7 things I'm doing to rest + recalibrate this weekend:
1. Slipping offline for the weekend
2. Layering pretty dresses + winter cords, painting my finger nails, and putting henna in my hair
3. Taking walks alone to stalk the Piliated woodpecker in the far meadow, and follow coyote tracks
4. Emptying my inbox entirely
5. Clearing the number of feeds in my RSS reader
6. Reading Mary Oliver's Evidence. Again.
7. Getting a dog.
Sometimes things just fall apart
I don’t intend to fall apart. I don’t intend to be standing by the sink, putting dirty plates into the dish washer one minute, and then falling to shambles the next, but this is what I do.
We’ve just watched the King’s Speech. Movies in general have a way of getting under my skin; I soak them up in the same way I soak up the emotions of strangers in a car on the subway; or at a bar, or a party where I know only a half dozen acquaintances by name. And so I’m scraping sauce off a plate and within seconds I’ve dug myself into a hole with T. I’ve made some flippant chiding comment I can’t defend or match with reason, and he’s putting silver into the drawer with unnecessary vigor, his voice raised.
I try to say stop, let’s not go here; hormones are making unsteady tonight, but it’s no use. He doesn’t hear me, not yet, not in the way I need him to. Things escalate. Whatever the words are that pass between us make me suddenly crumble. I run to the door. Drive away, sock footed.
The road is quiet. The air smells like snow.
I am the only one leaving, the only one with headlights making circles in the night. At the edge of the road there are deer. With the cold they come closer now to human dwellings; finding the last sweet fallen apples; the scraggly lawns still nearly green; the last frail petals of climbing roses, petals faded like pink paper tickets from the county fair.
I leave knowing that if I stayed whatever I’d say would wild and unsteady. I leave because I know that what I need is just to lean into the feeling: of sobbing, of yelling things out loud into to the dark, until the things I yell are the things that maybe feel true. I leave so that I don’t actually have to leave, though I can imagine every detail of the way I might: just a small bag, my laptop, wallet, jacket, passport, boots. I’d go somewhere cold and far away, with wheat fields and Tim Hortons and I’d get a room in a roadside motel and sob until I couldn’t, and then I’d sleep and wake and try to be in the realness of what it feels like to be anonymous.
I leave because hormones are making a short circuit between heart and mind now; I leave because this is what my body does without thought: fight or flight.
There are potholes in the road and I hit them harder than I should, and above is barely any moon, the shyest of slivers.
I drive down to the end of our dirt road and then I back into someone’s drive, do a K turn and retrace my way until the bridge, where I park at the waterfall, and listen to it thunder, under a sky full of gathering snow clouds. I turn the engine off and feel the cold start in at my extremities.
And then I cry I know that the only thing I want is to return, though even then, even when I do, I say the opposite of what I mean:
“I just want to be alone.”
Why do I say that?
I walk to the boy’s rooms and find each of them uncovered, arms flung about like rag dolls. I rest my head on Bean’s mattress and feel the way the thought of him fills me up with sunlight. I inhale Sprout’s sweet sleeping breath. I tiptoe out. And then I pace back and forth in my studio until T comes to my door, sits with me, lets me sob, says only enough, finds the tense muscles between my shoulder blades and begins to work on them with a steady, warm hand.
The whole thing catches me by storm: The way I fall apart, as though my bones and heart and ambition and love and determination were all bricks and mortar in a dam so fragile that the dislodging of a single stone might cause the whole thing to slip and tumble under a sudden hormonal torrent.
It’s humbling and devastating and incredibly powerful to find the outer limit of my capacity.
And I’m sharing this here because sometimes people email me and say, “How do you do it?” Meaning the ALL of it part. And the answer is that I don’t always; the answer is that I’m still getting the hang of it. The answer is that there is a vital choreography here that I will always be learning: a dance between generative and productive; between producing and reflecting; between doing and taking enough damn space to remember how to just be silly and pretty and playful.
I tend toward overachieving; toward flat-out sprinting; towards burning the candle at both ends. I tend towards this because I love to be consumed, engaged, invested, at work. I love to work. I love to create. That’s the simple truth. But I am not nearly so graceful in the learning to reel myself in bit. The taking things easy part.
The part where I just take the day off to paint my nails aubergine and tickle my boys and trawl petfinder.com for the dog that my heart keeps whispering for.
That’s the real of it. The ALL of it. I’m good at going full tilt. Less good at coming to a full stop.
