a work in progress

It's been twenty days since I launched A Field Guide To Now, and in those twenty days I have been more intensely creative than I’ve been in over a year. I've been forced way outside my comfort zone. My word for the year was action, and this project has forced me to take action on behalf of my career as a writer and artist in ways I couldn’t have conceived of when I first took the plunge. I've had to learn how to query and research and push the limits of my ability to create at night after small boys go to sleep. I’m working on this book project, my novel, paintings, and a few other big projects that are under wraps with fingers crossed.

(I am also working part time, at a job that is pushing me to learn In Design and Photoshop, always under deadline. The child-free hours of my day are spent thusly: designing ads and view books and writing press releases. The rest of my day is spent juggling, with a single-minded focus pounding in my head like jungle drums.)

I am compelled, determined, wired, moody, thrilled, exhausted, inspired. When I sleep my mind is active in a way that is almost new to me. It’s frenetic and repetitive: gnawing away at the creative tasks I’ve left off from before bed. This past week I’ve begun dreaming of whales—and they’ve inspired some of the newest art for A Field Guide To Now. Here is a glimpse (in progress.) Incidentally, when I looked up what it means to dream about whales, this is what I found: Whale reintroduces us to our creative and intuitive energies to show us a talent we've forgotten about or haven't been aware existed. How spot-on is that?

I’ve had more coffee and less sleep; more wine, more sex, more dreams and less rhythm. I’m spending less time on laundry and dishes (and the house is in probable shambles because of it) and more time perched on the stool in my studio painting, with gauche on my fingers. Less time taking leisurely walks with my boys; more time trying to multi-task while they’re under foot.

It's made me think about my identity, about who I am and how I define that. For a while, after Sprout was born, I slipped wholly into the identity of mother, and felt my world narrow to the small, domestic orbit of that life. It was restful, to be there. For a while. Sprout was such an easy baby that I enjoyed his babyhood in a way that I never fully did with Bean—who cried more and was more needy, just as I was newer and more anxious at the whole mommy thing.

But now, Sprout is walking. Bean is 5. The house is littered with legos (Sprout holds lego helmets in his mouth like a chipmunk. I’ve checked his diaper but he’s never actually swallowed one. Go ahead call me neglectful. YOU just try to keep legos off the floor with two boys in the house, four years apart.) There is a constant stampede of activity and peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of milk that get spilled. The vacuum is out all day long. Money is tight. Bean has outgrown all his pajamas. Sprout is starting to say words.

And.

And in the midst of all this messy, simple, regular domesticity, I’ve begun to long fiercely for myself. For myself not as a mother, but as someone entirely separate from my children.

Truthfully, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the definition of motherhood, and now, more than ever, I am enjoying my boys and wanting to be distinct from them, in my own right. A writer. An artist. Right now my mind is preoccupied with the craft of writing, with images, and also about self-doubt, and longing…

How do you define yourself? Where does your definition of motherhood (if you are, or want to be a mother) shape you? What are the words you use to tell yourself the story about your life as it is at this current moment?

synchopation

I have the day off and I’m gleefully miring my way through an inconceivably long to-do list. I have yet to figure out how to accomplish my every day life and everything else that needs to get done.

The biggest thing I’ve accomplished: completely reorganizing and painting my studio. Last year sometime, in the middle of the winter, under a blanket of depression, I painted my studio a pale blue, which felt like a bad idea almost seconds after the last coat was applied. Without meaning to, I began to use my studio space less and less, until I would go for a week or two without ever entering it.

This affected me on a subconscious level. I felt creatively terrified. Performance anxiety corroded any attempt to splash color across the page or really sink back into a routine of writing. Without a space I felt comfortable in, I resorted to writing at the kitchen table, in the midst of the hubbub of daily life, and routinely sabotaged my own efforts even there, buy skimming through my favorite blogs, or trying to keep up with the voracious demands of my gig over at Parent Dish.

Somehow the entire month of September (and nearly all of October) was swallowed by the murky creature of un-ambition. All summer I was entrenched in the rich sensory beauty of the outdoors; of leisure; good food; good novels. Then fall arrived with the first nip in the air and the hillsides turning orange, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. My syncopation was jagged and blurry; like a scarecrow trying to dance. Somehow with the shift in seasons I stopped doing all the things that I love: running, writing, art, and instead became (maybe necessarily) submerged in the fabric of work.

