A minister once told me that there is enough material for a year's worth of sermons held in the moments of a single day. The trick is to pay attention. 

Even a humble dish like oatmeal can hold a teaching, as I discovered the weekend before Christmas when I was leading a workshop on silence at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health.

It was my first time at The Center which is located in Lenox, MA, smack in the middle of the Berkshires. I had heard the food there was healthy and mainly organic, (Okay, one friend had advised me to pack snacks and a bottle of wine to have in my room.) but nothing prepared me for how absolutely delicious it was. And abundant. No need for a cache of snacks here. 

The first morning, I helped myself to the baked oatmeal, one of the many dishes in the buffet. One bite and I was smitten. Hands down, the most fabulous oatmeal I have ever had. It was laden with nuts and fruit and spices, but there was more to it than that. Some secret ingredient, perhaps. 

I told my students about it. At length. When I called home, I told my daughter about it. My husband had come along for the weekend and I talked to him about it so much, he finally said, "It's oatmeal." 

When I was meditating, it was my mantra. I couldn't wait for breakfast the next morning. In short, I became obsessed. Nuttier than a holiday fruitcake. Have you ever been taken with a desire like that? It's no mistake that "bewitched," "haunted" and "possessed" are listed under "obsession" in the thesaurus. That kind of giving over of self to an object or person or a dish of oatmeal is a kind of dementia.

When I ran into one of the kitchen staff in the hall, I asked about it. He said there was a Kripalu cookbook in the Center's store and probably the recipe was there. In between sessions, I hit the store, only to find the recipe missing from the cookbook. One of the clerks in the store said to just go ask for it. He told me it was a family recipe of one the chefs. 

After dinner, I encountered another of the staff and when I asked for it, he said, "We don't give out the recipes." He suggested I bring a pen and paper to breakfast in the morning and write down the ingredients which are always listed above each dish.  I couldn't wait for morning. 

At breakfast, I was ready, pen in hand, mission nearly accomplished. The Holy Grail of grains nearly in hand.

And oatmeal wasn't on the menu. 

Sometimes I don't need to be hit up side the head with a sledgehammer to get it. The message was so clear, I laughed out loud. What better place to have a lesson in non-attachment than at a Yoga Center? 

I was still laughing when, on my way to my class, I passed a chef. I stopped to thank her for nurturing us with such delicious food. Love the oatmeal, I tossed in at the end.

"You have to prepare it the night before," she said. "Beat the eggs and sugar and milk and add it to the oatmeal mix and let it set overnight. Then bake for 45 minutes in the morning."  

Was it an accident that the moment I let go of my hunger for the recipe, it came to me so easily?

Enough moments in a single day for a year's worth of sermons.

I had a Boys' Lunch Out yesterday and it was a revelation. Okay, a sorta Boys' Lunch Out. Okay, okay. I wasn't really invited, but I went anyway.

I'd stopped at the Land Ho for a bowl of soup while out doing holiday errands. (Actually I ordered a Buffalo wrap and fries, but that's a story of best intentions gone awry that I'll save for another day.)

A table of five men were seated ajacent to my table and since I was only inches away, eavesdropping was unavoidable, not that I ever avoid it since I figure it's a writer's occupational responsibility and due.

it wasn't more than five minutes into their converation that it hit me how very different men's luncheon talk was from women's.

In recent meals with girlfriends, this is what we've discussed: Our kids, books we've read, movies we've seen or want to see, our dreams, the needs of aging parents, our bodies, dieting, how difficult it is to strike a balance in our lives while juggling not only a dozen balls, but a half-dozen dinner plates as well, our current writing projects, and (with a select few friends) the fate of the Red Sox or Patriots, depending on the season. And, threading through it all in one way or another, we weave our emotional lives.

The men? Not so much. The conversation at the next table began with an analysis of the previous day's election to fill the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy's death, including a break-down of the votes by party and candidates. The next topic centered on an on-going controversy over a Board of Appeals decision on a business sign that might or might not be in violation of the town's sign code. "Who holds the moral high ground on this?" one of the men asked. I didn't turn around, but I think it was the man who had identified himself early on as a lawyer. And the cost to taxpayers such legal wrangling brings. That led to some general talk about the task of being a judge in the area. 

In the rambling way of such conversations, next they were talking about which town had the best oysters. "Brewster always wins the contest," one man said, "but I think that's because the competition is held there." Another chimed in, "Wellfleet is supposed to have the best, but I don't think they do." "I have two rules in life," said another, in what turned out to be the best line of the day. "I never eat Wellfleet oysters and I never date Wellfleet girls." It took steely resolve not to turn to see which of them had spoken.