Productivity and self reflection: a vital ratio for happiness
It occurred to me last night that I have no fewer than NINE very significant projects that I'm working on right now (not including my boys, or laundry, or a strangely irrational obsession with finding a family dog.) It also occurred to me last night that I've been feeling a little like a windmill, diving into things in an unfocused blur of reaction. To-do lists are converging, deadlines are colliding, and incredible connections and potential projects are practically bursting out of me... and I haven't created the space to reflect. I could say I'm overwhelmed, but the truth is, I havent been making enough space for synthesis and consideration.
It's a ratio that is vital to being successfully creative and fulfilled for me. Action and self reflection need to happen in tandem in order to be able to slip into the grove between intuition and purpose; between effort and ease.
And if that ratio is off I can feel the way my intentions become blurred and and my actions reactive.
So this morning I began the ritual that always reclaims me: Writing first thing for a half hour. My handwriting is a mess then, as I sit up among pillows in the lavender dark of my bedroom at dawn. My sentences unreasonably long, my focus fickle. But what I get from writing then, is the ability to slip in at the back door of my mind and listen for what I'm feeling, for the way my heart responds to certain ideas, questions, fears, projects.
That half hour with the cat at my hip purring, while the mountains become blue and dense with daylight, is is a way of closing the loop on worry; tying up the loose ends of fears; and finding the pulse of my intention.
The morning begins like this:
The morning begins when I am less awake than dreaming, and with shut eyes I shift my body, truing towards the warmth of my husband beside me; pressing my nose against the warmth of his bare shoulder. I pat the edge of the bed when I hear my littlest come in, carrying his bear, a pacifier in his mouth. He climbs up and burrows in next to me like a puppy, finding the curve between my neck and shoulder where little head fits just exactly so. Then we all doze, until his brother starts to call from their room down the hall; ever the bright eyed one in the morning, Bean wakes up curious, eager, effervescent, loud. Sprout props himself up on an arm, then sits off, shoving the warm covers back. “I’m coming,” he calls, then trundles off.
The morning begins like this: I am between sleep and waking, sitting at the edge of a mossy dock. Below me the water is warm, and when I slip into it I discover amethysts sparkling below the surface. Then I am here, with the cat purring at my hip, and I roll over so that I can run my hand along her apricot fur, her purr vibrating up through my finger tips, into my palm, my pulse. In the kitchen below me, the boys sound like herd animals. They make the wood floor thunder. They shriek and laugh and yell. The house smells like woodsmoke and bacon (two of my favorite things) and soon I push back the covers and stumble toward the shower, my vision blurring suddenly to stars. Head rush. I hold the door frame and pause.
The morning begins with all four of us around the butcher block island in the kitchen on stools. There are white bowls of oatmeal with butter and maple syrup, seedy toasted baguettes with butter and raspberry preserves, fried eggs, bacon, flat whites. There are greasy little boy fingers. There is a scuffle over the last slice of bacon. Both boys ask for milk, then water. T and I look at each other over the table and smile.
The morning begins with this: I am sitting beside the wood stove, this mix is playing and the sun is out. It makes shadows fall in bright contrast across the un-vacuumed floor. I sit with my new notebook (I’ve filled the last one up) and a pencil with soft lead, and find my pulse. I watch wild turkeys run across the far meadow, and settle into the steadiness of my hand moving across the page, scrawling careless, messy script. “What chu doin mama?” Sprout asks within minutes, his face right at table height, his cheeks rosy, his bangs in his eyes.
The morning begins like this.
A creative loophole:
That perfect letter. The wishbone, fork in the road, empty wineglass. The question we ask over and over. Why? Me with my arms outstretched, feet in first position. The chromosome half of us don’t have. Second to last in the alphabet: almost there. Coupled with an L, let’s make an adverb. A modest X, legs closed. Y or N? Yes, of course. Peas sign reversed. Mercedes Benz without the O.
Y, a Greek letter, joined the Latin alphabet after the Romans conquered Greece in the first century—a double agent: consonant and vowel. No one used adverbs before then, and no one was happy.
~ From Y, by Marjorie Celona, originally from the Indiana Review, republished in Best American Non-Required Reading 2008.
How can you not be inspired, like I was, reading this, to pose and consider everything remarkable about a letter? Maybe your first initial, or your last. I'm on the lookout every day for opportunities like this: to slip through an open doorway, an imaginative loophole, a slight tear in the fabric of all that right now insists. Because everything is happening at once, as it always is. Everything converging. Projects, deadlines, discoveries, presentations. It’s easy for me to just put my head down and run hard without stopping, without looking, without pausing for a handful of moments to practice doing what I love the most. And I found this to be the perfect thing to do today, mid week, now, on the seventeenth of November, with the world blue and brown and quiet with the promise of snow, amid everything else.
