Studio time

Hello friends,
I can hardly believe that summer's (almost) over. It was everything summer's supposed to be: Art and sun and wine and friends. Late evenings and late mornings. If I'm totally honest, I'm reluctant to head back to the constraints and rhythms of school.
Summer's moments of extra light and days without schedule allowed for more time for making, and I've been taking every advantage of that.
I thought I'd share a few glimpses into my studio and a new series of paintings that I'm making. The paintings are on much bigger canvases than I've ever painted on before, and I feel like the rules have changed. They're experimental and unfamiliar and all I want to do is spend time with a brush in my hand, following where the ink and paint take me.
One of the biggest pieces began as a compilation of the 100 circles I made for the 100 Day Project. It felt incredibly risky, and then incredibly freeing to paint over that work. To let it evolve, become more.
This is something I've been exploring in general lately: How to not be too precious with things. How to let things go easily, and move towards the things that fill me up or move me in the moment, without needing to cling to them, or to contain them.
This is a theme I've also been exploring over on Tumblr, making 100 poems for 100 days. They're raw, in the moment gestures that allow me to slip around the side door to my subconscious and tap into the stuff my heart knows, but my mind tends to get too clever about. Like I did with the 100 circles project, I've made the rule set super simple for these poems: In the moment, wherever I am, without much fuss or editing. Just write. Hit publish. Let go. It's pretty sneaky how this work has started to change me.
How showing up for real, without doing much talking about it, or procrastinating, or posturing, has made me a better artist and a better writer. It takes a certain kind of daring and discipline I'd lost for a while, and I'm grateful to have rekindled it this summer.

I'm deeply filled by this new approach to work, in a way I didn't expect, and can't quite put a finger on, except to say: Each time I show up, I feel myself become re-grounded. I find my breath differently. It's become a practice, again, anew.
Thanks for stopping by. I'm so grateful for the scattered community that still finds its way here. And I'd love to hear what you've been up to this summer, and see glimpses, if you have them to share, of your creative practice, your work, your workspaces. xo, C

To the coast

We went to the coast, just us two for a few days. We climbed cliffs and ate fish tacos and watched whales spout and turn as the sun set and the gulls dance. We drank wine on sand dunes in the rain. We lay side by side and felt the earth spin. We ran down dunes, giddy, laughing. We slept in late. Argued. Made love. Went for a run. Explored every tide pool. Wandered slowly. Answered the 36 questions, and then more questions, mapping everything: tattoos, trips abroad, new ways of seeing, the future big, passion-filled, near. It was good. These are the images I don't want to forget.

Like magic

Today I found myself standing in various rooms, having walked there from other rooms without knowing why, on auto pilot. I opened the bathroom cabinet, then shut it again, forgetting to take out the hair dryer. I opened too many browser tabs and crashed Chrome. I forgot obvious words in the middle of sentences. Basically I ran out of words. Every single word squeezed out into sentences for presentations in which every word must be the exact right word. It's been a doozy of a week.
On Monday I gave away my cat. Bean is allergic, terribly. I stayed up with the friend I gave the cat to, drinking wine until nearly midnight. When I left the cat followed me to the door. We had her since our first apartment together, T and I. We had before 9/11. We had her from the advent of Web 2.0. Remember when email was a novelty? Remember when we had Hotmail accounts? Remember Ask Jeeves? My friend who took the cat is gorgeous and smart and loves brass figurines. Together with her husband I think they may love the cat more than we collectively did, seeing as T never really loved the cat, only grew accustomed to her. Still, to look back and remember getting her from the shelter together, baby faced, just out of college, and then to see our lives now? Time flies like magic.
On Tuesday I stayed up till nearly midnight, at a Guster show. I remember how much a friend in college adored their band, though I never listened to them much. Turns out, one of my sweetest writer friends in VT is married to the lead singer, and our families became friends. It was a kind of surreal to watch him perform. He was so exactly himself, and yet so much larger than himself, and then after the show, hugging him, he was just regular again. Like Magic.
On Wednesday I stayed up until midnight, working on a presentation for work. As a strategist, I basically start with the broadest and most complex challenges, or ambiguous data sets, and then distill them gradually. Often pages upon pages end up being a single page, so obvious that it doesn't look like it's anything at all. This, in fact is the mark of good strategy: to distill to the point where something is self evident. Where it's so straightforward and intuitive, there can be no mistaking. The work to get there is often arduous, but invisible once the answer becomes evident. Strategy is all about process. Thinking about that this week, I thought of the Tibetan monks I once watched making sand mandalas. They bent over their work for an entire week with intention and focus, creating something splendid, and then sat back to let the wind blow it away. Magic.
On Thursday before I collapsed into bed the minute the kids were in bed, which is late these days because of spring vacation. My mother in law is to watch the boys for the two weeks they have off which is a boon. She makes soup and takes the boys on adventures, and her love, unconditional and abundant, is a gift. Yesterday they did tie dye. So far all I have seen as an outcome is that my ten year old's hands are somewhat permanently dyed blue. His grin when he announced he was a Smurf was perfect.
Today I missed two coffee dates with two different sets of people because of the work. I said goodbye to one of my favorite designer friends who's moving on to a rad new show. He is one of the zen travelers I know. I had the fortune of taking a trip with him to Chicago for a conference last year. He forever changed how I think about travel. Worry less. Just show up. That's basically his approach. Its good for life too.
Now, looking ahead to Saturday, there will be Easter egg dying and coffee drinking and bike riding and writing.
I write every saturday, slowly but surely on my next book, or more realistically, on a single story that will be in my next book eventually. Each weekend I wrestle the piece back from a feral state. I write sentences. I delete them. I grapple with the way everything seems to come back to my mother, even though the story isn't about my mother at all. I sit in a cafe a few blocks from my house and I write, and in between I watch people come in. One couple comes every weekend. They spend the entire time taking selfies, and photos of their coffees. She wears incredible stilettos. He wears one of those baseball caps with a flattened bill. Another is a guy who is also writing. He takes smoke breaks out in front and fiddles with his wait length dreads. So far we haven't said hello. It seems like a matter of time.
Tomorrow, the weekend. How grateful I am every week for the interlude. It's like code switching. Right brain left brain. On the weekend I exhale. Sometimes I fall apart. Sometimes we argue. Sometimes we fall harder in love. Whatever happens there always magically seem to be enough moments to reconstitute me for another week. Magic.
Happy weekend, friends!

