Ready

I have a secret & I'm just about ready to share it.

Any guesses?

closer now

Hunger brings them close, but I don't see them at first; I'm at the sink filling a water jug for the chickens, watching the water spill across the dirty dishes left for later and then I glance.

The sunlight moves, and in the shadows they're there. Six deer, maybe more. They move like quiet trees, they move like shadows. Their fur is dappled with the sun. They cannot know that inside, on the windowsill the branches I've brought in are blooming now. Forsythia, yellow and urgent with what's to come.

Outside I walk across hard packed snow, the mud turned back to ice; my breath rising in clouds, my nostrils flaring in the cold. 14 degrees and it's nearing the end of March.

This is when I forget everything (dandelions, the smell of lilacs, the song of the peepers): just before it happens

+++

Some inspiration I've been finding:

This gorgeous painting (and all of her paintings really).

My Heart Wanders. Don't you just want to pick this book up and thumb through it?

This poem. You simply must go read it.

And these words. So true.

Where are you finding inspiration? What are your days like now in early spring?

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.)

Things that delight me

This series of shadows snapped from a walk with the boys yesterday.

Spring riding today: blue squares all the way. Easy turns. Wide grins.

Buying a new moleskine. The reporter kind with plain white pages. I the way the pages feel flimsy and effortless; the way ink shows through & the way words tumble after each other to be put down there in my messy handwriting.

A secret I can't wait to share really, really soon.

The way the light lasts longer and longer every day.

Mapping out my schedule for summer and blocking off whole days for writing, no excuses. (Or perhaps I have the best excuse.)

What are six things you're delighted by today?

The Unnamed

I keep thinking of the people, unnamed who wake up in the morning, leave their houses and return to the Fukushima plant wearing frail protective gear and thicker prayers to protect their bodies soaking up more radiation than is reasonable, sustainable, possible.

Do they say goodbye in the morning? Do they kiss the kids and women and men that they love? Do they wail uncontrollably in their cars driving towards the reactor, or are they convinced, confident and cool?

What does it feel like to be a civilian volunteered up for this enormous task: insurmountable and devastating both now, and in years from now when their white blood cells drop or tumors spread, when their hands quaver and their minds grow dim? What does it feel like to go unnamed so long, to return day after day, failing, hopeful, frantic, resigned?

I keep picturing them standing in their kitchens in the morning eating bowls of steaming broth, but their kitchens have likely been destroyed. Their homes, neighborhoods, all of it. So where do they go at night? And where do the others go, also unnamed, the thousands without shelter, food, heat?

My hands flurry across the keyboard until they end with the sentence above and then they stall. I start, stop, delete, start again.

I can't think of words that fill the gap in my chest; the ache; the way my heart is filled with everything: hope, promise, prayer, sadness, wonder.

Outside snowflakes are falling from a clear sunny sky, like crystals, weightless and glittering. The sun has risen, and the sap is rising, and the earth, tilted a little farther on its axis, is turning here towards spring.

What we can do.

A kind of prayer

Today I want to remember the way the orchids turn to the light; how heat waves rise from woodstove; and how cat’s purring vibrates up through my thin ankle bones where she has curled against my foot, the rhythmic whirring of her content traveling up my shin bones into the soft muscle of my calf.

Today I want to remember how tiredness makes me fragile; how I feel like something insignificant and slight, like paper tossed to the wind, and how I want to fold hope around my heart like a paper shield; a fleet of fluttering cranes.

What can anyone say now? What can we do except offer up what we have, and feel the way the urgency and tragedy as it fills up our own small lives with poignancy and grace and devastation?

Here, the world is softening; the swelling buds make the stark silhouette of twigs less distinct and edgy, and the hillsides are dappled with snowmelt and mud, and I’ll take hope wherever I can find it.

+++

Another way to pray.

Things stay the same even while they change.

Now we go down the muddy road

You can feel it on days like this: the way everything wants to run. Blood, sap, snowmelt, everything quickening and spilling over.

We go out because there is nothing else we can do. Staying indoors and getting work done is like trying to hold water in my palms; the boys slip out before I can stop them. Sprout barely has his boot’s on and Bean has run away ahead carrying a summer umbrella. I chase after carrying mittens, hats.

The big one is almost flying: wind catching the umbrella as he makes the turn. And from a distance his slight body has lifted off the ground.

