Author: Margaret Bendet (Page 4 of 6)

I’m Margaret Bendet. I left a journalism career to live in a spiritual community and, after several decades, left that community to become, once again, a professional writer. That’s the nature of my re-entry. The question is, how to do it gracefully. How to return while remembering where I’ve been and why I was there.

No False Spring

March 17, 2015 / Margaret Bendet

Spring snuck up on me. It was beautiful for a week in early February, and then I looked around and the whole world was in bloom. At first, I didn’t trust it. Twenty years on the East Coast taught me not to have confidence in an early spring. There, the weather would warm for a few beautiful days, maybe a week, in March, and my body, which had become acclimatized to the inhuman cold of Northeast winters, would begin to relax. My shoulders would widen and lower, my chest would expand. Breathing would become easier; walking less tentative.

And just when I felt safe, winter would blast back—and then it seemed worse, much worse, than it had before that sweet respite of the false spring.

But in this time and in this place, it was not a false spring. There was no killing frost to confuse the daffodils, no final blanket of snow. A month on, it’s still beautiful on Whidbey Island. Last week I planted lettuce. Without thinking, I told a friend in New York that, and she almost wept.

Spring means lighter clothes, lighter colors, more light altogether; it means being outside more; it means longer walks; it means planting—and because my birthday is in the spring, for me it is also a time of personal rebirth.

It’s fortuitous that spring started earlier this year, because when my birthday comes next month, I will be heading into a new decade, the big seven-oh—an age that I have never thought of in any regard except as the beginning of “the final years.” Actually, I’d thought that about fifty and sixty as well, but these milestones I managed to go through with no sense of true change. This time, I know there should be changes, there must be changes—there are changes. Any point in life can be our final year, final moment, but if death hasn’t come by the time you’re seventy, at least by then you know it’s fairly close. And if not death, then serious aging—the deterioration of body and mind—and these are certainties that, if you’re prudent, you acknowledge and anticipate.

A few weeks ago a friend suggested I dye my white hair, and I had to laugh. What would be the point of it? Do I want to fool people? To kid myself?

And perhaps that is the change I’m undergoing. I have no energy left for making a show. If something isn’t either fun or nourishing, if it doesn’t contribute to my well-being or to someone else’s, why bother with it? At this point, dying my hair would be like setting up a false spring in my own life.

Of course, the winter of our years has its own compensations, and the meaning of any milestone is what we ourselves give to it. Someone has just reminded me of what George Bernard Shaw, then ninety, said to a friend at his seventieth birthday celebration—“Oh, to be seventy again!”

Stepping Out

January 27, 2015 / Margaret Bendet

In the first week of the year, I understood that it was time to let go of my part-time job at the library—a fifteen-hour-a-week ballast, working with friends and surrounded by wonderful books and movies. What could be more pleasant! Then I wondered, If given the chance, what else would I fill this time with?

And I was being given the chance. I saw that I could, indeed, support myself with work that I find more than just pleasant, work for which I feel passion. I could focus on telling my stories—and on helping others tell theirs!

The day after this contemplation, I gave notice at the library, and two weeks later I dispersed chocolates, hugged my colleagues, and left. It isn’t exactly like retiring, but there is a wonderful unanchored feeling to time right now.

This weekend I went to the opening of a pop art exhibit at the Museo Gallery in Langley—and loved looking at all of the creative things that local artists are doing in the name of tin cans and soup labels. They’re having fun with their art! That was inspiring, and so was talking with a friend about her accomplished high school–age daughter.

This teenager was the down the street that evening, singing at another gallery—and planning a juried performance on the saxophone in a few weeks’ time and an exhibit of paintings this spring. Four years ago this same girl was a concert-ready violinist and two years ago she won an island-wide writing competition. What will this astonishing young virtuoso do next! “I have no idea,” her mother said. “Katyrose is always a surprise.”

