I was so excited to find this in my email this morning, a review of my poetry book at the marvelous EIL…
and then the review itself — I’m blissed out! Thank you, Kathleen Kirk!
http://www.escapeintolife.com/blog/review-of-sparrow-by-bethany-reid/
About a month ago I was at Village Books with my daughter Annie, and I spied a copy of Pema Chodron‘s Taking the Leap. This is a book I’ve picked up multiple times, held in my hand, read the first few pages…and put back on the shelf. $14. Do I really need one more book?
Annie was in a hurry and had no patience for this. “Mom,” she said, “it’s called ‘Taking the Leap!’ Buy it!” So I did. Here’s the opening paragraph:
As human beings we have the potential to disentangle ourselves from old habits, and the capacity to love and care about each other. We have the capacity to wake up and live consciously, but, you may have noticed, we also have a strong inclination to stay asleep. It’s as if we are always at a crossroad, continuously choosing which way to go. Moment by moment we can choose to go toward further clarity and happiness or toward confusion and pain. (1)
All stuff I know. Right? “…the only way to experience our pain is to experience it fully” (28).
Whether you’re in the middle of a writing project or contemplating a big change in your life, the key is to not let your fear — and your aversion to that fear, your tendency to flinch away — dictate your actions. As someone else once told me, fear can come along for the ride, but he can’t drive the car.
From photobucket…though this looks exactly like our mongrel, Duke, from my childhood. A thoroughly mischievous dog (who soon disappeared from our menagerie), but full of joy.
As my husband has generously pointed out, the paperwork sent home with me the other day from the orthopedic visit specifies a lateral malleolus fracture. The x-ray report in my GHC inbox states:
1. OBLIQUE NONDISPLACED FRACTURE OF THE DISTAL FIBULA.
2. OSTEOCHONDRAL FRACTURE OF THE LATERAL TALAR DOME.
I have been doing some time-tripping. I’m rereading Kate Atkinson’s 2013 novel, Life After Life…which is a time-trip even the first time through. Our heroine, Ursula (“Little Bear,” as her father affectionately calls her), dies at birth — comes back, dies as a very young child in a swimming accident — comes back, dies in a fall from a roof, and so on. In some lives she is brutalized by the sort of people she cannot comprehend (her mean older brother’s suave yet oafish American college friend, for instance); she meets Adolf Hitler; in one life she marries a thoroughly detestable man; in another life she marries a flawed man (well, are there any other kind?), but eventually, every time, she gets a chance to do it differently. It’s a brutal book in its way. So brutal that I hesitate to recommend it to you. But maybe that’s just me talking. (My mother’s voice here: YOU NEED TO HAVE A THICKER SKIN!) Meanwhile, lyrical passages abound. I am in love with Ursula’s childhood home, Fox Corner, and astounded to learn (I thought I knew!) how dreadfully Londoners suffered during the blitz in WWII. In a couple incarnations, Ursula falls in love with a German man and spends the war in Berlin. It isn’t men, Ursula (and Atkinson) concludes, it’s war that’s evil.
Meanwhile, my daughter bought me a copy of About Time, a movie by Richard Curtis, starring Domhnall Gleeson as the main character, Tim, Rachel McAdams, and Bill Nighy. Plus other notables. (Including Lydia Wilson as Tim’s sister Kit Kat, a personal favorite.) As with Atkinson’s Fox Corner, I wanted to come home to this family and have tea with them. On the seashore in this case. The premise of About Time is that the men in this particular British family can, after a 21st birthday, travel in time. Bill Nighy, as the wise father, says that going after money or prestige has laid waste to some ancestors’ lives, and he can’t recommend it. Tim, wisely, decides that the mother ship is love.
There are a great many things in my life I would like to do over. I would like to be very, very careful as I walk down the wet grassy hill to the St. Andrews lodge on Sunday, March 9, 2014. But like the About Time characters, I would also like to go back and experience my children as small children again. I would take a walk with them. We would get a dog.
I have been thinking of something my friend Madelon Bolling once shared with me, I think way back in my dissertation days at the UW:
“Try to spend a little time every day imagining the unimaginable.”
I want to imagine taking a trip to the British Isles (including Ireland, where my friend Cherie Langlois snapped this photo)…I want to imagine going there with my husband and having a lovely time.
I want to imagine being fully mobile again! (Stupid ankle!)
I want to imagine finishing this damned novel and starting on the next big thing.
I want to imagine being the full-time writer I’ve dreamed of being almost my entire life.
I want to imagine owning a horse.
I want to stop wanting to imagine and actually imagine. This, in itself, will be a leap. (I’m so glad I noticed it.)
What do you imagine?