The good news is that there are two fabulous, go-for-broke, forget-the diet French bakeries on Cape Cod.  The bad news is that there are two fabulous, go-for-broke, forget-the-diet French bakeries on Cape Cod. Pain D'Avignon in Hyannis and PB Boulangerie and Cafe in Wellfleet.

The first time I went to the Wellfleet bakery I intended to try one croissant. A few minutes later, I  walked out with $27.00 worth of baked goods. It takes a will stronger than mine to by-pass the cheese and bacon country loaf or the raisin and walnut. The apple croissant had my name all over it. And that was just the beginning. To put this splurge in prospective, I rarely buy bread, never mind eat it. On the way home I said to my friend Jebba, "It's a good thing that place is 25 miles away. It would be dangerous to have it in the same town."

Alas, distance has not proved a deterrant.

Like a person obsessed, I find myself inventing errands that will get me heading up-Cape or down-Cape and bring me near either bakery where I happily stand in line to purchase their goods.Twice in the past week I've driven to Hyannis to have the ham and cheese croissant at Pain D'Avignon.

"Stay away from that bakery," my stellar assistant Kate e-mailed me earlier today. To no avail. This morning's indulgence was a croque monsieur in Wellfleet. While there I picked up two more loaves of bread since my favorite breakfast at home is now a fresh egg from Hillary's hens poached on a slice of lightly toasted bacon and cheese loaf. A marriage of flavors to dream of.

Part of this obsession no doubt is the memories stirred of the meals I've eaten in France, a country I love and yearn to return to. But a large part, too, is the quality of the food offered. Real food, not factory produced or created from a mix comprised of ingredients I can neither spell nor pronounce. It is not a coincidence that both bakeries have fiercely loyal customers who spread the word like gospel.

 This has gotten me thinking about what leads to success whether we're considering a food purveyer or a novelist. Granted, luck always plays a role, but the commonalities of quality, whether it be in baking or writing, are attention to and passion for the craft.

Cape Cod spring is an oxymoron.

I've lived on Cape Cod for more than forty years and never before have I witnessed a spring like the one we're having this year. Long time residents know it's a mistake to pack away winter clothes before mid-June. (When they were young, more often than not my children wore parkas when they marched in Chatham's Memorial Day parade.) Experienced gardeners know that to set out peppers and other tender annuals before the third week of June is to court frost-killed plants. 

But this year flowers are blooming a full month ahead of schedule. Lilacs, their branches traditionally gathered in Mason jars this holiday weekend to grace cemetery graves, are already well pass their peak. At the beach at the end of my street, people swim in Nantucket Sound, and daily I sight convertibles with tops rolled down. Temperatures have hovered in the 70s for days and occasionally have risen to the 80s.   

The other day I overheard someone at the gardening center say, "Things are so early this year, I wonder what will happen when August comes." Another customer responded, "I don't care what happens in August. I am loving this weather."

Like plants springing to life after a cold, harsh spell, I, too, feel alive. My energy level spikes. Years fall away. Dreams, in hibernation all winter, waken and recharge me.

Is there any season more intoxicating that spring?

When I walk out to retrieve the morning paper at the end of the drive, the world sings with the song of bees and birds. Already the perennial beds are a riot of colors. I am besotted with it all, but especially with the apricot poppies, their frilled and heavy heads nodding in the breeze. In a week or two, their brief blossoming will be at an end and their petals will confetti the garden soil. The temporal nature of their stay only increases my appreciation and awe. Just as it does when I realize the transitional nature of our own planet walk.

 "I feel so grateful," I said to my friend Margaret the other day. "Sometimes I think it's a wonder we don't walk around on our knees all day in gratitude. Don't you?" "No," she laughed. "I think there's a reason God gave us feet." 

Spring arrives with its eternal message of resurrection and rebirth, and amid the turmoil of politics and economics and news of friends' illness and deaths and smaller human concerns, I am reminded of the wonder and majesty of life.

Walking or kneeling, I am moved to a prayer of gratitude,

"You should be on Oprah."

If I had a penny for every time....

Oh. Okay. Let me just jot that right down on my to-do list, I want to respond to these supportive friends and readers - and readers who are friends - who regularly offer this suggestion, some of whom have actually initiated a write-in campaign to get me on the show. As if it were that easy. 

Which reminds me of something one of my fellow faculty members at the Hawaii Writers Conference said last summer. "Want to be on Oprah?" Bill Bernhardt asked those who attended his talk. "Write this number down." Everyone dutifully took out pens and paper. "One-eight-hundred dial-a-prayer," he said.

For years now, writers (and publicists and editors and publishers working on their behalf) have maneuvered to be on Oprah, hoping to be in the select minority for whom the call from Harpo Productions comes.