I remember.

I once jumped off a toolshed as a girl. There was a wind storm. I held an umbrella high above me. It was the only thing I wanted: to fly. And it seemed so inevitable, so certain that I’d just lift off. I didn't hesitate at all.

I don’t remember falling. Though it’s certain I did because I’m here aren’t I? Or have I just forgotten some secret magic of childhood where flying is less impossible; where dreams blink in and out of reality just like shooting stars?

Now we go down the muddy road and everything is running quick, quicker: our feet, the snowmelt, the sap in every thick trunked tree and slender willow. Under the banks of snow at the edge of the road muddy water rushes: rivulets gathering and spilling, seeking downhill; seeking the eventual streambed, the pond, the river, the lake, the ocean.

The boys are soaked in seconds but giddy with the late afternoon sunlight and the softness of the air. They find sticks to poke in snowy holes; carve miniature rivers; make dams of snow.

Beneath our feet, slush the color of maple sugar. And though it is still long before the purple of crocuses;when I look up I can see the slight red fatness of buds on the maples. A swelling promise. Sweetness soon. And this weekend: daylight savings already.

Being Right (brained)

When I started snowboarding, I started with my left foot forward on the board. It’s the standard way to do it. Go to the mountain and you’ll see: almost everyone has their left foot first, and at first I didn’t even think to question it. Except that it was wild to try to get my brain to conform to the movement. For the first two times we went to the mountain I had to perform complex mental acrobatics to be able to get myself down the mountain. I had to visualize every single turn, and it felt strange and unfamiliar, but I couldn’t put my finger on what the feeling meant to me.

At first I thought it was just part of the process of learning this new sport. I’d ride the lift, fall off getting off, stand, clip my bindings and then begin my elaborate inner dialogue. I’d have to talk myself through each and every turn, as though I were translating the action to my brain from another language. And I’d make it to the bottom, baffled and astounded by the difficulty.

I’m not brilliantly coordinated by any stretch; but I am athletic and strong. And it felt strange to me that I couldn’t get beyond my own mind; that after two trips to the mountain I still couldn’t ride without extreme mental focus.

Then I talked to some friends who are boarders and one kindly told me to stand and then pushed me hard from behind.

I stumbled forward, right foot first.

“Ha!” she laughed. “You’re goofy footed. Try putting your bindings the other way around.”

I promptly got my bindings switched and the next time we went to the mountain the process was awkward, but already I could feel my body taking over. After a few runs, my mind grew quiet and my muscles began to lead: my body moving to it’s own remarkable choreography of balance and motion, my mind present only in the sensation.

Yesterday I was carving beautiful arcs down the mountain, and I could feel the way the motion was suddenly natural to me. Half down a run by myself I started laughing because everything suddenly came together for me: of course I’m right footed. I’m also right brained.

And soaking up all the goodness over at the Right Brainers Business Summit has made me realize: I’ve been approaching money and strategic planning and many other elements in my life much the way I was trying to approach snow boarding: from a left brained slant that feels utterly foreign.

Because it is.

I’ve been trying to work within a left brained paradigm. Spreadsheets, for example: they feel almost painfully unnatural to me. Linear organization has always felt lacking. I can’t wrap my mind around rows of numbers without some form of translation. I’m always drawing pictures and diagrams to make things make sense.

And I realize now that part of my unresolved relationship with money comes from telling myself certain left brained myths: that successful entrepreneurs are left brained, MBA, straight talking folk who crush on Excell; and strategic business plans and growing money can only be approached through crunching data.

Pam Slim spoke at the RBBS a few days ago and I found myself relating deeply to what she had to say.

Pam shared that she grew up in a rich neighborhood, but without a lot of money, and reflected on how this shaped her view about money for a long time: "Things are imprinted from a young age. I remember always hearing my mom worry about money. There were some things that were set in my psyche about money early on."

Such as “Good people make teacher’s salaries” and for a long time when she didn’t “want to be greedy” about asking her full worth.

But asking her full worth is what has enabled Pam to become an investor in the causes she is passionate about.

That struck a chord. I want to give more than just being in the trenches. I want to invest.

I also loved this little bit of advice that she gave: “Document your assumptions every month. You forget what your assumptions are and you can’t measure your progress and make adjustments unless you revisit your assumptions regularly.”