Headlong there, in the classroom, participating in the daily alchemy of turning eighteen individuals into a working group of learners; time spent watching spiders eat grasshoppers in the terrarium; and writing stories about magical shrinking potions. Time spent tying shoes and counting shells and navigating small sorrows. Time spent feeling nearly exhausted every afternoon; always empty, hungry, anxious.

And then I came home a few days ago to an empty house (Bean and DH were out running errands) and despite feeling hungry and grumpy, I decided to pull on my running shoes and head out in the perfect autumn sunlight for a run.

On the way back, passing a long field that follows the road for a good stretch, a small pony saw me running, and cantered up to the fence and then ran with me. I stopped and petted her tousled mane, and then continued, delighting in the unexpected equine attention. And then I realize: I was no longer either hungry or grumpy. My mood and body had been off kilter because I’ve been so out of rhythm. My soul misses running, it seems. Just as it misses moving through steady sun salutes on my yoga mat on my sunny studio floor.

So in the past few days I feel like I’ve come back into orbit around the quiet fire of my inner self. I’ve started running again, and I want to do it nearly every day. My body needs to move, just as my mind needs the quiet emptiness of one foot falling in front of the other along the gravel road.

So I’ve cleaned my studio and tackled my to-do list, and finally feel like I’m at least leaning towards a place of balance. Not quite there yet, but at least facing the right direction now.

As I write, thousands (really!) of lady bugs have migrated to our house. They are landing on the windows, twirling through the hazy autumn air in their bumbling flight. Do they hibernate? What are they doing here? Some say lady bugs are good luck. I'm content to imagine that they are.

Waiting

Feeling the tight stomached ache of waiting, now. For spring, for the fat envelope, for several nights of sleep stacked up against each other like a solid cord of wood.

I finished The Year Of Magical Thinking yesterday, and all day today I keep going back to it in my mind. So many of her sentences are like the unusual pebbles we scoop up at the beach and then finger softly in the white cotton interiors of our pockets all afternoon.

This one, particularly:

"Marriage is memory, marriage is time."

I randomly opened an old issue of Vanity Fair today, looking for inspiration, and landed on a page with her bird like portrait: frail after so much loss, but fierce. I clipped it to the wire running along the low wall near my desk, with other glossy pages ripped from other sources, each image causing amazement to quicken in my soul.

Waiting always feels like this. I heard from one school, yes. But the other, the one I dearly want, most, utmost, not yet. There are more birds now: doves, grackles, starlings, chickadees and a whole bevy of chatty bluejays at the feeder; but not yet robins from the tree tops, and not yet buds swelling large enough to force in jars along the windowsills. Though surely soon.

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.

Vanatage point

It is raining softly, and the sky is the color of goose down. The fan oscillates back and forth, blowing paper ellipses across my studio floor. I’m starting to love this space. This place for leaving tracks across the page of my heart, for wandering and wondering, both.

Finches dart from twig to branch outside my window, calling each other and shaking raindrops from their wings. I’m grateful for the rain today after yesterday’s warmth. The past few nights we’ve had heat lighting, illuminating our bedroom with stark white light, and the days have been so hot and damp, clothes stick and sleeping seems impossible. Now the air is cool and gentle, and raindrops fleck the wooden windowsills.

I’m gearing up for a shift back to teaching, to being pulled in hundred different directions. I feel myself wanting this abundance. I love challenge. I thrive when I’m pushed, when an economy of action develops out of necessity, when my days are bursting

The past eighteen months away from work have been something I needed down to my very core. I needed this time to realign myself, to relocate my foundation and settle again into the house of my spirit. Like a bowl of water I gulped eagerly after a long hike, this time away from work with Bean ameliorated my fractured creative self, grown used to being pushed aside.

Now I have a studio instead of an office—I’ve given thought to where I put my paints and tools rather than storing them in boxes under the bed. I’ve adorned the walls and sills with artifacts I love: rocks from Long Island Sound; shells from Puerto Rico, prints I’ve made, photographs in faded black and white. This is why I feel ready to go back to fullness of my work as a teacher: because I have recharged and grown. I’m going back to something I’ve done before, but my vantage point has changed.

