Begin at the Beginning

“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?

 

 

 

 

Stop Making Sense

I wrote this little essay when my mother had been living in care for over a year. After four years in a care home, she has lost additional ground and is even more bedridden, and no longer speaking. I miss her loopy stories and the way her eyes used to brighten on seeing me, even when she didn’t know my name. So, I’ve decided to share this with you. Thanks for indulging me.

When I was in an MFA program for poetry, one of my professors chided me for my reliance on narrative, on story. “Stop making sense,” he advised.

My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2011. My father had recently died, and Mom managed okay for a couple of years—but only with a lot of support from me and my youngest sister. Eventually we called in the clan to help and we moved Mom from the farmhouse where she was born in 1932, the house where her parents raised 14 kids, the house where my mom and dad raised their five children.

In her new apartment, she was able to hold onto most of her independence. At her insistence, she kept driving. (I kept borrowing her car, thinking maybe she’d forget that she had it–not at all a stretch of the imagination–but no such luck.) She had a small kitchen, but took dinner with the other residents in the main building, usually. She loved it when I came and spent the night. We could still watch Monk reruns on her television; we could still talk, even if she looped through the same stories again and again.

In the summer of 2014, however, all that changed. A stroke paralyzed her left side and plunged her into a world that my former poetry professor would have admired. In short, my mother stopped making sense.

When Mom first moved into a skilled-nursing facility, my sister and I kept trying to make sense of things for her. We moved Mom’s bed from the middle of her room to the side, thinking her line of sight (from her right side, the neurologist had explained) would be better. Maybe she’d watch TV again. She could read, and sometimes pointed out words. She still wore her glasses. But she didn’t read. I tried reading aloud one of her Agatha Christie novels, and she stared at me, puzzled and alarmed. Then said, “You got all of that, from in there?” Just as with moving the bed, reading aloud to her seemed another of our relentless attempts to make sense of what didn’t make sense.

Yesterday, Mom wanted to tell me about two horses. Not the horses of my childhood, at least it didn’t seem so, but maybe her brother’s horses from her childhood. I asked questions, but the conversation had taken the bit in its teeth and Mom was intent on the poetry of it. When I looked out her window, I saw green trees and rain. When she looked, everything was in bloom. She seemed to be riding farther and farther away from me.

It’s only because it’s late in the day, one of Mom’s caregivers told me. She’ll be better in the morning.

But this morning, Mom doesn’t know me at all. She is telling a story, however, that somehow includes my name. Bethany did this, Bethany did that…it’s hard to follow. “I’m Bethany,” I tell her after a while, and her eyes focus on me, wide with surprise. “I thought you were Evelyn,” she says. Evelyn, her dark-eyed, dark-haired sister (I am blonde, like my father). Evelyn, her older sister, walking with a cane the last time I saw her, but still with her wits pretty much about her.

Mom does get a little better as I coax her to eat lunch. She knows me now, if only to scold me. “I’m the mother,” she says. “Stop telling me what to do.”

“What do you want me to do?” I ask her, feeling elated, as though my mother is back in the room and ready to take charge. But, no. Mom turns her big-eyed, little-girl expression on me again and says, “Will you call my mother and tell her where I am?”

From time to time I have tried to embrace the stop-making-sense school of poetry. I like poems of all kinds, after all, even the absurd ones that spin a kind of magic spell over a reader, transporting us to another world. Mom’s world.

Tonight–back home–I get up at midnight, after my young-adult children have finally abandoned the living room. I turn on the TV and find a 73-minute movie called “A Poet in New York.” That title is all I have to go on, but I start the movie and discover that it is about Dylan Thomas. I think of my favorite poetry professor, not the “stop making sense one,” but a professor who liked my story-heavy, narrative poems. I think of how he adored Thomas. He could do a fair impersonation of him, with a swaggering, Welsh accent. “When I was young and easy under the apple boughs.” There is frightfully little of Thomas’s poetry in this movie. Mostly there is whiskey and sex and poor Caitlin Thomas’s mad passion for Dylan (he pronounces her name Cat-lin and writes her letters telling her how much he misses fondling her breasts). The movie does not make a lot of sense, but that, in itself, makes a kind of sense to me. Tonight it does.

