Chaos + golden light

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chaos and golden light.

solitary moments

The valley is umber and golden and red below me, and the poplar that quivered all summer in turns silver and green has shaken it’s leaves to the ground. Crows call, squirrels churl, and the wind pulls at the house. It’s a familiar sound: the sound of the colder months here on this hill that I call home. It will be our fifth winter here and I know now the things I imagined I would when we first moved: where to find the brightest leaves for pressing; the softest moss among quarts in the woods; mushrooms under brambles; leathery skinned, fragrant and sweet apples.

Today I am inside and alone. In other rooms the floors gleam in the sunlight. In mine, the windows are backlit with the gold-orange of the trees, and the loudest clatter is my own fingers on the keyboard, my own breath. I soak up these solitary times when I can become reacquainted with the threads of narrative in my book, make progress, print drafts, scribble notes. It’s so very rare though, for me to be solitary, or even alone for more than an hour.

I imagine sometimes, dreamily, a little writing hut with months to spare. Time elastic and mine. But then I wonder if my mind would go soft; if I’d lack the discipline to persevere in the circle of my own circumscribed thoughts for so long. Self inflicted deadlines languish the longest, this I know. Similarly quiet rings the loudest in the absence of my small boys who fill the house with ruckus laughter; with the crashing of vehicles into one another; with wailing, with stomping feet, with squeals, with words.

When are you alone? What is the quiet like for you? What do you do that time, with only you? What are you like then?

A list for Saturday

Today: wood stacking and striking skies. The hills are dappled with sun and shade. My boys want to be outdoors all day, their noses running, always heading for the mud, always climbing to the top of unstacked piles of logs.

I'm still getting over being sick--and contemplating the affects of it on my digital and academic life over here. (I'd loove to hear your thoughts on this subject.)

Today there will be chocolate chip cookies and chicken soup and rosy cheeks. There will also be reading. Lots of it. And figuring out how to do a podcast for A Field Guide To Now (!) and maybe a run. Yes. That's Saturday's list. What is yours?

Also: we're entering the phase of toddler temper tantrums around here. Oooh boy. Here we go. More on that and some pictures tomorrow.

Go Boldly

I'm sick and going to take a nap but I just wanted to check in and say hello and share this little bit of art (one of my mottos of late.)

Once I get caught up on sleep and get over this cold I have so much I want to share. Right now my brain feels echo-y. Does that make sense? My thoughts keep bouncing around in there. Kind of like this. (So cool, right?) I can't believe it's already October. What does fall look like where you are? What are you enjoying?

learning things

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

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

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

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

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

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

small discoveries

At some point there will be enough hours and I’ll know it, but for now Photoshop is like sliding down a rabbit hole into an alternate reality where everything reacts and responds in arbitrary, brilliant, and unexpected ways.

I spent the whole day occupied in this way, siting at my long white desk, sheaves of paper sketches spread around me like snow, making images, digital and graphite both.

Outside the weather has turned decidedly autumn like, and today the sky was the kind of gray that makes me moody, and it’s that time of the month where everything seems blunt or sharp depending on the circumstance, and chocolate really is the only solution.

It takes more effort to dig out of my own head space on days like these: to inhabit family life without the residual layers of mood and intellectual momentum. Still, there were lovely moments: French toast with maple syrup from our neighbors, cuddling with the boys on the floor, taking a walk down the road with Sprout in the wagon, Bean holding my hand, T's arm wrapped around my waist. Every single day I fall in love with my boys more. All three of them.

Today I wanted to share a new mix of music I’ve been absolutely crushing on: A soundtrack for making things.

Also into this project: Love 146. And this awesome, awesome site: Arbutus Yarns I love, love, love discovering your sources of inspiration. What are you crushing on lately?

almost a list about today

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

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

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

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

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

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

an unexpected rescue

It wasn’t the way I expected it might happen; in fact, I didn’t expect it at all. In the back seat the boys were eating peanuts and chocolate graham crackers, on the way home from picking Bean up at kindergarten. I was thinking absently about school projects; about this book that we are reading this week, and about how it’s maybe true: you do know. Yes you.