So I’m looking forward to returning to the daily activity of meeting small minds and giving them handfuls of ways to learn. I love the opportunity teaching provides me: to think ever flexibly, to see each child as an individual, and to discover how I can help them learn. I learn so much from this.

It’s such an interesting opportunity: to take time off, and to return to something that you love. A bit like time travel, I settle into the familiar setting of the classroom, with younger, less experienced versions of myself in attendance, as I gather papers and sort through books.

I’ve often wondered if other people have moments like this---where they encounter themselves and discover how abundantly they’ve grown. Because of the very nature of growing (organic and chaotic,) we hardly ever have the clarity and calm to glimpse beyond it while we’re in the process. We’re simply doing it. But then there are occasional moments like now, where I feel like I’ve landed on a smooth rock amidst the turbulence---and can see below me the vast topography of where I’ve been.

I’m always shocked at this. To see myself, different than I was. To catch glimpses of younger selves; to find their outlines smaller than the shape of now.

I need your help

I'm ashamed to admit--I actually know next to nothing about web design and I barely understand how my publishing platform works. Are you surprised? Yeah, I'd like to learn--but seriously, where would the time for that to be found? So instead of learning, today I am begging. If someone has the fancy shmancy web skills to help me integrate a gallery to display my artwork into wordpress, I'd grovel willingly at their feet. Doesn't sound enticing enough? I can throw in a year of free hosting from Wired Hub. Better?

Email me if you're interested.

And for everyone else, this is the best I could do. Enjoy.

Becoming

To grow is to go beyond what you are today.

Stand up as yourself.

Do not imitate.

Do not pretend to have achieve your goal, and do not try to cut corners.

Just grow.

--Svami Prajnanpad

***

I am surrounded by notebooks, and I am taking notes. Like an archeologist, I am looking for clues about the piece (a book?) I am trying to write. I want to find the veins that traverse it, that bring meaning to it’s peripheries. I am re-reading all the scribbled pages and documents I’ve written since the winter of 2004 when I was hugely pregnant, exhausted, and severely dislocated from my sense of self. It is startling and sometimes funny to go back and read all the thoughts I’ve dutifully recorded.

Over and over againI write the same things, tugging at the girdle of phrasing, couching my words this way and then that---trying to get closer to truth. And then over and over I forget.

I find I’ve written things down that make me laugh out loud. Like this:

“I look around the apartment today and think: god, I’ve all but killed the houseplants.”

Other things make me go quiet inside, the way a bird must feel after it has landed. Like this:

“The map of your identity changes when you love someone. “

**

“On the train home, we slice through the dark—an isolated rectangle of light and breath and shifting weight.” **

“The days of recovery from labor and bonding with Bean have blurred together into a continuous present. I find I am unable to think very far forward or backward and instead end up lingering in the moment doing nothing except watching and listening to my son breathe.”

** “His little fingers curl around my thumb, and I am learning humility now. The moments of each days fabric have become a string of little wonderments. Little things matter now. Like coffee, and the incredible smell of his hair.”

** “Everyone lives through periods of intense change, yet few give pause to these moments of turbulence. Few are present and reflective right in the moment of becoming.”

**

I’ve started to feel present in the story I am trying to write for the first time, and have begun to realize that it is more than a story about birth (my son’s) or death (my father’s) or love (my parents, my own). It is a story about becoming.

I want to know your stories of becoming.

Feeling a little off kilter

Everything felt slightly out of step today, the way it sometimes happens on TV when the image is broadcast seconds before the audio, so the actors are moving and speaking but their words come trailing after and nothing quite lines up. Even the weather felt like this: snow fell hard in the afternoon for about twenty minutes, and then the sun came out exuberantly.

I'm in the midst of working on more paintings for my cafe art show. This is the background for one. I'm painting gold finches in flight that will wing their way across this surface, but somehow the texture of the background as it is right now captured my mood. Pithy, a little dark, a little murky.

I'll post more when I know how both turn out (*chuckles*).

Clutter

February always gives me cabin fever. It is that month before anything noticeably spring-like happens: before buds swell or mud arrives—but after the magic of winter has worn off somewhat; when it just feels cold out no matter what, and all the stores rub it in by displaying only flip flops and little skirts (this should not be allowed, I think.)

