tonight

“Mommy,” he says, sitting up like a small bird in his top bunk, “I just have the feeling stuck in my head that the lightening can strike and kill me. “ I can’t see his eyes, but I know they’re huge; red rimmed from allergies, lashes so long they get crisscrossed when he rubs them.

I’ve been in class since one; in meetings since eight this morning. I’ve had a cumulative fourteen hours of sleep in the past three days. There are circles under my eyes; I haven’t exercised; deadlines still defining every waking hour.

I hear him sniffle, rub his nose, squirm under the covers, his thin torso still propped up on an elbow. I can see his silhouette: he’s watching the window, even though the shades are shut.

I want to snap at: Stop being silly. You’re fine. Go to sleep. I want to plunk the little one into his crib instead of holding him in my lap, rocking as he squirms around, not settled either, also anxious about the storm that has arrived suddenly, just as T drove off for a meeting. I can feel the impatience thick on my tongue.

Instead I take a breath. I zero in. I let the breath expand the place where my ribs join; let my love for these two boys flood me like the storm.

“It’s okay," I say softly. "I’m right here. Mama will be right here,” and then I begin to whisper, “Shush, shushhhhhh.”

And the lightening comes, the thunder comes, the sky grows dark, darker. The windows pelt with rain, and I rock and whisper and then begin to softly sing Brahms’ lullaby, until I can feel Sprout’s body soften, his hair suddenly damp and warm with the onset of sleep. And I keep singing.

I keep singing as the lightening lights up the room, once, twice, six times, twelve. I lose count and keep singing until I can hear Bean settle, curling like a small animal in his covers. I sing until they are breathing in time, steadily, evenly, with the sweet magic of sleep.

Dreaming in the morning

I feel like I am a feather or a tumble weed; something blown about across the vast space of the night. The morning comes too soon. I haven't dreamed enough. I wake, go through the motions: coffee, eggs + toast, say goodbye to T and the big boy (whose birthday is tomorrow!) and pull out my laptop, intending to be productive. But I can feel the way everything resists. My mind still feels slight and suggestible and tossed about, and when Sprout goes down for a nap I crawl beneath the covers of my sun striped bed and sink into sleep again.

Except I don't feel like I am sleeping: I'm not gone entirely. I've slipped into an almost lucid dreaming state. At first projects replay on the inner screen of my mind: the code and the physical dynamics of an interactive piece I'm making spins in and out of focus; other things arrive as well, rotating, repeating, overlapping. The cat leaps up onto my bed and for an instant I am awake, in the room, and then gone again under the opaque sheath of dream.

This time I get up again, go downstairs, do things: except that I am dreaming. My body heavy beneath flannel. My mind testing the length of thread that I can follow through the labyrinth back to myself.

Eventually I begin to have vivid dreams: each one complete, like an envelope with a snapshot in it. In the last one I am standing on sand dunes by the water, holding the strings of five or six yellow and orange helium balloons. I ask the friend I am with to take a picture, and then I run and leap, and feel the way the air catches beneath my feet before I finally land; the water warm, the sand pebbled and golden.

When I do finally wake to Sprout calling, it's like he is calling me from the other end of a tunnel, and I can't just snap to. I trail myself. I feel the way the dreams still flutter like prayer flags. I look about the room expecting that I will be wearing the clothes I dreamed that I put on. My disorientation is almost physical: it has a weight and color to it. And then finally I am here again, in this body, bare foot, and stumbling down the hall.

I haven't been getting enough sleep and I think I'm running a deficit. I think I haven't been dreaming enough. Not metaphoric dreaming; real dreaming. This kind of dreaming that filled with irrational beauty and wonder and disorientation and utter belief in circumstances of disbelief. I can feel the way I need this dreaming time to be wholly creative. It's vital, but I can't quite put my finger on how.

I'm curious: what are your dreams like? How do they affect your creative life?

Flight + Fruition

It was fascinating to start the new year in the sky. To watch the curve of the earth appear below, as the plane lifted off, at once heavy and weightless as it cut the clouds and traveled upward improbably into the wide expanse of atmosphere above the earth.

