A Few Things I Don’t Want to Forget

The dream where both of my parents are asleep in the same bed. The floor is littered with balled up tissues because someone has a cold, and my father’s eyes are fluttering like he’s trying to open them after 15 years shut. In the dream, the woman standing next to me grabs my head in her hands and blows hot wind into my ear, as if casting or breaking a spell.

Later, walking in the forest and along the water, and so many happy green ferns and flowers – huge hydrangeas and dahlias the size of dinner plates. And all those tiny, end of the summer blackberries along my friend’s road, and how the first one I picked was bitter, and I started to make up a story about being too late, but then the next one was sweet, and I understood it like a lesson.

And that comment Diane made that changed everything about the way I taught that weekend. She said that if her students felt seen and welcomed by her, then she’d done a good job, and how I immediately felt the truth in that. It’s the way the poet, Mark Nepo rises from his seat when a student enters the room, the way his face lights up when he sees one of us. It’s the comment Mark Dahbly told me 20 years ago when I began teaching for him, “they just want you to love them,” he said of the writing students, which has nothing to do with false praise, but simply being seen.

And how when the emphasis is on seeing and welcoming,

the noise around my worthiness as a teacher falls away, and the teaching doesn’t feel like teaching, but sharing, and it rolls out of me, unscripted and more true.

I’d come to Whidbey a couple of days early to spend time with Jen before our two-day workshop. But we never talked about the workshop. We talked about life and a million things, and we walked on soft pine needles through the forest, and she showed me the hand built house her parents had created 30 years ago by the edge of the Salish Sea. We walked the bridal path, a winding lane beneath the trees that had been cleared for her sister Kim’s wedding 26 years earlier, and Jen described how family and friends had lined the path to receive them.

As we wandered, we came to a soft feathered bed tucked amid the trees, surrounded by a canopy of fluttery fabric, where family and friends slept, facing the sea, listening to the owls and other night birds.

It was a magical place with his and her art studios, easels and looms, towering trees, grand fireplaces and long tables for family. I didn’t want to leave.

The evening before the workshop I said, “we better talk about the workshop,” and Jen said something about not liking to work that way. We decided to sleep on it, and in the morning Jen said she knew what she was going to teach, and I said “surprise me.”

And the day went on like that…

I woke up with vulnerability, so I led with that. I remembered something a friend had said years ago, that if you want to feel supported, start with where you are, name the thing you stand on.

I want to remember how Jen and I – who had only taught together twice – looked across the room at one another, and a silent understanding passed through us. It was the way we listened when the other spoke, becoming students to one another, and how we wove our work together that way.

It was the note I wrote myself the other day about a project I was working on. “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” I scrawled, and then underlined three times, which could seem like nothing because aren’t we always reminding ourselves that things don’t have to be perfect, but for me, it was the first time I really meant it.

I don’t want to forget that afternoon in the bookstore on Whidbey, and how most of the books on the shelves were face out instead of spine out – which was adorable – but also unusual because those shelves are real estate in the bookstore world. Facing a book out means you can’t have more books on the shelves. “But I found that people bought more books if they could see the cover,” the spry, white haired 85-year-old owner explained. “How did you realize that?” I asked, and she slapped her fanny and said, “by the seat of my pants!”

Which was also something that I did not want to forget.