Earth Moment is to engage in living prayer, as the poet Mary Oliver writes in Thirst,

It's like falling in love with life all over again.

Gateway Canyons Casita where Susan Tweit & family spent the night of Earth Hour. Her folks are on the right and her husband Richard is on the left. The snowy top of the Uncompahgre Plateau is in the background and part of Sewemup Mesa on the right. (Photo by Susan Tweit)

I love Susan's grounded wisdom and lyrical nature. The casita is heart's desire with it's tinyness next to the rising mesa.

We both believe that symbolic actions have power and meaning. Symbolism is the tool of the poet, the visionary, the dreamer, the prophet, the priestess, the medicine woman, world healers and healers all over the world, ritualists, ceremonialists, performance artists, theater folks, and...yes, activists!

Chatting by email, Susan agrees that symbolic actions have power "because in the doing them, we shift our own way of seeing the world and the habits we practice."

In Susan's Earth Hour with her family in remote Western Colorado which she describes fulsomely on Community of the Land, they communed with red rock mesas and "myotis bats fluttering through the night air in search of early spring insects, and three ravens in croaking conversation that echoed off the cliff walls, and a screech owl called once from down by the Dolores River. There's a kind of magic that happens when we stop to listen to the pulse of nature and the sounds of other species." Without cellphone of internet connection, they could focus on this magic and emerge refreshed and renewed.

I recall long stretches of time in Africa where the only lights were stars, piercing into our souls from the darkest of night skies. Once, around a campfire with a truck broken down in the desert, we looked up at that night sky, all worries about repair and rescue quenched, singing!

Yes! Keep a poem in your pocket. Read a poem a day. Step outside to breathe in our connection with all beings. Remember that symbolic actions matter, inside and outside.

Read what Susan Tweit has to say about Title Page at Community of the Land Blogspot.

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Editorial Producer and Presenter: Daniel Menaker

New Yorker Daniel Menaker hosts the show with the kind of ease and charm you'd expect of a graduate of Johns Hopkins University. After teaching for three years in independent schools, he began his twenty-six-year career at The New Yorker as a fact checker in 1969, and seven years later became a senior editor specializing in fiction. In 1995 he went to Random House as Vice President, Senior Literary Editor. In 2001 he became Executive Editor at Harper Collins, returning to Random House in 2003 as Editor-in-Chief of the Random House Publishing Group, a division within Random House, Inc.

For those Riehlife and Community of the Land (Susan Tweit's blog) readers who've been intrigued by our Blog Duet on the theme of Regenerative Design/Living, hop on over to Hal Manogue's "Living a Non-Ordinary Life in a Non Ordinary Way" for a thoughtful essay that expands this dialogue.

Susan J. Tweit telling plant stories in Colorado

Janet Riehl performs "Big Butts Are Beautiful"

As a journalist, memoirist, blogger, and speaker I've known Susan through two organizations: Women Writing the West and Story Circle Network. We recently had such a lovely ongoing email conversation about "how to find a balance between an outwardly focused life and an inward one" (as Susan puts it) that we decided to move it onto our blogs in an ongoing Blog Duet.

Some of the questions we are holding and exploring in our dialogue/duet are:

--How do we strike a balance between "connection and stimulation on the one hand and solitude" on the other?

(artwork by Edna Patterson-Petty)

--How do we find "our equilibrium between inward-focused spiritual and emotional work and the outward focus involved in creating new connections and tending existing relationships"?

-- If we're always connected, always tuned to other people, how can we hear our own inner voices? [See Susan's blog for how quiet time and periods of rest and anonymity help her listen to the voice of creativity and spirit.]

-- What are some places that give us "the comfort of the familiar without the demands of intense connection"?

From left: Bluff House (my spot of ground on Evergreen Heights, hidey-holes, rose homecoming journals...my places of familiar comfort...sorting...and sowing.

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Susan says she's an extrovert-seeming introvert. Depending on the day you meet me, I might seem the same. I learned from taking The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator years ago that I'm in the INFP (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving) zone of the world. In fact, when I took the Meyer's-Briggs, I was told I was on the line between introvert and extrovert, and I could choose which side of the line I wanted to fall on, based on my own sense of myself. I chose introvert. While I enjoy social interchange, I require large amounts of down time to rest and recharge after forays out. I also learned someplace along the way that I'm a kinesthetic perceiver and learner, and highly tactile.

How does such a person step out into the world to travel...give workshops, talks, appear on panels and so on? Throughout my life I explore the answer to this question. I keep on stepping out of my cave and then diving right back in for comfort and days of low-stimulation, sorting, and sowing anew.

