I love a list. Not a To Do list. But a To BE list.

I also love word To Be lists. I call myself a word wanderer. For years my screensaver words have been: Playful, curious, awed, kind…

I landed on those words after thinking long and hard about what I value. What I want to be. What is at the essence of who I am and have always been. Those words feel true every time I see them, especially in my writing life. There is an ease to them. A familiarity. A knowing. All too often, however, I see those words crawling across my screen while I have taken a break from my writing to respond to life’s other calls, and I think, Am I being playful right now? Am I being curious right now? Am I being awed right now? Am I being kind right now? And by kind, I mean: self-kind.

Being kind to others comes easily to me. I am a writing retreat leader and teacher, after all. Most of my students/clients are scared. It’s my job to keep their word-wandering safe. Writing is challenging enough all on its own. I help them steer their course as safely and truly and kindly as I can. Self-kind, however? That’s a different story. Outwardly aimed playful, curious, awed come easily too. But self-playful? Self-curious? Self-awed? Again: a different story and a sometimes dusty one.

Ultimately I know how to be all of those things to myself, and have worked hard to re-know them and live them and to understand that as children, we know and accept the self. Then we lose this self-knowing along the way. I’ve spent the last decade word-wandering through a book about this trajectory in fits and starts, and finally found the essence of what I wanted to say. The book came out in April. It’s a book about wonder and how to return to it. To me, it’s one of the most important things I have written because it has the greatest capacity to help. It’s called The Wild Why: Stories and Teachings to Uncover Your Wonder.

In this year of book promotion, I’ve travelled, and continue to travel, all over the US. I’ve held bookstore events, taught workshops, given speeches, led Q&A’s, and have learned just how hungry people are to speak about this subject. How hungry I am for this subject. But when you use one word over and over, there is the danger of the edges rubbing off. So while I like to land in the word wonder, there are other words that awaken those edges and get me to think and feel. Playful, curious, awed, and kind are a few of them. But what else do I value and want to live by? Obviously love. Compassion. Forgiveness. Truth. But those are honed words, like wonder, for me.

There’s nothing wrong with a honed round strong word. Not at all. Those stone-words are the ones you keep in your pocket and hold in your hand when you need to know that there are things that never fail you.
They are not edged. You earned them. They hold you. The edge-words don’t hold you. They push and pull you. They threaten and teach you. Playful, curious, awed, kind beckon me to the edges that wonder has rounded out. And as I go into the second half of the year of book promotion, travelling for the next month, keeping my message and the sharing of it pure…I know I need to support my honed word with some new words to add to my To Be list. To live in wonder, I would like to be: playful, curious, awed, kind but what else?

Word wandering is like a walk in the woods. You never know what’s in the trees, or around the bend, or in a hole in the forest floor. But you do have to wander those “woods” to find them. I found my word on a sunny fall day on my front porch this October.

I was sitting with my friend, and her daughter, (also my friend) who is thirty-five, has Down Syndrome, is a horsewoman, and a Special Olympics silver and bronze medalist in downhill ski racing. She is the most present person I know and has lived all her life on a Montana horse ranch. The first time I saw her, she was five, lying underneath two wild rescue mustangs that were there for her mother to train. She was listening to her headphones, singing (loudly and with all her might) Under the Sea from The Little Mermaid. I was worried.

I quickly was told by all the other horse people, who knew her well, not to worry. “She knows what she’s up to. It’s good for the horses. She doesn’t live in fear. They accept her exactly as she is. She isn’t asking anything of them. They understand each other.” Her mother is also one of the most fearless people I know. So any chance to spend time with the two of them is always sacred and I had the perfect way to make it just that:

In anticipation of my first grandchild’s birth this December, I created an all-summer activity for loved ones—locals and visitors.

You stop by my house, I feed you, you create art for this little soul who will arrive around Christmas time. Words are encouraged. I kept a bucket of fabric pens on the outdoor dining table, and a long white banner made of triangular cloth flags spread out along the middle. It was like hanging out in the art room in grade school. Just sitting there making things, sometimes in silence, sometimes getting into deep conversations. Not needing to be a good or bad “artist.” Just a good human with a sweet intention for my grandson, daughter, and her husband.

A project like this brings out the best in people: What in the world would I draw on a small white triangle to honor a baby, as he grows and wonders about the world and the people who love him, giving him this string of talismans of sorts? I loved watching people noodle before they put pen to fabric. What to create? I knew this mother/daughter duo would “get” this show of love, so I invited them over. I had made many flags all summer, with my edged and honed words…but there were only a few triangles left and I wanted one more from me. What would it be? I decided it would be my next edged word.

Small digression: This project was such an interesting study in people’s relationship with the sacred through words and images, especially in honor of a new life. Most people took some time thinking about what they wanted to put on their flag. Many said, “Oh, I’m not creative,” but with a little encouragement, their pens moved. In the last fifteen years, quite by surprise but not really, my biggest mission has been to remind people that they’re creative. Every thought they have, every word that comes out of their mouth, every gesture, every decision…all acts of creativity. Little children don’t say, “I’m not creative.” People are told this, sadly, tragically, by someone else. And they believe it. The Wild Why is full of this message.

I believe that it’s because, at least in this culture, so often children are slotted. You’re a brain. You’re a jock. You’re pretty. You’re artsy… So that it’s only the latter that feel they can deem themselves “creative.” Which is such a travesty to me. We are all creative. Period.

Back to the story: I knew this mother/daughter duo would have none of that non-sense. They don’t live in slots. They live in the free zone of horses, feeding 20-40 head of them twice a day in Montana weather, just the two of them. They never complain. They are loved by many. They love many. They mean every word they say. They are intrinsically playful, curious, awed, and kind. Wonder incarnate. As we sat at the table, I told them about my list of words and that I wanted to add to it. “I want words that call me to Being, not Doing. That bring me to my edges and to the essence of myself.” And I told them that I wanted that word to be my last addition to the flag-banner.

I watched as the mother drew the word love four times, in her beautiful cursive, on her white flag triangle, and many tiny hearts and stars in red and pink. Then I watched as her daughter made a tick-tack-toe board in blue and green on her triangle. She stopped, smiled at me, churlishly as she tends to do, then filled the board with X’s and O’s, deliberately painting what my father called “a cat’s game.”

“So nobody loses!” she said, putting out her hands as if imploring the world to end its greed. She seemed like the perfect person to give me my new word.

I asked her, “What is a word to offer to a baby in this world of winning and losing?” I figured whatever word you offer a baby, you should also offer yourself.

And she said, without even thinking about it (which is the best way to find words, because it means that you allow them to find you instead): “Hope. Hope never fails, Laura Munson.”

And so that’s what I wrote on the last white triangle of my grandchild’s flag-banner. Because it’s true. “Hope never fails.”
Think about it. It’s total truth. What you hope for might not happen, but are you worse for the wear for living in it? I don’t think so. It can be exhausting to hold hope. Being a writer who wants her work to be published, requires miles of hope and delivers miles of heartache from miles of rejection. Whether you’re a writer or not, when you get a yes in life, your hope feels requited. But you know there will be more no, and when you get a no, if you’ve learned anything along the way, you understand that it doesn’t remove your ability to hope. You just re-direct your hope. Maybe that’s what life is: a constant re-directing of hope. What can I hope for? What can I create? What can I wonder? What can I love? These words, honed or edged, these values, these wonderings…indeed, prevail. No one and nothing can take them away from you.

Welcome to this world, my dear little grandson. May you wander well, word by word, find hope in it all, and always have a honed stone in your pocket.