At the back door there are leaves that the wind’s tossed up in heaps, brown and crackling under our feet as we make a bonfire with friends, roast marshmallows and press them between crumbly graham crackers with chocolate; drink cappuccinos, and watch the children play. They take rakes with bamboo tines and heap the leaves until one or all of them are buried, laughter rising up with the sparks toward the night sky that is full of ink and diamonds; such a mess of grandeur, are the heavens above us.
The children turn on the porch lights; four boys in hats, leaves eddying up in the dark. Their shadows are eerie and huge across the grass, and then up in the sky, the waning gibbous moon, a pregnant C up there with the spilled milk of the universe, the faintest shadow of its darker side also there, barely illuminated: a C in reverse.
C: The letter that is at once the contents and the container, the balance of negative and positive space, the curve of palms, cupped, holding a bowl, and also the shape of the bowl. It is curiosity, and the top bit of a question mark in reverse. The final slight line in a pair of parenthesis, the pause of a comma, the arc of a story, a a smile turned on it’s side. It is the consonant that invokes creativity, the third letter of the alphabet, the symbol for chemical concentration, the speed of light in a vacuum, the abbreviation for carat, century, constant, cubic. It is the first note in C major, and the way my name begins.
***
Take 5 minutes. See what you can write about a letter. Or share a link an image or post and I’ll be sure to take a peak.
An inventory of things found on my studio floor:
Things found on the floor of my studio: A blue letter O; two puzzle pieces; a small rocket ship; a cardboard tile with the word COMETS on it; a very small sticker stuck to the floorboards that says "Road Closed" in black against orange; another sticker, artfully pressed into a knot in the floorboards that says "YES" in all caps; a small black wheel; a spool of turquoise thread; a solitary striped sock; a red matchbox car; 1 pacifiers; 7 hair ties; countless snippets.
I can only trace the origins of the final two from that inventory. This is what happens when I work in my studio with children underfoot.
It's such good practice though, to slow down enough to take an inventory of the details around you. Try it: Can you notice five unusual things within an arms reach? What are they?
This is true:
Possibility.
Opportunity.
Joy.
What you hold are hold the fragile wings of something that arrives in the night and then slips away, leaving only its slight carbon footprint on your sill; or the small body of a sparrow that’s just hit the window. Or maybe you hold the runaway tug of your dog’s leash; or the runaway tug of your heart.
You might hold the hand of the one you love; or your face in your hands; the heft of your child’s body, his head thrown back with laughter; or the weight of emptiness in your palms pressed together in prayer.
What you need to know is that what you hold can be a anything. What counts is intention. What counts is reaching out. Taking hold. Accepting. Offering.
Spend today taking note of your hands: of the artful way they pick up a pencil, wipe tears from a cheek, flip eggs, type, caress, create. Of how they translate the world for you; the way they’re the bridge between what’s inside your heart, and what you make of it. Of the way they feel held in another’s hand, or pressed into dough, or submerged in water. Imagine the joy you can hold; the possibility you can ask for and accept, like a boomerang tossed and received.
Today I hold the last of autumn’s leaves; papery now, and wind tossed; my coffee frothy and warm; scissors for cutting Sprout’s long bangs; the excitement of new possibilities; a brush dripping with aqua ink; the soft cotton of shirts, ready for folding.
What do your hands hold today?
*
Inspiration for daily art: lines + marks
Hello! I wanted to share a few pieces that have been inspiring me as I continue with Daily Art, trying to make pieces that are simple; that play with positive and negative space; with online lines + marks or color. I am exploring what it means to make something quickly. To just do make something--following following through with the act of putting something on the page because this is what I committed to do. I am trying to slip into a grove of doing this as a creative habit, without worrying about meaning or intent or composition, as a way to exhale a little.
“Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this? By the time I give the taxi driver directions, it’s too late to wonder why I’m going to the gym and not snoozing under the warm covers of my bed….
It’s a simple act but doing it the same way each morning habitualizes it–makes it repeatable, easy to do. It reduces the chance that I would skip it or do it differently. it is one more item in my arsenal of routines, and one less thing to think about…” ~ Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit
If you're feeling brave, join us! Just a few simple marks on a page; a photo; a squiggled line; a bit of fabric sewn. This is a way to pay homage to your creative heart.
xoxo, Christina
No one prepared me for this: The end of my baby's babyhood
“MAMA!” he yells, eyes close, face upturned. “MAMA!”
I run out in bare feet across the cold November grass, to cup his soft warm cheeks in my hand and brush the sand from his eyes.
“Thank you Mama.” He says, this small exclamation of gratitude something secondary to his nature. He grins as I kiss face, and returns happily to playing. I stand there for a minute, then go back indoors where the maple floors are warm and golden with slanting sun, and my work awaits.
