Hopscotch
The forecast: more icy air, and I’m starting to feel antsy with winter. But today pure sunshine reflecting off the snow and spilling onto the hot pink flowers on the windowsill. It was weekend of long naps; of using a winch to get the truck out of a snowbank; of cheap red wine and good friends with toddlers running pell-mell; of a handful of quiet moments with a magazine on the couch, coffee cup in hand, its sweet fragrance rising up with the steam.
Also, it was a weekend of roller coaster emotions. In one instance I’m sure we’re in it for the long haul: we’re standing together in the sunlight in the kitchen, arms around each other, kissing, while our kid eats kiwi circles; and then in another instance we’re off kilter, unintended words tumbling like the triangular blocks at the top of the tower that make the whole castle fall, a geometric mess of shapes onto the floor.
Right now for us there is no room for error, no space for careless words, for passive teasing, for jagged edges. It’s like we’re always at square one, tossing the rock, jumping forward, trying not to land on the chalked lines, but doing so anyway. Remember that game? I used to play it for hours in the school yard. Now the stakes are high. Sometimes I wonder if we’d be better off just friends and co-parents, it would be easier, maybe. Other times I can hardly fathom how much I love, or how perfectly my body fits against his, heart to heart in an embrace.
I really want to know, what is the bedrock that holds you together with the one you love? What connects you? What make you certain?
Self portrait challenge: black & white # 1
Polarity.
Wine. Water. Whimsy. Substance. Chaotic. Rhythm. Impulse. Logic.
The past few weeks have gone by with fewer posts than usual, and it’s because I’m never home and always busy and I feel like I haven’t hit the ground and I’m already running. But. There isn’t anything more busy about my life than previously. It’s just I’m trying to handle it differently. For one, I’m going to bed earlier, and waking up before the sun to spend an hour writing for real in my studio, with my feet tucked up under me and the cat purring around my chair legs.
I’m trying to undertake a gradual, though massive shift in priorities; really committing to work towards the things I know I want, but haven’t gotten yet: published work, an MFA, more order in my life. I’m a chronic forgetter of small things and not so small things: phone dates, emails, meetings. I can’t plan a week’s worth of menus to save my life. The refrigerator always lacks at least on essential item. Laundry is always piled in my bedroom, not clean.
Because I’m an Aquarius and an artist, an idealist and a creator, I’m struck with wanderlust and whimsy and find it miserably difficult to put things into the tidy square boxes on a calendar, or plan ahead. I’d like to, though. Because I know everything in my small world would run more smoothly.
So I’ve been forcing myself to start somewhere, and that somewhere is painfully, less blogging and more real reading. Less posting, and more time spent revising the half finished application pieces I’m still feeling delusionally semi-optimistic about. I pretty sure my life will always contain a bit of this struggle between necessity and wonderment, between substance and desire.
It’s hard for me to buckle down, but I miss my athletes’ body and my reader’s mind. I miss talking about god, and reading about spiritual practice. I miss devouring books the way I used to in college. And yes, I have excuses now that are legitimate, but if I want to ever get to anywhere further than here, I have to start here, now. So I am. Small step, by smaller step. But still, I’m starting. Do you have any polarities you struggle with? If so, what are they, and how do you find balance?
More black & white self portraits here.
Morning writing
(Maple syrup on snow.)
Golden light fills my studio, the first of the morning. The sun, just up, climbs the rungs of the trees. Its smooth white disc of light is etched with a crosshatching of twigs, snow dusted and dark. Last night I made plans to wake up and write for an hour while the newness of day still holds some secrets in. So I am here, wearing my husband’s burly wool sweater and socks pulled up to my calves. My hair is still rumpled from sleep. I haven’t brushed my teeth. But something feels alive in me that allows me to fling a few unguarded sentences at the page.
After forty minutes of revising, the light spreading across my room has turned pale and bright with day. The sun has climbed sky’s ladder now, its face well above the trees, and the mountains look like cardboard cut-outs along the horizon, painted dusty blue. I go down to the kitchen where DH is mopping spilled coffee from the soapstone counter, and Bean, wearing his blue striped train conductor hat, is twirling about the room. They’ve made a fire, but it’s still cold. I pour coffee and maple syrup and milk into a pan and reheat it until the steam rises, and then pour it into a white enamel mug. With a stack of buttered toast, I head back upstairs, back to this desk piled high with books and papers where I wait for words to fit the empty spaces on the page.
