This morning Delycia and I attended our weekly writing group -- 90 minutes of writing and listening to others read their writing. It's a strangely inspiring meeting each week, a chance to simply write and listen, without any discussion and with no interruptions and disagreements, which, we have found, are almost always a part of adult meetings or classes. This group, for me, is quite refreshing and uplifting,  mostly because it gives me a chance to get to know a group of people, often quite personally, just by listening to what they wrote. There's no discussion after each person reads, very little commentary, and certainly no criticisms or suggestions. We all just listen, an activity that, in my experience, rarely happens when adults get together. Our leader, a former teacher who handles all of us with the utmost respect and gentleness, offers a few positive thoughts about each piece of writing, and then the next person around the table reads, or passes. What's wonderful, too, is that the prompts the leader gives to get us started each week nearly always call forth deeply personal writing -- about sorrows and disappointments in our lives, as well as triumphs and dreams. We all seem quite willing to simply write "from the bottom of our hearts", as the saying goes, which turns our small meeting room every week into a place of quiet but intense power. A visitor entering the room for the first time might immediately get the sense that something special is going on here, and indeed it is.