My favorite part

I come home after they're asleep; after a day filled like honey in a comb, the hours oozing from between the cracks of overlapping schedules, workloads, deadlines, demands, and now this sweetness. This, at their bedsides in the dark, listening to their breathing: soft and even.

Sprout still sleeps like a baby: his arms thrown up above his head, pacifier in his mouth, legs askew. His hair is almost damp and soft, so soft; his fingers curled into his palms.

Bean sleeps with long legs pulled up to his chest, on his side, curled with a hand under his cheek. He's kicked his covers off the way he always does, and I replace them, tugging them softly up around his chin.

It's this that is my favorite part: the way the day ends and I have them.

That they're mine; these two boys.

And even when I'm gone pulling long hours and making dreams come true, they're ready whenever I return to yell "Mommy!" as I come through the door; to throw themselves at my waist, sticky-handed and too loud, the house a tumult of their messes.

(Being their mother is one of the best things in the world.)

What I see when I blink

Last night I came home late from working on a collaborative project and slid beneath the covers to find the embering heat of my guy, dreaming. Now the morning is here again, too soon, jostling, clattering, and filled to the brim. I blink, and when close my eyes I see my life in snapshots, like sunspots, the minutes compressed to just these instances, mid air, mid action. My big boy with a voice that sounds like the bark of a dog who woke up at 3 am feeling like he couldn’t breath.

Blink.

The little one in a pointy Hannah Anderson hoodie and his brother’s Sambas running around with jam on his face and a paci in his mouth.

Blink.

Squirrels that have figured out how to leap from a stack of broken wooden lawn chairs through the gravity of air to the bird feeder, where they twirl with fat furry bellies exposed, eating seed with their dainty little paws.

Blink.

The startled chickadees who fly down to find these furry beasts their tails whirring, their cheeks chock full.

Blink.

Out the window the icicles taller than me; the sky bluer than the ocean; the clouds gathering over the mountain tops like the breath of dragons; the floor that has not been vacuumed in days.

Blink.

Everywhere I turn there are things: to be done, held, watched, waited for, unraveled, sorted, replied to, invented. This is life, mid motion, captured.

Blink.

More glimpses of winter moments captured here.

Unwind

Oh hello!

What have you been up to?

The past few days have been my very own Alice in Wonderland gone awry: coding and building a website from the ground up--using all new (to me) tools has made my brain ache and my body long for movement. It's still in it's demo phase, but I'm excited to share it. Go take a peak around.

Outside it keeps snowing: gorgeous dreamy flakes and our Christmas will be white, white, white. In the tree out the dining room window a red cardinal waits, wondering when I'll put the bird feeders out. Things have been on hold around here as the semester came to a symphonic end. Everything colliding with many unexpected technical failures: the learning curve is steep when you're a novice.

Of course, I love every minute: I'm like that. But honestly, this last week was really hard. I really started to miss all the things that define the day to day of my life: wrestling on the floor with my boys; exercise; painting my toenails; making out; going out with friends; decorating for the holidays. Everything was temporarily abandoned as I hunched at the table and produced create a website; two essays; and three art projects.

Now: I'm a free girl for a few days--but I have some serious (and super exciting!) book business that must be attended to, and how! Cannot wait to share--but can't yet. Just grin with me & keep your fingers crossed. And thank you, thank you for your patience with getting rewards and all the rest. I haven't forgotten. Oh no, not at all. It's just: I never do things half way. It's going to be awesome. Oh yes.

Today we are heading out to cut a tree and tonight our neighbors have a Christmas nativity that they've been putting on with the neighborhood kids in their barn for twenty years. It's magical: warmth and caroling and kids with halos and angel wings and donkeys and lamas and lambs all acting out the story of the birth of Jesus. I love it. It's one of my favorite things about the holiday actually: this simple, old fashioned celebration that speaks to the heart and the truth of this holiday. Peace and goodwill and community. And also cookies and sledding after.

