So far…so good

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So far my trip has been AMAZING! (Note to self: All that anxiety was a waste of time.)

I did not find a hotel, at least not one with a reasonable price attached, so while in Boston I  stayed with the daughter of a good friend of mine–and felt as though I had met up with family. I spent Saturday walking all over Boston, both the Freedom Trail, and Harvard. On Sunday I took a commuter train to Salem so I could see Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthplace and The House of Seven Gables. (Little did I know I would be walking into Halloween Town.) I’ll tell you more when I finally reach the retreat center and get the pictures from my camera uploaded.

Thank you, thank you to all those people who told me, “Just go — it will be fine!”

 

 

Leaving on a jet plane…

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Tomorrow night I leave for Boston — two days walking around where Nathaniel Hawthorne once walked — and ten days at the Gell Center in upper state New York. Scary!

I worry about my daughters. Aren’t I completely crucial to their well-being? How will they survive without me?

I worry about my students. Yes, I’ll be “on-line” with them, but is that really enough? Don’t I HAVE to sit in my office for several hours every day being present with whatever little dramas I can cook up with them? (Am I not abandoning them?!)

Can I REALLY write for most of every day for ten days and segregate my coursework into a mere two or three hours?

Will I be able to travel comfortably with this cold? (Will my sinus-y head explode at 35,000 feet?)

Will I get lost in Boston? (Will I find a hotel?!)

Will it take a million hours to drive from Boston to Naples, New York, and back? Shouldn’t I have flown into Rochester?

The only advice that fits is that old chestnut: “Do it afraid.”

Here’s what I can control: take a novel to read on the plane; take a cleanish copy of my manuscript with me; take a map (buy a new one if that one gets lost); put one foot in front of the other and see what happens; listen to people; take my camera with me and take lots of pictures.

Oh, and whatever happens? Write it down.

The Fence

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I have been gifted this quarter with students who argue with me. Try writing every day, I suggest. “I can’t do that,” they say. Try using a little dialogue, let us hear this character’s voice, I suggest. “I never remember what people say.” I felt confused by this sentence, I tell them in workshop. “I meant for it to be confusing,” they patiently explain. I don’t think that’s a word, I point out. “It is now,” they say.

Rather than spending any additional energy today trying to get these students to let down their defenses, I wonder if maybe they’re here to remind me to let down my defenses? What am I resisting? What am I afraid to learn?

I want to remember today not merely to think outside the box, but to remember that there is no box.

Cold Meds

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Despite a sleepless night (couldn’t stop coughing), I decided I had to go to class today. Standing in the kitchen with my cold meds in my hand I said aloud, “If I take these I won’t be able to think straight in class. If I don’t take these, I’ll spread my germs to everyone.”

One of my teenagers said, “Take them. Your students will find it entertaining.”

This quote from my desk calendar felt appropriate:

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” -Henry Miller