Now THAT'S More Like It

Just knowing that you were out there, semi-waiting for this, made me pay attention much more closely today than I otherwise would have.  Thanks for being there.  It is way less fun to have an adventure by yourself. I’ll tell you that much.

So today.  Today was a regular day for me.  Yay!  I met with someone too early this morning. I got my kids up and dressed and off to school. I worked.  I cleaned up around the house. I had a meeting at the kids’ school.  They came home and I was present for them. We looked over homework and snuggled a bit. We talked about their days. Without an ounce of recurrent anxiety.  Thank God for perspective that lasts.

Then I borrowed $2 cash for parking money from my 11-year-old son and I went to class.  Just drove there, like a regular person.  Didn’t even look in the mirror on my way out the door.  I saw someone I know standing outside my classroom and I was able to hug them and chat for a few minutes without puking or bursting into tears. 

If that was the end of the experience, it would have been sufficient for me.

But it wasn’t the end of the experience.  Today was full-on-workshop-chairs-in-a-circle-people-talking-too-much-or-not-enough-certainly-thinking-too-much-with-some-shining-nuggets-of-gold experience.  No sick professor.  None of God's hilarious jokes.  The pretty real deal.

There are the usual suspects in my workshop – the guy with the long fuzzy ponytail who probably writes science fiction and the little hipster, all the way down to his D&G glasses, who feels so much like a non-Jewish Schmidt I want to bring a douche bag jar to class with me next Tuesday.  And there’s the little girl who sat next to me with a random zebra printed duct tape cuff around her arm.  She licked the lid of her smoothy for about five minutes in the beginning of class and had a very hard time sitting still.  For those of you who know me and what I’m used to in a group setting, you’ll understand that this was distracting to me, to say the very least.

I sat very still and prayed and tried to keep my friend’s sage wisdom in mind. “Just don’t talk too much.  Nontraditional students always talk too much.”  I tried to be quiet inside and I only talked when Professor Canty asked me what I thought.  Which was quite often, I’ll have you know.

The day he called in sick, he’d passed out this story called I am the Bear by Wendy Brenner.  I adored it. It was exactly my kind of strange and beautiful, full of longing and the fundamental separateness.  It reminded me of when I was 12 and my mom took me to see The Princess Bride.  The movie ended and the credits rolled and I fell apart in her arms, my scrawny adolescent body wracked with sobs because Jason Glass would never love me.

The infants had a lot to say.  They talked about how it didn’t make any sense, how they couldn’t identify with it, how the language was trite and the phrases overused.  I thought they missed the point.  When I was asked what I thought, I told them the Jason Glass thing.  Then I listened to them talk some more and I tried to stay very present.

I wanted to be in my body because every once in a while, amidst the pretentious, intellectually arrogant bullshit, Kevin Canty would say something about writing. 

I read something recently about spiritual learning actually being remembering what we already know.  I felt like he was talking to my guts and all the other important parts that allow me to do what I do.  It was Anne Lamott and Stephen King sitting right in front of me talking with humor and passion about this thing we all love.  Stellar.  A couple times I tried to scribble some of it down.

What he said over and over was that if I don’t do it, it’s not going to get done.  If I’m not writing, I’m not a writer.  I can think about it all I want, but the life is in the doing.  I’m supposed to be writing like I eat and breathe and love. It’s meant to be one of the things that serves to sustain me.  And it’s not that I didn’t know this.  It’s that I haven’t practiced this in a very very very very very long time.  Too long.  It’s been one million years since I’ve gotten up every morning at 5:00 to meet my writing mind.  One million.  What I have needed is a kick in the ass.  And I’m not 100% sure, but I think that’s what I’ve gotten myself into here.

I’ve been trapping myself a lot lately.  Like this blog.  I’m roped into it in a way that my ego will most likely not let me out of.  (See there, I write “most likely” because I want to give myself a backdoor.)  It’s true though. There are a lot of people I want to share this experience with.  This is a convenient way to accomplish that.  I’ve been in the practice of documenting what happens to me in this arena. I like being back in that practice.  But I’ve really forced myself to be accountable to something bigger than my crazy brain.  Cause that thing lies.  It lets me talk myself out of things with ease.

So here I am, cornered.  I’ve got you on one side, with your texts and Facebook messages and phone calls, all wanting to know what’s happening to me on this journey. And I’ve got him on the other.  This unreal resource who tells me to come to him, that he wants to teach me, that that’s his purpose.  I have to produce another 31 pages for him this semester.  HAVE TO.  And 31 pages wasn’t much to me back in the good ol’ days when I was honoring that which has been gifted to me and cranking out five pages a day.  Now I’m rusty and lazy and scared. 

But I’ve got some beginnings. And Kevin Canty tells me I can bring him three one-page beginnings and we can see what we see.  He also tells me I better be getting my ass up at 5:00 to write.  So I think that’s what I’ll do.

He asked for volunteers to bring in short stories next week to workshop.  I raised my hand, like the Good Student I am.  YIKES!