The most dramatic symbol for creative potential was what I saw in the street when I left the gallery—a bearded man in a ponytail, wearing pink and twirling fire in the air around him. “How long have you been doing that?” I asked him afterward. “A couple of weeks,” he said. “I saw it on YouTube and picked it up.” My jaw dropped, and he laughed. “I’m kidding you.” He handed me his card: he was Matt “Madhat” Hoar. “I’ve been doing this for fourteen years,” he said, “but if you wanted to, you could learn it in no time. I’ve had people do professional shows after two or three days of lessons.”

Who knows; perhaps I will. (The video is courtesy of a gracious bystander, Jenna Ashley.)

At the new year I always feel the potential for change, but with 2015 the possibility seems momentous. This is a year in which I’ll turn seventy, a year in which a memoir I’ve been working on for more than a decade will be published.

My meditation teacher once spoke of the new year as a gift we’re given, in the way a sculptor might be given a huge block of some precious substance—marble or gold—to work with. This gift of time is our raw material, and we’re asked to create a masterpiece with it. What will this year become in our hands? What will we make of this gift of time?

Now, more than ever, I see that it’s up to me.

The Crash

January 11, 2015 / Margaret Bendet

It’s been many weeks since I’ve posted, but I do have an excuse. Over the holidays I was traumatized by my Mac Mini. First, it was processing at a glacial speed, which was bad, and when I took it in to be checked (at an Apple Store, in a packed mall, a week before Christmas), I was told that my hard drive had crashed. “That’s good,” the young man in the bright red T-shirt told me, and in a way it was. The hard drive is major, but it isn’t an outrageously expensive fix.

So, I left the computer in the shop for organ replacement, along with the nifty little external backup drive, which I had remembered to bring with me. After the new hard drive was in, the folks at Apple would reinstall the software and files from the backup, and I would be up and running again. They said they’d call within forty-eight hours.

After about sixty hours, I called them. “I was going to call you,” the guy said. “There was nothing on your backup device.” I hadn’t hooked it up correctly to the computer; it turned out there was much more involved than just plugging it in.

So, went back to this bustling mall on the Sunday before Christmas to pick up a repaired computer with nothing on it.

I did have a plan B. Carbonite was one of the first in-the-clouds backup systems, and I had been subscribing, by auto-renewal so I didn’t forget. Only two months earlier, my credit card had expired and Carbonite had called for the new numbers. I paused for a moment then. Did I need this second backup? Yes, yes, yes, I did, and fortunately I knew it at the time.

The day after I got the computer home, the stored files began streaming… trickling… drib-drip-dripping into my computer.

I spent a lot of time talking with Carbonite’s friendly technical support crew, and twice I got to speak to people in the second echelon. The first time I did, we scrapped the first day and a half of downloads and restarted the process, routing the files into one discrete directory on my desktop. They were streaming again.

By the next morning, they were back to a drip. I saw how many files were left, how it was taking three minutes per file… and I called technical support. “At this rate,” I said, “it’s going to take another twenty-three days to download my files.”

That was the second time they sent me to the upper echelon. This young man told me that my Internet connection was slow.

I asked him, “What does that mean, ‘slow’?”

“Here, where I am, and even at home on my own computer, I can download ninety-four megabytes a second,” he told me. “You’re downloading two.”

He, of course, lives in a city and has huge cables, while I, a country girl, was downloading my entire computer through a telephone line.

Whidbey Telecom is a divine company. They fixed it so that I could increase my Internet access package for the time it took me to download my computer, and they also delivered the improved equipment on that very afternoon—Christmas Eve!—and let me keep it after I lowered my access.

They’re all great, actually—the brilliant techies at Apple and Carbonite and Whidbey Tel.

I got it all back on Christmas morning, and I knew it was a gift. But I haven’t felt the same about my computer since. The magic is gone.

What was horrifying about the experience—and it was horrifying—was seeing how much I depend on this technology for support in my work, information about my world, connection to my friends, entertainment…and how little I understand about how it all functions and how to use it intelligently.

