Self-helpy gurus will say that annoying thing to encourage grown women to find a satisfying activity, especially a new career: ‘ What did you love to do when you were a kid?’

I shake my head and think of how limited my choices were at that age. All I did when I was a kid was read through the library.

Hmm.

Here lately I’m letting that count. These hundreds of books I’ve consumed are even more fun than when I was in single digits.

I’ve leaned into my love of reading in the last couple years. I’ve read more than a hundred books each year for the last three years.

When I allowed myself to feel the reality that I had written a book myself—not just one but four! —I engaged with books as an equal. They are colleagues, not experts.

The books were less magical; they became earth and food and life-sustaining art.

Writing a book is a particular and rare thing. This weekly wonder is writing. It has a different structure.

There are some bits that I write that I are not weekly wonder pieces. This platform has it’s own shape and voice that I’ve created with you all.  I want to pull back the curtain to share some of the choices I have made as I’ve built this essay over the last 10+ years.

The goal is to serve the action immediately. Funny, my action is seldom action. The Weekly wonder has ideas, thoughts, perspectives or wonderings.

It’s in the title.

Fuzzy cloudy soft-edged ideas can move in and out of focus. I slash every word and phrase to get to the hard nugget, a useful idea to be carried around and used. Every weekly wonder leave piles of clauses cut from my sentences.

You can’t be in the text.  I don’t know what you are thinking. We don’t do anything, unless I can prove it.

I’m the only one I can about. I have to admit what I am thinking, feeling, doing as my own. I have had many of you (yes, you, readers) write to me over the years to tell me I am not alone. I’m grateful to you.

The art of this feeds me. I hear that it feeds others, doubling my joy.