Speaking of... we're having some friends for some cookie decorating fun tomorrow and I'm wondering: what is your absolute favorite holiday cookie recipe?

nothing but scraps

Impossibly, I am still awake. Smacking my head into code. Ready, ready, ready for the semester to end. Ready for some time disconnecting from intellectual work and reconnecting with play and this here space. In the meantime: bed, because nothing else makes sense and then tomorrow more work than is possible in less time than is conceivable. Rinse and repeat until Wednesday. Then, no matter what: yoga + dinner with girlfriends and the semester will be more or less complete. Whew.

Emergent Process

Today the first snow. Not really the fat flakes of later winter, but the quiet delicate fluttering of small flecks of snow nonetheless. The sky is gray except for where the clouds are pulled thin, and then the sun shines through with milky light. Out my window birds arrive: chickadees, blackbirds, crows. The alight among the bare twigs, and preen, the slight fleeting snow falling on their feathers. This is as close as I’ve come this week, to being out doors: watching from my window as the world turns to winter outside. And I can hardly believe it: winter, just like that. The days darker, and darker still. Inside, I’m at my desk; an itemized to-do list hanging on the wall in front of me: 34 projects of varying degrees of critical importance to be accomplished by December. Two weeks.

And it’s intense. That’s for certain. Especially with two small boys underfoot. This past week I was doing the solo parent thing which forced every single minute to double in value. Not longer. Just worth more. In every minute I’m mother and student. Writer and novice programmer. Digital artist and researcher. All of it, every minute.

But when people ask me how I’m liking school, often with an “I’m so glad it’s you and not me” tone of voice, I can’t help myself: I love it. {more...}

A compass of ordinary things

By Wednesday night I can hear my heart thud, thudding in my chest as I wait for a glass to fill with water, or scrub the dinner pots and pans after the boys have gone to bed. It is a hollow drum in the hull of my chest; my rib bones lifting and falling shallowly, more fragile now, after days with too little sleep and so much to think.

I seek out the basket of laundry, rumpled from a day left waiting; shirt sleeves inside out, socks always mismatched, and find solace in shaking out the wrinkles with a quick flick of the wrist, my fingers smoothing the cotton of little pajama shirts; the denim of pair of after pair of jeans. I let myself become lost in the folds, in the process of folding; the bed where I am sitting filling with tidy categorical stacks: napkins, linens, little boy clothes, mine, his. It’s Wednesday, the end of my classes for the week, the day when I feel the cumulative lack of sleep spill out unevenly in my mind, my thoughts like so many mismatched socks.

I’ve discovered this is the only way for me to be: wholly here, heart thudding, and then here again, wholly.

Here is anywhere. Here is this moment with a random fat fly buzzing heavily about my studio; my keys clacking. Here is in the car driving home in the golden light of late autumn (the leaves are mostly fallen now; the ones that remain are rust and ocher.) Here is scooping Sprout up, his hands covered with green marker marks, and pressing my face into his sweet sticky curls. Here is telling my sweet wide-eyed bean a story about two chickens and a hedgehog on a raft. Here is now, and mine is a compass of ordinary things.

What holds you in your life? What makes it possible for you to do, and do, and be, more, again, day after day?

scraps and bits

It's late. It is that time of night where the house hums in the quiet, and outside the moon, full and round and up till morning, is obscured by the clouds that came in the evening. It is that time of night where my mind becomes perforated and shallow; where what I'm working on dissolves like sugar in the bottom of a cup of tea.

It's been such a non-stop week, I haven't felt like there were ever minutes really where I could come up for air until today when Lizardek came for a visit, all the way from Boston, all the way from Sweden. Liz. What can I say? She and her mom filled up my home with smiles today. We went to an ice cream factory. The blue sky sang bluer. The yellow leaves lingering on the hills hued to gold. Such a fun day; also because Bean and I got to hang together, and I've been loving these times we've been having: just the two of us. He's a different kid when he's by himself. All kids are, I suppose. But I particularly like spending time with him when we're going someplace and chattering together. On the way home from our adventures today after two ice cream cones, he passed out in the car, chocolate still on his cheeks. Looking back at him I could feel my heart thudding hard in my throat. His eyelids transparent almost; his sandy hair falling slantwise across his dreaming face.

It's amazing, again and again, to find myself in the identity of being somebody's mother. It's a form that constantly shifts and sheds; like the fragile skin of a snake. I grow as they do.

