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If I were to sum up the question that has haunted and challenged, motivated and confounded me throughout my adult life, it would be this: What is my work?

The funny thing is that I've always asked the question within fairly narrow parameters, a slim window of possibility. It's not like I've been pondering brain surgery or construction management or choreography. I write. I teach. I love books and classrooms. I enjoy people and believe in the dignity of people's stories.

Years ago I wrote a mission statement that basically said I wanted to live a creative life and help others be creative.

So what's so hard? In some ways, work for me is not a question of content, but of form. In what way am I creative? In what way do I help others be creative? Where do I put my energy and attention?

For a long while I wrote poetry. I went off to distant cities and wooded cabins to write poetry. I also read poetry aloud in places. I taught poetry to kids and college students and teenagers and adult professionals who wanted an outlet for their voices. It was plenty of fun. I was broke.

Things shifted. So I started a job in which I wrote a lot -- feature stories about other people's work -- professors and researchers and program directors and, once in awhile, students. I met amazing people and got to be creative alongside photographers and designers and illustrators. But often I'd sit across a desk from someone with a list of questions and a tape recorder and I'd be acutely aware that they knew their work and I didn't. And I was there to tell about their work while not doing mine.

So in 2006 I took a trip, a long trip clear across the continent and back. I was following the journey my grandmother made 60 years earlier and recorded -- although sparsely -- in a small black journal. This was so clearly my work, to take this trip and write about it. It would pull together my research and interviewing, my writing and planning, my interest in women and travel and family and legacy. The trip was intense and surprising, magical and grueling. I lost a friendship. I gained seven pounds. I kept a blog and people I didn't even know read it.

Then I tried to write the book. How a book so obvious and appropriate could be so impossible is a topic for another day. I pushed, labored, wrote and rewrote, and as I danced around that project two things happened: I got engaged. And I landed a job I really, really wanted.

That was almost 3 1/2 years ago, around the time I last wrote in this blog. Since then I've gotten married and confirmed how much I love domestic life, my garden and my kitchen with its yellow checkerboard floor and red Le Creuset pots. I've been a few places, mostly ferny Northwest destinations but also on a recent cheese-and-bread-filled Paris journey. And I've been running a program called Free Minds with my full attention and full heart, a type of professional engagement I didn't know was possible for me. Oh, and I've written a few more drafts of the book.

So what is my work? I still find the question hard to answer simply. Perhaps it's because so many of these things are my work. Or because I am always journeying toward it. I return to this blog now because I think here those pieces of my life can be woven together into story. And I know I believe in story.