It doesn’t help this February DH, Bean and I are living in about 900 square feet of space and we’re straining at the gussets. Maintaining tidiness here feels like trying to keep a house of cards erect in a windstorm.

I’d give a lot for a dishwasher tonight (the sink drain keeps clogging, and it gives me the heebie-jeebies to unclog it.) More for a basement that doesn’t flood with every rain storm (our boxes of books and summer clothes sit damply on pallets).

Tonight I am restless with longing: for a bedroom that is JUST a bedroom (not a nursery, and the epicenter for endless heaps of laundry), for a studio (that is NOT the dining room table), for ample cupboards and closets and shelves to store things in properly

I’m bumping up against my own thoughts like clothes on tumble dry. I feel wrung out.

Synchronicity – events that seem related but are not obviously caused by one another

A week ago I saw a flyer advertising baby sitting and took down the number. DH and I had been talking about how we’re finally ready to start letting someone take care of Bean for a couple hours during the week while we work together on the house, so we called. She was wonderful, and tonight she came and spent an hour with Bean while DH and I walked down town together like teenagers—just us, holding hands.

We stopped for chai (for me) and espresso (for him) and a chocolate filled pastry (to share, licking the chocolate off our fingers), and then went to the bookstore where I devoured (on a mini artist date) the glossy spreads in design magazinesand DH wandered off to the fantasy section.

When we left the bookstore it is snowing gently. Back home, Bean was happy and the babysitter was happy (which made me unbelievably happy, and terribly relieved). After she left, friends stopped by and we had an impromptu takeout dinner—pad thai, dumplings, tofu, spicy noodles. Then I took over the table with my boxes of scraps, paints, gel, glue sticks, brushes.

I've booked three art showings in cafes this week, and I'm unbelievably excited. (One thing I have done as a result of the Artist’s Way has been to acknowledge and set the ball in motion on some of the things that I've had on my dream list for way too long. Cafe art showings has been one of those things.) For the first time since I was a kid, I’m finally allowing myself to say it regularly. I am an artist.

Give and you shall recieve

I have now finished half of the postcards for the swap I organized (of course, they were supposed to be mailed by February 1st, but I'm terrible with deadlines.) You can go here to see them up close. It has been absolutely delightful to make them—each piece is mixed media: watercolor fish with vintage stamps, bits of ephemera, acrylics and varnish.

There is something so freeing about creating little pieces of art and sending them off. A part of me falls in love with each piece I create. A part of me wants to hoard them. But I also believe that there is a principle in the universe that says: give abundantly and you shall receive abundantly. So I continue to send my art out into the world. Little pieces carrying the joy of my soul--and in return I find I am continually showered with a profusion of good things. Sudden opportunities, fresh creativity, new friends, and kind accolades keep pouring into my life. I am so grateful.

Thank you to everyone who voted for me in the BOBS! Your friendship, your support, and your kind words satisfy a much deeper part of my being than the actual win does. Though I admit, I’m terribly tickled. :)

Baby, it's cold outside...

The theme this week at Mama Says Om is cold. I'm having fun with this one.

The amazingly talented Nichola gave birth to a beautiful baby girl on Thursday. Welcome to the world, Esme & congratulations mama! Nicohla also organized a postcard swap last month and, being a sucker for foreign stamps, paper mail, and all things artsy, I was excited to participate. The only rules were that they had to be handmade and postmarked by the 31st. As usual, I'm cutting it close with the deadline. (In theory, though I finished them today! they won''t be postmarked until November 1st.)

I wanted each postcard to be unique, and yet similar--so I used the same media (acrylic and watercolor paints & a block print) and colors, but varied the theme for each as my whimsy dictated. I really had fun making these---allowing my paintbrush to follow my mind into abstraction. I also really liked the idea of including a fish print in each---because fish are sort of a signature art piece for me.

I would love to do another postcard swap---so if you would like to participate please let me know in the comments and I'll email you with the details.

Studio Friday: Something Found

I've been hoarding stamps since I was eight. But these I found in DH's parent's basement: shoved into shoeboxe---tiny picture menageries belonging to one of their elderly friend's who had died and willed the contents of his house to them. Four boxes in all, many stamps are organized by type in small wax paper envelopes. Some are still attached to postcards or letters. I couldn't believe my luck.