It’s a wonder to feel the way anything is possible this very instant, always and again.

Right now.

Today.

In this new year.

I left before dawn, after the requisite security line removal of belt and shoes, jackets, laptop and toiletries laid bare for the world to see, and then no coffee because the kiosk was closed, I was off. The sky was ink, the runway lit by lamplight, the cabin dark.

I held my breath: waiting for the feeling of air catching under the wings. I used to love airports. They meant adventure and freedom: Italy, Germany, New York, Puerto Rico. I loved the bustle, and energy I felt at airports, the way everyone was coming and going, the expectation and possibility that was almost palpable in the air. But now the world of airports is defined by orange alerts and leaving. Leaving my two sweet boys and T, who woke with me and carried my bags to the door and kissed me softly on the lips before I left for a week to visit my sister and her new sweet little baby boy.

In the air the earth grows small and spectacular at once. The land stretches out in an intricate pattern of rivers and mountain ranges overlayed with the persistent geometry of human life: grids of roads and fields and buildings that look, before dawn like twinkling circuit boards; light bordered by dark, by deserts, by lakes, by the black of pine forests and mountain ranges, white-capped volcanoes rising up above the clouds.

Three flights later I was in Oregon, circling then landing next to a field of grazing sheep. Live oaks, and mossy sycamores; hills steep and rolling under wide West Coast skies. I walk out into the bright afternoon sun disoriented by the time change, and hug my sister who looks beautiful and tired and happy all at once.

It stuns me to realize how I’ve already forgotten how newborn time is alternate to the reality of the rest of the world. How time is defined by the moments of feeding, and the moments of sleep in between. How life exists entirely within the circumference of doing nothing but holding the baby, and doing small things: running the dishwasher, or righting coats on the rack; the world soft and quiet and wrapped in the cocoon of a now that the rest of us forget, caught up in the plummet and pull of a faster pace.

I’ve already forgotten the way this is everything. Small sighs, milk down your shirt, toasted cheese, and the gift that is five consecutive hours of sleep. It’s a time out of time: the moments of falling in love and being split open. It is the beginning of everything.

I sit with my nephew in the crook of my knee and write; body memory returning, time traveling backwards to that newborn time with Sprout, new and warm and dreaming.

I try to explain how this is now and then it’s over, forever.

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Last year my word was action.

And it was fulfilled again and again with steps taken and decisions made towards a life more fulfilling, sustainable, and full.

It was an incredible year: T quit his job and found new work that he loves; I went back to school and launched A Field Guide To Now (still holding my breath on this....More (good) news and rewards—finally—to be sent out in February!) and my boys learned to play together: moving through the house in a tornado of action, transforming couch cushions into forts and blocks into castles.

This year my word is fruition.

Fruition (n.) 1) attainment of anything desired; realization; accomplishment: 2) enjoyment, as of something attained or realized. 3) the state of bearing fruit.

Yes.

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I loved reading your comments in your last post; loved to feel the force of your intention being put out into the world. I'm so looking forward to what this year brings. To the adventures, the discoveries, the things that will come to fruition.

An ending & a beginning

The world is suddenly green. The drenched trees lost their blossoms as quickly as they bloomed; petals fell like a party dress to the grass. Now everything flutters with the minute iterations of leaves. The grass is suddenly shaggy and surprisingly long; as though it’s from a Jack In the Bean Stalk fairy tale while hummingbirds zip among the rain drenched azaleas and lilacs fill the air with heady sweetness.

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This weekend big things are happening. A Field Guide To Now on Kickstarter is ending tomorrow. 28 hours left. (Become a backer if you haven’t. This is IT!)

I’m leaving on a weekend adventure today with my camera and some pretty shoes in tow. I won’t be here when the project time runs out, but I want to tell you how grateful I am. I am astounded, joyful, terrified, delighted, eager. This is such a big deal… and YOU made it happen.

Thank you.

xxxo!