After revising the entire essay, reworking sections again and again until the words fit together into a mosaic that I can understand, and that, at least in part, take on the shape of what I’m trying to know, they bust into my studio grinning. It’s 10am now and my coffee is cold. DH is ready for a shower, but before he goes he pulls me close, his hands traveling up under my sweater touching my hot skin. Bean circles my studio, a wreck after preparing for my showing. Empty frames litter the floor. Scraps of paper, one shearling clog, a case of rubber alphabet stamps. He sings, tunelessly, sweetly, as he collects and reorganizes the loot this space provides: tabs of watercolor paint, the wingnuts on the easel, a drawer full of cards, a futon frame without the mattress. He lies on it, his legs and arms spread out to account for the gaps. Perfect balance.
I finish reading This Autumn Morning, by Gretel Ehrlich. It’s an essay in the 1991 collection of Best American Essays, and it speaks to me in a language I know: one of loss and natural wonder both. As I read I relearn something about this art form that I love. That words can travel around and around the heart of whatever it is you’re trying to say, like the circles spreading outward from a pebble tossed. They do not need to go straight like arrows.
A new start
Before it melted, the snow was boot deep and crystalline. Now unseasonably warm rains have returned and the ground is slick with black ice at night. Above the bald mountains that rise up from the lake, the full moon was setting just as the sun was rising this morning, white and round like a plate against the pale tablecloth of pink and blue.
I’m busy again, but the past two days have been deeply satisfying. DH and I keep talking, and each time it’s getting easier and richer. We’re moving, not stagnant, and also we’re starting to train for a half marathon. Five miles at the gym yesterday, and then dinner all together. Ice cream with cherries for dessert, and Bean licking his bowl. We’re trying to be gentler with each other than before, and this is good.
I’m also back in the thick of creative work, which I love. Somehow I managed to forget I’m doing an art showing in a café and am supposed to hang my work this weekend, so now my studio is spread with frames and canvasses, as I scurry to prepare for the show. I like it this way, a patchwork of rectangles and brushstrokes.
A good way to start the new year.
Happy new year!
I cannot think of a better way to toast in the new year than to hurtle downhill on a sled. Wild, silly fun. Bean’s grin spreading like sunshine across his face. DH laughing, truly in the moment and content, just before he bites snow for the hundredth time. The heat of our breath rising up against the cold air, and in between our giggling, how quite the landscape is covered in snow.
I am ready for a new year. And if I had to distill my resolutions for this year into one pure wish, it would be this: to bring loving devotion to every single moment.
I'll probably write an uberlist over here, tomorrow. In the meantime, if you had to pick one thing for this year--one theme, one goal, what would it be?
Also, happy new year to all of you!
The view (and the most random, grumpy post ever)
Here are a bunch of photos I took the other night when the light was doing the most incredible things. On my way home the stormy sky was suddenly ripped open and sun burst through, right in front of the rain—creating the most remarkable and vibrant rainbow I have ever seen. Of course, I didn’t get the camera until after it had faded (rainbows never look as beautiful as they do in real life anyway), but I did walk out onto the cold damp grass to see raindrops hanging like bright jewels from every twig and branch.
I can make no guarantees about where this post will go because I’m sick with an awful stomach bug—the second time this year, and I’m hating every minute of it. My head feels like it’s in a vice, and I feel utter anguish that I’ve left my class to some poor substitute the week before vacation. The kids are so excitable right now; we’ve discussed where Santa lives about a hundred times, and still, the conversation seems to wend its way there. As they terrorize the sub, I’ll spend tomorrow on the couch with Bean patting my cheek and saying, Mama, sick, or more urgently, Mama, get up!
I got whatever I have from DH who woke up yesterday morning feeling sick. To make matters worse, the garbage disposal chose yesterday to jam, which in turn caused the dishwasher to spew its backwash into the sink drain and the sink to start filling. Lovely, no? In a moment of flawless teamwork, a very feverish DH and I worked together to find and remove the pieces of broken plate that had fallen into it, and then, as he retired to the couch threatening to faint, I had to wrestle the darn thing back into place. Sort of like wrestling a greased pig made out of metal. I reinstalled it, to my credit (all kudos are welcome—it was the most disgusting, awkward, frustrating thing I’ve done in a long while!)
