Your first big trip.

Tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day, and we have a dear friend coming over from Dublin for a couple of weeks. She's the same friend that hosted us when my grandmother took me across the sea for the first time at fourteen years old.

It's funny what sticks in your heart and mind on your first big trip, even when it's been a decade and a half (or longer!). Writerly note: Sometimes, when you're writing about memories, or you want to write about a particular person, place, experience, or situation, the best way to start is to make a bulleted list. It doesn't really matter how you say what you want to say; first, it just needs to get out on paper. Then you can go back and see what stands out, what needs filling in, what else the memories stir in you.

A bulleted list! Here we go - Ireland, 2002...

- How the eight hour plane ride felt like nothing and the airplane dinner tasted delicious

- Looking down upon squares upon squares upon squares of green from the sky

- The swooping sensation of being on the "wrong" side of the road in the car, as if I were leaning too far to the left and couldn't regain equilibrium...

- Walking into the house and looking around and going out to the garden and again, this feeling of unbalance, disbelief almost, that this was a house and a garden but on a piece of land completely different from everything and anyone else I knew.

- The shifting sky over Greystones Harbour - color and cold wind intermingled, and how the sun showed up at all different angles on the green hilltop straight ahead of us. The smooth stones I picked up from the beach, now in a box in my childhood bedroom.

- Irish butter, a thing of beauty, breakfast had no equal. And how they said "half eight," not "eight thirty."

- The bright colors of Powerscourt Gardens.

- Meeting friends and family of our hosts, who all came over for dinner one night, and feeling so special as the visitors from faraway.

- Going through at least four rolls of film in the first two days; we wouldn't get a digital camera until the next summer.

- Driving up into the hills of Wicklow to Glendalough, and the rushing water, the dark green of the eternal forest, standing small gazing up at ancient stone. I had only just seen The Fellowship of the Ring, and I hadn't read the books yet or paid much attention to the movie the first time around (ha!), but it reminded me of my surroundings; at the very heart of earth, something about the sacredness of creation that I could not truly understand. This land held secrets I couldn't find if I searched for years. How the winds on the lower lake seemed calm until a storm, complete with hail, rushed us to our car.

- Getting Chinese takeout, which felt so normal.

- Waterford and Wexford, we only went to Wexford, but for some reason the two are crystallized together in my mind. The hotel we stopped at on the way back from Wexford to eat lunch.

- After lunch, we stopped in Ferns - I don't know where it is, I just know that's its name - pulled over in the car because one of us spotted the ruins of a church in the midst of a green field, and a cemetery full of stones stained with age. It was cold and whipping wind, and I ran back towards the car from the far end of the stones, "Nana, Nana! I found the grave of a king!"

- A day out in Dublin: The peppermint foot scrub I bought because it seemed luxurious and smelled stingingly fresh, and I kept the empty tin in my bathroom drawer in Atlanta for at least two years afterward, and sometimes I would sniff it just to remember that I had actually been in Ireland. The name of the department store and restaurant, Kilkenny's, and how lemonade wasn't sweet, but strong. Cigarette smell floating. Buying Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the British version; it still has the Euro barcode on the back. Snapping photos of the colorful Georgian style front doors and - were we walking or driving? - standing in between two doors, a big beef of a man wearing a tight t-shirt shouted cheerily, "Eh, take me picture then!" The swans on the lake in the park where we stopped before dinner. Roly's Bistro, and the white clothed round table where we sat.

- That night, seeing Beauty and the Beast the musical at the Point Theatre on the River Liffey, and it was as if the movie had never even existed. The songs hit me all afresh, the musical interludes swept me up, the added numbers glorious in their depth and heat (example A). In those two hours, my eyes were starry, and I felt truly on the brink of something new - starting high school in the fall, thinking of all the boys I had ever liked, wondering what stories I could tell with pen and ink... What was next? What would happen?

- The last day: We saw the Book of Kells and the Long Room and I wrote postcards in smeary gel pens, half of which I never sent. Took a photo in front of the Molly Malone statue on Grafton Street. Went to the airport, and hugged our friends farewell. The plane wheels lifted off from ground of my ancestors and I thought, Ireland, my feet will touch your ground again.

On a late night six and a half years later, I remembered that moment, when rubber hit runway, carrying me to Erin once again, and I knew the green was there, even in the darkness.

The ties - and stories - that bind.

Is it okay to write about negative things in our lives? someone asked me the other day. It's a good question, and I wanted to give it a good answer.

On Friday night, I went to a workshop on making photo books, organized and presented by my friend Jiffy Page, who runs Pixorium here in Atlanta. She opened the evening by sharing this 2013 Bruce Feiler article from The New York Times. It's called "The Family Stories That Bind Us."

