Like a lot of writers I know, I love a challenge. Especially when you’re right in the middle of a pause in your own writing. Note that I didn’t say a writing pause – because I am still writing  – but there is a stillness to it, which means that the spark is, well…gone. So a challenge is good to get the old juices flowing.

Fiona Robyn has challenged writers to

write a post about your Most Beautiful Thing….You can post a photo of your most beautiful thing, a poem, a descriptive piece or whatever you like. Your thing can be an object, a person, a place, a memory or a philosophy/ideal (e.g. love).

Easy. Right? Well, not quite. I’ve started thinking what I might write about. I thought about beautiful things in my life:

the birth of a baby;

the astonishment on a boy’s face as he reads a word aloud – it’s magic, he cries;

the lick of lips tasting raspberry chocolate cake;

enjoying a newly discovered tea in the sun in a strange and beautiful city.

I thought about writing about these things. Or notions or versions of them. But there’s nothing. Nothing but the stereotypical (to paraphrase Paul Auster) nothing but a woman sitting alone in a room and writing a book. Except I’m not even trying to write a book; I’m just hoping for a few lines!

Orange peel, mint, honey: 'grandad' tea in Krakow, Poland

But pause for a moment and think about this nothingness. For in this moment what I am allowing myself to experience is something precious: permission to witness nothing, be in a moment of nothingness. I have a burning in my stomach – like I did when I awoke at 4am last week and wrote (without any memory of writing) five pages of a monologue. This feeling is growing; there’s more of that monologue coming.

And this wouldn’t be happening if I hadn’t stopped, looked at that blank page, then looked at the blank screen. So, a week before the actual challenge, and I am thinking that my most beautiful thing is

listening to the silence inside