Early Spring

With the longer light the days have a little more ease. We get home, and there's just enough time to go out on the back porch and listen to the wind stirring in the trees and the spring time birds serenading the setting sun.
Every weekend is a boon. A few hours spent writing at my new favorite coffee shop, listening first to Joan read aloud. Letting the sound of her clean, direct sentences wash over me.
Other hours doing the endless loads of laundry that creep up on us, and all the other things the week never affords: grocery shopping, vacuuming, the usual. But there is also time for sipping coffee + reading Modern Love. For riding bikes to Blue Star with the dog, the wind in our hair and the scent of cherry blossoms heady and sweet filling the air. Or picnicking up on Mount Tabor overlooking the reservoirs set aflame with the light of setting sun.
Not enough hours, really, together, all of us, but still. Enough to fill us up temporarily so that we all head off back to our separate worlds sated till about mid week wen we're all hungry for time alone and time together and dinner happens later than it should. Enough for the time being. For March, for early spring in this city we're falling in love with daily.
At the end of next month, we'll have been here a year.
How did that happen?

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PS:

There are just these few pieces left from my studio sale, including the little humming bird piece above. Just leave a comment & I'll get in touch.

Owl Medicine

Find Flight

Flight Behavior

Messenger

Birthday glimpses

So I'm 37. My birthday came and went. A blink. It's the first time in ten years I haven't posted here on, or near my birthday. Instead, today my oldest son turns ten. TEN. In four days my youngest turns six. The world turns. It keeps turning. Every day with them is a hilarious mix of pure joy and annoyance, angst and delight, frustration and sweetness. Every day my heart is cracked open with wonder. Every day the floor is strewn recklessly with their things.
There is no way to make up for the lost days between my birthday and now: Nearly a month of milky winter sunrises through pale curtains; the smell of my boys' skin curled next to me, reading stories before bed; oysters sucked down at the coast around a table with incredible writers; bonfires built on the sand; holes dug; donuts consumed.
No way to describe all the moments spent at the alter where ocean meets sky; at the cusp of the world where you cannot help but feel that you are made wholly anew; the ions dancing in the air; the kites; the bonfire smoke at twilight, sipping wine, watching the birds flock towards their rocky island homes.
No way to convey the way Tin House was both fire and solace for my writer soul, re-invigorating my work, and igniting new fervor. No way to list the he books I've read, or partly read; the thousand kisses exchanged with my love; the late nights spent on projects for work; the deadlines and the satisfaction of hitting them; the camellias in bloom; the downward dogs I bow into with each new day.
Instead, here are a handful of pictures. It's been an incredible start to the year. A year I've begun with big intentions and deep gratitude.

PS: I made a new Birthday List, here.

The world moves, and moves on. One minute, then the next.

One minute everything is flaming up grandly, and the next, it seems desperate and desolate in the small fire pit at our feet that we've fashioned out of smooth beach stones. Every visible flame has licked itself to ash. Coals glowing on the blackened undersides of logs, but nothing more. Then the wind shifts direction, and up the flames lift. Flames bright and filled with sudden roaring heat. Sparks skid off into the dwindling light as the sun sinks down.
Beyond us, at the shoreline the waves lip at the rocks like a pony at a handful of sugar. Then fresh waves ride in slantwise, full of vim, and crash headlong into the rocks causing spray to skid off into the dusk.
Steadily, the earth turns. Each day, we arrive and are made new.
In the car, driving to the beach we hit the 1.5 hour mark and all of us have had enough. We're sick of each other, sick of the sound of our own chatter. In a no-service zone, even satellite radio plays only the crappiest songs. Everything feels suddenly feels claustrophobic and close, and the coast seems like a horribly stupid idea. But then, out the window passing wetlands, a hundred birds lift into the golden winter air. They twirl and lift in a sudden exquisite ballet, and all of us see them, and as we drive on, we're different. We pass around cheese sandwiches. We start the alphabet game: Antennas on the hill. A red barn across the way. Cars. A dog in a truck. Electrical wires. Fences.
So the world moves, and moves on. One minute, then the next.
Sitting watching the fire I realize how intensely I live into each moment. How easily I'm fooled into believing it's a forever state, a constant. How my default is often still to power through or run when things feel dire or off kilter. Clam up, or tirade. Fight or flight.
Yet after the fire nearly dies three times, and I throw everything into it's rekindling: smoke in my face, armloads of small driftwood sticks, sparks in my hair, I give up. Let go; try just sitting back observing. And the fire dwindles. And rekindles. On its own. The day becomes night. We sip wine. The boys dig holes. One minute they laugh. The next they yell. Water seeks its own level, and holes fill; every ember flares up to live its promise as a flame.