+++

Some scraps of exciting news:

Milk & Ink: A Mosaic Of Motherhood is out! It's jam-packed with amazing writers--many of the pieces moved me to tears with the sheer beauty of the language, and poignancy of story. I've contributed three pieces to this collection and feel so lucky to be a part of it! All profits are going to Mama Hope--which makes this an even more most buy, must read book. Go get your copy!

I've started a new weekly column over at Today's Mama chronicling some of the nitty-gritty bits of being in grad school full time as a parent. Fun stuff.

Some musings about the future of digital media and culture here. (This is where my head is when it's not here.)

Chaos + golden light

It's really like this. Golden, golden light. I get out of class and drive home in wonder, my camera on my lap. I pull over randomly to take pictures (one of my many projects for class is to sustain a daily practice--mine has been to take a picture of the same thing every day in different contexts. Here is a peak.) I am stunned over and over and over again by the beauty of this world.

On the radio about a month ago I heard a scientist declare, "there are no miracles," and I spun the tuner away in frustration. How can you look at this wonderment of beauty, or even at the precise minute functioning of your hands or dreams and say there are no miracles? I couldn't live without wonder. Could you?

Today Bean was sick and Sprout was teething--his final teeth (fingers crossed) are poking through, and even so much to do, I spent most of the day outdoors in the mild golden light stacking wood and watching the boys play side by side: with sticks in the mud; in their tree house; in the sand box; in the gathering froth of fallen leaves. Bean desperately wants Sprout to talk, but Sprout is taking his sweet time. He says many words, but enunciates them poorly; always grinning, gesturing, moving. Sprout isn't interested in the names for things the way Bean was at his age; instead he's interested in making people laugh. He is so tuned in emotionally, it always surprises me to see the way his face mirrors mine. When he's done something naughty and I scold him, he bursts into tears of remorse, arms flung wide, running to me to fix it.

But oh, he's got a temper too, that little one. When he want's something and doesn't get it, he'll grab the nearest object and throw it to the floor howling, "No! No!" indignantly. And he does the perfect jelly-limbed all kick and squiggle tantrum. Nothing lasts though, and he's like a summer day. Even when the clouds show up, it's only for a little while. Bean on the other hand will dig in and stay moody for a long, long time. He does things his way regardless of who he annoys, or disappoints. His. Own. Drummer. Oh yes.

By Thursday the week has always pummeled me a bit. My mind spits sparks. The ideas lift off and land like startled birds and I'm always hoping I'll have enough down time and quiet to catalogue them, though I rarely do. My notebooks are bursting. My desktop is a daily array of exploding files. Thursday always shoves me back into the daily, immediate, messy parts of my life. The laundry that's piled up; the wood that needs stacking; boys, loud, snotty nosed and grimy handed with jelly grins and the softest hair in the world.

Today we made gingerbread cookies and apple sauce from the trees on our land--and it was an exercise in letting chaos happen, let me tell you. Flour, everywhere. The nutmeg grinder disassembled. Apple peels on the floor. Sprout on the counter (he climbs everything all the time now, to all of our chagrin.) Sometimes chaos is perfect.

Chaos and golden light.

the things that show time's passing:

I spend the day between here and myself.

Outside the trees are turning to vermillion three weeks early and in the evenings the mountains are on flame; the sky purple dark and sudden light the way only a New England sky can be. I spend the day in a state of almost perpetual creative activity and it’s crazy and intense and thrilling. If I could chart the synapse activity in my mind these past five weeks it has skyrocketed. Each idea leading to sequential sparks, my mind like the starry sky when you look up after twirling: blur of streaking gold and dark.

It is inconceivable, almost, how fast the days go. How fast autumn light is gaining. The equinox slipped by like something leaving silently through the closing door of summer. I look now and wonder at how fast time has gone, while all around me there are marks to show it’s passing:

T and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary this past weekend (and our eleventh together) returning to the place where we were married for a marvelous meal. We were married outdoors on a little peninsula reaching out into the lake, and over the weekend we walked back there in awe by the way our lives are now. “Did you ever think?” I asked. He shook his head.