This is possibly the least festive I’ve felt at the approach of the holidays, EVER. We bought wreathes the other day, but besides that and baking cookies, our house is decidedly un-holiday like. Oh dear, I’ll stop moping when my stomach stops feeling like someone is excavating it with a child’s sized plastic bulldozer.
A little help, please
What might one give a guy this holiday season? I need some ideas...both for big gifts and tiny ones (Dh & I are uber cheesy; we exchange little treasures every day of advent--a tradition left over from my childhood). I always hate myself when it's December 23 and I haven't thought of anything and end up opting for sweaters. What are you contemplating for the men in your lives?
Afterwards
An entire week of goodness. Time with long-time friends. Pedicures and walking bare-toed down cold cobblestone to share coffee. Browsing jewelry stores. Trying on dresses, the three of us to a dressing room, and then twirling in front of the mirror. Toasting with champagne and eating pomegranates. Laughing. A lot. And soaking up time with the in-laws also here, as the best babysitters ever. So much fun, chatter, intellectualizing, giggling, cooking, strolling, enjoying. Now that everyone is gone, the house seems hollow and big, and Bean fell apart at every gusset, over-stimulated, teething, and off schedule. We’re all ready to find our rhythms again. To get back to the things of daily life: showering before bed so my hair doesn’t turn to icicles in the early morning frost; planning out lessons; replying to an overcrowded email inbox that has sat untended for days on end. It’s a shock to the system though, to go from such heady days to this, yet I find myself craving downtime.
Thanksgiving goodness
Such a great day with good friends and good food. A mid day run in clear cold air. Antique Lennox china on the table and fresh flowers. Hours on the couch lounging, post dinner, with wine in hand. Always a grown up to chase Bean around the house, playing peekaboo behind the couch, twirling in socks, laughing wildly. A walk after dinner under stary, stary skies, counting our blessings and giving thanks while watching shooting stars trail through the dark. Then hours spent talking in only the way good friends can about all the things that matter deeply and can be rarely said. So thankful.
Like crushing grapes
I feel myself doing the same thing I always do. Like a rodeo pony at the gate, my entire being bucks up against the process of sitting down to write about the things that matter most to me: about trying to make a life. Invariably this work always takes me to the brink of what I know—and pushes me over, to where I plummet wildly into the unknown.
As I sit down to write about things that matter: about my father dying, about the gunman at school, about fighting with my husband, or loving my son fiercely, and I know that I will be changed by the act of writing. It is the act of putting words on the page that defines the reality of the world I inhabit. And so invariably, I resist because I am terrified that the act of delving deeply into this material will bring me face to face with my own small self and demand that I become more pliant. That I take risks or grow in ways I cannot yet fathom.
When I force myself to write like this my heart feels trampled like grapes becoming wine: something comes from the crushing that is sweet and heady and intoxicating, but also, there is the stain of broken skin and the pulp of the fruit that was once a different shape.
10 random things
1) This reminded me how much fun it is to write an utterly random list.
2) Things I am into this month: pomegranates, this soap, making homemade granola, Scrubs on tivo, hearing my son giggle, and remembering to make time for the stack of books on my nightstand.
2) Sitting down and beginning anything—a manuscript, a book, my to do list—is the hardest part.
3) When we ripped out a wall in the bathroom upstairs, we found a Dr. Pepper bottle from 1976. It sits on the windowsill in my studio now.
5) I am procrastinating about working on a manuscript right now.
6) I love Tahitian vanilla ice cream.
7) I’m adore this orange infused dark chocolate. Dark chocolate can do no wrong anyway--but with a hint of orange? Reminds me of driving through southern California as a kid and smelling the heady scent of orange blossoms on the breeze.
8) I almost always choose wine by the label.
9) Violence towards women is something I have become deeply angry about, and I want to do more to affect change.
10) Even in winter, I like having bare feet. Radiant heat makes me happy, and so do my clogs.
Your turn. Write 10 random facts about you, right now—here or on your blog. If you post on your blog, leave your link here so I can check 'em out.
