Where am I? What is this place?

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I’m a pretty busy person. Despite my teaching schedule this quarter, I’ve managed to get away for poetry weekends and readings. I’ve met friends for coffee or lunch (if they could drive to Everett!). But there’s something about my mother’s final days, about her death, about her burial and her memorial that has made me I feel as though I’m driving through a long tunnel. I’m aware that there’s a world “out there,” and yet to get through these days and weeks I’ve had to focus on staying in my lane and moving forward. There’s light, somewhere up ahead, but no scenery or detours or flashy billboards to entertain or distract me.

This morning (Friday, when I drafted this) I have been reading some poems — getting ready to do a Veteran’s Day poetry unit for my daughter’s fifth grade class — and this poem by D. H. Lawrence twice crossed my path. I think there’s a message for me here, but I’m not quite sure what it is.

The White Horse

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.

–D. H. Lawrence

What we know about tunnels is that they feel dark and endless, but they do end. Tunnels are thresholds. They lead us to what comes next. In her book, The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred, Christine Valters Paintner calls thresholds, “liminal times when the past season has come to a close but there is a profound unknowing of what comes next.” She continues:

“Thresholds are challenging because they demand that we step into the in-between place of letting go of what has been while awaiting what is still to come. When we are able to fully release our need to control the outcome, thresholds become rich and graced places of transformation. We can become something new when we have released the old faces we have been wearing, even it means not knowing quite who we are in the space between.”

I don’t know quite who I am just now. I want to stand still in this place, to be silent. I want to let all that is becoming, come.

 

“Progress, Not Perfection”

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This is what I’m thinking about this morning.

Every other month or so, for the last several months, I’ve been taking a Juice Plus challenge, called the Shred10, 10 days to supercharge my focus on my health.

I’ve been taking Juice Plus for YEARS, but always rather haphazardly. Last year I got in touch with my distributor and asked her to un-enroll me from the program. After chatting a while (this is a person I really like), I committed to giving it four months of really-taking-it-seriously. I started researching their research, I actually watched the videos my distributor is constantly sending me, and I signed up for my first Shred10.

Juice Plus is not a weight-loss program, by the way. It’s all about nutrition and good health. Yes, it does cost a little money. (But, really, what does it cost me NOT to pay attention to my health when I have parents who have suffered from heart disease and strokes?) Besides, with the Shred10 I’ve lost 12 pounds and kept them off!

Okay, so why the heck am I telling you this?

My husband is about to have hip replacement surgery (tomorrow). This has been the worst possible week for me to be changing up anything. This morning I ‘fessed up that I’m not doing a good job with most of the principles (no eating after 6 p.m., no gluten, no dairy, no coffee–not even close on that last one), but I have 6 days without any alcohol, and I have walked at least 30 minutes every day. (And I mean walking vigorously enough to get activity minutes on my Fitbit. Yesterday, despite my 4-hour trek there and back to see my mom, I managed to get 54 activity minutes!) I’ve also been pretty good about working in my Juice Plus shakes. So I reported in and said I intended to make today work.

Okay, Bethany, so why are you telling us this?

My distributor is more like a health coach, by the way, and what she said when I told her I was doing a crap job was this:

Sounds good to me Bethany! Love you’re making today count.

Progress not perfection. 

This is why I’m telling you this. Today is the only day you ever have. It is the only day you will ever have. Forgive whatever it is you did yesterday. If you want to write, write now. If you can’t write your whole book today (you can’t), if you can’t write for four, three, or one hour, if you can’t write for a half-hour, WRITE FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES.

The best time to write, is right now.

Cortney Davis’s Details of Flesh

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Cortney Davis‘s Details of Flesh has been on my shelf since it was first published by Calyx Books in 1997. A couple of times I’ve come close to giving it away, but on each occasion I thought twice. A nurse practitioner, Davis writes about issues that matter to me. Shouldn’t I reread her poems before letting them go?

Short answer, yes. As I read, I thought of the nurse’s aides who care for my mother, of the RN’s who change her catheter twice a month, of the nurses in hospitals who cared for my father after his open-heart surgery, and, ten years later, after his stroke, during his final week in the ICU. Davis often writes of children and young women, but the indignities of the flesh, the beauty of the flesh — these are omnipresent throughout the book. It takes a calling to do such work. Reading about it gives me heart for my own work.