I was pregnant then, with Sprout.

How things have changed.

Do you know that when I started this blog I didn’t know a single “real life” person who had ever even heard of a blog? Little did I know how it would change my life. And it has—wild as that may sound. It has submerged me in the world of digital media where I feel compelled and creative and at home; and it has given me community and audience and escape and reassurance. This week I’ll likely hit the 1000th post mark. (This is the 992st post)…and there are 11,854 comments logged on this site. Pretty awesome.

Since that time blogs and digital media and the internet have changed so much; facebook and twitter and commercial blogging have reshaped the face of personal blogs in many ways—but I’m still so happy to come here. So grateful for your comments, for your shared pieces of existence, for your tips on good music, good food, good books, good ideas, and good ways to solve problems with two little rapscallion boys.

Time is galloping. The garden is scraggly with weeds, plush with overripe tomatoes; overrun with squash. The geese are back, cutting the skies in Vs, and the starlings and blackbirds have arrived in throngs on the wires of the telephone poles I photograph daily now as a part of a daily artistic practice. Tonight I am tackling HTML and CSS (another thing on my 33 before 33 list) and listening to new favorite mixes on 8tracks, and feeling like while time is slipping, it is the best time I’ve ever had. All of it, all my life: the best time. Do you ever feel that way?

What are five things you are grateful for right now?

snapshots like sunspots

From the past week:

1.

Frustration the color of crushed grapes; my fingers in my palms. We’re at a stand off: my five year old and I. He wants to do one thing, I’ve given him a choice of two others. It was like this when he was a baby. People said, “just let him cry it out,” but when we did, a single time, he cried for an hour, then fell asleep but woke up angry, remembering everything. Now his eyes are puffy with tears and allergies and I’ve had far too little time to myself, and far too many deadlines to make time now for this push and pull. I scream. SCREAM at him. I am ashamed, heartbroken. I want to snip through everything I’ve done with a small pair of embroidery scissors, thread after indelicate thread until I get back to the place where our hearts are close and our cheeks touch.

I hate you, Mommy. I hate you he screams.

Nothing prepared me for this. For the way I would feel like I had ruined everything. Like being broken up with, but irreparably worse. (Thank god we have a few more years before he is a teenager to figure things out...)

Finally I backed down. He played outdoors. We skirted each other ashamed by the mess we’d made of things. At bedtime he asked for Daddy to read to him, and slipped by my studio door without coming to goodnight.

2. T carries him into the bedroom before I am awake. The feeling of his bird like shoulder blades; the hull of his delicate ribs; the haphazard placement of his marionette arms against my neck, wakes me. I love you Mommy. I love you so much.

I love you too. I love you. I love you. I whisper back. His elbow makes an upside down V along the line of my chin. I press my nose into his neck where it smells forever just like him: like cookies and grass and autumn air, and slip a little towards a softer sleep.

3. We're downtown at a street festival and he stands watching the fire throwers, just like his dad, hands in pockets, one knee bent, transfixed. I leave the two of them watching and walk with Sprout and my mother to the Capitol green, where my littlest runs like he has something to prove. (He does: joy is everywhere.) His face beams. He climbs every set of stairs he can finds. He stops to smell every single flower; stroking the plush purple petals of the petunias as though they are the source of joy. (They are.)

4. My little one. He is the still point at the center of my heart, and a twirling dervish that colors my heart with of comfort. He is curls and sticky fingers and sweat on his brow and newly found independence and tantrums. He is laughter with juice running down his chin. He carries crushed gingersnap cookies in his fist and grins.

5. I can see them walking towards us across the green grass, both wearing yellow, like sunshine flooding towards me. They walk in synch and they are grinning: they’ve gotten lemonade and a new hat and gloves for him for winter, and they are almost one and the same, those two foreign bits of my heart.

6. The light is golden and the hills are purple and flame. The leaves have begun to turn to orange; tattered yellow; ocher. The grass is dewy now and strewn with the tree’s spent energy of a season.

Light refracts like fire in what remains.