So. Here’s to documenting assumptions.

What are yours?

Money, Passion + Vision

I've been coming to some big smashing realizations lately about money: making it, growing it, attracting it, and managing it. And about all the crazy, peculiar attitudes towards money that I was surrounded with growing up.

I know, right? This is so not a subject I'd usually write about here, but that's part of my breakthrough. I've silently harbored all sorts of inherited attitudes and assumptions about money for long enough. I'm ready to slough off, dig deep, and start fresh.

See, here's the thing: I came from a family that was poor by choice. Crazy, right?

My parents were poor because they were committed to work with a higher purpose. They were altruistic, spiritually minded, and broke. Always.

We never had enough money for any frivolity: fashion was scorned (because we could not afford it;) after-school sports shunned (no money for uniforms of for the extra gas to drive me to & from practice;) and and people in our community who devoted their careers to earning high pay checks were regarded as selfish, self absorbed, egotistical, or worst of all: materialistic.

I didn't really question any of it for a very long time. In fact I bought it all. Hook line and sinker. I'd say things like "Money isn't important to me. What I really want to do is change the world." Or: "I don't really care about money, all I care about is making a difference."

And you know what? That's bullshit. What does it matter if you grow the capacity of your own soul immensely, if the isolation of poverty limits you to affecting only yourself? Even Pema Chodron and Ticht Naht Hanh leverage the significant sums of money available to them to extend their reach: affecting thousands upon thousands of people. It's money that makes it possible for them to travel; to speak at workshops, to write books, to act on their inner fire.

I've started to dig to the bottom of all this in part because I've found my tribe at the Right Brainers in Business Video Summit (which is awesome by the way.) And in part because I've been following Danielle Laporte for a long enough to feel like her approach is finally getting under my skin (in the very best of ways.)

I love her unabashed way of aiming for it all: for the tripple bottom line AND changing the world. She is both a humanist AND an entrepreneur. She gives like crazy; she is ethical, she is fierce. She is someone who who is growing her soul AND selling her soul.

This is big. To find myself here, facing all the strange ambiguity I have towards standing in my own power around money. It's complex, confusing, and awesome. What better thing could I be doing at the start of spring? It's time for rebirth and growth and transformation. Pow! Spring cleaning taken to the nth degree.

So of course I'm curious. Really curious: what were (are) the attitudes towards money that you grew up with? How have they shaped your world view? How do these attitudes influence what you do?

Do you believe you are worthy of making a fat paycheck? Do you feel like your creative work can be richly rewarded financially? What are your hang ups? What are your success stories?

Halted

I've got a world class sinus infection and there is nothing like it to halt me in my tracks; to arrest all my momentum and force me to pause. The floor is freckled with crumbs, with legos and bits of string; sun and shadow making triangles and lines, a geometry of this moment right now. I curl up on the couch and do nothing and realize immediately that I don't know how to do this at all. I'm falling behind even as I close my eyes, turn my face toward the sun and feel it hot on my cheek.

The boys zoom by in circles on their plasma cars. Bean dressed in full pirate regalia; sprout in a spotted shirt. The house plants need watering; my to do list is longer than the day.

I am so ready for spring.

The art of falling down:

I crossed the first item off my 34 before 34 list this weekend: snowboard blue squares, and it felt amazing. They were my last two runs on Sunday. The light was golden and the shadows long and blue across the trail, and it was just me and my board and the snow and random strangers hurtling down at improbable speeds around me. And I did it: carving my way back and forth in a brilliant, precarious, unlikely upright angle, slanting and turning, all the way down, and this is what struck me about the whole process: that becoming something or learning something is always this crazy, amazing, awkward process.

Falling is awkward (and painful) and it isn't something you can skip. You can't fast forward learning. You can't overcome fear by skipping fear itself. You can't avoid falling by not falling. You've got to be in it: messy, face planting, laughing, crying, doing it all over again.

The best thing about riding the lifts is getting a glimpse at a bigger picture. When you're on the ground, your perspective is narrow. You + snow. You think you're the only one, maybe, to every wipe out this horrifically. To skid into the drift at the edge of the trail; to splat off the lift like you don't know how to stand. You collect yourself quickly, looking around, laughing self consciously. But from the air it's all different.