Two kinds of prayers
Praying
It doesnt have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch
a few words together and dont try to make them elaborate, this isnt a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
__Mary Oliver
Wringing a dry sponge, and therefore some photos
This NaBloPoMo thing is kicking my bootie. It was a totally uneventful day, and I'm still sickish so I don't have a whole lot of energy, and certainly have no ardent desire to write carefully crafted sentences. So instead I thought I'd take you on a random picture tour of yore (in other words, the only old pictures I could locate on MY hardrive. All the good ones are on DH's computer, since his hardrive is so much bigger than mine.) I'll begin by presenting you with a picture of the one and only time I've gone cross country skiing. I fell like nine-hundred times, from a near stand still.
I
Here is one of my favorite pictures of me EVER. It was my first snowy Christmas since I was oh, FOUR, and I was with DH's family in a teeny tiny cabin in the middle of the Northeast Kingdom. We went dog sledding and bought our Christmas tree lights from Ames, and made gingerbread cookies as ornaments. Definitely one of the best Christmasses ever.
This is a picture of me freezing my tail off in Quebec for New Years that same year. Look! I still have my vampire teeth from the days of yore (really, that's what the kids I taught called them. You get a thick skin when you're a teacher. Nothing like sweating profusely during a high-stakes evaluative observation and having a kid say, "Ms. C why do you have wet circles under your armpits? Anyway...) DH and I spent a few days there, drinking hot chocolate from huge bowls, ice scating at the outdoor public rink in the middle of the town square, and poking our heads into quaint little shops and restaurants. If you haven't been, Quebec is a lovely place to go. Everyone speaks French and drives very, very fast. It was also the first place I ever ate snails.
Not exactly sure of the date on this one. Way before we were engaged. Still in college maybe. Totally enamored. Can't you tell. (I know, that should be enough sappiness to last you a good long while. But just wait. I have more!)
And finally, the most cheesy, sappy, totally tacky and yet utterly sincere picture I could find of us about 5 minutes after DH proposed. We were camping. I was wearing some sort of sarong over my bathing suit (really!) Oh yes, and I had just died my hair--the one time I've ever boldly done that--RED. You like?
I do hope you've enjoyed this.
The helter skelter arc of my heart
I took the day off from work, feeling crumpled and exhausted and near-to-tears. Work, post-traumatic stress, and life in general, has me feeling more anxious and more depressed than I have possibly ever felt in my life. Mostly, it’s the whole post-trauma stuff, which seems to permeate everything else. Because I am an optimist, a glass-half-full dreamer, it is unnerving to be here on the brink of sorrow. Doubt, like an unbalanced weight, threatens to pull me over the edge. And perhaps the worst part of this is I’ve always been a mind-over-matter type of person and suddenly I’ve come slamming up against the fact that I can’t just mind-over-matter this all away. My body has internalized the stress of it all, and I’ve been sick in this low-grade kind of way that has me always feeling thin skinned and raw.
So I took the day off and reveled in a morning all to myself—no toddler, no kids all asking for help in unison, no colleagues asking for favors—just me and some writing and a tall frothy latte.
Then I took a nap. It was that weird kind of sleep where semi-consciousness hovers close. Every few minutes I felt like I was almost awake, and, for a moment upon waking after an hour of sleep, I felt sure I had not slept at all. But I had, and the day outside had gone from grey to a perfect autumnal blue.
I took Bean in the backpack for an hour hike through woods, stopping every so often to listen to the sounds of the woods and smell the crisp autumn air. We’d stop, both of us nearly holding our breath, and listen to the sound of water, to the occasional crow calling overhead, and then, suddenly and more than once, to the report of a gun. Damn hunters. I sang softly walking along the spungy trail, not wanting to be mistaken.
Home again, DH and I immediately launched into an argument, that in retrospect had everything to do with the fact that I wanted to be taken care of and hardly anything to do with whatever puppet topic we pulled onto the stage. But later, after I’d left for town he called, and we talked until we came to some sort of understanding, and he met me there for dinner. It was cold out, and I was glad for my down jacket. We at kebabs and crepes from street vendors, and sipped creamy hot chocolate from the local chocolatier, and had a lovely time.
So I guess I’m stubbornly scrabbling out of the hole I’m in. It seems a lot like one step forward, two steps back, but there’s movement, and many exquisite moments. I am grateful for this—that I have not lost my capacity for joy.