This is the boy/baby who as of Sunday no longer sleeps in a crib. He’s been climbing out for months, agile and sure footed. He’s been swinging with the ease of a gymnast over the railing, in and out, the crib growing less and less sturdy with every vault, and finally I made the decision to put it away.
I didn't expect that he would be terribly sad.
“I’m still da baby!” he wailed that night, sitting on the potty, his face in his hands.
The next night he said, “My new bed is so cozy. The crib went bye bye. I'm big. ” (Yes, he said cozy.)
And just like that, I can feel the way things are ending. His babyhood. And with it an entire span of time where motherhood was straightforward and consuming. Where my physical presence could solve nearly anything; and a kiss could most likely solve the rest.
Now there is separation. There is the complex terrain of emotion. There is getting to know this person he is becoming, beaming-faced, hilarious, stubborn.
Neither of us are quite ready for the way things are inevitably shifting. At the dinner table he's taken to crawling into my lap, wanting to be close to me, wrecking havoc with my dinner plate. Some nights I'm all patience and games: "Here comes a bite for the hyena, the lion, the hippo." Other nights, like tonight, I'm worn thin by the way he squirms, his strong little body knocking me off kilter. But when I set him firmly back in his chair he begins to pout and then cry.
And I know the years to come will pass just like he counts now: “One, two, three, four, five, eleven, eighteen.”
It’s not something I expected or even considered: That it would feel this way to be here, at the other side of babyhood: Bittersweet and uncertain. He’s just shy of being done with diapers, and with that, he’ll be all kid, hair in his eyes, doing tricks on his bike, swinging ling a monkey from his bunk bed frame.
The world narrows so much when you’re in the thick of mothering in the first years—-when your kids are small, and then suddenly the aperture shifts, and they're chest high and learning to read.
How to do this gracefully? This part where I try to stop calling my baby “my baby?”
Life In The Present Tense: A Field Guide To Now ~ Thanking my backers
I'd want to start this week off with sharing (finally) many of the incredible Kickstarter Backers who made this book dream of mine real. These are only the folks who have an online space to share with the world. Together with many others, they believed in this idea when it was just a glimmer in my eye--before I had any kind of real plan, any proposal on paper, any chapters written; when the whole thing consisted of a handful of drafts and a heart full of longing.**
I can't even describe how powerful it is to have people back you. How it makes things real, how it makes you be accountable and your very best self. How generosity is at the root of so much: abundance, success, inspiration, joy.
Thank you.
There is so much talent and creativity and passion and goodness in this list of bloggers and creative entrepreneurs, and they fill me right up with inspiration + gratitude + joy. Have fun perusing. You'll be so delighted.
1017
100 Proof Stories
Airstream Dreaming
Andie Edwards
Annie Denison
Barb's Evolving Project
Bead Tree
Becoming Megsieth
Beverly Reverlry
Blissful Thinking
Brickhouse Studios
Bring Yourself
Catching Days
Cayden J
Coco & Lafe
Coffee Stained Clarity
Daily Fieldnotes
Dawn Smith Designs
Dream Dust
Do What You Love
Dust Of Europe Film Project
Elayna Alexandra
Elisa Elliot
Everyday Glimpses
Flyover People
Hashi Works
Hysterical Mommy Network
Imaginations Everything
In The Violet Hour
Inosculation
Jorun Boklöv
Johanna Hoerrmann
Julies Little Joys
Just My Digital Stuff
Last Crumb
Laura Two Tina
Learning To Walk In Heels
Leonie Wise
Lesley Dahl
Life On The Green Line
Like A Radio
Listening & Speaking
Little Elm
Little Potatoes
Liz Lamoreux
Lizardek
Lylium
Magpie Days
Magpie Girl
Meadow Lark Days
Meat Revolution
Melissa Brott Photography
Michael Kershner
Mindy Schroder
Molly Sutton Kiefer
My Creative Space
Oink Tails
Paul Frank
Perils Of Caffeine In The Evening
Phriday Filosofy
Pixie Campbell
Positively Organic
Rosa Murillo
Scatterbeams
Seeking Equipoise
Shameless Self Promoters
Slightly Scrappy
Shona Cole
Solomon Shiv
Soulful Owl
Some The Wiser
Stefanie Renee
Story Lamps
Sunday School Rebel
Superbeck
Susan Kruse
Susanna Crossman
Tara Bradford Photography
Terri Rambo
The Learning Curve
The Life and Times of a Kiwi-Mumbaiiker
This Joy Ride
Timothy C. Flood
Trying To Stay Focused
Wet Fresco Photography
Wood Smoke & Lingon Berries
Also heart-filled gratitude for the following inspiring + generous bloggers who shared my project with their readers:
Ali Edwards: Giveaway
Boho Girl: Giveaway
Do What You Love: Interview
Liz Lamoreux: Nine {An Interview}
Magpie Girl: 1Q Interview
Susannah Conway: My Creative Life {Interview}
Wishstudio: A Book You Can Help Bring To Life
** (If you are a backer and I didn't include you on this list, it wasn't on purpose! I had a few broken links and a few outdated URLS that I couldn't trace. Please please send me your URL if you backed this project and would like me to add you.)