And then we were on the dirt road, going around the corner and I could feel the way the mud grabbed at the tires of the car. I wasn’t driving fast. Slow enough that I could slam on the breaks and the tousled maple-syrup scented head of Sprout barely tugged forward at all.

“What, mommy, what?” Bean asked.

But I was already out of the car. Like that: like instinct, my body moving before I could think about what to do next.

In front of me: a car entirely flipped over, roof to the ground, in a ditch, on a rock, windows shattered. Smoke threaded its way from the broken windows.

There was a girl inside, alive, and I felt my heart want to explode with relief. Alive, and secondly, her neck wasn’t broken. She was dangling from her seatbelt, her feet were stuck, her face smooshed into the roof of the car. She had already called 911 (I am guessing here—but I am pretty sure she was on her cell or texting when she crashed—because she wouldn’t have been able to locate her cell phone if it hadn’t have been in her hand—everything was strewn everywhere among the broken glass.)

She was shaking, and I could feel my own body quiver with adrenaline and empathy. I asked her if she could move. I asked her if her head hurt. And then I carefully, carefully pulled her legs free. And she was totally unable to help me—she just shook and sobbed. She hung upside down until I reached around her and unclipped her seatbelt and then she collapsed into my arms.

She was 17. Gorgeous pale skin, freckles, smudged mascara. I held her until she could stand.

And all she could say over and over again was: “My parents are going to kill me.”

No, sweetie. They will be happy you are alive. I wrapped her in an animal print blanket we keep in our trunk for impromptu picnics and I brought her to my car. Other people stopped. One man had stopped while I helped her to get out. He was too scared to help. Afterwards he said, "You should have a medal." But it’s really not like that at all: I am a mother. There wasn’t anything else I could do.

So I kept her warm and kept her from hyperventilating, which she was slipping towards several times as she panicked about her parents. She called her work first. Then her mom, lastly her dad, who came, tall, thin, without a smile and stood beside the state trooper answering questions before he finally turned to me and said, “thank you for stopping.”

He didn’t hug his daughter. He didn’t reach for her or stroke her hair or tell her he was happy she was alive.

How does this happen? How?

My boys meanwhile were so good. They sat in their carseats for 45 minutes—because the first responders and then the EMTs treated her in my car before finally taking her to the hospital. Bean watched everything quietly, unafraid, wide eyed. He was in heaven watching the firemen come and clear the way for the car to be towed. (The smoke was from the airbag, thankfully.)

One fireman, seeing Bean, went and got both boys Junior Firefighter medals from their truck. Bean was over the moon proud.

I drove home slowly, grateful, grateful. And it was a peaceful, mellow afternoon of story books and me doing design work and Bean drawing next to me at my big long desk (while Sprout slept.) Oh how I love them, my sweet, sweet boys.

Also: What is with texting while driving? Why do people—and particularly teenagers do it? Also: her seatbelt saved her life. I have no doubt about that at all. If you have teens or know some, tell them.

Blur and beauty

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

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

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

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

Why must this be so?

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

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

an impossibly possible project

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

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

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

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

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

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

{grin.}

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

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

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

August 23::uncertain ordinary (and a list)

Hello there.

I hardly know where to begin tonight. I’ve been playing tag with the delete key. Typing words, then flitting over with my pinky finger to delete them all, and again. It’s a peculiar choreography of indecision and exhaustion: the day was full of talking. Some days are like that, full with friends and family in such a way that the quiet becomes slender mortar in the chinks between the noise, and I want to creep away and scribble little quiet notes onto bits of imaginary paper and slide them into the slight hesitations between hubbub and bustle, between making bread and taking phone calls, meeting a final deadline for work (that job is through now, on to the wild blue yonder of freelance + being a full time student) and sharing lunch with a friend and her wee ones, all the while circling about wiping counters and trying to pinpoint exactly where I am in space.