From there you can see: everyone is falling. Even the show-offs. Even the brilliant ones for whom snowboarding is like flying. They know that falling = learning. Falling = risking. Falling = facing fear.

This is true for everything, not just this new obsession of mine. It's true for writing; for making art; for asking for what you want; for extending your reach; finding your voice.

When was the last time you gave yourself the opportunity to fall?

Almost spring

Do you feel it? The days are growing longer. There is more mud and less snow; but still snow. Spring, almost. The boys are drawn to the puddles; to wherever the ice is thin. We kick chunks of snow along the road and stand with our heads thrown back watching the starlings and grackles lift and land.

A few days ago I brought my camera with me for the first time in a little while. I love how having a camera makes you look harder and see more. Have you done this recently? If not, you should!

Two + all the love in the universe

You were the beginning of the rest of my life, little one. You arrived, wide eyed, with a certain calm that has stayed with you. You came with smiles already fluttering; who, and at two months old you veritably beamed. You came to this world loving. It’s your thing, it’s what makes you, you. It’s awesome.

This morning you came to our bed in our still dark bedroom while Daddy was in the shower, and you snuggled with me; your soft hand gently stroking my face. No one taught you this. You just knew it: how to be tender; how to make someone feel the warmth of your big heart.

I adore you. I haven’t spent nearly as many sentences describing our lives with you as I did with your brother because of many things: life is fuller, busier, and there are four of us now. But also because I simply love to be with you, and whenever I can, that’s where I am.

You make us all laugh. You get humor like no other kid I’ve met, in a way that is beyond your years. You’ve got timing, sound effects, gestures. It’s hilarious to watch you string us all on, grinning. We’re all game, always.

You are an athlete already. You love to throw and catch balls; you love to sled; you love to run. You’re at home in your little study body: coordinated, agile, content. And maybe it’s because of this that you go to sleep easily, effortlessly, just a kiss and then you lie down and close your eyes. Today when you woke up from your nap you somehow managed to reach through your crib bars to the book shelf. You occupied yourself this way for almost an hour, quietly, looking at books.

You make things easy. Except for mittens. And potty training.

You are talking a lot now: not long articulated sentences yet; but short phrases: naming everything, saying “thank you” every single time you receive something, saying “I love you” often. You can count to ten, in your sweet little voice, each word sounding like something uttered with marbles in your mouth: soft on the consonants. You sing at the top of your longs.

With you little one, I want the present to last forever. I want you to be the way you are for as long as long. I want this sweetness to last. The way you give drooly kisses; the way you put your own boots on; the way you drink out of a glass all by yourself, casually with one hand. I want all of it to be indelible in my mind, but even as I write you grow, and I know that one day I’ll push back the hair from my face, look up from what I’ve been writing and you’ll be 10.

Happy birthday, my little Sprout. I love you. I love you.

Breathing room

What You are like at 6:

All legs and knobby knees, always outgrowing your jeans. Mood swings: sweeter than sugar, to darker than a storm filled sky and back in the span of an hour. Messes: a thousand snippets of paper strewn like snow; marbles always rolling off beneath the couches; legos wherever I step; erector set nuts and bolts never put back. Collections: old padlocks; post it notes in rainbow colors; the mailing inserts from magazines; stamps torn off of envelops.

You have a sweet tooth, and a soft spot for stories about gnomes and fairies and and anything magical. Your eyes get large and lost in the land of faraway. You listen with everything, drinking up stories. You fidget. You are stubborn. You take the easy way out except when it's framed as a competition or a teacher tells you to keep at it (then you always do.)

You snuggle. You wrestle. You like pizza and dumplings and requested them together with carrot cake for your birthday. You like looking at picture books and listening to stories read aloud for hours. You are teaching yourself to read and write. "I know how to write LOVE!" you proudly tell me. And you do. You write us all love notes, every day. We find them everywhere: stuck in things and to things; poked into pockets; folded into books.

Numbers are your thing. You just get them, almost without thinking. You put yourself up to new number challenges every day: doubles facts and multiples; adding and subtracting from small groups of things. "If we had three more," you say eyeing the egg box, "We'd have twelve," and if we had one more we'd have ten."

This winter we've started snowboarding and last week after we picked you up from your lesson, we did a few more runs, us following you down the mountain. And wouldn't you know? You went straight for the terrain: the jumps, the trail through the glades, the bumps. I followed after in awe, taking more risk than I would have done on my own.

