A kind of christening

I know I promised you all kinds of things: Part 2, a list, posts full of details and whimsy, but here I am, in the middle of things and all I want to tell you about is the hour that I spent on the California coastline this weekend. All I want to do is hit pause. All I want to do is linger.

So that I can remember the way the ocean sounded. The way it felt like coming home, and how that feeling hit me so hard it almost took my breath away.

I haven’t seen the Pacific since my father was alive. I haven’t been back there, to that familiar geography of rolling hills and gnarled cypress since he died. And oh, how that feeling pummeld me. The bittersweet of grief and longing, of memory and utter joy.

Standing there on the sandy beach with the cuffs of my jeans rolled up, ankle deep in the cold tide, I found myself inhabiting the memory of my twenty-one year old self.

I didn’t know my father was dying.

I’d just barely met the man I would marry.

I couldn’t imagine the children I’d conceive. These boys that I have now.

I hadn’t even claimed the word writer as my own.

Let alone heard the phrase brand strategy. Blogs didn’t exist. Social media wasn’t even a term. Google had just barely made the scene. People used Hotmail and still picked up the phone.

I was a girl with salt tangled hair, who felt like her heart would just bust open from the sheer wild joy of the waves.

And here I was now: 33, turning 34 in a matter of days. Inhabiting that feeling. Those memories. That ache, that loss, that progress.

It was cleansing, and devastating and wildly, utterly gorgeous. The light. The waves. The sand. The sky.

I picked up a small handful of treasures: a tiny wing-shaped shell, a bit of driftwood, a gull feather. And then I looked and shut my eyes and listened, until who I was and who I am became the same. Christened there, in the sea foam, before I turned to go.

Slowly, softly, the new year arrived here:

I’ve been wanting so very much to show up here and tell you things, but with the new year came a fever—the kind I remember having as a little girl, and all I was able to do was curl under thick down covers and sleep.

It’s not something I make time for readily: resting deeply, and I think my body knows this. I think it staged a mutiny just as soon as my very last project for the semester was finished and I crashed hard: first a chest cold, then a brief respite right over Christmas at to ring in the new year, followed by a fever that when it broke, left me feeling like a knobby kneed colt, my limbs somehow new and unfamiliar as I woke from a day of sleeping. I felt unbearably grateful to find my hands again, my arms, my kneecaps, scapula, ribs. What a glorious blessing to arrive with these fragile lungs still intact to suck in the cold air; with eyes to watch the birds lift and dive from branch to feeder; with fingers to type these words!

And so I woke, sipped tea, and wrote in my notebook 12 things to manifest in 2012 and a word to true towards, my own inner north.

FLOURISH

I’d been thinking of EASE, and VITALITY, and AFFLUENCE, and about the way those words called to mind a certain blooming of soul and career and creative work that I want to dream real this year, and then flourish found me, somewhere between dreaming and awake, while the puppy was on the bed, and the boys too, and it felt so right and true that I laughed.

Flourish (v.) 1. to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way; thrive 2. to develop rapidly and successfully; to achieve success; prosper 3. to be in a state of activity or production 4. to reach a height of development or influence.

For 2010 I chose action; for 2011, fruition, and each word speaks more truth about its year than I could have ever imagined.

Big things came to fruition in 2011. I wrote my first book, completed my fourth semester of graduate school, got a dog, made incredible + soulful creative connections, watched my six year old become a first grader and my two year old become a talking, singing, dancing boy.

And now to flourish in this new life I’ve dreamed possible: doing work that I love as a writer, an artist, and as a social media strategist.

I haven’t shared as much here as I intended about my journey through graduate school, or about my growing love for social media strategy, and the way this field combines storytelling and conversation. It’s been so intense and full velocity and transformative in ways I’m only now able to put my finger on. It has reshaped my view, reframed my capacities, and honed my passions. It’s been pretty cool, really, and I’d like to share more here about that process this winter and spring as I finish up my thesis, and about the process of being a mother while also doing these things.