This + that tonight

Hi. Tomorrow I have some photos to share + some stories about the epic tantrums and dark parenting moments that occurred this weekend (brought to my knees, I dare say, by my five year old Bean who holds my heart rather indelicately among the coins and pebbles and twine and marbles in his pocket) Tonight, I thought I'd share a glimpse into what I've been thinking and doing, squirreled away for hours in my studio studying:

I've been asked several times in the past couple of weeks what Emergent Media is exactly, and, as is often the case with my mixed-media multiple genre life, I find myself wanting to shrug and say: it's everything.

Because it kind of is.

It's words, for starters, and everything conveyed and made possible through the evolution of conveying words with letters, first on papyrus, then on the page, now here, on the screen. Simply: within the story of words evolving from speech to writing, is the story of human beings becoming, of human consciousness evolving, and of media emerging.

Thus, to study Emergent Media is to study both the medium, and the message, the chicken and the egg. It means to study words, and to study the ideas that words convey. It means to study media, and the messages they convey. It means to examine investigate the past for patterns, and to peak towards the future for clues. ...[more]

learning things

I want to feel like I am living down into my feet, but today I make it only as far as my spine: curved, contoured to chair after chair, listening, scribbling notes, my mind compressing and applying information as flexibly as I know how. It’s an all out pummeling to be submerged like this on Wednesdays: 6 hours of class, everything entirely new. Like learning to moon walk, or speak Japanese, that is what it feels like to dive into RAW and HTML and CSS; acronyms becoming little dog-eared tabs of meaning in my mind.

And then to switch gears from web design and theory, to making pizza and nuzzeling sweet little boy heads.

Over warm apple crumble I’d pulled together out of sheer will power Bean said, “I love Nonna more than I love you, Mommy. Just a minute more, but I do.”

Oh, to find the quite open space to be there with him then. To hold that moment open without filling it up with my own small hurts. I couldn’t help but turn away, picking at a fingernail, eyes smarting.

So this is showing up, this is what it’s like to throw yourself towards the day with the urgency and grace and inexperience of a dancer learning new material. Some moments I feel like I am defying gravity: I hit all the deadlines, I take copious notes, my mind is a perpetual shower of sparks while I am vacuuming the kitchen floors. Other times it’s about falling hard: the way my eyes feel blurring from so many consecutive hours of screen and classroom time; the way my boys see me for less time some days than they do their grandparents.

Tonight the house smells like baking apples, and I read the boys stories in the semi-dark of their bedroom. Then I come downstairs to where the house is humming with stillness. I want to fold like an origami bird, wings to body, head tucked inside a fragile crease of paper and sleep, but this isn’t about folding. No, this time, this year, these moments, are all about learning to fly.

almost a list about today

There were things, hours, chocolate graham crackers, kisses, tears. There was a walk down the road stalking birds on telephone wires for an art project (I've been inspired by this theme. Do you like the new header?) There were storm clouds and hours spent reading, Ong and Havelock and Surowiecki, and pages filled in my notebook ideas bursting like sparks.

There was an afternoon self portrait session when the light was temporarily good. Three self portraits are due in another week, in deferent mediums, and I've settled on a theme I think, of how we occupy ourselves in this illusive way: we are beings being. I feel this particularly as a mother--the way so many different piece of me are occupying the same space with myself. Does that make any sense at all? I am interested in the way we converge with ourselves, and are at odds. The way the words mother | writer | artist | designer don't necessarily overlap in any kind of orderly way.

There was giggling on the bed, snapping more photos, twirling, and heading for the door. There were white rocks found and stored in pockets. Wild grapes eaten that stained our lips. Birds caught in flight, in pixels. Birds in silhouette, black over blue.

There was an evening sky filled with pink, and fallapart tired boys and more tears and bedtime snuggles, and then T and I found each other on the couch, soaking up the light, soaking up each other, our fingers running lightly along each other's limbs.

Now there is night, windows are mirrors, lamplight makes circles and words fill the page.

Tell me about your day... I love reading little glimpses into your worlds.

Blur and beauty

Hi. I have resolved to come here and snatch snippets and pin them down even if I feel like they don't matter or don't make sense. Will you still come to visit? I hope so.