One postcard of South African women standing wrapped in long white, red and yellow cloaks reads, "These are the people very near here. Most interesting country and my virst visit. Working hard but seeing a lot. Love Bill"

Another with a small cellophane package of sharp black lava crumbs from the Mauna Lao Volcano in Hawaii reads, "Now don't burn your fingers ha! ha! Having a grand time and a lovely place to stay here. Wish I had longer but must be off again. Hazel."

Since I first saw the brightly colored ornate stamp on an 'overseas' envelope addressed to my father when I was five, I was stricken with wanderlust and wonder. I could hardly fathom the places that spawned the exquisite tiny drawings of orchids or frogs, or the events that seemed noble enough to emblazon with the lithograph onto those tiny inch-by-one-inch squares.

History reveals itself on these small tokens of currency that send letters fluttering across the globe. Holiday greetings, inventions, political activism, endangered species. Everything, it seems, has been recorded for posterity on a stamp.

Growing up I pressed them under the glossy pages of a photo album, but now I keep them scattered. I use them in my art often when I'm seeking to capture a sense of the exotic or foreign. Or I use whole rows of the same stamp, repeating an image like Warhol in miniature. I know they might be worth something, but I have never been the type to preen over a collection. I keep my books dog-eared. I put flowers in antique vases, and I use these stamps.

(Click on each image to view them larger--they are so gorgeous, I couldn't resist including the full-size images.)

Studio Friday: Paytime

I put watercolor paints on a plate and let Bean play. This is what he made. Click on the picture for more photos of us in action.

Studio Friday: Tryptic

I like Studio Friday because it's a peak into other artist's studios. This week's project was to show "three of a kind." Oddly, almost everything around my desk comes it twos or fours or singles. And I sat stumped for a long time before I realized my desk, a second-hand goody inherited from a deceased friend of my husband's parents, has three deep drawers. I replaced the handles when I got it—the old ones were gaudy and ornate. And it suits me fine.

This is my studio: Along one side of the dining room in our small apartment. Red walls. My desk is nestled below a built-in china cabinet with old leaded-glass doors. I keep them open, and use packing tape to affix notes and quotes, to-do lists and receipts to the glass. Into the latch hole I have stuck two drying maple leaves---the first that I picked up this season, fallen to the sidewalk, vermilion and gold.

I use the shelves in the china hutch for books. I stack my books both ways: spines facing up, and horizontally. And in front of them, mugs and jars with brushes, pencils, pens. An orchid my husband gave me on my birthday, no longer flowering, but still with waxy oblong leaves sits on my desk.

Everywhere, heaps of papers, books, magazines, paints. They spread out in circles around me, like the rings in water after a pebble has been thrown in. I am at the epicenter.

Things I keep within reach: my laptop, my camera (A Nikon CoolPix5000, Jillian, since you once asked), a bar chocolate (this yummy raspberry kind by Lake Champlain Chocolates), my favorite volumes of poetry (The Rag And Bone Shop of the Heart, edited by Robert Bly, Inland, by Pamela Alexander, A Tree Within, by Octavio Paz, and The Complete Poems of e.e. cummings) a bouquet of dried roses from my wedding, and my address book (a Metropolitan Museum of Art item, with irises on the cover).

Things I keep in my desk drawers: Lots of stationary boxes---now filled with scraps, pencils, magnetic poetry bits, glue, staples. A small metal wind-up toy. Silver embossing powder. Thumb tacks. Quarters. Packing tape. Bank statements. Vintage postcards, sparkly ribbon, thread. An old wallet. Burt's Bees raspberry lip balm. Sharpies.

Since starting this, it has begun to rain out. Hard pebbles of rain falling against the open screens. The night air comes in cool. Tomorrow I will paint I think. Tonight I try to paint with words.

Studio Friday: Favorite Tool

When I got to thinking about it, I realized that the tool I always use in my art is gel medium. I've already shown what happens to my son when I use it here. Better than glue, I use it to adhere pieces in a collage, as a fixative for pastels or watercolors, as a sealant, or as a thinner. It dilutes paint without making it runny, adds texture, depth and translucence. This stuff is good, people. Yes it gets all over everything. Yes I catch myself pulling off thin sheets of dried gel from my elbows or fingers like peeling skin after a sunburn, but I'm fine with that. I've never been one to keep my hands clean anyway.