I am not sure where I am. That is the truth. With this sprained ankle, I haven’t been running and I’ve lost that sense of forward motion that I have when my feet move down the dirt road, the sweet scent of grass drying thick in the air and the crickets singing, every night louder. But it’s not just because I cannot run. Things have been out of the ordinary for so long I no longer really have any memory of what ordinary is.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, I know something of that. This year has pummeled me so often with last minute curveballs and second chances and unexpected offerings that I’ve started to develop a new set of reflexes. I’ve learned to duck and bend, to bow in prayer, to hold my breath and then release it, and then to wake up and carry on with the day without knowing where it will end despite the fact that every ounce of me craves control and certainty and sure outcomes. I’m beginning to understand that we never really have any these things, though sometimes with more resources (time, money, etc.) we successfully concoct elaborate facades that allow us think we do.

But for now it is about this. About facing the uncertainty and saying yes, and saying yes again. It’s about counting up the little things each day and finding the utmost joy in them: the white cat crossing the bridge with a black mouse in her mouth; the red cows chest deep in clover; the corn, taller than my head now tassels waving against the blue, blue sky; the fat four-leaf clover I found when I looked down today at the edge of the field; the apples turning golden and pink and red.

It’s about just going, slowing, being right here with this life. Being.

I’m terrible at it, but I’m learning. I’m learning that it’s okay to never be finished. I am learning that the real blessing is about not being finished.

It’s about having more to do.

Does this make sense at all?

As I gear up for school this week, which feels just as foreign as it would feel to be saying that I am heading for heading to Antarctica or the moon, I have no expectations, only happiness tucked into my pockets, and wonder, and a little trepidation too….and I would like very much to hear what new music you are listening to (so I can make some new mixes for driving) and also what is inspiring you right now.

Mine:

This blog. And this one.
This poem.
This artist.
Some music
A piece of clothing (or a few)

Your turn. : )

August 15::The only way

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

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

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

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

August 14:: Country Fair

Still on the August Break and posting every day over at flickr.

Yesterday we went to a country fair. Fun. Sun + sun, livestock, lemonade, maple cotton candy, ribs, tractor + truck pulls, pig races and rides. Sprout's first carousel ride = total glee. An awesome day, except: my gimpy ankle and the long drive home.

Today I feel nostalgic for summer, even though it's here still. I hate that it's ending. I'm not ready for the yellow leaves that are already on the ground; the cricket songs; the shooting stars. I want the live long light and languor of July a little longer. Although the peaches now are making me smile, and the promise of apples soon. Today the sky is pale, pale. The color of sun on cement; the color of white with shadow. The color of a day slipping by with wind in the trees. I want to nap. There are things I must do: two chapters, an InDesign project, always a to-do list. Two weeks more of summer and then who knows. Everything upended, likely. Everything different. I don't remember how to be in class. Don't know, yet, still, if I will be. So it goes.

How are the last weeks of your summer being spent?

Interlude

Running last night, after a day that felt so very long, I tripped and sprained my ankle. Damn. It was shockingly swollen immediately, but our awesome neighbor who is a doctor said it wasn't a particularly terrible sprain (thank god) and that it will take about 3 weeks to heal.

Hi universe. How are you? Oh, what? You haven't noticed that I have a lot on my plate this month huh? Well I DO. So can you please ease up a wee bit? Thank you very much.

August 10::Tuesday

I am permeable and split wide open like a summer melon overripe with the sweetness and sun and with all the things that are still unresolved.

I am like a diver, on a cliff with a blindfold leaping on promise, daring to dare.

I am girl caught in the morning light, caught by the beauty until I can hardly exhale, wet hair dripping, light slipping golden and honeyed across the floor.

I have just exactly these superpowers: I am a questioner, a seeker, a storyteller, a finder four leaf clovers everywhere; I am brave; I love the ones I love to a fault; and I find my salvation day after day among the pebbles on the path, the spider’s weaving webs, the sun rising and then setting in a sky filled with rain and contrails and wonder.

What are your superpowers?

August 7::Saturday

All about friends. The best of friends. (Miss you Jess.) Long walks to fields dappled with light; clouds above, laughter, the kind of honesty that comes from knowing someone for more than a decade; good wine and pasta with fresh corn, and chard, basil and tomatoes from the garden; the promise of Sunday bacon and a few more hours to watch my kids play with some of my favorite people in the whole world. (Also love that seeing my family through someone elses lens...)