Then the talk looped back to the sign code controversy. My husband leaned across the table and whispered, "This sounds like a morning talk show." Which got me to wondering why the majority of callers who phone in to those shows always seem to be men.

The meal turned out to be not only fuel for the body, but food for thought, too. And reconfirms another thing women talk about over lunch: Men really are from Mars. And women from Venus.

One thing for sure. I'll keep listening.

Several years ago, when I was writing "Listening Below the Noise," I shared some of my Silent Monday experiences with two friends in Virginia.

Over the past seventeen years, I have encountered many responses when I share my experience of this practice, the most common being either curiosity or a desire by listeners to themselves experience formal stillness. Robert and Wayne, my Virginia friends, fell into the second group and vowed to set aside a Sunday to spend without talking. As I expected, they found the day rewarding for it is almost impossible to spend hours in deliberate, choosen stillness without having revelations. The wisdom of silence can only be heard in its own surrounds. 

 Years passed and occasionally Robert and Wayne would set aside a full day to go without speech. Then, this past Wednesday, in response to an email I had sent wishing them a few moments of stillness on Thanksgiving, they called to say they had decided to spend Thanksgiving Day in silence. I was moved by this and the next day, as three generations gathered at our home to celebrate, I felt connected to Wayne and Robert by the string of silence and imagined their day unfolding.

On Friday I received an e-mail from them, both poetic and moving, in which they related how full of realizations, surprising revelations and connections, and imbued with sweetness the day had been. At one moment, while in the tub and floating in silence, Wayne thought of his mother and "how she carried me in embryonic fluid for nine months." He relayed how close he had felt to her in that moment.  He wrote, too, of the "magic of thought which speaks louder than the spoken work."

At the end of the day, they reconnected the telephone and immediately the outside world flooded in with noise and confusion.

This led me to wondering how and why we have let our holidays become so frantic and removed from original intention. And how would they change if on all holidays, sacred or secular, we set aside an hour to absorb the meaning of the day and in stillness taste the nectar of it.   

I wonder if such celebrations - joyful and festive and filled with the din and chaos of life - might also hold deeper significance.

I read an article years ago about how in the Middle Ages no one took vacations. They made pilgrimages. In fact, these journeys were the precursors of vacations. This thought influenced the way in which I began to think about the trips we planned. What would change if we consciously thought about our destinations as places where we workship what is important in our lives? 

Thanks to Robert and Wayne, I have decided to spend part of each holiday in the up-coming year in the blessed surrounds of silence.

I recently read a FaceBook posting by my friend Claire Cook in which she advises writers to always Write First. Blog later, she says. FB later. Twitter later. Clean the house later.

Unlike Claire, I like to clean or at least declutter the house before I head to my studio. Doing the breakfast dishes, running the Swifter over the floors, scrubbing a sink, putting a load into the washing machine, piling the newspapers in the recycle bin, all have a way of slowing me down and opening space for me to think about the novel or story I am writing. I listen to conversations between characters. I fiddle with plot.

This got me to thinking about how deeply personal are the habits of writers and the rituals with which we support ourselves and our work, as individual as the places we set up shop.

An interviewer once asked the writer Ralph Ellison where he wrote, perhaps imagining Ellison at a kitchen table, or a rolltop desk, or in the recesses of a public library. Or even in a separate shed like the ones E.B. White and Robert Penn Warren had. Ellison's response was less prosaic. He wrote, he said, within a magic circle.

I think all writers work within the circumference of such a space, whether they are sitting in a coffee shop - where J Rawlings is said to have created the Harry Potter books - standing at a sideboard like my friend Tom, or enthorned in the middle of a king-size bed laptop propped up by pillows like my friend Jackie.

Our rituals vary, too. Pat Conroy said he starts each day by doing two crossword puzzles. Another writer dresses up each morning, goes out the kitchen door, walks around the house to the front entry, goes in and walks to her studio to begin work. She says this creates the necessary space and distance from her ordinary life for her job of writing.

Of course, discerning what is preparation and what is procrastination can be tricky. Solving a crossword puzzle can grease the mental wheels. Scrubbing a floor can be a form of meditation that creates "thought time." Doing dishes can slow the mind and allow solutions to surface. Doing ten or twenty games of FreeCell feels more like avoidance.

Whatever our method, the goal is the same. Putting ourselves in the middle of the magic circle. 

