Should I, should I not?

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I am challenging myself to create a small, private class this fall. I promised myself that I would begin planning it this week.

When I wanted to learn to play the piano, I bought a “teach yourself” book–but after the first time sitting down with it, I…basically…never again opened it. I needed a teacher, and that wise move was what helped me to create a practice that transformed forty years of avoiding the piano (I had lessons as a child), into being able to sit down and play without angst and with pleasure. I may never be a concert pianist (mad laughter here), but I play every day and consider it part of my spiritual practice. Worth it.

If you follow my blog, I’m guessing that there is something you’d like to write. (If you’re writing it, then carry on!) This class could be a wise step in your journey. And no matter where you find yourself–conceptualizing, constructing, completing–it would be a privilege to help you make forward progress.

I’m thinking that it will be 5 90-minute sessions, on Thursday evenings– beginning September 26. (Though nothing, as yet, is certain.)

If it sounds interesting, please drop me a line.

Bethany

p.s. Don’t forget my reading at Elliott Bay Books — coming up August 16!

 

Where You’ll Find Me

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On Friday, August 16, at 7 p.m.,
I will be reading from Body My House at Elliott Bay Book Company.
I’m thrilled (of course) and very very grateful to poet Ed Harkness and Elliott Bay Books for inviting me.

Wouldn’t it be lovely
if about 50 of my nearest and dearest friends could join us?

(Yes, it would!)

Bethany

 

Luminous and Compassionate: Good Goals

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How did my daughters get so old?

Today my twins–Pearl and Annie–those tiny babies that we brought home in 1993–turn 26.

I have been reading old notebooks that I scribbled in when they were much younger (playing soccer, needing rides to friends’ houses and to the swimming pool), and I found this passage from the introduction to Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop:

Poetry, in the end, is a spiritual endeavor. Though there is plenty of room to be playful and silly, there is much less room to be false, self-righteous, or small-minded. To write poetry is to perform an act of homage and celebration–even if one’s poems are full of rage, lamentation and despair. To write poetry of a higher order demands that we excise from our lives as much as we can that is petty and meretricious and that we open our hearts to the suffering of this world, imbuing our art with as luminous and compassionate a spirit as we can.

You could substitute parenting–and though I wish I could deny the moments of rage, lamentation and despair, there they are, inked across the pages of my notebooks. So, with my apologies to Kowit:

Parenting, in the end, is a spiritual endeavor. Though there is plenty of room to be playful and silly, there is much less room to be false, self-righteous, or small minded. To be a mother or a father is to perform an act of homage and celebration–even if one’s family life is sometimes buffeted by rage, lamentation and despair. To parent in this higher way demands that we excise from our lives as much as we can that is petty and meretricious and that we open our hearts to the suffering of this world, imbuing our interactions with our children with as luminous and compassionate a spirit as we can.

You could substitute teaching, or…anything. How can we, today, imbue our lives with a luminous and compassionate spirit?

My friend Louise says to her sons (and sometimes to me), “I’ve really enjoyed being on this bus ride with you.”

They are 26 now, and their baby sister will be 20 in 10 days. I can see them, still trying to figure out their lives, to become who they are. But I’m also a work in progress–still learning how to parent them. And I’m still working at that “luminous and compassionate” thing.

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.

-Stanley Kunitz

 

 

Writing the Labyrinth

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Some experiences seem beyond words. That’s how I’m feeling about my week in Chartres. And yes, I know it was a writing workshop, and that I should be perfectly at home, writing about it. But.

So I went to Chartres for a writing workshop with Christine Valters Paintner. I wasn’t expecting a  spiritual workshop focused on Chartres Cathedral and its nearly 1000 year old labyrinth (and its 2000 year history, pre-current cathedral). Even had I known that the labyrinth would be a central aspect of our week, I don’t think I could have fathomed how profoundly meaningful this location was going to become for me.

I’ve walked labyrinths before, and I have always found meaning in them. At a Courage to Teach retreat years back (my youngest daughter wasn’t yet in school, so I know it was at least 15 years ago), I encountered a lavender labyrinth and one of the reasons I remember the event is because I wrote a poem about a conversation I had with a friend while standing in that labyrinth. (Did we “walk it”? Did we know that was a thing?)

Thanks to my dear friend Janet, I attended an Episcopal Women’s retreat in 2015 and again (I think) in 2016, at St. Andrew’s House on Hood Canal, and walked their labyrinth. At the first retreat I learned about the history of labyrinths, even about Chartres, though I had still barely scratched the surface. At St. Andrew’s, the labyrinth is outdoors, in a wooded area, and it’s lined by white rocks and shells. I wrote about this labyrinth, too. (Not a successful poem, but one I put through numerous drafts.)

When my mom was in care, I sometimes stopped at a nearby church, St. Hugh’s,and walked their labyrinth. It was always comforting and peaceful. In Ireland I walked a number of stone circles, and at least one actual labyrinth, on my mom’s 85th birthday, as it happens (and, yes, tried to write about it).

This past April during Holy Week my church put down a canvas labyrinth in the sanctuary (apparently, they had done this before, without my clocking it), and I signed up to facilitate a 2-hour slot, and I walked it, of course.

So I am not unfamiliar with the labyrinth structure and spell and movement.

You can find labyrinths all over the world, by the way, by searching this link: https://labyrinthlocator.com/home.

If the other labyrinths were difficult to get into words, the labyrinth at Chartres is proving impossible.

But here I am, typing away and…trying.

I think the best experiences in our lives are exactly like this. I’ve never been able to do a great job, for instance, in writing about my daughters’ births, and I know I have much to do before I’m finished writing about the deaths of my parents. Perhaps some people can be glib about world hunger and climate change and homelessness and the current state of American politics…but I find them daunting. Does that mean I shouldn’t write about them, that I have nothing to say? Or that what I have to say doesn’t fall out of my pen, polished and perfect?

That a subject calls us to write about it and yet proves difficult to capture, is not a reason for us to avoid it. If anything, that’s how you know that you must keep approaching, keep circling, keep trying to put the words down.

Maybe it isn’t a blogpost. Maybe it’s a 30-page essay about tears and healing. Maybe it’s a book.

If you feel called to write it, no matter your conflicting feelings, then I want to encourage you. I am willing to bet that there’s someone out there who needs to hear it.

Me, for instance.