So Wednesdays are the longest days for me around here now. Two studio classes with so much awesome my brain basically explodes by the time I'm through at 5pm. Then the long drive home where I can feel my body practically humming still with the energy of thought. Like a whirring halo of ideas that glisten over the surface of my skin. It really feels like that.

I'm grateful for the drive; for the almost forty minutes (with evening traffic) to pull myself out of my mind. To reconnect with my muscles, breath. It's a good transition time so that when I get home I can melt to floor level where Sprout comes to find me, folding into my chest. He strokes my bare arms with his little sticky hands. "Hi mama. Hi."

This is the hardest part and also the riddle: not being around him all day, even though when I am around him all day I long for exactly what I have now--heady intellectual conversation and artistic challenge.

Why must this be so?

Tonight T was out late, so it was just me and my two boys after their grandparents left. We said grace, ate polenta with cheese and sauce, giggled a lot. And then already it was about teeth brushing and diaper changing and bedtime and now more than ever I want to sneak in and kiss their faces. Am I missing everything by not being here every day to police the endless tussles over toys; to clean up the endless messes; to catch their endless smiles? No. That can't be. Their lives are rich with grandparents and Bean is in Kindergarten (!) and oh, how I love this crazy intense busy mind expanding stuff of being in school. Little by little I'll be posting a few more tidbits over here if you are ever interested in following along. I'm also on twitter pretty regularly, sharing all the inspiration I'm finding daily. Like this (so fun!)

It's starting to feel like fall here. The garden has reached that prolific wild state of neglect and bounty. There are potatoes with a thousand sleeping eyes waiting to be dug; crickets still in the evening; the first yellow and red leaves. Something I'm going to try very hard to do on the days when I don't have class is to get outdoors for small snippets of time. There is nothing more restorative than walking under the open sky, or lying in a field of tall grass, or feeling the wind hard on my face at the top of a parking garage with a glorious view.

after midnight | in the morning

There is a quiet now that I’m unused to. The way the house almost hums: the ambient noise of all the things we use all day, plugged into their sockets, sleeping with green blinking eyes open. The baby sleeps; the boy too, spread-eagle on his bunk. I can hear them breathing. Outside there are crickets in the dark, calling with their stick-legs sawing legs for summer to last a little longer, and also to have the of encounters with a mate.

It’s 1am. My mind is a hive of whirring thoughts. Heidegger and his mysteries coupled with all the things I do not know about how to make a video capture of my screen, or how to alter images the way I see them in my mind, and there are also things about aperture and chance and promise. And this: what will I do when the day comes fast and hard and I’ve had only five hours of sleep, backing up against a handful of other nights with barely six. How not to take the world personally then?

+++ I wake up with "you are the best thing... that ever happened to me.." running through my head in loops and I can hear the boys downstairs clattering, laughing, fighting over the fire truck. My husband has let me sleep in some, and when I slide into the skin of my waking self I feel still, like the hive of bees swarming through my limbs, each finger quivering slightly, and the thoughts I went to sleep with are still there, like a trace of sugar on my lips. I remember, I gather, the thoughts coming faster, too fast until there are words before sentences.

Heidegger. Oh my. Have any of you read Heidegger? The piece I was working through last night was called "The Question of Technology" and oh, how his circular, mysterious sentences thrill me. I am a girl for whom philosophy speaks truth. I'm versed in this. The way words, when traced to their origins reveal certain truths. I love it, even as the questions themselves make me uneasy.

I keep meaning to show up here in a more reasonable way: with a complete story, with a real update--of all the things and thoughts and ideas that have filled my days, but I can't seem to yet. So the fragments will have to do. The snippets, whenever they come, making a patchwork memory of these moments.

I need your help!

First of all, a little bit of giddiness: I must just have pause here to say how THRILLED I am to be in an MFA program.... To have weekly artistic assignments in multiple mediums I have never explored. To be engaged in daily discussions about how ideas and words and images shape who we are. YES. Indeed. It's been such a long time coming and it feels incredibly incredible to be here finally. So awesome. Now that that is out of the way, because you are all reflective and brilliant and generous and truly amazing, I have a favor to ask. I need your help. 5 minutes of your time and a little bit of your brain to be exact....