My husband wonders about the big things.

"I wonder why some people die and others don't," Hillary said when I asked him what he thought about these days. "And what inner clock causes birds to migrate. And why some birds mate for life and others don't."

Most of my concerns are of a lesser note. You might say they are barely on the keyboard.

I wonder what it means that I now take more time tending to daily care of my teeth than putting on make-up. And what it means that I no longer care when my mother makes critical comments about my hair. Am I growing up or growing old?

I wonder if I can believe studies that say men really don't care if a woman has cellulite-pocked thighs. When Hillary swears this is true, I wonder if he is being honest or just smart.

I wonder why, if imitation is suppposed to be the highest form of flattery, if feels more like a form of vampirism when a friend copies my ideas.  

I wonder if I'll ever be on Oprah.

Or run a 10K.

Or have a grandchild. 

Or spend that month in Italy I've always dreamed of.

And I wonder why we wonder.

When I arrived here in Virginia six weeks ago, the first thing I saw as I walked up the path to my studio was a bluebird swooping into its box atop a pole. It stopped me dead in my tracks. I waited until it emerged and continued watching until it flew away.  

For the next several days, as I walked past the box, I waited to see if I could again catch glimpses of the bluebird and usually my patience was rewarded. Each time it amazed me anew. Now, two days away from the end of my residency, I realize it has been weeks since I have seen the bird. Has it moved on? Or have I stopped seeing it the way we do when the wondrous becomes part of our ordinary day?

This past winter, a son inherited the property behind us and almost at once, he demolished the summer cottages that had stood for generations and began the process of obtaining permits for a huge house ( a story for another day).

The immediate result was that I had a view of Nantucket Sound from my living room. At first I couldn't believe my good fortune. I sat each morning with my tea and - newspaper forgotten in my lap - would stare out at the water. Just as weeks ago I stared at the bluebird here.

I corralled friends in to take a look at the view.

"What a shame your neighbor is building a house there," they said. The process was proceding and the cellar hole had been dug for a two-car garage with overhead apartment and the foundation already begun for the main MacMansion.

"At least I have a view for now," I said. "And really all we have is today anyway so I might as well enjoy it."

Then, so graduallly I don't even know when it happened, I stopped looking. I would settle in with my tea and paper and not even look up. Days passed and I realized one day I had taken the view for granted. I no longer stood at the southwest window in the late afternoon and watched the sky change color over the water as the sun set. I no longer made visitors observe my ocean view.

Familiarity and habit rob of us of so much. I am wondering how we keep the awe alive each day. How do we stay aware of the splendor that surrounds us? The bluebirds and ocean views.

This past Christmas, a good friend from Illinois gave me a sweet blue velvet pillow embroidered with these words: Quiet Please. Novel in Progress.

These days it should read: Novel Not in Progress.

For the past month I've been busy promoting the new book, leading workshops, writing copy for various catalogues about classes I will be giving, and otherwise being completely occupied with the business side of writing.  And before that - and continuing - I have been totally engaged with furnishing a house from top to bottom, a home we built eleven years ago for my mother to live in. In December she suddenly announced she wanted to move to a smaller place in an apartment complex where another friend lives. She explained that the house had become too big for her to manage and that, unable to drive, she wanted to be closer to activites. I understood, but the suddenness of this decision threw me and left me, as I said, with a three-bedroom, three-living room home to outfit and ready for summer rentals. The shopping list was extensive. Couches, tables, armchairs, a dining room set, pots, pans, dishes, glassware, silverware, microwave, coffeemaker, beds and bedding, bureaus, lamps and paintings, televisions,outdoor furniture. In short, everything.  Thank God for friends, say I. And for Craigslist.

And so, of necessity, progress on the new novel has stopped. Each day I get itchier to get back to it. Not-writing feels like sloth. Like my brain has shut down. Purpose lost.

And then this morning, as the grounds around our property come alive with signs of spring - grasses greening, shoots of spring bulbs poking through the earth, branch tips swelling with the promise of  leaves - I thought of the farm where I grew up. My father taught me that each season has a purpose in the cycle of the year. Even snow was useful for crops yet to be planted, he said, because it brings nitrogen to the soil. Fields that lay barren and uncultivated, he instructed, were also working. Thought it looks like nothing is happening, in fact, much is occurring. Lying fallow, they are resting, restoring after depletion.

As my novel continues to be "Not in Progress" I think about my father's words and am comforted. While the book sits in my studio, untouched for months, am I, too, lying fallow? Are my fields of imagination being restored, gathering a kind of nirtogen for creative soil? Is this, too, part of the artist's season?