A wonder-filled new year

We went, just before the New Year to the high dessert. To a place of cold air and saturated hues, big skies bigger quiet. The kind of quiet that reminds you what you are, and also, what you hope to be.
Among the topography of the dessert you feel time differently. Where the landscape looks Mars and bears the memory of Paleolithic beasts, you understand what you are, and realize that becoming means more than this day or even this life.
Time here tells not of daily things: hurry up, finish up, let's go, come on, make it happen. But rather, galactic evidence. You are here. Part of everything. Breathing and alive. A speck on this spinning planet. A spark, a fleck, some inkling of the beyond.
I did what I haven't done in years: lay down in the snow with my face towards the sky and let the quiet take hold of me until my heart began to thrum in tune with the painted hills. Thrum with the truth of their the vibrations; of the pebbles red and ocher and green; of distant tectonic shifts; of volcanic ash; of other landscapes, submerged, fiery, then cooling; of the, the earth spinning, spinning around the spirit sun. The sun that painted the landscape indescribable hues of gold and lavender in the long light of afternoon. The sun that flirted with the moon all day. The sun, the moon, the spinning desert that held me. And then my word for 2015 found me.
A word born of the blue, blue sky, and the gibbous moon, the golden dessert, and the silence.

Wonderful.

Yes.
Happy New Year, friends. May it be truly wonder-filled.

Around here, lately

In this hemisphere the earth tilts farther from the sun. The days grow dark and short, but no matter. Inside there is light. In the evenings I've been making art. On the weekends, writing. Slowly a new short story, one in the collection for my new book is taking place. Three hours on the weekend isn't much time to write, but it's been just enough to stitch the story into being. I slip off to cafes, evesdrop next to people, let my mind wander, and catch the sentences as they arrive. It's a ritual I cherish.
This week, I cracked open a new notebook. I've been a Molksine girl forever, but Leurchtturm has captured my curiosity. Something about the possibility of blank, yet numbered pages....

Here are a few other things I've been up to lately:

Listening :: The Paper Kites "Woodland" album.
Reading :: Dear Life, by Alice Munro + Bark, by Lorrie Moore.
Walking :: Around the neighborhood in the evening with my silly blonde dog the sidewalk wet and reflecting circles of light.
Sipping :: Rooibos Tea (my new favorite).
Smelling :: The fragrance of pine + juniper in the wreath on the table, and the candles we burn at dinner.
Working :: Long hours
Sleeping :: In on the weekend + then snuggling with boys in bed for longer still.
Watching :: Briefly
Reveling :: In the fact that I live on the same coast as my dearest friends.
Looking forward :: Two two weeks of vacation, coming soon.
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Tell me, friends. What are you up to lately?

Synchopate

syn·co·pateˈsiNGkəˌpāt/ verb - to displace the beats or accents in (music or a rhythm) so that strong beats become weak and vice versa.

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Summer went, as it does. The long golden days becoming shorter. Arrows of light aiming sooner toward evening.

School started, and with it all the trappings of routine. Tea sipped in the car on the way to dropping off the boys. Homework folders. The hauling of a 3/4 sized cello back and forth three days a week. Late pick-ups at the end of long days. Traffic on the way home, and in that in-between time in the car, en route, we tell each little things or watch people in other cars tell each other things, their hands pantomiming stories we cannot hear.
With daylight savings, we cross over the bridge after the blue hour has been swallowed by darkness and the lights from boats below us look like stars on the river. In every tall building, we see signs of life. The evidence of days spent at desks, or wistfully at windows, or waiting for busses, or texting lovers, or having quarrels, or picking pumpkins. All of us, alive, and going about our days. All of us doing.
When the leaves began to turn, it was not all at once, but gradually. A blush of color among the green. And then, under certain trees with leaves shaped like small fishes, the streets began to fill with falling yellow and gold. At the same time everywhere, on every wall and tree and corner, the moss began to roll its velvet carpet out, green, greener with each softly falling autumn rain.
This was the way that summer summer went; punctuated by the particular certain geometry of being new to a place. A kind of slanting rush to acquire a sense of direction, far beyond whatever landmarks mean East or West. A circling around what shared purpose means now, here, with us moving through new routines and days, our familiar aims sent loose and spinning like a compass needle brought too close to the pull of other closer force fields. There were days that felt like we’d lost our North. Temporarily, or longer, even as we found ourselves, each of us, in the focus and drive and purpose of the work we love.
This was how summer went. With this prioritized over that, with wanderlust seeping in at the edges, with satisfaction sometimes fraying without a birds-eye view. With delight, sudden and intense. With hikes. With the coast never too far.

It isn’t just moving here. It’s that moving here has somehow illuminated in sharp contrast how my boys have grown.

How they no longer need me the way they did. How I am still at the center of their lives, but not their everything. How their orbit has grown wide, drawn by the forcefields of their own lives and consumed by the turbulence of their own tides.
Their days are filled without me. In school, in after-school, with books and friends. Days spent with with sandwiches and goofing off on the swings, with secrets, with small hurts, with stories I'll never hear, with facts about the solar system, with art, with wonder.
Suddenly time with them feels at once intense and rarified. And somehow more than ever I am unaccustomed now of it all; to whatever it means to be in the middle of this life, in middle age, with a career and responsibilities and all the hours of every day accounted for in new and different ways than when they were small and their hair smelled like vanilla cookies after naps.