The things I carry:
Today I carry the feeling that I’ve slipped right back to the cusp of more things not being known than things that are for certain. I am carrying the way the light looks over the pacific ocean in the morning at Bodega Head, and a homesick feeling for my fathers hands; for the way they were always warm and skilled with tools, knobby knuckled like mine, mottled with vitiligo.
I carry a secret awful wonder at what my DNA might hold for me, and a list of appointments including one at the dermatologist’s to investigate a small hard lump on my thigh that arrived without my notice sometime in the summer, and then persisted. My regular doctor shrugged. More than likely benign. Still, a referral was made, and then one appointment after another, cancelled to make room for other more urgent things.
I carry my wedding band of soft hammered gold; a hair band around my wrist, snarled with a few tangled strands of hair yanked free from a ponytail with impatience; and the memory of my tenth birthday.
I carry my father’s SANFORD LOGO II mechanical pencil; my soft-covered Moleskine reporter’s notebook; and an ache for what I know I will forget of the way Sprout is right now, small like this, speaking with a little lisp, repeating everything, begging for a convertible blue vintage VW like the one our neighbor drives. His hair is sandy gold in the sun. Potty training is a comedy of errors and stubbornness. He gives the sweetest kisses, one arm circling my neck. How will I hold all of this in the permeable container of time?
Today I carry the sight of geese cutting across the pale morning sky, one after the next; the first inklings of a second book; ideas for classes I’m planning. I carry the way comparisons always make me feel terribly small; the fact that my jeans are tighter than they were when the summer; and the muscle memory of running hard (today, 3 miles.)
Today I carry the memory of quiet; my cup of coffee; the rooster crowing; my laptop; kindling; honey crisp apples; and questions, always questions.
What do you carry?
A reminder:
{Also, a quick introductory DAILY ART prompt (sort of) is up over on Flickr.)
Daily Art + Unabashed joy
I watch my son sitting across the table from me in the golden afternoon light, drawing. He draws effortlessly, without thinking of it as a creative act. It is simply a means, a process, a discovery. Every morning before school he draws; every afternoon, he produces copiously, without caution, without expectation. He makes pictures because they are adventure: the representations of the story track running in his head. He draws in a way that is utterly his own. Complex lines: cogs, wheels, wires, motors. He draws pitched roofs and internal stairways, porch lights and door bells, cars with drive-shafts, oceanscapes with pirate ships, secret potion machines, fantastical creatures, and night skies filled with five pointed stars. These, he’s just mastered, and he draws them in everything now, along with words and letters, filling up secretive corners on every page where he practices invented spelling; summoning the magic of phonemes and consonants to make word sounds.
And he draws all of it, without even realizing the work, the effort, the certain shortcomings of his ability; he draws all of it joyfully, filling page after page with deep, wholehearted practice.
I’m in awe of this. Of him, now, at six and a half, before self doubt has any leverage at all; before there are any inklings of “perfect,” in his bright mind. Before this effortless creating slips away and the unwanted cacophony of standards, criticisms, expectations, and reviews fill its place.
Now there is simply the joy of drawing lines for the sake of it: Drawing without any critique at all, without any consideration for audience or perception. His art is the work of wholly self-absorbed wonder, and I am taking notes.
This week I have been asking: What do I need to do to allow myself to create as recklessly and easily?
What creative constraints do I need to put in place to quiet the analytical chatter at the back of my mind, ever full of commentary, critique, and doubt?
When I was finishing the illustrations for my book I discovered the immense power of creative constraints: Of having certain parameters that defined the scope of the work. I have found that for me, incredible creative force emerges under such circumstances, and in the context of daily practice, I’ve been experimenting with constraints as a way to short circuit my inner critic, and find my way back to the simple joyful state of art as play; of making as wonder; of creating as joy.