(Here are a few pictures, still with the crappy camera.)
Perfect
Time to really watch this little boy of mine who is growing so fast—who is talking now in two word sentences. Under his Gran’s tutelage he has become an aficionado of all things nature: he eats wild apple after wild apple, puckering up his face at their tangy, bitter sweet. He gathers acorns, and picks dandelions, and climbs rocks with ease. Today he followed our cat into the woods, farther than he’s ever gone before—a good acre away from the house. He climbed over the old stone wall that zig-zags in and out of the trees and found a woodchuck’s burrow which he promptly filled with leaves. Then he straddled a fallen birch, and sat there contended for a while, as the cat slipped off into the dappled sunlight further up the hill. Here are more pictures from our day.
Last week I didn’t have any of these moments of simple pleasure. Without my weekend (we were in NJ) everything collided every day, leaving me exhausted—unable to climb out of the stress and into the beauty of now. But with today, I feel efuled, and, after spending the past two hours writing lesson plans for the week, feel excited to jump in again. I just wish, somehow, that I could get a thirteenth hour every day. Wouldn’t that be great?
What would you do with a thirteenth hour?
What it's like
This morning, all I could muster after a too-busy weekend with houseguests and rainstorms were these few lines written in dark ink, the words running together as water dripped from my hair.
I throw myself into the face of the day waiting like an expectant martyr to be handed alms or be run over.
I’m at that point right now, before things feel easy, but after things have been at the hardest part. It’s that point between exhaustion and sweetness. That point at the end of being sick for a full week, and not having had two nights of solid sleep in a row---but after spending an evening in the curve of DH’s arm, watching firelight and making love so many times. We celebrated our anniversary today—-waking up to a leak in a pipe in the wall above the kitchen sink and a sick baby.
But we also woke up to another day together. Another day where what I wrote to him when we were first together, still rings true. Now more than ever: your hand fits the curve of my hand and your mind fits the curve of my mind.
Tonight
Today I feel the earth has tilted on its axis farther from the sun. The air tonight is cold, and the earliest of the maples are vermillion on the hillside. Monarch butterflies have been everywhere in the past few days. They fly in their delicate aimless way from flower to stem along the roadside, and I wince as one hits my bike tire. It’s beautiful wings falter, but it’s no use stopping. It is not like a bird, whose body in shock can be revived with the shelter of warm hands.
In the flats below our house the mountain rises up from the wide field of grass like an elephant on bended knee, purple in the late afternoon sun. We make a fire after dinner, and sit in the quiet of early evening listening to the last of the crickets and the crackle of burning wood. The first frosts will be here in a week, and then the nights grow silent. The fire licks logs, and quickly turns the wood to pale ash. A snake, curled in a flat crevice of rock awakens with the heat, and glides from its hiding place, tonguing the smoky air. Above us, the moon is exactly half full, tangled in the leaves of a maple tree, and across the field our cat, a streak of orange and white, pounces on a mole.
When the sky turns from cerulean to indigo, we pour water on the fire and go indoors. In place of smoke, steam rises up. Tomorrow we go back. Back to the place where havoc happened and everything that mattered most was encapsulated in each pure second of staying alive. Tomorrow we go back to where we were before tragedy scraped across the surface of our souls. Back to where we were standing before the gun shots and the breaking glass: near the sink cutting paper. The new geranium in the bright sunlight on the windowsill had already dropped its first petals on the floor.
Yesterday I went with others to see the colleague I had been standing with who was injured. Just out of the hospital, her face was radiant with smiles. In place of guilt, she offered up forgiveness, easy and immediate, despite the fact that we all heard her cries but couldn’t come. Didn’t. Because we placed our own lives first. Self preservation lurching up in our throats, a part of the hardwired code being human, followed immediately by the bitter taste of regret. Seeing her was good. It gave me room to breathe again, room in my heart to stop replaying every broken moment, and to move instead towards preparation. And seeing her also made me think of this again: forgiveness is an act of love.
Night fills the bowl of day. The window becomes a mirror.
Monarch.
Purple stars.
Leaf lace.
Rock.
Fall on its way.
Bark.
Moss in fallen log.
Field flowers.