This is something I’m becoming increasingly aware of, how this truth, more than any other thing, is my trumpeters call, my purpose, my passion. To tell you this: you can do what you want.

Choosing is a myth. Being only one thing or only another isn’t a requirement. And manifesting what you long for has everything to do with finding your true velocity: your right tempo at the borderline between self and world; between mamahood and career; between soul and body.

I don’t always get the tempo right; and there are many days when I’m reminded once again that I’ll always be a novice at my life: new to the curveballs, the passions, the possibilities that come my way. But I’m joyfully committed to the process nonetheless. And that, my friends, is my way of way of telling you: I have big plans for 2012. New offerings, new directions and new adventures. And I can't wait to share them!

xo, Christina Rosalie

On holiday expectations, collisions, and delight:

There is something about first days of the holiday vacation when we're all together as a family, converging on the kitchen with our apron pocket hearts stuffed full with expectations. We show up aproned and get flour everywhere, and then burst into tears, each of us in turn, when there is too much crowding and impatience, too many elbows around the mixer or fingers in the icing. "Mine!" the boys chorus back and forth like harpies.

It's this bittersweet thing, the way we all show up needing. Wanting. Wishing. We put carols on the stereo, and dance to Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, and then we end up arguing about something insignificant, a phrase said slantwise or some careless remark, and each of us far more crushed than necessary by the other's harsh tone.

So few days. Full velocity. From one frame of mind to the next we go: from work to full-on family, rolling out sugar cookie dough while tying up loose ends: the last of deadlines, proposals, promises, details. We check our iPhones, catch each other doing so, and sigh, while dreamy snowflakes fall outside. Just enough snow to make the world magic. White on blue, and in the distance cirrus devour mountain tops. The dog licks our bare toes, the fire makes the house toasty, and still we collide. We kiss, we rub noses, we snap, we argue, we laugh. It is all inevitable: this mess, this frantic loving, this silliness of converging in the time allotted before the holiday. Everyone excited, hopeful: imagining perfect days that unfold like the lyrics of the nostalgic carols we play. And though days never do, still we find delight the minute we let go; the minute we remember to just lean into the chaos.

This is just a little reminder to you today: be gentle with yourselves as you converge with family and try to find the rhythm of your mutual expectations. Rest into the mess of it, into the moments just as they unfold. Know that there is no perfect, save for exactly the way the day unfolds with you in it. Be content in the way things will inevitably unravel. Find ways to shake off the expectations and hold instead to the moments of delight that emerge unexpectedly. The easy sparks of joy that come from the simplest things: warm sun, touch, coffee, quiet.

Wishing you each peace + light + delight this holiday. xo! Christina

Starting the day:

My dreams are the kind that make no sense upon telling: dancing porcupines, crazy riots, precocious children, and a pervasive feeling that I was never entirely in control. It’s a little how I feel when I wake too, the wind blowing until it rocks the bird feeders off kilter, the air so warm it could be a Chinook save for the fact that it’s now, a week before Christmas. Where is the snow?

I slept in (7a.m.) and missed breakfast with the kids and T, and now the house is in that helter-skelter tummult of everyone rushing to get out the door. I move through the motions of making Bean's lunch like a heavy-handed robot. My fingers are made of clay. Sprout refuses to put on pants. I put cream cheese and jelly on an English muffin. Bean keeps walking from one end of the house to the other trying to locate his hat and gloves and jacket, each separately although he’s left them all in nearly the same place. The floor is mud stained.

In the small ravine where a winter stream runs beyond the meadow where our kitchen garden gets planted, the wind sounds like a freight train. Chickadees fly sideways; smoke comes back down the chimney. Where did all this wind come from anyway?

I have today to finish preparing presentation, to tie up the loose ends on several other signficant projects all due tomorrow. I’m making coffee. Pulling on rain boots for a walk with Clover. Ducking my head into the wind.

Ready, set, go!