August 5::Thursday

This boy makes me smile all day long. I snapped these right after his nap... when he was all sleepy and mellow still. Love his little bum in the air.

+++

Today was all about long walks and conversations with my best friend... Conversations interrupted by little boys asking for snacks and finding caterpillars and banging on drums. Conversations about purpose, about passion, about direction, about contentment.

About the difference between these three terms:

Self absorbed.

Selfish.

Self confident.

What do you think of when you read these words. What does each mean to you? How do your definitions change when you apply them to your best friend, your lover, your mother, your child?

With grace

Good morning! We are just about to head out on a long bike ride (so happy) but I wanted to post these photos. I am loving the morning light this summer... and playing around with focus. I'm so looking forward to The August Break (there are a lot of projects around here that need some serious attention and it will be lovely to just show up in this space every day with a few photographs.)

In other news, there is still no news. I am learning gradually, slowly, to just settle into the present and let it be. I have begun to see how the mind in limbo becomes a trickster; how worry springs up when there is nothing else for the mind to do. When in a place of uncertainty, it's like the mind wants to be productive, wants to be doing something, and so, for lack of anything better--the untrained mind defaults to worry, to distraction, to imagining all the ways that things might not work out.

I am trying to do this part with grace. Already, some things that felt like they took forever to happen are behind me now with certainty: T is starting his new job next week, for one. I remember how we both obsessed over that situation, how the worry felt like a plum in my throat, swallowed whole. So we'll see. I'm trusting now that the right things will happen; that this is my right life filled with early morning sun, and words to write, and small boys playing harmonicas underfoot. Also: I spent all of yesterday thinking it was Tuesday. Imagine my surprise to discover today is Friday. Has this ever happened to you?

I am 32.5 today; he was 68 eight years ago

I remember the way the turkey vultures circled in the blue, blue sky, and the way the light moved across his room, casting the shadows from the paned windows, the cherry tree, the fence, across the pale wall. I was a different version of myself then. Twenty-four, living with T. in a two-floor rental by a hot pink liquor store in a crappy neighborhood in Connecticut. I was in my second year as a teacher in a charter school where cops would chase guys across the parking lot, guns drawn (drugs) and the Long Island Sound was two blocks from the school. T. and I had just gotten a dog; we’d walk him in the evenings to a graveyard down the street from our house. Everything already felt like it was at stake. I had no idea.

I'd started my first master's program that summer; a master's in Education. I remember exactly where I was sitting when I got the call: on a boulder in a field in New Hampshire. Above me, the full moon hanging low and round, and the air was sweet and heavy with the scent of blackberries and newly turned earth.

I flew home the next day. Home to the place that I still associated with that word. My childhood home: the 6 acres of hilly Northern California land where I'd broken my arm, become a teenager, and yelled fuck you at my father, then ran out the door and down the hard-packed path to the barn, to the hill beyond where I always went in sadness. I was 16 when that happened, and he was strict in an archaic sense of that word: he expected me home by 10pm until I graduated; thought women looked best in dresses; counted on my mother and sisters and me to cook and generally keep the place presentable. I don’t remember the fight, save for the fact that he followed me and said: what if I’d left and those had been the very last words you said? (He was leaving for a trip that afternoon.)

I am painting the wrong kind of picture. He was formidable and peculiar to be sure. He was stubborn, foolish, and sometimes clueless (particularly about teenage girls and their boyfriends.) But he was also wise, funny, astounding, tender, and proud of me.

He admitted this before he died: I have no idea why I was so strict with you three.

Maybe in part because his father was a Lutheran minister; because he was one of nine. His own childhood was marked by obedience and hard work; berry picking to make the family budget, a paper route with a too-big bike before the age of 9. As a result he parented peripherally, often illogically. He didn't have much of a model. I'm not sure if this is a reasonable excuse. Who would I be now, if I had had more freedoms then, less boundaries, more team sports, less time spent doing work to earn free time?

I resented him at 16, certainly, but only with the kind of fleeting resentment that most teenager have for their parents. It didn't last. And even through those rocky years, mostly, I adored him. Adored the way he could fix anything; and also the way we could talk.