The way that stories seem to hover in the air

In the middle of the summer the light would last and last, but now it fades fast at end of day. The crows fly west, nightly passing over our house, cawing after the fleeting sun. The sky turns to rose, to melon, to yellow, to indigo, and then to night. Stars, faint here among the pole lamps and the traffic lights, and the thousand lit rectangles of windows that reveal the our private worlds, wink into the sky one by one. There, Cassiopeia, her unmistakable shape, a chair overturned, glistening through the walnut leaves.
We've come out to the back yard after dinner, drinking rosé in glasses without stems. We exhale. Twilight finds us.
Sprout climbs the bay tree by the neighbor's yard and is immediately swallowed in the dark. He and the little girl next door are exchanging good night chatter. Every day they call to each other across the fence, play on the weekends, their laughter and yells and chatter filling both our yards. "Goodnight!" They call. "See you tomorrow!"
After the boys are in bed I take a walk with the dog, the neighborhood becoming gradually familiar. Here, the last of the trumpet flowers blooming yellow and wild over a low rock wall. There a girl standing in the light of her second-story apartment window, hair cropped short on half her head, long on the other, tattoos running the length of her arm. She sips wine and tilts her head back to laugh. Around her, friends, all backlit, are laughing too.
The sidewalk holds the day's heat still, and I feel it through my soles. The air is sweet and soft with jasmine which blooms on nearly every street. Each flower a fragrant star, small and white among a foliage of midnight green. The dog pauses to greet a cat. Her tail wagging hard, then harder against my leg. The cat pretends to be the sidewalk. Flattens. Flattens farther. Becomes a shadow. Becomes the dark.
In the house beside us a man in a white t-shirt paces in his living room, talking on the phone. Behind him a wall-to-wall bookshelf. The kind you want to linger by. The kind I wonder if people will have any more when Bean and Sprout are big. The kind fat with volumes, each one signifying something more than the story or information it holds: the moment it was gifted or bought or loaned. The college course it was for. The girlfriend who dog-eared the pages. The grandmother who wrote, "Margaret," inside the dust jacket. The best friend who gave the volumes of poetry as a birthday gift. The novel by John Williams, it's spine unbroken, given by someone without a signature or remark. The underlined copy of Munro's newest stories, loved so much.
Walking, alone under yellow streetlight along bushy cedar hedges, past sunflowers taller than my head, past tomato plants that dangle their voluptuous fruit into the street, past the garden beds of swiss chard and fennel, past cats on stoops, I am walking among other people's stories.
A man stands combing his hair in the reflection his window mirrors back.
An elderly woman in a lazyboy, her face alternately blue and pale with the flicker of TV. In the still air behind her, a dozen rianbow colored mylar balloons.
At his table, a silver-haired man sits smoking, shirtless. Behind him, a lamp glows, it's base a woman.
Beyond the waxy leaves of a magnolia, a blue bottle of Dawn dish soap in the yellow frame of a window, stands idle by the sink. Behind it, the wall is tiled red.
On my way back the air smells patchouli. On the corner, a man sits in front of an open warehouse door on an old folding lawn chair playing chords on an electric guitar.
This will be what I'll remember about this first summer here. The softening light, the gradual end to summer, and the way these stories seem to hover in the air. With day drawing to a close people don't draw their curtains the way they do back East where there is already the cold promise of first frost. Instead they go about their lives, windows wide open. Unadorned,and vulnerable: each one imperfect and beautiful among their particular and curious collection of things.

Creative rhythm + some time at the coast

The past two weekends, though I've committed to the #5x5challenge, I've been off the grid. Though I've taken many photos, and shared some on Instagram, I've had no chances to slip away, get some internet connectivity and post.
There's something that feels right about letting there be a rhythm to these posts. I like the regularity, and the commitment during the week, and also the exhale on the weekends.
I've been thinking a great deal about rhythm lately, and how we've created a culture that doesn't allow us to exhale much. Since dealing with adrenal fatigue last fall and winter, I've forced myself to do that more: to step back, let go, forget whatever definitions I have of perfect.
I'm curious about how you experience rhythm in your creative lives, and in your work lives. When do you give yourself permission to leave gaps, let things go unfinished, fall to pieces, give way to entropy--and when do you persist?

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Here are a few of my favorite glimpse from the weekend, getting some soul medicine on the beach with messy hair and sandy feet and the people I love.

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Back to the #5x5challenge tomorrow. In the meantime here are a few of my favorites from #5x5challenge contributors this past week:

Food as art

Birthday Party

Expiration Dates

Coffee with cream

Late Afternoon

Seemingly Perfect

The entire point is this

"CAN SOMEONE RUN MY BATH?" He yells from the open bathroom window. I'm outside, under the walnut tree, reluctant. When I come in, he's already naked, surrounded by a small army of his favorite Lego trucks and matchbox cars. A rescue boat, a semi truck, an "old-fashioned car."
"HELP!" he yells, even though I'm sitting right next to him, watching now as he squats down on the bathmat. Something seems to be wrong with the semi truck. Clearly, he isn't calling to me.
"HELP, BEAN" He yells again, then mutters, "I really, really need it." Behind him, the old Standard tub fills. It's one of properly deep tubs that you can stretch out in and submerge.
His voice rises above the water, "I wish I could play with that. But it's broken." In another second, the semi truck has been cast off to the side. His brother hasn't come to the rescue, off somewhere instead playing the ukelele (a new obsession) or trying to kiss his elbow as he did at dinner when he announced, "I read in a book that 99% of people cannot kiss their elbow, but that 99% will try."
Sprout climbs into the tub, easing into the hot water slowly, then begins to splash and make the strange car motor noises all boys seem to know how to make. I can't recall a single instance as a kid when I made such sounds, though I was every bit a tom boy and could climb a tree or ride my bike faster and more recklessly than any of the boys. What is it about vrrrrooom, vrrooom?
I sit for longer than five minutes, watching, though I only remember to scribble notes into my moleskin every so often, so my collective time still adds up to 5. Sort of. I so rarely sit with him while he takes a bath now, so rarely just sit and watch his antics. This is, of course, the entire point of this exercise.
I tell him that soon it will be time to get out.
"I'M GONNA DO SEVEN, TEN, NO FIRTEEN MINUTES MORE" he says defiantly, his voice at full volume. "NO! I'M GONNA DO SEVENTEEN MINUTES," he adds, as if that is an enormously long time. Then immediately he sing-song whines, "I hate this car. It's broken. I want a different car."
There's been a lot of this thin-skinned, fragile whining lately, and when I'm at my wisest, I know that that is exactly what it is. Last night, after royally falling apart and whining all through dinner, after cajoling and firmness and tears, when he finally was tucked into bed and I lay next to him in the soft nearly dark of his room he told me about the things he was afraid of: how people die, poison, prison, bad guys, robbers. His eyes growing wide.
So small still, this little one of mine, and yet so big. Wiggly toothed. Loud voiced. Bright eyed.
I'm glad I spent a handful of moments noticing so that I'll remember the ordinary sweetness of these moments long after they're gone.     The 5/5 Challenge: Day 2

To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing

“It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing…. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”— Tom Stoppard (from Arcadia)

It's taken me a while to write because every street, every ritual, every instance of who I am, and who we are as a family has been made new with this move. We arrived one month ago, chasing the sun across this wide country, and settled gradually into a wee bungalow with an arched doorway that's just up the street from the original Stumptown .

First impressions:
There are flowers everywhere. Bamboo grows like a weed, but I like it so. Whenever I go running, I find new paths and neighborhoods past enormous, ancient trees, bigger than any I've ever seen except for the Sequoias growing up. I run uphill, up an old volcano cone until I have a view of the city from above. On one side, Mount Hood lifts above the blue like a dream. On the other, bridges, so many of them, and a skyline I'm falling in love with.
It's taken days, many of them, for my internal sense of direction to kick in strongly. I've oriented now, and there are more days than not (finally) that I can find my way around without help from my iPhone. Thankfully, someone thought to plan most of the city in a grid, with numbered streets running one way and named streets the other.
Our little home is the littlest yet, but I love it harder every day. The angled archway going into the breakfast nook. The gorgeous morning light in the bedroom, and the evening light that floods the living room when we come home. Upstairs, the boys have the "master bedroom": a long rectangular room that was once the attic, refinished with lovely cabinets for all their things, and plenty of space to play. It's made so much sense for them to be up there, where they can sprawl out and leave legos and shells and dress-up things about. And in turn, our bedroom downstairs is dreamy. I've always wanted a room just like this--with windows across two walls, and white floaty curtains that lift and flutter in the breeze.
In the backyard the boys spend a great deal of time in the hammock strung between a plum tree and apple tree. They tilt each other out and scream; they have tickle fights; they drag up quilts and snacks; the read books; they argue. They've both adjusted to their new school and routine with grace and resilience, but there are still there moments when so much change adds up. When things feel scary and big to them. When they fall apart. When they ball their fists. When they cry.
Bean, especially is growing into himself in new ways, and new moods and wonderments overtake him. Sometimes he is the sweetest, and other times morose. His long legs, coltish as ever, his eyes flashing with a new defiant light. Sprout, full of eagerness, tender-hearted, hot-headed. Last night, when things didn't go his way, he stomped his feet and wailed, "I wish the world hadn't been made this way at all." Oh, to be small.
We live near the ocean now. Near food trucks and book stores and swanky restaurants and cafes. My creative mind is drinking it up, like someone thirsty after a long drought. How I love to be at the edges of things watching; or at the center, unnoticed, curious, smitten with beauty. I love the thousand faces I pass every day. The bikes, the blooming roses, the bumble bees, the baristas. I love the jumping rope that happens every morning, rain or shine outdoors at the boy's school. I love the tiny studio T built for me, with just enough space for creating, floors made for spilling paint, and walls for thumb tacks.

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And... I am still finding the tempo of life here. When writing happens; when work does; and also running, and painting, and kissing and friends and dinner too. One of the things I've missed the most, that this blog has always been for me, is a daily record. A few moments pause. A handful of moments of intentional observation. Sometimes the most effective way of reclaiming creative habits is to start with exactly where you are, and with the smallest actions, which build to their own momentum and greatness in time.

I've been thinking a lot about what that might look like, and I've settled on this simple routine for June: 5 photos + 5 minutes. 5 photos documenting moments throughout the day, and a 5 minute writing exercise: simply recording the immediate, the present, the now.

I'd love for you to join, if you'd like! (I'll be posting more about this little challenge. Keep an eye out.)

BTV to PDX Days 6 & 7: Utah to Oregon

By the end certain routines became habit, an inevitable part of of being on the road for days on end.
We carried things into each hotel in a rag-tag orderly manner, then proceed to tooth brushing and story-reading, puppy-piling on the hotel bed as though it was all we'd ever done. A life in motion. A night of rest, and anywhere will do.
In the morning in Ogden, Utah, the grass was covered in frost but the air was sweet, and the mountains lavender in the new light of day. Whatever the future would hold, hadn't reached us yet. We were just there, gathering up our things, making circles around the city for a breakfast place, then moving on.
Road travel. Everyone warned us that the boys would become unbearable. They said we'd need to keep them plugged in to an endless supply of movies and games, screen time to the max. But we didn't. In fact, though we brought the iPads for that purpose, we never pulled them out.