How to fall in love with your life: the wisdom of little boys

Bean is watching my every subtle move. We are in the middle of a game of “alligator” and Sprout, perched on the couch cushions above us launches himself suddenly through the air, chubby thighs bare, and lands between his brother and me, straddling my chest, laughter erupting.

Alligator is a game that Bean invented. It requires certain might and restraint and all the physicality that little boys crave. The rules are simple: I catch him and wrap in my arms and legs, my fierce alligator jaws devouring his lithe little body, and then I hold him tight regardless of any plea, or request, or peel of giggles as he tries to wriggle free.

Sometimes I follow the rules. I am a fierce and steadfast gator, remaining unswayed until just exactly the right moment when the wiry-mulled little boy I’ve trapped is clever enough to outwit me, or strong enough to slip between clenched biceps. Other times I add a twist: I pretend to be asleep and snore, and he slips out easily, much to his delight and my pretend chagrin. And then there are the times, when it takes everything I have not do not to devour him whole: soft cheeks and sandy hair that smells like honey and milk.

Today he’s already made his first escape, and has immediately clambered on top of my ribcage for more. His weight familiar. I’ve always carried him; always held the heft of him close; always been the cradle for his small knees and elbows and belly. And thisI think, is part of what I do that makes it possible to sustain this full velocity life. Of doing the work of my heart in all the ways that I must: writer and mama, strategist and artist, graduate student and runner, all in unequal measures as the day demands. No matter what the day holds, it will always finds us like this, limbs colliding in this certain and unequivocal choreography of love.

I watch him watch me, imagining what he must think of me. My own childhood was far less physical. There was no puppy piling, no running through the house, no yelling. I remember often being told to be quite, to find the boundaries of my ebullient self and rein them in. I praised for my intellect, never for my ability to make people laugh; and other than sitting on my father’s lap to listen to a book read aloud, or hugging my parent’s goodnight, or holding hands when walking along a busy street, love was never spelled limb against limb, twirling in giddiness, kissing like blowfish, or howling like the pack of wild hyaenas always on the loose and restless in my soul.

Which is why his answer delights me deeply when I ask:

“If you were to describe me to someone who has never met me, what would you tell them?”

He tilts his head to the side and looks at my face.

And then he says, “That you’re strong…. that you’re funny*….and that you stay up late.”

Then he adds, “And that you wrestle with me.” As if this is the most important thing of all.

It’s such a gift to catch the tiniest of glimpses into how he sees me. It’s a gift, always, when you can get a glimpse of how anyone sees you. It broadens your view of yourself; increases your imagination of what you think is possible, and makes you lean into your potential differently. Give yourself this gift today: go ask someone how they would describe you to a stranger. Bask in their reply.

xoxo! Me.

*FUNNY made the list! Funny. You have no idea how over the moon that makes me.

7 things I'm doing to rest + recalibrate this weekend:

1. Slipping offline for the weekend

2. Layering pretty dresses + winter cords, painting my finger nails, and putting henna in my hair

3. Taking walks alone to stalk the Piliated woodpecker in the far meadow, and follow coyote tracks

4. Emptying my inbox entirely

5. Clearing the number of feeds in my RSS reader

6. Reading Mary Oliver's Evidence. Again.

7. Getting a dog.

Sometimes things just fall apart

I don’t intend to fall apart. I don’t intend to be standing by the sink, putting dirty plates into the dish washer one minute, and then falling to shambles the next, but this is what I do.

We’ve just watched the King’s Speech. Movies in general have a way of getting under my skin; I soak them up in the same way I soak up the emotions of strangers in a car on the subway; or at a bar, or a party where I know only a half dozen acquaintances by name. And so I’m scraping sauce off a plate and within seconds I’ve dug myself into a hole with T. I’ve made some flippant chiding comment I can’t defend or match with reason, and he’s putting silver into the drawer with unnecessary vigor, his voice raised.

I try to say stop, let’s not go here; hormones are making unsteady tonight, but it’s no use. He doesn’t hear me, not yet, not in the way I need him to. Things escalate. Whatever the words are that pass between us make me suddenly crumble. I run to the door. Drive away, sock footed.

