Why do I blog?

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Two of my girls dragged me to our discount theater last night to see A Simple Favor. It stars Anna Kendrick–they fell in love with her during her Pitch Perfect days–and my youngest daughter has seen A Simple Favor five times. They said I had to see it.

It was a strange movie, and strangely entertaining.

But among other, jazzier plot points, Kendrick’s character has a vlog that goes viral and hits its one-millionth follower.

This gave me pause. A million followers?

I have 40 followers.

I woke up this morning, thinking I should delete my blog and go do other things (which I largely do, anyway). And then I remembered a video I saw recently about cows, about (specifically) how hard it is to impress a cow. (If I could find it, I’d post a link here…but maybe someone deleted the video when they realized the cows wouldn’t care?)

In the interest of full disclosure, the cow video got me because I’ve been writing a poem about cows.

But, more to the point, I thought it was time to revisit “why I blog,” and why I will probably keep blogging. So–

  1. I started blogging as a kind of commonplace book, a place to post quotations and links that I wanted to be able to find again.
  2. I started blogging because writing has taught me so much, and I thought I would enjoy sharing what I’ve learned with my writer friends.
  3. A few people–a cousin and my friend Janet B., for two examples–wanted me to share poems (this, when I was writing a poem a day), and it seemed a blog would be a good way to do that.
  4. Once I started blogging I discovered that–for whatever reason–I don’t get all uptight and perfection-y about writing blogposts. I just type stuff and go over it a couple times for errors and post. It reminds me of showing up to teach at the college–ready or not, here it is.
  5. For a new reason, I recently made a commitment to blog about my journey through The Circle, and I’ve yet to carry out that commitment.

And, just for good measure, here’s a quote that I came across today that definitely applies:

You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.  -ANTON CHEKHOV (found on Advice to Writers)

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.

 

Writing THE CIRCLE

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If you follow my blog, then you already know that I read a lot of books. I love sharing my books with friends and passing them along to the exact right person. But every so often, I come across a book that is so wonderful, I want to buy copies for all my friends.

One of those books is THE CIRCLE, by Laura Day.

Laura Day has written a number of successful books, including PRACTICAL INTUITION, WELCOME TO YOUR CRISIS, and HOW TO RULE THE WORLD FROM YOUR COUCH. But THE CIRCLE is my go-to favorite. I’ve read it several times, and I think I have an effective, “anti-woo woo” way to share it with you.

To my mind, THE CIRCLE isn’t necessarily “woo woo” (what do we mean by that? Spiritual? And what would be wrong with spiritual?), unless you want it to be. In the Prologue, Day reassures readers that The Circle is “not in conflict with any religious or spiritual beliefs,” and my experience has borne this out. You could understand it as an Irish Caim, a blessing circle. But it is not magic, and it is not about any realm of being other than the one we live in right now.

As Day explains, you have probably walked the circle before. My most powerful past experience of it came when my husband, Bruce, had a major health crisis. He was already in the hospital, and had undergone successful surgery. It was Mother’s Day and our daughters were 8, 8, and 2. My parents had been helping out, and planned to go home later that day, as Bruce was scheduled to be released. I had everything under control (hah!)—I had even worked out my teaching schedule so that I would miss only one day of classes! Long story short, my mother got up that Sunday morning and cancelled everything I had orchestrated for my Mother’s Day. She told me that I was to go to the hospital, by myself, and see Bruce.

Long story short, the supervising nurse met me as I got out of the elevator. My husband was hallucinating, he had ripped out his stitches and his catheter, and done some other damage to himself, and he was headed back into surgery.

If I wanted this introduction to be twice as long, I could tell you the astounding number of coincidences (besides my mother’s initial insight) that then ensued–including a woman I scarcely knew showing up at the hospital to take me to lunch because it was Mother’s Day and she thought it would be nice to do something for me. For the next ten days, I lived inside a circle where the right conversations, unexpected help, and loving encouragement flowed to me.

Here’s how Laura Day has helped me to understand this personal story.

Sometimes, often in a crisis, we get intensely focused on what we need. It’s kind of like the way radio waves are all around us, all the time, but we don’t always have a receiver tuned in to them. When my husband had his health crisis, I tuned in.

THE CIRCLE is about creativity; specifically, it is about living and creating consciously.  And it can help you to tune in to what you
really really really want to create in your life.

Day has divided the journey into nine parts, with three main headings: Initiation, Apprenticeship, and Mastery. My favorite subsections might be ritual and synchronicity, and these are the parts I always incorporate into my own classes, even my intro-to-composition classes that I used to teach at my college. (Now, of course, I’m sharing all of it!)