This week, I’ve been inviting myself to show up for 15 minutes to make a piece of art—and to be joyfully, gently, gratefully satisfied with whatever emerges from that process. As V-Grrrl commented in my last post, "I’m first and foremost a writer"... and I know this resonates with many of you as well. But there is something so profound about working with images. It’s good cross training, at the very least: to slip out of your comfort zone, and create with the pure raw material of image.
I’m going to keep doing this for the entire month of November, sharing my pieces every week in this set, and I am wondering:
I’ve created DAILY ART flickr pool here
...if you’d like to join me on this adventure... I'll be posting more observations and discoveries about ways to get started this week...if this is something that you'd like me to share... I would SO LOVE to have you join me.
I'm also curious: When was the last time you remember being creative without worrying about meeting a deadline, or if you were "doing it right" or being "good enough"? When do you find yourself slipping into an un-judging creative groove?
How summer passed while I was becoming the work
I didn’t realize I’d missed it until I was standing at the window by the wood stove looking out over the hills that have shrugged off nearly all the amber and vermillion leaves of autumn, revealing the skeleton crowns of sugar maples and birches and alders, that I’d missed summer.
The tall wild grass in the fields bends over now, like praying nuns, each rustling frond keeping the secret prayer of burrowing beetles, ants, wasps. The fields have begun to turn brown. Wood smoke hangs in the air. The corn, late to ripen, has finally been cut.
And all the while that it was lush and green, I was indoors, with terrible posture and paint on my jeans, or in class, or traveling to and fro with one or the other boy in the car. Going, doing, going.
I didn’t realize how fast it the season was passing: The greening, the long days, the light, until now, with pumpkins on our window sill waiting for carving, I realize, it’s dark by five; and when we leave for school at 7:30, the sun is just barely climbing above the familiar cleft of the mountains in the East.
So. This is how a summer passes. This is how days pass, one after the next, with effort, with hunched shoulders, with focus, with forgetting. This is what it means to do the work of making; to create until you forget the locus of the present, and orbits inward, inward, toward the source.
There must have been evenings when I lingered with blush wine in a Ball jar in a lawn chair out the back door, but I cannot remember them. I only remember the way the mess in my studio rose and ebbed, drafts spread everywhere, or paint and snippets, and spilled sumi ink.
I look back and realize I had no idea what I was doing. I look forward and realize the same.
You can’t know the outcome.
There is no guarantee of anything. There is only the act of doing the work, becoming the work.
What I know now is that there are a hundred things I will do better next time (and this will be true for every book I’ll ever make, I’m certain.) I’ll have more clarity of scope, for one. I’ll ask for feedback sooner, instead of holding my drafts and art to my chest like some sort of secret too precious for the world to know.
But whatever way, the one thing that won’t change, that cannot change, is the way that close to the quick, nearing the end, the work consumed me. There is no other way.
And so summer slipped by, a lost season of fluttering grass and weeds that devoured the garden. We had a tomato blight. I barely noticed as the red fruit suddenly rotted on the vine. I accidentally planted some sort of gorgeous cousin to the sunflower: rambling, enormous, with fiery orange flowers that took over an entire bed and bloomed and bloomed. Even now, this late in the month, there are still some blooms left, and when I go to cut them in the early evening, I find bees dormant for the night on every single one. I stare at them and I stare at the flowers and I wonder where both came from. I stand with my sharp knife, and wonder briefly if the bees are dead.
lean in, and blow hot breath on their tiny, perfect bodies and watch as the warmth spreads threw them, and slowly they move antennae, abdomen, wings. They can only be here, in the midst of what they are doing: gathering the season’s last pollen, the promise of honey, and as the sun sets they grow torpid, in the midst of things. This is how it goes. Each day happening so fast, yet while I was in it, each day lasting forever into the hours of artificial light and pre-dawn blue. An eternity of repeated effort.
++
Not many of you answered my question in this post about doing the work that you love every day, but it’s a big question that I’m digging into in my own life and would like to explore here with you.
What happens between projects, when you feel your creativity ebbing, or your life becomes so full of other things (babies, work, whatever.) How do you make room then, for creativity? I’ve been working on a little project each day this week, exploring just that question that I’ll share tomorrow.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts...
An autumn glimpse + Do What You Love Shared Stories Feature:
Just wanted to share these photos from a woodland walk with my sweet Sprout yesterday afternoon. It's such a different pace: To go with just him through the woods, noticing, looking, laughing. It was a good break between projects and potty training and school pick up and all the other "shoulds" and "musts" of a busy Monday.
Also, I wanted to let you know that a some of my words + images about creative process and finally doing the work that I love are up over at Do What You Love: Shared Story Series this week.
What work do you love? Does it make it to your daily to-do list?