In two weeks, I will pack up the novel and computer and head south to begin a six-week writing residency. The work will begin again. I go trusting in my father's words and in the promise that the unseen work of my fallow season will bear fruit.

Last month I flew to Florida to take part in a panel discussion at the Jacksonville Public Library event, "Much Ado About Books." The topic was "Women as Writers, Women as Characters."

Before I left home, I'd been thinking about the subject of women writers and I came across a quote by the poet Louise Bogan. I don't know the original context or date of the quote (most of her work was published in the 1930s) but it was the epigraph for "The Writer on Her Work," an  anthology edited by Janet Sternberg and published in 1980. It seemed as timely today as in the poet's lifetime.

Bogan said, "...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart."

In the same book, Anne Tyler said that for her writing things down was her way out. And Joan Didion said she wrote entirely to find out what she is thinking, what she is looking at, what she sees and what it means. What she wants and what she fears. Which pretty much sums it up.

For me, writing is a kind of self-created enchantment. It is the way out, the way in and a way to give back a small portion of the world's lost heart.

For a number of years now, at the end of each day I jot a journal entry about what I have seen or heard that day that amazed, surprised or delighted me. I find this a good exercise, partially because it keeps a childlike awareness and curiosity awake in me and makes me pay attention - a good thing for a writer. It also is a reminder of how much we have to appreciate about our world, especially the small things so easily overlooked.

One day while out in Hillary's boat, I saw a seagull swallow an orange-billed oystercatcher whole. The orange bill of the shore bird was the last thing to disappear. Another time, I was awestruck by the maternal instincts of a female black duck who was nesting in the salt marsh with her ducklings. A neighbor of ours happened to be walking along the beach with his two Irish setters at the same time. When the dogs caught sight of the birds, they headed straight for them. The mother duck fluttered into the air, away from her offspring, diverting the dogs. She would fly and fall, holding one wing limp, as if injured. Bit by bit, flutter by flutter, she continued to lead the setters astray, into the waters of Nantucket Sound. The dogs swam for her, following their doggy instincts as surely as she was following her maternal ones. She led them nearly two-thirds of a mile out into the Sound, then rose and flew back to her brood. The dogs swam back to shore, exhausted, and collapsed on the sand, too spend to pursue the ducks. It was a remarkable thing to witness.

It is the unexpected factor that often brings an event to my listing. Yesterday while shopping I stopped at  Burger King for a cup of coffee and was surprised to hear classical music playing over the sound system. A tiny part of the day, but delightful because it was so unexpected. Mozart in a fast food place.

But lately, the entries fall into a category more absurd than delightful. While in the supermarket, I saw a small yellow plastic object in the produce aisle with a price tag of $4.99. It was a banana cutter. So now we need to buy something to cut bananas? A pineapple, perhaps, but a banana, a fruit so easy to slice you could use a straw. This seems a perfect example of how we got in this economic mess. On the other end of the spectrum was an ad in that morning's New York Times for a simple cotton sleeveless shift. It probably took no more than two and a half yards of fabric to construct. The cost? $1100.00. That beat out the fruit cutter for absurdity. A wow factor of a different kind.

What's been on your Wow Factor list lately?

1. It's 17 degress here and although I'm no fan of the cold, I love looking outside my studio window at the enchanted forest of ice and snow limbed trees. It's like living in a crystal cathedral. And the salt marsh at the end of the street is frozen over, as is Nantucket Sound several feet out from shore. 

2. While the other winter birds chow down at the feeders, I worry about the robins and wonder how they find food when the ground is blanketed with snow.  

3. I wish I could play a musical instrument really, really well. Such a talent is a free pass to parties not to mention hours of personal pleasure.

4. Do you think time is elastic, too? The past three and a half months since my last entry feel as if they were but weeks. Things seem to be speeding up. 

5. The new book, LISTENING BELOW THE NOISE: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence comes out next Tuesday and I feel both excited and nervous, kind of like Christmas Eve and the night before final exams.

6. Most of the time I'm okay with my looks and just glad for my health, but when my publicist called two days ago to say there was a chance I'd be appearing on a national morning show, I lost it for about a day and started thinking: Botox, Facial Fillers. My husband thinks I'm crazy and I have to agree.  It drives me nuts to live in such a youth obcessed culture and ever more nuts when I fall for that line.

7. And this I know for sure: Gratitude can turn a grim and gray day golden.