I hope I’ve intrigued you with this introduction. Over the next several weeks I’ll be writing my way through The Circle and I’d love it if you could join me.

Of course I recommend purchasing Laura’s book, but the posts will be enough to move you all the way through what I am calling WRITING THE CIRCLE.

In order to get started, all you have to do is subscribe to my blog. (See the link below.) If you want to know a little more, three of the posts will be available on the blog to everyone, and you can read the first one by clicking here.

Can You Picture What It Looks Like?

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If you’re following this blog, there must be a part of you that wants to write, or wants to write more. 

It’s hard to go from a wish to a new reality, but it is possible.

Several years ago, I had not only a full-time teaching job, but also a houseful of kids (my twins were probably about 16 and always had friends over; my youngest would have been 10, and ditto). And, somehow, to my great dismay, I was 40 pounds overweight. I wished–fervently–that I could have back my old, lean and fit self. But I felt completely helpless to change. I was too busy to do anything differently. Wasn’t I?

In the lunchroom at the college one day, I wondered aloud if I was going to gain 5 or 10 pounds a year every year until …what? … until I could no longer move?

I am not going to bore you with all the details of how I changed that belief, and how long it took (not in this blog post, anyway), but I do want to share a crucial first step.

It started with a dream.

And I mean a real, night-time, epic dream. In this dream I wasn’t younger, not some old “ideal” self. I was my age at the time (50-something), and it was by no means a fantasy self either–no bikinis here. But in this dream I was thin, and I was packing a suitcase and preparing to go somewhere on an adventure.

When I woke up, I did not think, “Oh, that was nice. If only!” Rather, I felt as though I had been hanging out with MY REAL SELF. I knew that the woman I saw in the dream was ME. Real me; not pudgy, too-busy-to-exercise me. I shifted–I began to think of myself as a healthy person. I started to make different choices–nothing big (I still didn’t have a lot of time on my hands), but small, daily choices. What would thin/fit Bethany do?

In the more than five years since then, I have not forgotten that dream. For me this little story demonstrates something that I think we all already know–at some level–about goal-setting. It starts with a vision–an image that goes way beyond all the advertising we’re bombarded with. It’s about making a conscious choice (out of the many choices) and imagining it fully.

 Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” –Albert Einstein

Of course it doesn’t have to come to you like a vision or a night-time dream, but it’s pretty clear to me that my dream triggered for me a shift in who I pictured myself to be.

I’m reminded of my dear poetry professor, Nelson Bentley, who said over and over again to his eager little poets: “You must fully imagine!” That’s exactly what I did. I’m reminded, too, of a line we used back in my restaurant days to get ourselves pumped up:  If you can conceive it, you can achieve it.

Mary Morrissey, a motivational coach I listen to, talks about this at length: Everything is created twice. Before the chair you are sitting in came into being, someone imagined it.

If you want to change something–or to reset something (like resetting my personal image to my more energetic self)–it will help you so much if you can PICTURE what it is you want.

This is your writing assignment today.

Your job is to really really picture what success will look like for your writing. It does not have to be big; in fact, there is good reason to make it small. My go-to mantra for writing, when my kids were young, was simply, “I write every day,” which I then had to do to make true. Five minutes was enough to make it so.

In this assignment, be POSITIVE and CLEAR. In my dream, for instance, I was holding a pair of size 4 shorts, ready to put them in a suitcase. I looked at them and thought, Should I pack these? Can I really fit into them? And dream-self said, YES.

For the record, you can do this and still remain the anti-affirmation, anti-woo-woo person you are. I have no interest whatsoever in being 20 again, or looking 20 (or 40, for that matter). When I was working on my bigger WHY for getting fit, I wasn’t looking up plastic surgeons. I was thinking of someone a little like my Aunt Aronda, my mother’s older sister, who even at 94 was still a sharp wit, good with a jigsaw puzzle, still reading books (if not writing them) and if not as fit as I want to be at that age, pretty dang close.

I also thought of the poet Stanley Kunitz, who was still giving poetry readings at age 100.

Do I have control over how long I live? No, I don’t. But do I have control over what I do today–and, right now? Yeah, pretty much.

Can you come up with a solid, tangible picture of what you want? (Is it a magazine publication? A finished and printed poem you can share at your next lunch with a friend? A blog? A book? You, standing in front of an audience? You, being interviewed on PBS? Your future granddaughter reading the book that you wrote about your year in Tibet?)

What does your writing dream look like?

Write that. I’d love to hear about it!