Points of View

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“It would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place.”

-Neil Gaiman, from his introduction to “Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy,” collected in The View from the Cheap Seats (Morrow, 2016)

Today was my last instructional day with my motley crew of English 101 students. Despite my pervasive sense that I was really too busy this quarter to teach a class, I enjoyed this batch of students. They were fresh and enthusiastic. Many of them were still in high school; no one was older than 19. Although they were uniformly very young, they were truly an assortment. They came from all over Snohomish county and from all walks of life — athletes, gamers, science majors, artists — and even represented a small range of ethnic backgrounds. They were conservative and liberal, radical and undecided. We managed to avoid any knock-downs over politics by agreeing that it was better that we didn’t agree on everything. If we all agreed 100%, then we’d be living in a sci-fy world — we’d be clones, or robots. It would be bad.

Neil Gaiman would agree (on that at least), though he’d probably want to explore the subject further by writing a dystopian book about it.

I told my students that I didn’t care how they voted. What I was there to teach them was how to be informed, how to read closely and widely, how to think, and how to write — which can be described as how to have a voice and how to use that voice effectively.

(And while we’re talking about Neil Gaiman, here’s his advice for how to behave in tough times: http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address-2012.)

 

 

“And she started being a cat again…”

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My friend Susan recently told me an inspiring story, and she gave me permission to share it here.

Susan is an utterly sane cat lady. Bona fide. Not long ago a friend at a shelter called her to ask if she would take a cat that had been traumatized. “This cat is going to die if we don’t get her into a home,” Susan was told.

The kitty’s master had died, it seems, and his body had not been found for four weeks. Four weeks! Kitty (let’s call her “Kitty”) survived by drinking out of the toilet. She was emaciated and terrified. She was not improving.

Susan was already at her cat limit, but because her friend was a few cats beyond, she agreed to be a temporary way station. Kitty was put into a guest room, with a hiding place crafted out of boxes so that Susan could get access to her. She had all the food and water she needed. She did not have to worry about other cats (as they were shut out of the guest room), and she was given, to the best of Susan’s ability, just the right amount of affection. All she had to do was eat her catfood, drink water, and slowly get better. After a few days, Susan reports, “she started being a cat again.” Susan began to fear falling in love.

Fortunately a call came that day announcing that a permanent home had been found.

This is the part that fascinates me. They moved Kitty immediately (before she could get any more acclimated to Susan and her safe haven) with as many of her familiar objects (dishes, boxes, litter box, toys) as could be carted along to make her feel at home. And yet, despite human efforts, it was a set back. Kitty spent several days cowering in the bathroom beside the toilet — remember, drinking toilet water had saved her life! — and not acting like a cat at all.

The happy ending is that eventually Susan’s foster kitty did begin, again, to act like a cat, and to thrive. The shelter worker who had announced, “this cat needs a home” was right.

We are all like this cat. We didn’t have enough to eat in childhood, so we overeat. We worried about money in the house where we grew up, so we continue to fret about money. We are not easily talked out of these behaviors. We often are not willing even to examine them.

I used to not have enough time to write, and I continue to feel pressured and threatened, despite my early retirement and my amazing writing life. Yes, I do have my mom to keep an eye on, and my teenager. But I don’t have a lot else that absolutely demands my time. Even so, I feel as though I don’t have enough time. Isn’t this the definition of PTSD? I’m acting as though the old trauma — that inability to stand up for myself and my writing that I experienced years ago — is still true. No great, insurmountable power is standing over me and threatening to take my writing away. I have to say no to some things, of course. But how hard is that?

Your writing does not need a safe cage to protect it. It needs love and tenderness and compassion and affection. It needs understanding. It needs time and patience. It needs a home.

And it has all of these things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meandery

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Is meandery a word? Well, meandering. That’s my mind lately. I’ve been on a no-holds-barred quest since about mid-December to figure out how to work. And, like Tolkien’s wanderers, I’m not lost.

So, what do I mean by figuring out how to work? I know how to work, of course. My first paying job came at age ten when I went with my brother to the strawberry fields where my aunt Rayma was a field boss. (In truth, I ate more berries than I picked, but after a few summers, I could make $5 a day!) I started babysitting at age twelve, usually for my younger cousins. ($5 a night!)

And, unpaid work. I mucked barns and helped with hay. I weeded gardens and dusted furniture, folded clothes and made beds. Caring for a horse is work.

Homework.

And of course adult life was (was?) all about work — restaurants for me, to start with, then other jobs — typing class notes for $1 a page, tutoring, working as a bank teller. Eventually, teaching, which I was involved with for twenty-five years, and still am involved with, to one extent or another.

Rearing children is work. Keeping laundry caught up and a house clean is work. (I admit to being rather inept in all of these.)

And then…writing.

I have been fitting writing into the interstices for years — for decades! I’ve written in the very early morning, in spiral bound notebooks; I’ve written in my car (only when the car is stopped!); I’ve written during soccer practice and in between classes and beside hospital beds. I have written in many, many coffeeshops.

What I’m grappling with now, where my meandering is leading me now — is how to put writing on the front burner and really work at writing.

I think I can credit Author Magazine for introducing me to this quote:

“Have the courage to become who you are.”

                    -Nietzsche

That is what my meandering mind is working on now.

 

 

Photo of labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral:  ©Jill K H Geoffrion, Ph.D., www.jillgeoffrion.com

 

 

Poetic Medicine

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“Writing and reading poems is a way of seeing and naming where we have been, where we are and where we are going with our lives.” -John Fox

I saw this book, POETIC MEDICINE: THE HEALING ART OF POEM-MAKING, by John Fox, at a friend’s house. She hadn’t read it yet, but promised to forward her recommendation. I remember that day, that writing session, especially, because, as we were finishing, her front yard suddenly filled with all sorts of birds. I think it was a precursor of the weather that was sweeping in, but it had that feeling of an omen. When I spied Poetic Medicine on the shelf at Half-Price Books, I remembered those birds, and I bought it.

While visiting my mom over the last couple of days, I packed the book with me, and read in all the interstices. Some gems include the preface by Rachel Naomi Remen, and an abundance of poems from every where, including this one by Wendell Berry, which spoke directly to the emotions I’ve been dealing with these last few weeks. I started in September to work on a series of poems about my dad’s death, and wings seem to push their way into every poem. I’ve been trying to read between the lines of my drafts, and see what this is saying to me, what it’s saying that hasn’t already been said by so many others. And this book is helping. So, the poem:

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

-Wendell Berry