One of my first assignments is to explore some ideas around design--and to create some type of presentation based on that exploration. I've decided that because my art and writing has come to life here on this blog through my interaction with you--that I'd like to ask you a few questions and then turn your answers int a super cool mind map representing how you collectively think about the answers to these questions.

I need your info by Friday at the latest...All that is need is a one or two sentence response to each of the following questions. (You can leave a question blank too, if you want..)

What do you get by being a contributor? My undying gratitude--and a a glimpse at the final product (if you'd like.)

UPDATED: Thank you to everyone who contributed. I can't wait to figure out how to represent your awesome responses. xoxo!

an impossibly possible project

I’m driving with the windows down and my hair down and the late August light makes everything gold, gold, gold: the asphalt, the windshields of oncoming cars, the dozen college boys who run across the road in front of me, shirtless, their skin on fire in the setting sun, to run down the green median between the traffic. The air is sweet and the traffic slow and I drive away from myself and towards myself simultaneously. I’m going to class. The first of the semester. Already my mind is like a hive of bees, bristling with ideas, with longing, with possibility.

I feel like I am in the looking glass, slipping towards an alternate view of everything that I know, everything I can imagine, be, do.

I’m wearing a blue dress and it’s just me and the quiet and then, eventually, NPR as I wait at the stoplights and I want everything to feel the way it does tonight: full with opportunity, yet not saturated with the stress that will inevitably come as deadlines press and the hours cannot hold enough. Right now, anything feels possible. This is always the way things are before you begin them. You can be anything, right up until the moment when you try.

Then it’s all about sweat and grit and talent. I’m not leaving any room for doubt.

I have the feeling that I will be coming here often with words; with the little scraps of thoughts I invariably carry around in my head; with the wonder of all of it, and the terror too. I’m the only one in the program with two small kids. The only one living at the end of a long dirt road thirty minutes away. The only one nearly bursting with words for a book. It will all be possible, right?

If there was ever a time this blog had anything to do with balancing motherhood and a creative life, it will be now, for these next two years. I'm thinking it should be my new byline: My Topography: An Impossibly Possible Project.

{grin.}

I want to remember this: just before parking for class tonight I watched a middle aged couple, both blind, navigating the sidewalk together, their bodies a dialogue of halts and movements, their dark glasses reflecting the setting sun. They held each others arms, each tapping out a path for future steps with a long white stick. They encountered the park bench, a tree, and navigated around these obstacles with a kind of faltering grace. Without sight, they were wholly devoted to the task of being present in the moment of walking.

The only place I can be is right here, encountering the unexpected with joy.

I also wanted to tell you that I'll be posting links and inspiration and essays about emergent media and design here. (But I'll also be taking full advantage of all your awesomeness here. Stay tuned. I have a project already in the works that I need your input on.)

August 22: decided

I love this set. I've been loving taking pictures every day (though I've failed to post every day.) I like trying to tell a story with shape, with color, with line echoing line, with gesture reflecting gesture, with color. +++

So I am going.

It's for certain. Even though things will be tight, tight, tight financially. And also time, it will be a figment, and invention of imagination, a delirium, a dream. Who cares? I'm going. A full time student, this year, this week. I'm giddy. Happy. Content. Terrified.

I didn't even imagine this last year, now.

It's been such a year.

A year of big huge changes. Of beginnings. Of this: every day I face uncertainty on the page and keep going. I put my words here, and here, and here again, around the moments that I am trying to say. It isn’t arrow straight or clear, but it’s got a pulse, and it keeps unfolding, like something new and wet, or something very old and furled and fragile, and I keep waiting, and showing up, fingers crossed, with more determination in my rib cage than I’ve ever had for anything. This book is happening. There is no other way.

And now school too. Complete reinvention. The beginning of so many things.

Have any of you done this: full time school + full time parenting + full time writing?

Full, full, full.

{big smiles}

August 15::The only way

This is what I will keep saying, even when things seem impossible, or impossibly hard, or just straight terrifying, or daunting, or uncertain. Over and over, yes.

Two phrases in my head today (the second one makes me giggle):

"There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way." ~ Wayne Dyer

And also: "If you're going through hell, keep going." ~ Winston Churchill