The road is quiet. The air smells like snow.

I am the only one leaving, the only one with headlights making circles in the night. At the edge of the road there are deer. With the cold they come closer now to human dwellings; finding the last sweet fallen apples; the scraggly lawns still nearly green; the last frail petals of climbing roses, petals faded like pink paper tickets from the county fair.

I leave knowing that if I stayed whatever I’d say would wild and unsteady. I leave because I know that what I need is just to lean into the feeling: of sobbing, of yelling things out loud into to the dark, until the things I yell are the things that maybe feel true. I leave so that I don’t actually have to leave, though I can imagine every detail of the way I might: just a small bag, my laptop, wallet, jacket, passport, boots. I’d go somewhere cold and far away, with wheat fields and Tim Hortons and I’d get a room in a roadside motel and sob until I couldn’t, and then I’d sleep and wake and try to be in the realness of what it feels like to be anonymous.

I leave because hormones are making a short circuit between heart and mind now; I leave because this is what my body does without thought: fight or flight.

There are potholes in the road and I hit them harder than I should, and above is barely any moon, the shyest of slivers.

I drive down to the end of our dirt road and then I back into someone’s drive, do a K turn and retrace my way until the bridge, where I park at the waterfall, and listen to it thunder, under a sky full of gathering snow clouds. I turn the engine off and feel the cold start in at my extremities.

And then I cry I know that the only thing I want is to return, though even then, even when I do, I say the opposite of what I mean:

“I just want to be alone.”

Why do I say that?

I walk to the boy’s rooms and find each of them uncovered, arms flung about like rag dolls. I rest my head on Bean’s mattress and feel the way the thought of him fills me up with sunlight. I inhale Sprout’s sweet sleeping breath. I tiptoe out. And then I pace back and forth in my studio until T comes to my door, sits with me, lets me sob, says only enough, finds the tense muscles between my shoulder blades and begins to work on them with a steady, warm hand.

The whole thing catches me by storm: The way I fall apart, as though my bones and heart and ambition and love and determination were all bricks and mortar in a dam so fragile that the dislodging of a single stone might cause the whole thing to slip and tumble under a sudden hormonal torrent.

It’s humbling and devastating and incredibly powerful to find the outer limit of my capacity.

And I’m sharing this here because sometimes people email me and say, “How do you do it?” Meaning the ALL of it part. And the answer is that I don’t always; the answer is that I’m still getting the hang of it. The answer is that there is a vital choreography here that I will always be learning: a dance between generative and productive; between producing and reflecting; between doing and taking enough damn space to remember how to just be silly and pretty and playful.

I tend toward overachieving; toward flat-out sprinting; towards burning the candle at both ends. I tend towards this because I love to be consumed, engaged, invested, at work. I love to work. I love to create. That’s the simple truth. But I am not nearly so graceful in the learning to reel myself in bit. The taking things easy part.

The part where I just take the day off to paint my nails aubergine and tickle my boys and trawl petfinder.com for the dog that my heart keeps whispering for.

That’s the real of it. The ALL of it. I’m good at going full tilt. Less good at coming to a full stop.

Productivity and self reflection: a vital ratio for happiness

It occurred to me last night that I have no fewer than NINE very significant projects that I'm working on right now (not including my boys, or laundry, or a strangely irrational obsession with finding a family dog.) It also occurred to me last night that I've been feeling a little like a windmill, diving into things in an unfocused blur of reaction. To-do lists are converging, deadlines are colliding, and incredible connections and potential projects are practically bursting out of me... and I haven't created the space to reflect. I could say I'm overwhelmed, but the truth is, I havent been making enough space for synthesis and consideration.

It's a ratio that is vital to being successfully creative and fulfilled for me. Action and self reflection need to happen in tandem in order to be able to slip into the grove between intuition and purpose; between effort and ease.

And if that ratio is off I can feel the way my intentions become blurred and and my actions reactive.