Marion Woodman and Robert A. Johnson, both Jungian psychologists, are two introverts who've successfully stepped out into the world to nurture it with their work, but who have done so while nurturing themselves. They have given me hope. Decades ago I read how Marion Woodman, mythopoetic author and women's movement figure, upon returning from forays out to speak and teach, went into solitude at home and required that. Reading of her way of working totally normalized my own need and experience and I was so grateful to see this in print.

Also, decades ago, I heard Robert A. Johnson speak at the DeJung. (Oops! That is to say, the deYoung Museum...I guess it was the DeJung Museum whilst Johnson spoke for Jung's ideas that day!) I loved it but didn't want to put it on the blog or cause you embarrassment! Museum in San Francisco while he was presenting a seminar. He was so brilliant. But here's what he did that really stuck with me: he announced as the break approached that he didn't mean to be unfriendly, but that he needed time to rest, and therefore during the break he'd be going to a quiet place to do that rather than mingling with people and visiting. What an inspiring model of setting boundaries and politely and firmly defying and confounding public expectations. I loved him for that moment, even more than all of his books that I'd read...and I really liked his books, too!

As an introvert having "connection" as my platform is tricky and potentially dangerous. Yesterday I asked my Wisdom Self for guidance, and received these words:

My instrument is tuned for the world to move through me.
I care for my instrument to keep it tuned.
I take care in how I place my instrument in the world.

This feels like a touchstone for me. So much information pours into my body and nervous system. I have to have time to sort it all, or I will explode/implode. As a kinesthetic who loves to go into the world full-heartedly, I've learned that it's also important to carry a cloak.

When I told Susan about my need to "carry a cloak," she told me a great story, and maybe, just maybe she might tell us on her blog for one of our duets. We'll see.

I was struck by Susan's analogy of quiet time to let the stimulation of other's emotions and thoughts subside, my thoughts clear like a pond going still after a rainstorm stirs it up. I use the image of a storm deliberately: what connection and conversation and the stimulation of being around other humans does is very like what a rainstorm does for a pond: it stirs up the bottom sediments, redistributing nutrients, changing the patterns of habitation and flow, and adding fresh water and nutrients as well as other lives washed.

Sogyal Rinpoche, the bestselling author of "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" often quotes a Tibetan proverb: Water, if you don't stir it, becomes clear. Similarly, the mind, if you don't stir it, finds peace. When we allow the mind to settle, then in that quiet we experience goodness, our true nature.

It seems fitting that for Susan, who views the land as our oldest community, that she would observe the pattern of the water in a pond and find the analogy to the mind.

Fade out for this first duet.

Barbara Lindquist Miller's "Solitude: Balm and Mystery" provided a marvelous bilbliography and explored the question of What is Solitude? Barriers to solitude; past experiences of solitude; solitude and community; and making personal plans for solitude. I helped her carry her book bag to her car afterwards. The car trunk here serves a lot like our lockers did in Junior High School aka, Middle School, now.

Cindy Bellinger led us in writing practice and reflection on "Harvest Your Family Tree and Write Scrumptious Stories." I hugged her afterwards and congratulated her on a job well-done. We both agree it's been fun being room-sisters for this little bit of time.

Helen Leatherwood, of Beverly Hills, California, and I chat about the intersection of The Muse and The Critic. She's just attended Lisa Shirah-Hiers workshop "Accessing Your Inner Muse" and tomorrow will present "Giving the Critic the Slip." We compare notes, too, on the workshop I designed and gave widely in New Mexico during the 1980s through my consulting company "Clear Communication." My workshop title was "Transforming Your Inner Critic" and came on the scene before that phrase was widely in vogue. Years later in California a national seminar company invited me to tour nationally with my workshop, but I said "no." When I examined what that life would really have been...not unlike a band on constant tour schedule, with never more than one day in any town...I saw it only looked glamorous on the surface.

Theresa May, Austin, Texas, Chief Editor for University of Texas Press, will be on the Pen to Print panel with Cindy Bellinger and myself tomorrow as Paula Yost moderates. She sat next to me at lunch, and I enjoyed her delightful humor. I asked if there'd been lots of teasing in her family. "Yes," she said. "Turn on a 40 watt light bulb and I'll tap dance." What a pleasure to be surrounded by witty women. She is working with Susan Tweit on her memoir.

When I lived in New Mexico in the 1980s, I studied Spanish like the devil, even going to Mexico for immersion training. When I came back, I could hardly speak English. Folks warned me that without constant practice, my ability to produce the language in speech would decline. Sure enough, it's true. Here, years later, I dredge up Spanish nouns and verbs to chat with the maid in the hallway to tell her not to worry about changing the beds. She's filled with good will for my halting efforts combined with pantomime. It's just like a quick trip to Mexico or Spain where I can get a Spanish lesson on every street corner. It's the good will, the good-heartedness that makes both of us laugh and our day just a tad more fun than it was moment earlier. Not to mention, she's taught me how to string those nouns and verbs together into a recognizable Spanish sentence.