Welcome:
If I were reading these posts, especially back when I started studying, I would be rolling my eyes and skimming past all this hurrahdurah about “facing one’s pain” and “setting up a sustainability ritual” and “going easy into that dark night.” That younger me (about to have her first baby), and pissed at the zero pop teacher for her blah blah blah about depleting the resources of the planet, and getting sick-to-death of hopping around rooms for the incessant in utero hiccups (that baby was now upside-down and hiccuping in my…well…you get where) was impatient. That Jennifer was full of sorrows she couldn’t yet grasp while pretending she wasn’t. And, worse, she was myopically focused on this consuming desire to write about her life. She wanted to learn now. She wanted all knowledge of craft poured into her brain, or better, inserted like a chip into her hard drive.
That younger me, reading these posts would have thought, “GET TO THE POINT, LAUCK!”
Perhaps it is her spirit that has me starting up the plane and waving her in to take a seat behind me, while asking, “You want to know what this is really about? You want a taste of what you can do, as well as what it’s going to cost? You think you’re ready?” Only that Jennifer isn’t listening. She’s tucking her hair into her helmet and snapping her goggles into place. (Why she and I are in a bi-plane, I’m not sure, but work with me here). This Jennifer-of-old wants action!
“Let’s take this baby up already,” she yells over the thwap-thwap of the propeller “Let’s go.”
Okay then.
Since this is where we are in time anyway, let’s pause my/her quest for teaching and get to the story I wrote about the birth of my son which rests on top of another story from the past. This is a showing lesson. I’m going to show you by having done it and over the next few posts, we’ll pull it apart. So, the first thing when reading this story is to pay attention to this issue of two arcs. One, the outer and most obvious is having a baby. And two, the inner, less obvious one, which is, as Paley writes “bubbling beneath.”
Go back to this post, read again about the two arcs outer and inner, and when reading Show Me the Way, pay attention to both the outer and inner and when the two collide. I make it extraordinarily easy with space breaks and the use of scenes.
I’ll talk more next week about why I am sharing my work and the great benefits it offers all of us in this teaching/learning process. Finally, there are some notations on the pages that have to do with mapping scenes, but we’ll hold on to that for now. On Thursday, when I start teaching, we’ll get back to them.
See you then, Jennifer 🍎
Flying Lesson #1 ~ Pt. 1