So this morning I began the ritual that always reclaims me: Writing first thing for a half hour. My handwriting is a mess then, as I sit up among pillows in the lavender dark of my bedroom at dawn. My sentences unreasonably long, my focus fickle. But what I get from writing then, is the ability to slip in at the back door of my mind and listen for what I'm feeling, for the way my heart responds to certain ideas, questions, fears, projects.

That half hour with the cat at my hip purring, while the mountains become blue and dense with daylight, is is a way of closing the loop on worry; tying up the loose ends of fears; and finding the pulse of my intention.

* * *

What rituals do you rely on to bring you back into balance?

The morning begins like this:

The morning begins when I am less awake than dreaming, and with shut eyes I shift my body, truing towards the warmth of my husband beside me; pressing my nose against the warmth of his bare shoulder. I pat the edge of the bed when I hear my littlest come in, carrying his bear, a pacifier in his mouth. He climbs up and burrows in next to me like a puppy, finding the curve between my neck and shoulder where little head fits just exactly so. Then we all doze, until his brother starts to call from their room down the hall; ever the bright eyed one in the morning, Bean wakes up curious, eager, effervescent, loud. Sprout props himself up on an arm, then sits off, shoving the warm covers back. “I’m coming,” he calls, then trundles off. The morning begins like this: I am between sleep and waking, sitting at the edge of a mossy dock. Below me the water is warm, and when I slip into it I discover amethysts sparkling below the surface. Then I am here, with the cat purring at my hip, and I roll over so that I can run my hand along her apricot fur, her purr vibrating up through my finger tips, into my palm, my pulse. In the kitchen below me, the boys sound like herd animals. They make the wood floor thunder. They shriek and laugh and yell. The house smells like woodsmoke and bacon (two of my favorite things) and soon I push back the covers and stumble toward the shower, my vision blurring suddenly to stars. Head rush. I hold the door frame and pause.

The morning begins with all four of us around the butcher block island in the kitchen on stools. There are white bowls of oatmeal with butter and maple syrup, seedy toasted baguettes with butter and raspberry preserves, fried eggs, bacon, flat whites. There are greasy little boy fingers. There is a scuffle over the last slice of bacon. Both boys ask for milk, then water. T and I look at each other over the table and smile.

The morning begins with this: I am sitting beside the wood stove, this mix is playing and the sun is out. It makes shadows fall in bright contrast across the un-vacuumed floor. I sit with my new notebook (I’ve filled the last one up) and a pencil with soft lead, and find my pulse. I watch wild turkeys run across the far meadow, and settle into the steadiness of my hand moving across the page, scrawling careless, messy script. “What chu doin mama?” Sprout asks within minutes, his face right at table height, his cheeks rosy, his bangs in his eyes.

The morning begins like this.

Inspiration for daily art: lines + marks

1. Mine. 2. Collage Tipograficamente, 3. Collage and acrylic, 4. collage-067, 5. Collage 6x6 # 6, 6. collage-064, 7. Watercolor Collage

Hello! I wanted to share a few pieces that have been inspiring me as I continue with Daily Art, trying to make pieces that are simple; that play with positive and negative space; with online lines + marks or color. I am exploring what it means to make something quickly. To just do make something--following following through with the act of putting something on the page because this is what I committed to do. I am trying to slip into a grove of doing this as a creative habit, without worrying about meaning or intent or composition, as a way to exhale a little.

“Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this? By the time I give the taxi driver directions, it’s too late to wonder why I’m going to the gym and not snoozing under the warm covers of my bed….

It’s a simple act but doing it the same way each morning habitualizes it–makes it repeatable, easy to do. It reduces the chance that I would skip it or do it differently. it is one more item in my arsenal of routines, and one less thing to think about…” ~ Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

If you're feeling brave, join us! Just a few simple marks on a page; a photo; a squiggled line; a bit of fabric sewn. This is a way to pay homage to your creative heart.

xoxo, Christina

The things I carry:

Today I carry the feeling that I’ve slipped right back to the cusp of more things not being known than things that are for certain. I am carrying the way the light looks over the pacific ocean in the morning at Bodega Head, and a homesick feeling for my fathers hands; for the way they were always warm and skilled with tools, knobby knuckled like mine, mottled with vitiligo.