On motherhood and messes, creative process and apple pie:
Today there is rain and the final splendor of leaves the color of the summer sun, sumacs flutter with fronds of flame, the poplars are already bare. There is wood for stacking, bulbs to be put into the damp, still-soft ground, and the last of autumn's apples for picking: small and hard, with thick skins and the sweetest nearly wild fruit, perfect for pies and apple butter.
Yesterday I made a pie with the boys: each one of them armed with a pairing knife; cutting the slices with gusto and irregularity. There simply wasn’t anything else to do, even though, like every other day, there always is.
Rain was falling and I took one look at the way they were spinning around the kitchen, after having arrived home from their various destinations and I could tell: things would meltdown all too soon if I kept on writing, hunching over my laptop at the counter like some long-legged bird. And so, apple pie.
So we set to work: the boys cutting up apples while I stirred the sugar and butter and spices in a pan. I’m always a little surprised and terribly pleased by how earnest they are in the kitchen! How they just want to be helpful, and how, given real tools and real responsibility, they both are. They formed a team almost immediately, Bean cutting the apples into manageable wedges, and then Sprout following through, chopping each into as many small pieces as he could, and tasting nearly every one.
I let them lick out the bowl of course. And later, when the pie was ready after dinner, we ate it warm, in bowls with a little heavy cream the way my father always used to.
This is part of it: each night as I gather Sprout year old to my chest in the dark, as we sit in the rocking chair in the room he shares with his brother, as I gather his small solid body close and press my nose into his sweet hair, he says, “I want Nonna.”
The first time he said this, I felt my heart hit my ribs, heat spreading across my cheeks with the anguish of this small betrayal.
But what I have begun to understand in the process of making this work, this book, this life, is how to inhale the ache and intensity of these moments, bitter-sweet, and then to release it on the exhale, and say yes to all of it.
To realize: yes, he loves his Nonna. How lucky are we all that this is the arrangement. That he has this tribe of love, and I do. That this work I am doing is possible.
And so I kiss his warm forehead and say, “You’ll see her again tomorrow, my love," and he burrows into my chest and hums along as I sing "Speed Bonny Boat" in the dark.
I’m telling you this because all of this is part of the process. This is the real, messy, frustrating, bittersweet stuff of being a mother and a pioneer/artist/writer/creator. And it is also absolutely the only way I would want things to be. This duality. This love. This creative life.
There are days I don’t see my boys until 4 in the afternoon or sometimes 5, and there are days that even when I’m here, I’m preoccupied with the work I’m in the midst of, and I sit in the middle of the stirring living room, in the middle of the ruckus, writing while they build marble towers or ride their plasma cars around like hellions. And there are days like yesterday, when the pieces all come together: apple pie, thesis abstracts, client deliverables, tickles, brown sugar and cinnamon licked off of fingers. And for the hundred-thousandth time I think to myself, Whatever way, this life is the only life I want.
Tell me, how many of you navigate this tenuous line? What is it like for you?
On Making A Book (Part 3): Where words + images converge
Once the words were done, I threw myself into the unfamiliar, beautiful, terrifying territory of illustrating. I was wholly, utterly, entirely consumed. I spilled india ink twice. I wore the same jeans for a week, paint accumulating across my thighs. I skipped class. I considered only this: How the images I was creating might tell a little more of the story. How they might be a hook, a glimpse, some kind of emotional spark of evidence that might help you find your way into the moments I was describing and also into your own. I imagined making every postcard just for you: 22 notes from me to you about ways to be right here, to fall in love with this life, to hold on, to keep on, to become, be present, persist.
It was harder than I thought: To say just exactly what I meant to say with images. To get the right lines, the right metaphors, colors, shapes, words, gestures down on the 4x6 canvas of a repurposed postcard. Words are so much more precise and unambiguous. Illustrating is like writing poetry: It's all about gesture and suggestion, nuance and hue.
Each time I finished a piece I would instantly fall in love with it or hate it... then lapse into a state of doubt, hanging it on the wires spanning the wall above my desk for a couple hours while I worked on other things and eyed it warily. Sometimes I'd look at it with new eyes and certainty; other times I'd scrap it and start again.
It was so incredible and scary and amazing to start, and start again. To make some terrible pieces. To make some pieces that made me proud. To become fixated on a piece and have it throw off everything: Becoming too precious, so that all the other pieces following it would feel derivative or contrived. To question everything. To commit to something. To find the right lines, the right color of a moment captured.
I discovered I was capable of more than I imagined. This is always the case, I think.
You are always more capable than you imagine. It's buckling down and pushing through and doing, doing, doing the work you say you want to be doing that is So. Effing. Hard. But oh, so rewarding.