Boredom is it's own precious device.

Creativity exalts when the mind is left to wander about aimlessly, watching the hills change. New games happen. Ideas connect. Characters come to life.
Things we did do: lots of stops to run helter-skelter down hills, the wind in our hair. Snack breaks. The long hours spent listening to the Moth radio hour and Radio Lab podcasts. The license plate game (only 9 states eluded us.) Good tunes. Sketchbooks filled with pictures. Picture books. Chapter books. Stickers. Candy. Chewing gum. Running circles with the dog.
Yes, there were intolerable parts where everyone was hungry or sick of being in the car, but for the most of it, we were content to be together, moving across the wide country towards our collective future.
The last two days, from Ogden into Oregon, and then from some small place in Eastern Oregon were a blur of anticipation. We drove long miles through the wide expanse of irrigated fields, past canyons and waterfalls, windmills and fruit trees. We followed the river, west, west chasing the sun and finally below Mt. Hood's white-capped auspices, we could feel the future colliding with our now.
Past trees and water-falling cliffs, past big dams and bigger dams and wide-spanning bridges, and then finally, finally into Portland where we all yelled out "HOME!" and then looked immediately for sandwiches.
Since then we've been gradually unfurling, finding new routines in this new place. I can't wait to share some new stories, adventures + inspiration.

BTV to PDX Day 5: Cheyenne to Ogden

In the morning Interstate 80, the only road west out of Cheyenne, was closed at the pass. Inclement weather and nothing to do but wait it out.
First we went for breakfast at a place that seemed afraid we'd miss the fact that its all about eggs. Every surface, wall, and menu emblazoned with sunny yolks and ovals. (Of note: the eggs were terrible.) Then we snatched a glimpse at Wyoming history at the museum, learning that eons ago Wyoming was a tropical wetland with magnolias and palms and swampy places. When the climate shifted, the slow magic of geology turned the swamps to coal, and the rest is history, as they say. Hello oil fields and coal mines.
I could have looked for hours at the beadwork moccasins and headdresses of the Shoshone and Bannock peoples, but the boys were more impressed with the enormous head of a bison and other artifacts from the time of the early settlers. Each one revealing both recklessness and bravery. Rifles, spurs, tin pitchers, whisky bottles, washboards, sheep wagons, pistols, chaps.
I keep wondering what the boys will remember, if anything at all. We took a photograph of them out front standing in the stirring wind, their backs to an enormous cowboy boot statue painted with every Wyoming emblem you can think of. The have those quirky big-kid grins on their faces, the kind that happen when you tell them to smile. What isn't captured is the way Bean kept poking Sprout in the ribs to make him giggle. What isn't ever pictured in any of the pictures we take, are all the snippets of conversations, the eye-spy games, the arguments, the annoying repetitive noises that one or the other of them makes to drive everyone nuts, or the way they say "I love you" to each other out of the blue. What's never in the picture is the sweet scent of the wide open space; of raw snow, of sage brush of stirring wind. After a moment of jostling in front of the boot we ran for the car, checking the road reports.
The Interstate was open, and loaded with snacks from one of those health food stores that smelled exactly the way every health food store of my childhood, we were off, the landscape changing before our eyes.
Up, up, into the thin air and blue sky of the pass. Tears came for me. I couldn't help them. The West feels like home in an inexplicable way. I was born in the bowl of the Rocky Mountains, and it's as if that high-altitude air and jagged geography indelibly stamped my soul.
In Laramie we found the best coffee of the trip; an unexpected win. At the counter, the pretty barista with a feather at the end of her braid, and a guy on the other side of the bar were discussing reincarnation. Outside, the wind never let up and the trains of the Union Pacific kept barreling past. Laramie. I kept thinking of the book I read as a kid: My Friend Flicka. One of the best books. It took place outside Laramie, I think, and in my minds eye I can see the herds of horses. The big thunderhead clouds in summer. The way things were.
Soon we were crossing the Continental Divide, marking the place where the rivers no longer run towards the Atlantic, and instead slip and slid towards the wild, untamed Pacific. We saw antelope run, and a lone coyote with its shaggy salt colored coat blur into the sage brush and sun.
Everywhere the hills were traced with the terraced zig-zags of cattle paths. Small ponds, dried in the sun, left salt-slicked circles in the planes. Birds swooped, bright among the purple blooms and blowing grasses. Snow fences hunched weathered in the sun, and at their backs the last of winter's white stuff, greying in the shadows. And then we were among the red-rocked land of Utah where the mountains suddenly towered above us, the heavens gathering close is the sun slowly set.

BTV to PDX Road Trip: Day 2

After the first day of ill-fated adventures and leaving the state we'd called home for nearly a decade everything became a kind of blur. The kind that happens around the edges of a photograph when you snap the shutter too quickly and the subject twirls in motion. That is what we were: in the motion of moving West. Each day we spent following after the sun, following until the sky turned to violet and then gathered up her skirts filled with stars, and then finding some small hotel to tuck into, our movements of unpacking for the night and packing again in the morning becoming more routine and efficient as the day wore on.
After the first day of leaving, a shift happened. We stopped being in the abrupt present tense of logistics that had held us so sturdily for months, and slipped instead into a more fluid state. I kept scattered notes in my molskeine, but never had time to sit with them, recording details in paragraphs the way I thought I might. Instead, I found myself simply becoming the journey.
I spent hours just watching out the window--or attentive at the wheel, and at night fell into whatever bed we'd claimed as ours for the night with fresh gratitude.
Here then, are the glimpses I remember.