Would I like to be on Oprah? Absolutely. No cranial strain in answering that quesion. Would I shout the news, stopping just short of hiring a plane to float a banner over Fenway Park? No doubt. Would I post it on FaceBook? You bet. Do I believe it would change my life? No. 

I have eight friends who have been Oprah's featured guests, five of whom have had their novels selected for her book club. Has it changed their lives in that way we mean when we say something has absolutely altered our life's trajectory?  As far as I can observe, it hasn't. 

What it did provide for these friends was a wider audience for their work, more name recognition and an upward tick in finances and book sales - what one of them called getting the Oprah Grant. But as time when on, their lives continued more or less as they had before. Once the grant ran out, their struggles to pay bills, write and sell books, and gain readers continued. On-going battles in their personal lives - the ones we all struggle with, weight loss and relationships and juggling daily demands - picked up where they'd been before the flight to Chicago.

And still this myth persevers, the belief that one event - selling a novel and getting it published, making the NYTimes best seller list, having our books made into movies, winning big awards - will alter our days in an essential way, And so we continue to confuse aspirations with false expectations. We hang our hopes on something dangling out there just beyond our reach. The brass ring on life's merry-go-round. Students sign on for writing classes holding a pen in one hand and in their minds the dream so particularly American that publishing a book or scripting a screenplay will lead to fame and fortune. And then we'll know the satisfaction of having every classmate in the eighth grade who was mean, every person who was rejecting or abandoning or hurtful brought to their knees in regret and remorse. 

Last fall one of the producers for Harpo Productions called to talk about "Listening Below the Noise" and explore the possibility of my being on that Friday's show to talk about the practice of silence and how it has transformed my life. She said they didn't decide on the show until Wednesday but wanted to know if I could be available and would like to do it (Well, hello, let me just think about that for a nanosecond!). She then apologized for not being able to give me an answer until later in the week. I was dazed, the way I imagine many are when they receive "The Call." I began to dream the big dreams.I angsted over what I'd wear and if I should get my hair cut. When the producer called on Wednesday with the news that the show was going to be about the phenomenon of Twitter with Ashton Kutcher as the guest (and could anything be more removed from silence?), I felt the sting of disappointment. The astonishing thing was that it was only momentary. Some saner part of my brain prevailed and I got it that my life's happiness and worth wasn't based on appearing on Oprah.

Do you remember a few years back when an essay was going around in which the writer asked us to remember the last five Super Bowl winners, the last ten actors who won the Academy Award, the singer who won American Idol three years ago? Most people couldn't. (For every Susan Boyle, there are thousands of winners whose names are forgotten quickly.) The same essayist asked us to remember the name of our first grade teacher. That name surfaced easily for most people. Yet how easy it is in a culture that prizes fame to be seduced away from what really matters.

Getting a book or movie contract, appearing on high profile talk shows, these things can impact our lives of course, but they do not transform us in that fundamental way that leads to sustained happiness or contentment. Not even winning the mega millions does that as the dozens of follow-up stories about lottery winners reveal. 

There are events - death, catastrophic illness - that can permanantly mark us - but most of life's transformations are an inside job. That's helpful to remember when Oprah calls. Or when she doesn't.

People here on the Cape - and in a good portion of the northeast - are hunkering down and preparing for another storm this morning. Last night, before even a distant sighting of the first flake, the news stations started listing school closings for today. Pictures of the landscape in DC flashed across the screen. The capital still hasn't cleared out from the previous snowfall and there is talk of sledding on the White House lawn. Snow seems to have temporarioy muted political retoric, if not shut it down.

The last big storm we had here was the weekend before Christmas when we had 16 inches. Stores shut down. Except for plows, streets were empty. Our home, cloaked in a blanket of snow, seemed much cozier and tighter and quieter then usual even though outside the temperatures hung in the teens. "It's because all the cracks around the doors and windows and skylights are sealed," Hillary said. "Snow insulates."

Like silence, I thought.

I have always been struck by how much silent Mondays feel like the snow days I experienced in childhood. I loved snow days. Still do. Each one seems a gift, a vessel for holding treasures of peace, receptivity and quiet. Everything slows down, with no demands, no "push." Insulated from the noise of the world, the day is filled with mysterious promise. 

My father, a farmer, used to tell me that a spring snow was nature's fertilizer because it brought nitrogen to the earth. So it seems, is silence a fertilizer for the soil of my soul. Each silence day brings its own gifts.

The German philosopher Max Picard wrote extensively about our need for silence and the cost of a world without it. "In winter silence is visible," he wrote. "Snow is silence become visible."

 So I sit here in my studio and wait for the quieting snow, for visible silence.

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.