I discovered how much farther I could push, under the creative constraints of a deadline and the requirement of producing a cohesive body of work. There is something to this--the creative constraints part that I want to explore more here. I'm also going to be devoting some upcoming posts to exploring the relationship between word + image. It's a powerful one, and one I would love to explore in conversation with you.
If you haven't read the comments from yesterday's post, you should. Such amazing leaps of courage + faith + joy.
Today I want to ask you: When have you pushed yourself past a point you believed yourself capable of?
Making a book (Part 2): Finishing and starting
I want to tell you about finishing at 3a.m., when every last image was uploaded, processed, and correctly named, and every combed over.
The house so quiet that it seemed to hum. Coyotes called when the moon came up, and later owls. A pair of screech owls in particular held a caucus: One shrieking to the other from the branches of dark trees—some kind of ruckus promise people don’t usually hear.
Each night for a week I watched the sky go from black to indigo in the pre-dawn hours, slept less than a handful of hours, and then woke to continue again, because the night hours are the only uninterrupted hours around here (when the only sounds are of dreams, and wind pulling around the house, and wild animals doing what they do.) Then, on a Wednesday night, finally, I was finished.
I went to bed quietly, folding into the pocket of warmth beside T like a small origami bird, with no one awake to witness those first moments just after I hit "send." And in the morning I woke to coffee and fried eggs and little boy yelling and the fact that I was at the beginning of something utterly new.
A new voice. A new angle + slant. A book for your hands to hold next fall.
There are so many things I want to tell you about the messy, beautiful, exhilarating process--and about what's next: The ideas and dreams and plans to come. On Monday: A post about creative constraints and the process of illustrating the book...
But for now, simply this: I couldn’t have survived without Coffee. Or chocolate (in terribly copious amounts.) Or hot showers. Or my small legion of superheroes: T, my in-laws and two friends in particular who, on their respective coasts, nudged and encouraged and pushed me to be my biggest, bravest, truest self.
And YOU.
You, the wanderers and wonderers who come here with bright words and big hearts. I'm so grateful, always for you and your comments. Tell me: When was a time you took an enormous leap? What did it feel like? What happened next?
On making the book (Part 1)
I’m not sure where to begin: at the beginning, or at the ending, or right here, this morning, when I woke to the moon just slipping between the branches of the trees along the edge of the field, and Venus, a little higher up like a diamond against the pale lapis blue of the dawn sky. This is what I know now: that after a week where I stayed up so late I saw the brightening blue that comes before the dawn each day: the way the sky changes from dark to bright, the way the world begins to swell then with the sounds of birds, the way the trees shake off their silhouettes and begin to rustle and flutter with all the dimension of bark and branch and turning leaf.
The hills now are flame the way they turn each fall, and I stare at them in wonder, in awe that somehow together we’ve arrived here: Me and the hills, in fall. That the summer passed I have only this evidence: The garden entirely overgrown with weeds this year. The bright red peppers glowing like sparks among the two-foot high tangle of radishes grown to seed; the Mexican sunflowers offering a hundred yellow centers to the bees: bumble and honey and ground bees all coming and going with an urgency now, storing the last pollen they can find to turn to honey to stave off winter’s length and bite.
That summer came and went, I have only this: a six and a half year old with two missing teeth, and a two and a half year old who talks in full sentences and is afraid of owls and hot air balloons and loves to bring me pretend cups of coffee. “Are you writing again Mama?” he asks. “You want some more coffee?”
That summer came and went, I have only this: a six and a half year old with two missing teeth, and a two and a half year old who talks in full sentences and is afraid of owls and hot air balloons and loves to bring me pretend cups of coffee. “Are you writing again Mama?” he asks. “You want some more coffee?”
The monarchs have left the fields; and when we drive, we pass fields where the vines have dried to brown in the first hard frosts of the season, and the pumpkins lie exposed and orange like so many dots in a Serat painting. The hills are turning to flame. At night owls call, and coyotes wake us. In the morning the grass is drenched with dew or frost.
And I am here, at the beginning, at the end, right here in the heart of a vibrant autumn, and I finished the book.
I made a book. (And Yes. I totally got goosebumps writing that.)
I created an entire body mixed media work, turning my studio a storm of snippets and spilled India ink and gel medium and postcards and so many empty coffee cups. I spent the past three weeks working intensely
I want to write more about that process this week—because it was a glorious, immense undertaking that brought manifold lessons about what is possible, about creative constraints, about accepting help, and about urgency and drive and passion.
It split me open, gave me courage, terrified me, and made me absolutely certain of this one thing: This work is exactly what I am meant to be doing.
More tomorrow...Really, truly, excited about being back here.