Writing is something peculiar...sometimes we do it out of need to express an opinion, sometimes to change an experience into something other...something tolerable, something "useful".

For me, it's a way to take the many memories I have of patients and  families; great outcomes and horrendous ones. It's a way to explain the very weird world of critical care to people in my life who are not involved in health care, who have no knowledge of the very separate world of a hospital. It's equally important to me to validate the experiences I've had as a nurse, in critical care , for more than 30 years, during a time of great change...and to celebrate the colleagues I've been so fortunate to work with. 
I've found some other ways to work with the "bad" stuff over the years...working with a hospital ethics committee, for instance; and doing an enormous amount of reading.

And writing things for myself sometimes in journals.

I ended up in Taos, NM more than decade ago as a result of being part of a hospital ethics committee, just after a devastating divorce. My director of nursing was kind enough to pay for the vacation time and the costs of the workshop. At the time, I thought I was going to learn about how to write about ethical issues in health care.

Well, yes, and no.

As it turned out, first of all, we were forced to do many sorts of writing exercises, ranging from short paragraphs to essays. I had always thought that I was pretty darned good at writing the typical term paper or technical exposition (many years of policy writing, plus a degree in technical writing had assured me that I was "ok" at those things.) As it turned out...I actually had a whole lot more to say, and was encouraged to write more personal reminiscences. I  was critiqued in ways that told me that I actually had a real voice, and value. That was extraordinary.
I met in this workshop, and was incredibly fortunate to work with the late Ellen Meloy, who took the whole genre of science writing/personal memoir to a level I had never imagined, full of humor and quirkiness and intellectual rigor.
At the same time I also joined an online community of people who originally had joined a "dating site' which very quickly evolved into a remarkable writing community. Shared blogs, daily haikus, weekly short pieces on one word...the inspiration and feedback was incredible fun and highly creative. There are still a hundred+ of us who have met in person, and connect online, although it's changed in texture.

Two years later,after that writing workshop,  I found myself in the Middle Rio Grande area of New Mexico, making a new life in the high desert very, very far away from the lovely, verdant, sometime cold and dark northeast. In retrospect, that was very probably the bravest thing I've done in a lifetime...to just pack up the Subaru with the dogs and the the coffee grinder and some clothes and just  head out to an unknown job/place/life. At the time, it seemed simply the thing I needed to do.

I've been here for almost 10 years now, and I still think that there is a "reason" I've been drawn to the Southwest, this barren, water starved pace so full of history and myth,  and a "reason" I've spent the last 10 years working in pediatric critical care, and a "reason" it's time to get back to writing.

More later about my inspirations and aspirations. It's hard to know where to start in this recreation of this blog, although I'd welcome  you to "follow' me and see where it goes.

I would leave you with this quote from Ursula LeGuin, and extraordinary writer of 'speculative fiction.

A story is, after all, and before everything else, dynamic: it starts Here, because it’s going There. Its life principle is the same as a river: to keep moving. Fast or slow, straight or erratic, headlong or meandering, but going, till it gets There. The ideas it expresses, the research it embodies, the timeless inspirations it may offer, are all subordinate to and part of that onward movement. The end itself may not be very important; it is the journey that counts. I don’t know much about “flow” states, but I know that the onward flow of a story is what carries a writer from the start to the end of it, along with the whole boatload of characters and ideas and knowledge and meaning — and carries the reader in the same boat.