Five Reasons to Write Memoir

November 30, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Memoir has been maligned as navel-gazing, faux fiction, self-aggrandizement, an exercise in me-me-me. The criticism is spurious. If you’re not interested in a story, don’t read it—but if that story happened to you, if it’s lodged in your memory, then there are at least five good reasons for you to write it down.

It’s YOUR life. You are the star of your own life story. You could even say it’s all happening for your benefit. So many of us spend our discretionary time entertained by other people’s stories. Books, movies, TV, even local gossip are all composed of other people’s stories, real or imaginary. We spend our time with these stories in order to avoid engaging with the one story we need to understand, our own. Writing memoir is a way to explore what happened in your life, and why, and what you might learn from it.
You have a unique perspective. In one of my memoir classes, a woman in her 50s wrote about a wedding photo in which she, a young bride walking down the aisle on her father’s arm, mugs the camera with her mouth open in the shape of a perfect “O.” She wrote, “Dad had just whispered to me, ‘It’s not too late.’” The woman went through with the wedding… and, later, the divorce and, much later, a shift in gender orientation that gave her story its full piquancy—a flavor only she was in a position to truly appreciate.
Your stories can disappear. They already have. This is one of the reasons people give for not writing memoir in the first place. They say, “How can I write about what I can’t remember?” You can’t. But you can write about what you do remember. There is a great deal that has stayed with you, and this usually involves the people, events, places that mean the most to you. Write these stories before you lose them.
There is more to glean. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” That’s strong language. Socrates isn’t saying it’s better to contemplate than not; he’s saying that if we don’t look at our lives, we might as well not live them at all. The process of looking seems itself to be the key, because no matter how self-aware we may be, there is always more to learn.
The focus itself is beneficial. This might mean “medicinal,” “expansive,” “meditative”…many things. I spent the last year rewriting a memoir, and during this time I noticed that I was observing my life today with greater awareness. It’s as if more of me were present because I was actively delving into parts of my past.

There are multiple reasons not to write memoir, but the main one, I think, is not knowing where to start. This you can put aside by making a list. Ask yourself what matters most to you in your life, and write down the topics, names, events one by one, as they come up. Then take one item from that list, close your eyes, and ask yourself, What do I want to say…? Start writing.

Write It Down

November 17, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

At the end of an hour-long memoir coaching session, a woman seeking help to tell her unique personal story asked if she could record our next conversation. “There were pearls in this,” she said. “I didn’t get them all.” I told her I would record them in this blog and send her a link.

There is some basic guidance I’ve discovered in a lifetime of writing, and this is what I like to share with anyone whose fingers are poised, motionless, over a keyboard or a blank piece of paper.

When you aren’t sure what write about next, make a list. Ask yourself what topics matter most to you. List them. Or, if it’s a particular time frame you need to cover, make a list of the events—inner and outer—that come to mind. You may have major writer’s block, but you can always write a list. And once you have the list…
Pick one item as a place to begin writing. It may be the first or the first in a chronology, it may be the most intriguing, or perhaps it’s the one you find most annoying… Whatever your criterion turns out to be, if one item on the list presents itself as the place to begin, that’s where you’re to begin writing.
Close your eyes, bring that event (topic, issue, question) to mind, and ask yourself, Where should I begin? Whatever comes up, write it down. If it’s an image, describe it. If it’s a conversation, record it. If it’s a historical perspective, explain it.

In this first session, it’s often useful to write what I like to call a blurt. Webster’s definition for blurt is “to say something suddenly and without thinking about how people will react.” Express that verb as an exercise, and you have yourself writing for a length of time without thinking about what you’re writing. You do this by not stopping. You write down whatever comes up, and you don’t stop writing. I repeat, you do not stop writing.

It’s quite a discipline, this. In memoir writing classes, I have people write blurts for no longer than five minutes at a time. What comes up is almost always surprising and often glorious. Actually, this is what I call writing: listening to the font of creative inspiration coming up from inside yourself and capturing that—as best you can—in words.