Buffalo to Chicago

Bruce Springsteen singing Erie Canal. Crossing the uppermost corner of of Pennsylvania along the wide flat Lake Erie; so wide it looked like some gentle sea. The boys, rolling like puppies down the grassy hill at the rest stop. The sweet scent of petrichor, after rain began to fall. Bushes of singing birds at the rest stop in Ohio. Indiana slipping in and out of focus. Finding our way into Chicago after dusk and realizing immediately everything anyone has ever said about the city is true. It's intensity and grit reared right up to meet us: Drivers hurtling past in their cars, merging without warning, road markings and traffic signals taken more as suggestion than regulation. Humans hurtling across the intersections without warning, strung out, running recklessly. Pitbulls. Boom boxes. Bright lights. Dark allies. Sweet music. Fierce beats. All of it. And still, the city begged to be loved.
At night from the 19th floor downtown, the city put on all her finery for us. Lights glittering in the constellations of loneliness and companionship all up and down the glass-windowed high-rises, and in the morning, while T went for coffee and to walk the dog, the boys jumped in giddy glee on the soft beds and the morning sun flirted with the rooftops, and blushed, finding herself reflected in every window-glass.
For the boys everything was thrilling from that vantage point in the sky, but seeing Daddy walking the dog two blocks away--and then having him turn and wave up at them at just that very moment, that felt like magic. And then the parks and the waterfront and the Little Goat Dine with it's menu of brilliant collisions. It's above ground subways with trains clattering overhead to delight the boys. The smell of chocolate brioche in the air. The confused circles we made looking for just the right coffee shop. The biggest Whole Food's EVER. The overwhelm of it. The best fish tacos. Restocking on coloring books and sticker books and chapter books and mazes at Barnes & Noble, and then off, later than we'd planned to cross the width of Iowa.

Studio Sale

Welcome to my third first-come, first-served, pay-what-you-can studio sale! I am so honored to have your interest for my work, and am incredibly grateful for your generous hearts and encouragement. Your support makes so much possible. Thank you.
UPDATED: Wow! Pieces have been claimed quickly. There are only a few left (some of my favorites, actually!). Check them out:
Elephant | Snowy Fox | Gorilla | Oriole
If there isn't anything you see that you want. Stay tuned. Sometimes pieces end up finding a second home :) xo/C

HERE'S HOW IT WORKS:   1. Browse each piece by clicking on a thumbnail to see details. 2. If you find a piece you love, leave a comment with the word SOLD below that piece of art. (If someone else got there first sorry,consider it sold.) 3. I'll follow up with you by email as promptly as possible. 4. You tell me what you'd like to pay for the piece and process your payment through Pay Pal. 5. I'll ship the piece out to you as soon as is humanly possible.

Early access sale ends on Wednesday, April 16th at 8pm, EST. At that point I'll open the sale up to anyone not signed up for my newsletter. The entire SALE ENDS when all the pieces are claimed, or on Thursday April 17th at 8pm(so I have time to ship everything out before we head off on our road trip!) PLEASE NOTE: I can only ship within the United States for this sale.

A few things I've been up to lately

Hello friends! I've been so busy lately I haven't had nearly as much time as I would like to stop in here and share stories.

Here are a few things I've been up to lately:

:: Writing on Medium
:: Creating a new series of art pieces (this giraffe is one, in progress)
:: Planning a studio sale for the end of March (sign up if you'd like to get first dibs.)
:: Working on a few very cool client projects. I especially loved helping to launch this shop into the world.
:: Reading the Little House series out loud to Bean (and feeling very glad I'm not that kind of pioneer.)
:: Watching Sprout become an amazing artist.
:: Reading this book, and this one.
:: Listening to new music on Beats.
:: Writing every morning in a notebook (I've loved responding to these prompts though I haven't had time to share much here.)
:: Doing a 20 minute vinyasa routine every morning
:: Drinking tea (instead of coffee), skipping alcohol, going to bed earlier, and taking a zillion supplements... and feeling like my adrenals are saying thank you. {Hello energy! How I've missed you}
:: Walking out onto the icy lake with the boys (it still feels bizarre and precarious, but I love all the wide expanses.)
:: Making big plans.
:: Really hankering for spring (and we have many inches of snow in the forecast this week!)
What you've been up to this March? Crazy how time is whirling by these days.

At the cusp between wonder and fact

Tonight you made a fort before dinner: a quilt over two white kitchen stools, set up just so.
In went a metal tool box (your inheritance from my father) In also went your metal lock box: one you saved for and paid for yourself from the Barge Canal vintage shop on Pine Street where we go every so often, and you poke around, curious fingers in everything, always loving the things that come with lock and key.
Now you and your brother lie on your bellies, or sit cross legged, your heads bobbing up in the quilt. You light the room you’ve made by flashlight, and haul in 8 ball, assorted legos, and Honey Honey, your faithful alligator who has become your steady companion since we moved.