He opened up the world to me, with his ideas. He shone the flashlight, and let me take the lead. He asked me questions, then listened, and let me feel my way to my own truth. Up late, we’d sink in deep into conversations about Aristotle, Goethe, Steiner, Da Vinci, Saint John. He encouraged me to take risks too, to climb tall trees; to lie at the edge of cliffs and look far down; to sit on the peak of the roof and watch the sky.

I quit the program: knowing the rest of my summer would be utterly unfathomable, uncharted, disorienting. I wasn’t wrong. I lost my north star, my childhood home, my sense of who I had valued myself most to be: my father’s daughter. I’d spent my teenage years bucking up against his antiquated parameters and steep expectations, sure, yet as a result I’d become someone who felt confident with words and tools because of all the hours, years, spent by his side in dialogue, in partnership, his shadow, his helper. He’d taught me to use a weed cutter and a chain saw; to operate the table saw; use a hatchet, an ax, a maul; to drive in nails with a hammer, straight and true.

I was with him when he died today, eight years ago, on my half birthday. I secretly loved that he died the 26th; a day that we could share. It felt then as it was our final link; a secret handshake; a promise that I meant everything to him the same way he meant everything to me.

Damn.

How I wish it didn't happened that way at all. How I wish that he were alive still; that he could spend time with his first grandson, my Bean, who is so like him. That we could still spend nights up late, talking, or afternoons discussing the universe over Lipton tea and toast with cheese.

I look at Bean and see my father as a child. He has the same startling intellect; the same way with observation, with words, with plans. He understands numbers and machinery as effortlessly as if he came into this world knowing. And just like my dad, he’s exquisitely sensitive. Just the same: he’s smitten with hay fever; he wonders about god; he builds elaborate machines with Legos; he handles a carving knife with more grace and skill than most ten year olds, even though he’s only 5.

I wonder what grandchildren would have done for my father. Softened his edges, maybe? Let him slow down, linger, and enjoy without the intensity he brought to every interaction. Everything was a full-on discussion, an inquiry, a puzzle to be solved. Again, so like my son.

So like me too.

The things we take from our parents; the things we borrow, steal, keep unaware. The habits we hold on to, the ways we think, wonder, see the world. So much of who we are is shaped from what we received, or didn’t, from the people who raised us, who gave us love or failed in this enormous way.

I think of this now as I watch both my boys. My second, so like T. Sunshine, pure sunshine. Laughter always, smiles always. He’s action and play and physical finesse. He’s an athlete already, coordinated, sure footed, in love with games: with playing ball and peekaboo and hide and seek.

I didn’t mean to arrive here, at this wonderment at my sons. I meant to say: it’s my half birthday today. 32.5 and I'm at the brink of possibly going again to school, for the third time (remember, Sprout arrived on the scene unexpecedly the second time I enrolled?)

The past six months have been the best, and the hardest, and the most rewarding. I can only gape, wide-mouthed, at what the next six months will bring; nevermind the next eight years.

Who will I be when who I am now is my former self by nearly a decade? Tell me: who will you be?

Still between here and there

' It has been stormy the past few days: dark skies, fierce winds, rain at the slightest suggestion, then tempestuous blue skies all over again, and this, friends, is where I am at too.

Earlier this week I got news that financial aid for school may be a question and it's such a complex situation, our lives, our finances, the lot of it...and so here I am again, in limbo, opening my heart up wide to the universe.

I want to trust, to believe that all will be as it should; that things will align and fall into place. But oh, must it be this intense, this tenuous, this thinly threaded? Must everything come like the rains, abrupt and last minute, tearing down dead branches, and leaving everything rinsed and and astounded and green? This seems the way now, that things unfold around here.

So. A little more wondering.

More fingers kept crossed.

More breath held.

It's their busy time in the financial aid office, and so I don't get my answers any faster than anyone else gets theirs. Seven to ten days, more or less. Damn.

Will you cross your fingers for me?

Love, C

PS: I hardly have the words, for grinning, at how all your lovely offers for my art made me feel. THANK YOU. I'll be shipping the pieces tomorrow--and enjoying more space in my studio to create new things.