Accept the words that come. We all live with an inner critic, masquerading as the Voice of Reason within us. I think this inner critic has value at times, but what I’m certain of is that it has no value when you’re writing. You can listen to this Voice of Reason when you go over a piece later, after you’ve done the writing, but while you’re actually writing it, ignore any criticism that may come up—that will come up, if you’re like most people. Just blot out That’s a really stupid way of putting it… Nobody’s interested in this much detail… He’s going to be furious about this… and keep on writing.

Most first drafts sound stupid as you write them. Readers are interested in the details—especially when these are details that come up spontaneously from the deeper recesses of a writer’s mind. And you don’t need to be concerned about anyone’s reaction to what you’re writing now; no one else need ever see it.

Writing is not like speaking. Once you have given physical, auditory voice to a thought, it lasts forever. If someone has heard you say this thing, then it can live for an eternity in that person’s mind. But even as pure sound itself, the vibrations of that sound never truly die; they just keep on reverberating in the universe, moving ever outward. I think twice before saying something, anything.

But when you write something down, you can cross it out later. You can delete it. By then you will have had a chance to see where that thought led you, explore the terrain, and decide if it’s a direction you want to take. This is a great luxury, a boon to self-exploration. By all means, give it to yourself.

Nutritional Overhaul

October 30, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

I’ve long been wary of diets that forbid that trinity of culinary pleasure—dairy, wheat, sugar. Physical pain is a powerful incentive for change, but can changing your diet truly provide a cure? Then a friend with arthritis gave a glowing account of her own nutritional overhaul, an approach called The Abascal Way.

I remembered that a book by that very name had been sitting in the library, on a shelf in my line of vision for at least a month. The next time I was in the library, I found this book, took it home, and put it on my dining room table, where it sat for another week and a half, unopened. Having such a book is one thing; reading it is what threatens the status quo.

Then I spent an entire day in a meditation workshop, and when I got home, I picked up The Abascal Way and began to go through it. The next morning I started the diet.

I wasn’t committed to actually doing the diet, you understand. I was just going to put a couple of the principles into practice: a breakfast with no grains; a breakfast that’s half protein and half fruit or vegetables. It stretched my ingenuity to come up with such a breakfast, but I did. That first morning I ate fried eggs and kale.

Later in the day two friends from Seattle dropped in. I mentioned this impossible new eating plan—No grains, indeed! What other breakfasts are there?—and it turned out Alice and Jane had been following this diet for a year, they’d taken Abascal workshops online, they knew the founder’s story.

Kathy Abascal lives on nearby Vashon Island, a lawyer who also studied neurobiology and botanical medicine. To deal with her own health issues, she developed a nutritional program she describes in her books and now teaches in that online class called TQI—To Quiet Inflammation.

I got more serious about my new diet. It was now my new diet. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I’d stopped eating chocolate and almost immediately started having less arthritic pain in my right foot. But less pain is not the same as painless, and this is what I’m shooting for. I’ve been on the Abascal diet—and truly on it since that first day—for three weeks now. My newly un-inflamed foot is a joy to walk on.

What is most interesting to me is why it took me so long to let go of culinary crutches that I knew, intuitively, weren’t good for my body.

Chai, for instance, is an Indian-style tea I was drinking in quantity every day. I’ve loved this sweet, strong, milky, spiced concoction since the first time I tasted it, forty years ago. And I’d been telling myself, “This isn’t so bad.” The spices—ginger, cardamom, fennel, clove, cinnamon—are medicinal, and I was replacing the milk with soy creamer and the sugar with stevia. In her book, Abascal points out that packaged foods have additives. The third ingredient listed for that creamer is, I found, cane syrup—no wonder it tastes so yummy! As for stevia, Abascal writes that, from the body’s standpoint, sweet is sweet.