I carry a secret awful wonder at what my DNA might hold for me, and a list of appointments including one at the dermatologist’s to investigate a small hard lump on my thigh that arrived without my notice sometime in the summer, and then persisted. My regular doctor shrugged. More than likely benign. Still, a referral was made, and then one appointment after another, cancelled to make room for other more urgent things.

I carry my wedding band of soft hammered gold; a hair band around my wrist, snarled with a few tangled strands of hair yanked free from a ponytail with impatience; and the memory of my tenth birthday.

I carry my father’s SANFORD LOGO II mechanical pencil; my soft-covered Moleskine reporter’s notebook; and an ache for what I know I will forget of the way Sprout is right now, small like this, speaking with a little lisp, repeating everything, begging for a convertible blue vintage VW like the one our neighbor drives. His hair is sandy gold in the sun. Potty training is a comedy of errors and stubbornness. He gives the sweetest kisses, one arm circling my neck. How will I hold all of this in the permeable container of time?

Today I carry the sight of geese cutting across the pale morning sky, one after the next; the first inklings of a second book; ideas for classes I’m planning. I carry the way comparisons always make me feel terribly small; the fact that my jeans are tighter than they were when the summer; and the muscle memory of running hard (today, 3 miles.)

Today I carry the memory of quiet; my cup of coffee; the rooster crowing; my laptop; kindling; honey crisp apples; and questions, always questions.

What do you carry?

How summer passed while I was becoming the work

I didn’t realize I’d missed it until I was standing at the window by the wood stove looking out over the hills that have shrugged off nearly all the amber and vermillion leaves of autumn, revealing the skeleton crowns of sugar maples and birches and alders, that I’d missed summer.

The tall wild grass in the fields bends over now, like praying nuns, each rustling frond keeping the secret prayer of burrowing beetles, ants, wasps. The fields have begun to turn brown. Wood smoke hangs in the air. The corn, late to ripen, has finally been cut.

And all the while that it was lush and green, I was indoors, with terrible posture and paint on my jeans, or in class, or traveling to and fro with one or the other boy in the car. Going, doing, going.

I didn’t realize how fast it the season was passing: The greening, the long days, the light, until now, with pumpkins on our window sill waiting for carving, I realize, it’s dark by five; and when we leave for school at 7:30, the sun is just barely climbing above the familiar cleft of the mountains in the East.

So. This is how a summer passes. This is how days pass, one after the next, with effort, with hunched shoulders, with focus, with forgetting. This is what it means to do the work of making; to create until you forget the locus of the present, and orbits inward, inward, toward the source.

There must have been evenings when I lingered with blush wine in a Ball jar in a lawn chair out the back door, but I cannot remember them. I only remember the way the mess in my studio rose and ebbed, drafts spread everywhere, or paint and snippets, and spilled sumi ink.

I look back and realize I had no idea what I was doing. I look forward and realize the same.

This is the realness of creating.

You can’t know the outcome.

There is no guarantee of anything. There is only the act of doing the work, becoming the work.

What I know now is that there are a hundred things I will do better next time (and this will be true for every book I’ll ever make, I’m certain.) I’ll have more clarity of scope, for one. I’ll ask for feedback sooner, instead of holding my drafts and art to my chest like some sort of secret too precious for the world to know.

But whatever way, the one thing that won’t change, that cannot change, is the way that close to the quick, nearing the end, the work consumed me. There is no other way.