And that's how it has always been, little one: you make me braver. You make me bolder. You make me want to take risks and dream big dreams. You continue to teach me daily how to be a mama; and also how to be my best self. You fill my world with light. I love you my sweet 6 year old.

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?

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.

spark + blink

I feel like I am a forest fire; the way I move, the way I do, the way I am being in this life right now, this day, this week. The minutes are match sticks, my forward motion flint, the hours bursting into flame. Blink, the day gone in the heat of the moment.

Outside the snow is high above my head where the snow has been plowed to clear the narrow path for our cars to leave or arrive. I should be out shoveling, carving wider paths for our feet: to the woodpile, the chickens, the front door, but I am not. I am in the a state of perpetual mid-production; I am not in motion only when I am sleeping.

I miss running outdoors; I lingering. I need some unwind time in a big way, but I don’t think it’s going to happen this week. There isn’t a single thing that can drop off the list of absolutes except exercise, intimacy, and sleep.

What do you do in the midst of weeks like this?

in this moment

Just stopping in quickly to say hello this morning with these photos from my sunny, sunny bedroom... and to nudge you to go play. Do one thing. Today. You'll be so happy. (Promise.)
I'm finishing a big milestone for the book today (later than I'd hoped. Typing with fingers crossed makes things difficult.) And it feels good and terrifying and true to my heart. I wish I could tell you more, but I don't want to jinx it.
Today I'm crushing on this sweet song.
Reading the archives over at Slow Pony Home.
And swooning over every single afternoon here.

Flirting with chance:: it's your turn

Hello lovelies, I had no idea so many of you would play along on my little game of chance. It was an amazing day, and a challenge to try to fulfill at least suggestion from almost everyone who commented and to document it in some way. But it was also so much fun.. It was an adventure filled with many moments of resistance and joy and delight. Here is my the interactive piece I did for the class project.

I want you know know that the best thing I rediscovered through this project was just how amazing YOU are.

You are generous, sensuous, playful, romantic, and thoughtful.(Yes, you.)

You nudged me stop and take care of myself and pause; drink warm tea, luxuriate in a foot bath (the first I've ever given myself), throw myself in the snow; dance, twirl. Mostly the whole thing pushed me outside of my comfort zone and made me contemplate when I started taking things so seriously.

I was struck by how infrequently I really allow myself luxuriate in the moment. My life has gotten so busy that I'm uber focused on tasks and projects most of the time. If I stop to linger, it is to browse through my favorite photography blogs, to read something, or to stare out the window. Text and images have become the only way I fill up this hunger for beauty that lives in my soul.

My fingertips and taste buds, tendons and feet were grateful to be remembered; to be used, engaged, made to move, revel, relax, reach beyond.

How often do you flirt with chance? When do you allow yourself to step outside of your ordinary? Do you allow yourself the chance of random conversations with strangers? Moments lingering over tea? What senses do you nourish throughout your day? Which do you neglect?

To thank you, I am sending you on your very own chance encounter mission this week. It felt so taken care of by you in this unexpected way. I am so grateful for the opportunities you offered me to dig into ordinary moments of my day, and to find in them so much beauty. I hope you feel the same.

HOW TO PLAY:

In the comments share a link to your blog with photos (and words) documenting your discoveries. One person chosen at random will receive an original tiny art piece in the mail, and I'll feature some of my favorite of your photos/posts later this week here.

YOUR MISSION: This os permission to allow yourself to play; to follow whimsy and to explore who you are in this moment.

1. Make yourself your favorite breakfast. Use extra butter. Cream. Real maple syrup. Bacon. Whatever it is that you love . 2. Buy yourself tulips. 3. Take 10 minutes and pin, tape, or post some images that you love to a wall in your workspace. 4. Go outside, set a timer for 4'33 seconds and just breathe and listen. 6. Buy a pint of raspberries. Stick them on your fingers like you did when you were a kid. Eat them one by one. Don't share. 7. Do something for a stranger: buy the person in line behind you coffee, pay a toll, fill a parking meter, give them a flower.... 8. Clear a space, get down on the floor and stretch for five minutes. 9. Dance to this song. 10. Take a self portrait, of your face, in good light. Revel in your beauty.

Document in some way. Ready. Set. Go!