I let go of chai that first morning—you can do anything for one day—and found I could finally taste the black tea, which has quite an interesting flavor all its own. Now I look forward to a cup of tea in the morning, and because it’s not sweet, I don’t keep drinking it all morning long.

While I’ve overcome a few hurdles, I know there are more a ahead. I’m now facing my three favorite culinary holidays: Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween!

I just have to find a way to remind myself that inflammation is a pain.

Life Spans

October 13, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

A few years back a beautiful and charismatic woman who was my next-door neighbor told me, repeatedly, that she was not going to die. I suggested that perhaps she’d experienced the part of her being that’s eternal, but she said, no, this was not it; her body was not going to die. I might die myself, if I chose to, but she wasn’t going to. She spoke in a tone of certainty, but her truth, however she had found it, was not what happened. About six months ago, this woman succumbed to her human destiny. She died.

As we all will.

My friend Donna Hood and I teach a course on some of the things we can do in light of the fact that we are going to die—record our favorite personal stories, write our own obituary. Who else is going to remember what matters most to us! Donna asked her elder daughter to write her (Donna’s) obituary, and she (the daughter) remembered an ancient and minor beauty crown but forgot to mention the existence of her own father.

We used to call the class “Preparing for the Inevitable,” but a few weeks ago Donna convinced me to change the name. “It scares people,” she said. “They don’t want to think about death.” Now we’re calling it “Legacy”—and it turns out Donna was right. Next week’s class has only one space left.

That’s fine, but death is inevitable. I do like to think about it. This is an ongoing contemplation for me, and it comes up in various forms:

What should I do with the time that’s left?

When I die, is there anything I’ll regret not having done?

How can I organize my life to make my death easier for people around me?

Yesterday morning I got an email from a man whose wife—healthy, vital, in her mid seventies—took our class about six months ago. In writing her own obituary, she had placed her death in 2028, far enough in the future that it didn’t impinge on today. This woman has now lost her mental faculties and is, in many ways, dead to life as she knew it. Last week, and her husband wrote to thank us for the fact that his late wife had written her obituary and a brief account of her life story. He said, “It was very important for the family to see this.”

So, our preparation to depart from this life can make a difference to the people who love us.

And once we acknowledge that our life will end, we might also be willing to look more closely at what supports us in living—what human beings actually need in order to live. Air. Water. Earth. Light. The list is short but pithy. If you have time for a two-minute video clip, this Conservation International link (sent by a friend this morning) is worth seeing.

In terms of life spans, what humanity does on this planet isn’t going to kill Mother Earth, but we could do in our own species. For sure, we’re wiping out others. That too is worth thinking about.

Because of Spam

October 6, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

This week I’m discontinuing the “comment” function on Re-Entry. As wonderful as your comments have been, I am tired of weeding out the spam to find them. Spam outnumbers legitimate comments about five to one and outweighs them, word for word, by twenty-five times.

Most are from China—or about China—and go on and on about a book fair in Shanghai or property development in Beijing or natural gas supplies in a place named Surui.

Many are in response to the first blog, “Blackberries Are Coming On”—the column that was the inspiration for my turning on the comment function in the first place. The artist (and writer!) Deon Matzen sent me an email in response to “Blackberries,” saying how much she enjoyed the blog and that it had inspired her to write her own essay on blackberries, which she attached. Here is an excerpt:

My nephew came to visit from Montana one year when they were in season and fell in love with them. Fell in more ways than one. He picked all the berries that he could reach from the roadside. He came back to the house and asked for a ladder. My husband let him take the orchard ladder out to the street. Needless to say the best, ripest, and biggest berries were just out of reach, even from the ladder. An orchard ladder has three legs and before he knew it, he had fallen into the briar patch. He was in about 6 feet and totally entrapped by the vicious, but luscious berries. His clothes were completely caught. He was like a fly in a spider’s web and could not move or help himself out. We heard his calls and finally came to the rescue with a large plank. He practically had to disrobe to get out and almost require stitches to repair his lacerations, but he still said it was worth it just to have the pie.