The Nurse’s Task

When I pluck the suture
or pack the ulcer with gauze,
it becomes my task
to introduce rage to this body

that calls me nurse, nurse,
as if my hands were gold.
I cradle the body
like a mother rocks.

I lean close
and let it memorize my face.
Then, I begin.
First, something subtle.

A hasty scrape.
An accidental pinch
as if I might thrust needle
down to bone. The body

raises its hands in disbelief!
This is nothing. I thread veins
with catheters of fire,
I change morphine to milk.

When the body asks why?
I am silent. When the body
whines, I act bored
and turn away. If sleep comes

I sneak in and shake the body
until, angry and squinty-eyed,
it rises on its elbow
and stares at me, at last understanding

that the flesh is everything.
This is the body I love–the one
that laughs down death’s trumpet.
The one that escapes.

Cortney Davis, Details of Flesh (Calyx Books, 1997)

 

Writing — guilty pleasure or basic need?

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So here it is, January of the New Year. I have a few resolutions I’m working on, and someone suggested that I reframe why I set them, and that conversation got me thinking.

Then, at Writing Lab today, one of our writers admitted that she doesn’t write very much, even though she’d like to, because taking time for writing feels self-indulgent. Others chimed in. She wasn’t alone.

I kind of want to whine here. If, instead of writing, you are busy finding a cure for cancer, or homelessness, or world hunger, maybe you have a point. But, frankly, I don’t think any of us at the table today were doing anything stop-the-presses-newsworthy instead of writing.

And of course I’ve heard this from so many people over the years that it shouldn’t be jaw-dropping any longer. To illustrate, I have one friend who, in all the years I’ve known her has never been able to sustain a writing practice. It isn’t that she wouldn’t love to write; plus, she’s got the know-how — she has advanced degrees in writing. I asked her once why the heck she wasn’t writing, and she told me an amazing story about a teacher of hers who wrote despite having “crazy needy children.” Then she continued, “And I don’t want my children to go crazy.”

She was not trying to get a laugh; she was sincere. And although it seemed absolutely bizarre at the time, now that my friend has grandchildren and I’ve seen her in action for a number of years, I think I understand. She’s busy with work and keeping body and soul together, and when she does find any free time, she wants to spend it on her family.

For the record, I approve of people lavishing attention on the young’uns in their lives. But I don’t think that’s quite the problem here. You can substitute your non-negotiable here (unless it’s checking Facebook or watching Criminal Minds). At this point, I’m not even sure it’s about making the time to write (I’ve tried before to address how you might do that). So maybe, for you, like me with my New Year’s resolutions, it’s time to rethink your why. 

all pictures from pexels.com

And since we’re talking about writing here, which is — at least some of the time — about making stuff up, let’s talk about re-imagining why you want to write. (And I don’t mean so that you can pull down the big bucks. I mean why it’s important to you.) To get really really clear here, the belief that writing is self-indulgent is a belief, just like the belief that being a writer = crazy offspring is a belief. Not one of those beliefs like believing in God (let’s not mess with that) or not (or that). It’s not even a belief like your political beliefs, which I think we all know by now are troublesome enough.

No, this belief is simply something that you made up at some point in your life. Maybe at that point it helped you cope with some difficulty or other. Maybe it kept you alive.

But it’s just a belief, and you can replace it. Here are a few suggestions, all of which are true for me:

  • I write because writing is good for my brain. (This is also my piano lesson argument.)
  • I write because writing is healing. (See Louise DeSalvo.)
  • I write so I can be a better __________ (teacher/mom/pastor/committee member/friend).
  • I write to gain objectivity.
  • I write because I want ____________  (your students? your children? someone else?) to see that it’s possible to balance a busy, even over-full life with one’s passion.
  • I write so _____________ (my daughters) will see that having a passion is important.
  • I write to find out what matters to me.
  • I write because writing keeps me sane.
  • I write because writing gives me joy.

There must be other good reasons to write that you can gin up, and one may very well be to make a living (kudos for you), or bringing joy to others.

Writing is a guilty pleasure and a basic need. If you want to write, that’s a good enough reason to write.