Mom, me, and my big brother Eric

Immediately after the stroke, while still in the hospital, Mom told me, “Bury me on the hill beside your father.” (My sister, hearing this exchange from the doorway, slapped her forehead and said, “Geez, I hadn’t thought of that!”) The slow slide into complete dependency—into nonsense—continues, though she no longer has to be reminded that she can’t get out of bed, or that she can’t walk. She no longer asks to be buried on the hillside.

In my mother’s non-narrative, non-linear mind, of course she can walk. She is a child, running through a field (and I picture the young Dylan Thomas running through a field of tall grass). Her brother’s horses spook and wheel and she runs after them. This is the world, too, of the poem. We want to make sense of it. But we might allow ourselves a little more rein to be in the non-sense. To take the poem’s hand, and run with it.

Can You Picture What It Looks Like?

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!

 

Naomi Shihab Nye’s Transfer

Thanks to Dave Bonta at the blog Via Negativa, and his twitter feed, I’ve been spending a little time over the last couple of days with other poetry bloggers. (It was a lovely surprise to find a bunch of retweets leading me to bethanyareid.com. Someone IS reading me!)

This infusion of enthusiasm came just in time. Maybe because I had just gotten my own poetry manuscript off to an editor, maybe because I spent the weekend awash in poetry, maybe because someone at Goodreads asked if the project wasn’t going to give me “poetry indigestion” — I was questioning my purpose. But, then, the tweet, the blogs, and the books themselves renewed me.

No indigestion here. It was my great pleasure to spend the day with Naomi Shihab Nye, one of my poetry heroes. I learned yesterday that she will be speaking in at WWU in Bellingham on April 28 and I immediately recruited some compatriots in the land of poetry and made our reservations.

I also — since I was at Village Books when I saw the poster — picked up a copy of her 2011 book, Transfer (another poetry book, Bethany? really?). Worth it.

Transfer is a a tribute to Shihab Nye’s father, Aziz Shihab, who was a journalist and died of kidney failure and heart complications in 2007. The book includes some of his own words. I loved every poem. I took a picture of one poem, “Last Wishes,” about a 95 year old woman, and sent it to my friend Carolynne who just threw a birthday party for a 90 year old neighbor. I read lines aloud to my daughter. I wrote down these lines in my poetry journal: “There’s a way not to be broken / that takes brokenness to find it” (“Cinco de Mayo”). She manages to write out of and about her experience as a Palestinian American, and at the same time to capture what crosses and transcends cultural boundaries and speaks directly to my human heart. Her father was always looking for a home in the world, she tells us. At the same time, he — and his daughter — seemed to have found that home, in poetry, in writing, in family and friends, in acts of radical kindness to strangers.

Her poem “Kindness” is in my 2015 post, which you can find here.  And here is a poem whose title came from her father’s notebooks:

When One Is So Far from Home, Life Is a Mix of Fact and Fiction 

No one should hold that against you.
It’s a means of survival.
Sometimes I thought my best talent was
taking a skinny story, adding wings and a tail.
Dressing it in a woolen Bedouin cloak
with stitching around the edges.
Putting a headdress on it.
Making a better picture.
Your mother got mad at me sometimes
for telling a story differently but it wasn’t a lie,
just a story in different clothes
with other things emphasized.
My own mother dressed up stories for 106 years
till that last winter she rode in her bed
like a boat, sitting up to sleep.
Maybe it’s our duty to be shaped
a hundred times by the same stories.
We think we’re telling them
but really they’re keeping us alive,
memory oxygen breathed out and in.