Begin at the Beginning

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“Beginnings are times of grandiose dreams of escape, success, change, and possibilities. This is true not only for the protagonist of your story, but also for you.” –Martha Alderson, The Plot Whisperer (25)

Maybe you’ve heard this before, as I seem to see it everywhere lately:

The first step to getting out of prison is to know that you are in prison.

Substitute any situation you feel trapped in–your extra 30 pounds, your stack of unfilled blank notebooks that you thought would inspire you to write, the relationship that hurts more than it helps, your extremely unhelpful attitude about ______. Whatever your prison is, no amount of shovels or ladders or files-baked-into-cakes will get you out if you haven’t looked around and become 100% conscious of where you are and how you got there.

In a novel, the beginning is sometimes called “the ordinary world” (See Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.) It might take up as much as the first quarter of a novel, which is utterly necessary if readers are to understand the main character’s subsequent transformation.

But if there is to be a book, a story with not only a beginning but a middle and an end, the characters can’t stay where they are.

In your own life, too, the next step to beginning is re-imagine your present circumstances as the place you set out from, your launching pad, your sturdy ground on which to set your ladder, the dock where you untie your boat and push away.

That’s what I’m thinking about today. Where am I now? Where do I go next?

 

 

 

 

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)