How delightful is this! Comments like Deon’s, I always want to see. So, if you have a comment, please do send it to me—by email. If you don’t have my email address, go to my website (MargaretBendet.com) and find it at the bottom of the homepage. The machines that send out spam, flooding normal communication so there’s no room left for mere people, cannot manage a maneuver that complicated.

And because the point of spam is to laden other blogs with links to your own, I’ll add one more link to this entry: if you’re interested in seeing the Monty Python sketch that led to “spam” becoming the name for nuisance emails that that take up all avaialbe space and time, click here... and enjoy!

Looking at Light

September 22, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

"Together and Apart" is Asian ink, gouache, and Japanese watercolor. For more, here is a link to Angie Dixon's website.

“Together and Apart” is Sumi (Asian ink), gouache, and Japanese watercolor. To see more, visit Angie Dixon’s website

I work part-time at the Whidbey Island library that’s in a double-wide, a cozy space where we have interesting conversations. One day we convinced a library patron to bring in her art portfolio from her car. This artist, Angie Dixon, showed us glorious pictures—horses, a friendly orangutan, and one I’ll never forget: a window with rays of light coming through it. Nothing else, just the light.

As a child, Angie said, she’d read a read a book whose story entered and took up residence in her, even though the book itself disappeared from her life and its title and author’s name were forgotten. Here is my telling of the story she outlined:

A child enters a light-filled room that has two floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a lovely sunlit garden. A large gilt-framed mirror hangs between the windows, and it is this mirror that interests the girl. She walks up to the mirror and looks into it. It’s herself she sees, of course, and what she notices first is that she is becoming quite a big girl—a fine girl!

Of course, there’s that funny thing about the way her hair curls in the very back. She turns around, with her back almost to the mirror, and peers over her shoulder, looking critically at her reflection. Perhaps the hair will change in time. Her mother had suggested that once, and the girl had only dared to hope that it might, because her mother obviously didn’t like this tendency toward unruly curls.

The girl turns to face the mirror head-on. This is better. She looks much better this way. But she’s having trouble making out her reflection now. Why?

There is no light. The windows are like slits on the wall. They’re tiny! These windows were huge when she came into the room. How long ago was that? The girl isn’t sure.

She looks back at the mirror, and the minute she does that, the windows become still smaller. Horrified, she realizes she’s in almost total darkness. She walks over to the window then—if you could still call it a window—and reaches her hand toward the tiny ray of light that remains. Her finger won’t fit in the crevice. No, you wouldn’t call this a window at all. But it had once been a window.

Is there something she can do to make it a window again?

Angie doesn’t remember what happened at this point in the story. The girl had to do something to get back the light. “It was one of those fairy tales,” she said, “you know, where the heroine undertakes a mission or passes a test. The girl gets the light back, but I don’t remember how.”

If it were my story—and for this moment, why don’t we call it my story!—I would have the heroine pay attention to the light.

The girl looks intently at the window, willing it to expand. There is just a sliver of light now—and the light is extraordinary, the girl realizes; it’s beautiful, that light.

Once she notices its beauty, there is more light. The girl laughs then. It’s the first time she’s laughed since she walked into the room, and with her laughter, the slits in the wall become windows once again.

But they’re are more than just windows. These are doorways. The girl realizes she can do more than just stand in this room and look at the light. She can walk through the doorway. She can go outside, into the beautiful garden. She can be in the light.

So that’s what the girl does: she steps into the light.

Giving something our attention for the sake of delight—that is the magic key that expands anything in our lives. So, if it works for the rest of us, surely it would work for this girl in a fairy tale.

Smoking

September 16, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

When you pull together memories into a cohesive piece, like a book, some of your favorites won’t fit. One of these for me is about how, after the death of my first spiritual teacher—whom I refer to in the book as the swami—I went back home to Honolulu, got a job with a small local publisher, and took up smoking again. When my book finally comes out, this anecdote will not be in it. So, I’ll share it here. Continue reading