---

Honey Honey first arrived in a green box when you were four, in the upstairs hallway of our house at the end of the long dirt road. The box was on the old sewing machine table that we’ve since given away.
It said: Hello, I’m Honey Honey, and I’m here to go on adventures with you.
Before she arrived, you talked her often. You told me who she was, and how she could grow in the bathtub. You told me how she was magical.
Then she was there.
You’ve never doubted her magic---in the sweet, fearless way that children are about their beliefs. You know, and you don’t know—and you want to stay that way, at the cusp between wonder and fact.
You're wise enough to protect the magic that you love by not questioning too fiercely how the magic happens. Once, you left cookie crumbs on a small plate beside your alligator, and came back moments later to find them completely gone. “Ah ha!” you said.
I thought you’d call one of us out for nibbling them up, or possibly say, “See! That proves it!” but instead you said, “She likes cookies!”
Proof was never the point. You were simply interested in her dietary preferences.
In actuality your Honey Honey might really be a crocodile. She has a crocodile smile, but, to be sure, I’ve never been an expert on either. All I know is that she fits in the palm of my hand, and that the word FLORIDA is printed on her belly along with a set of numbers you declare is her birthdate and birthplace.
Who am I to argue?

---

Twice, she’s been eaten by the dog. Not eaten all the way—but had parts mangled. The first time it was her feet and tail. You cried and so I promised I’d bring her to the doctor, and she was gone for a week, and even more days after that you said, “Why is it taking so long? Is the doctor’s office busy?”
I said “Maybe there is a hippo in front of her in line to see the doctor. Hippos are big.” And I say something about how bandages take time to heal and you look terribly serious.
When she comes back, her feet and tail are, in fact, a different color: browner this time, than the green they were before.
You’re so glad to see her, you carry her on a string around your neck.
When we moved away from the only home you ever knew this summer, she rode with you like that, on a string around your neck, close to your heart. She was the only thing steady and for certain among the jumble of boxes and the bitter sweet confusion of grown-up conversations then.
There were tears, there was the ice cream truck, a new neighborhood, new bunk beds, and fields forever lost to you. Had we stayed to see you turn nine there, you would have claimed those fields this summer. Made them your escape, your wild home, your solace. But there it is: the edges of grown-up life and grown-up needs crowd in around you. You don’t have any control. You are probably only vaguely aware of the whys and hows. Commute time doesn’t mean much to you, nor does the word “work” which is one of the perpetual mysteries of childhood.
You and your brother talk about “daddy’s work” and “mommy’s work” but when I ask you to explain what that means you say things like: it means going to a place and being on the computer all day; and you go someplace where they pay you for something that you do. True enough. The ache of what those things mean, and the glory are both completely lost on you. For this I’m glad.
Yours work is that of growing tall. Of navigating the fine and fragile line between innocence and curiosity, between wonder and science.
What is true is wide and deep.
Fairies still inhabit the forests at the edges of the this truth, and the sky is filled with stars. “Up there,” you tell me, “in the stars, that’s where I came from before I came here.”
Yes, I nod. Yes. Nine years ago you came here from the stars and made me a mother.

---

At bed you can’t find Honey Honey. You crawl back into your fort on your belly, looking everywhere, your urgency increasing.
Daddy and I wait. We’re ready for this part of the day to end. Ready to kiss you tonight and to find, in the quiet of lamplight, the company of our own thoughts without interruption.
Your voice betrays your worry. “Where did I put her?” you ask, shimmying out, and inadvertently shining your flashlight in my eyes, as you inquire. I crouch down and peer into your small world of quilt and semi-dark, feeling with my hands along the edges of things.
“Think back,” I say. “Where were you with her last?”
Soon enough you look on your dresser and find her just where you left her, there among your other treasures: microscope, spy binoculars, batteries, Lego ships, quarters.
Your gladness rings out, “Here she is!” You kiss her tenderly, then kiss me harder, wrapping your arms around my waist.
You come up to just under my chin now. An inconceivable fact. Almost every night as we lie on the couch, and I read out loud to you, I cannot help but marvel: you were a baby. My first baby.
“You fit just here on my chest. How is that possible?” I say out loud.
You say, “I still do.”
Then you curl yourself against me, folding your flexible limbs up small, smaller, until you are contained right there, beside my beating heart and I can wrap my arms around the all of you.
“Yes,” I say, kissing your hair. “You do. You always do.”

Weekending

I pull the shades open to find rain spattering against the window-glass, then dive back under the soft-polka dotted coverlet, homing to the warmth T radiates. For a while we lie this way, just breathing. From here only the crowns of trees are visible: a crosshatching of black and white, a tangle of rain-drenched twigs against the milky grey of the early morning sky.
Eventually, I switch on the light beside my pillow, and T unfolds from bed. I've been crushing on the beard he's grown over this winter, and I can't help but smile watching him on jeans and a sweatshirt. Soon the warm place that he left has been filled by Clover, her sweet yogi-self pressing against me, tail wagging. I tousle her velvet soft ears, and when we've sufficiently greeted each other she curls into a ball, and keeps my feet warm as I write.
T brings tea, and from the next room over I can hear the boys in their room chattering in the perpetual way they do, and I fill page after page in the yellow legal pad with whatever comes to mind until the half hour mark, when I put my pen down, refill my tea, and head to the yoga mat with T for a half-hour morning practice.
This has been our ritual every morning for the past week, and I love what it's done to set my mornings right.
It's been my goal this year to build simple routines that sustain my core. Rituals that soften the edges and simplify the moments and reduce some of the stress I find all too easily creeps in.
Another ritual is simply to let the weekend be what it is best: a time to rest. Instead of filling it in with doing, I'm practicing doing not so very much. Sitting all morning with more tea in the big white chair by the windows watching the rain while Sprout puts out fires in the play castle he's set up across the room, and then heading to the studio after a snack to make some new art, Sprout in tow while Bean hangs out in his bed reading and organizing collections.

I would so love to hear about some of your weekend (or week day rituals!). Tell me: what makes you feel whole, and simple, and quiet, and good?