Walking down Berghofer’s this morning I experienced something of a ‘moment’, glancing down at my feet, shod in old walking boots, to discover them ably negotiating the badly eroded track. It came to me how clever and determined they were to overcome the many obstacles in their path–rock, sand, branch, cliff edge, gulley–and carry me safely along my chosen route. And that I seldom gave them a thought. Just presumed that they would do their job. Trusted that they would. Which started me thinking (naturally) of the need to trust in one’s own creative process. The process American writer, Annie Dillard so acutely describes in “The Writing Life”, a favourite book which I’m currently revisiting. And one in which I find on every page a dozen helpful/reassuring/amusing reflections on the travails of the writing life. A life in which, to quote Dillard: “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend…I hold its hand and hope it will get better.” Writing’s a tricky thing. As is trust. The degree, or lack of it, due in no small part to what life has thrown at you. And what you have managed to throw back. I was thinking such, heading home this morning, when I happened to bump into a neighbour out walking her dog. We stopped to chat, she asking after my writing, I inquiring after her health.  In her second remission from cancer, she said that she didn’t think she would have made it at all but for a deeply rooted belief in her ability to heal herself. A sincere trust. I thought of my own minor epiphany; and of how we’re all in the same boat. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, boot.