The essay is worth a read, but the main gist is that kids who grow up hearing their family's stories are better prepared to face challenges and stress down the line. "Developing a strong family narrative," Feiler calls it. It's about genealogy, but even more, it's about learning both the ups and the downs your family members have experienced. If the youngest generations gain a big picture of how families have built themselves up, emerged from hard times, leaned on each other for support, that gives children and teens the sense that they can do it too - and that they're part of something greater than themselves.

Learning both the ups and the downs - that's what stood out to me, in a world obsessed with showing only the best of itself on social media, what's on the surface. Sometimes families do that too. Probably every family does on at least one issue or one story. But I feel the depth of authenticity in this idea of family narratives, the doors of hope that honesty and vulnerability can open - this was hard, we didn't know if we would make it through, but here we are. And here you are. And you can make it, too.

And even when you're standing in a hospice room at a moment you thought would never come, you can shore up the goodness of decades, the sturdiness of story, the physical and spiritual presence of people, and understand that even though this is awful, this is sorrow and grief and wrong every way you slice it - there is an underpinning of good. Because you know those stories. Because you've created your own.

Is it okay to write about negative things in our lives? Whether we're simply journaling or writing for a larger audience, my overall answer is yes - with a couple of caveats that I've learned from books I've read (Tristine Rainer's Your Life as Story in particular) and my own writing teachers:

1. If you're writing for revenge, it's never going to get you anywhere good. And that's that.

2. Strive to tell the truth in love. This doesn't mean that you sweep something terrible under the rug. It means that you dig and explore, keep typing or scribbling, get to the heart of a tough matter, a tough person, a tough conversation - how you felt, what you did, and why. It doesn't mean that you're going to change your mind or perspective - but it might help you, and others, understand it a little bit better.

Acknowledging the difficult elements of our lives, whether it's in a piece of writing or a storytelling session around the dinner table, makes the good stand out even greater. Makes us realize that we've survived things we never thought we would survive, and come out on the other side. Gives the next generation the heart to be true to themselves, the understanding that hard times don't spell the end, the strength to construct their chapter in the ongoing story that binds them to history and, at the same time, encourages them to go out and make their own way.  

The Friday Five: Encouragement.

Truth: I always have a hard time coming up with a title for these posts, other than "The Friday Five" - I want to set them apart from each other, since of course, each week is different. But of course, items/happenings within the Friday Five are different from each other, so I sometimes get frustrated trying to come up with an all-encompassing title or theme. (I could just list them all in the headline, but then you wouldn't read the post, would you?)

Anyway, if I had to choose a theme for this week's F5, it would be encouragement. Encouraging weather, encouraging books, encouraging stories, encouraging people. Saving my life this week:

1. Warm weather. I'm starting to pull out my spring wardrobe and it's (*sings in Parks & Rec Jean-Ralphio voice*) the BESSSSSSSST. Spring just makes everything about life better.

2. Social media-less Sunday. I wrote about this earlier in the week, but have to state again that it was lovely. Let's see if it can happen again this weekend.

3. Still Writing by Dani Shapiro. Dani spoke at our Goddard College MFA summer residency last year, and I so enjoyed her. At the time, I was a little too caught up in my required reading to grab Still Writing, but boy am I loving it now. If you're a writer of any kind - and I mean even if you just journal or scribble or write really long Facebook posts - you should pick it up.

4. A writer-to-writer phone call. My friend Andrew called me up the other day so we could talk about my memoir manuscript that he's just finished reading. I met Andrew and his awesome wife seven (!) years ago when I interned at a marvelous church in Virginia. It changed my life in a lot of ways, and one has been the joy of continuing relationships that I first started to build in 2009. Since then, Andrew's become the pastor of a church and has published several books, both fiction and nonfiction. Check out his blog! Anyway, it was great to catch up and to bat around ideas on how to move forward in revising my manuscript and making it as rich as possible, for future readers and myself. Thanks, Andrew, for giving your time and energy to helping me on the journey.

5. Dinner with family and friends. My dad's best friend and his wife came into town yesterday and we all gathered around the table for takeouts of Community's finest - an aptly named bbq joint for the occasion - to laugh and reconnect and hear stories about the early years of their friendship. Top it all off with homemade banana pudding, and it did not take long to fall asleep last night.

Honorable mentions: Dinners with Sean, the Downton Abbey finale (so encouraging I half-expected/longed for Sybil to walk through the door at any moment), fun and laughter with coworkers, and the Game of Thrones season six trailer (kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of encouragement, except for the fact that it's starting soon and we'll get to see what happens! April 24, get here quick please.)

What sparks of light and encouragement have stood out for you this week?