And so summer slipped by, a lost season of fluttering grass and weeds that devoured the garden. We had a tomato blight. I barely noticed as the red fruit suddenly rotted on the vine. I accidentally planted some sort of gorgeous cousin to the sunflower: rambling, enormous, with fiery orange flowers that took over an entire bed and bloomed and bloomed. Even now, this late in the month, there are still some blooms left, and when I go to cut them in the early evening, I find bees dormant for the night on every single one. I stare at them and I stare at the flowers and I wonder where both came from. I stand with my sharp knife, and wonder briefly if the bees are dead.

lean in, and blow hot breath on their tiny, perfect bodies and watch as the warmth spreads threw them, and slowly they move antennae, abdomen, wings. They can only be here, in the midst of what they are doing: gathering the season’s last pollen, the promise of honey, and as the sun sets they grow torpid, in the midst of things. This is how it goes. Each day happening so fast, yet while I was in it, each day lasting forever into the hours of artificial light and pre-dawn blue. An eternity of repeated effort.

++

Not many of you answered my question in this post about doing the work that you love every day, but it’s a big question that I’m digging into in my own life and would like to explore here with you.

What happens between projects, when you feel your creativity ebbing, or your life becomes so full of other things (babies, work, whatever.) How do you make room then, for creativity? I’ve been working on a little project each day this week, exploring just that question that I’ll share tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts...

On motherhood and messes, creative process and apple pie:

Today there is rain and the final splendor of leaves the color of the summer sun, sumacs flutter with fronds of flame, the poplars are already bare. There is wood for stacking, bulbs to be put into the damp, still-soft ground, and the last of autumn's apples for picking: small and hard, with thick skins and the sweetest nearly wild fruit, perfect for pies and apple butter.

Yesterday I made a pie with the boys: each one of them armed with a pairing knife; cutting the slices with gusto and irregularity. There simply wasn’t anything else to do, even though, like every other day, there always is.

Rain was falling and I took one look at the way they were spinning around the kitchen, after having arrived home from their various destinations and I could tell: things would meltdown all too soon if I kept on writing, hunching over my laptop at the counter like some long-legged bird. And so, apple pie.

So we set to work: the boys cutting up apples while I stirred the sugar and butter and spices in a pan. I’m always a little surprised and terribly pleased by how earnest they are in the kitchen! How they just want to be helpful, and how, given real tools and real responsibility, they both are. They formed a team almost immediately, Bean cutting the apples into manageable wedges, and then Sprout following through, chopping each into as many small pieces as he could, and tasting nearly every one.

I let them lick out the bowl of course. And later, when the pie was ready after dinner, we ate it warm, in bowls with a little heavy cream the way my father always used to.

This is part of it: each night as I gather Sprout year old to my chest in the dark, as we sit in the rocking chair in the room he shares with his brother, as I gather his small solid body close and press my nose into his sweet hair, he says, “I want Nonna.”

The first time he said this, I felt my heart hit my ribs, heat spreading across my cheeks with the anguish of this small betrayal.

But what I have begun to understand in the process of making this work, this book, this life, is how to inhale the ache and intensity of these moments, bitter-sweet, and then to release it on the exhale, and say yes to all of it.

To realize: yes, he loves his Nonna. How lucky are we all that this is the arrangement. That he has this tribe of love, and I do. That this work I am doing is possible.

And so I kiss his warm forehead and say, “You’ll see her again tomorrow, my love," and he burrows into my chest and hums along as I sing "Speed Bonny Boat" in the dark.

I’m telling you this because all of this is part of the process. This is the real, messy, frustrating, bittersweet stuff of being a mother and a pioneer/artist/writer/creator. And it is also absolutely the only way I would want things to be. This duality. This love. This creative life.

There are days I don’t see my boys until 4 in the afternoon or sometimes 5, and there are days that even when I’m here, I’m preoccupied with the work I’m in the midst of, and I sit in the middle of the stirring living room, in the middle of the ruckus, writing while they build marble towers or ride their plasma cars around like hellions. And there are days like yesterday, when the pieces all come together: apple pie, thesis abstracts, client deliverables, tickles, brown sugar and cinnamon licked off of fingers. And for the hundred-thousandth time I think to myself, Whatever way, this life is the only life I want.

Tell me, how many of you navigate this tenuous line? What is it like for you?

On Making A Book (Part 3): Where words + images converge

Once the words were done, I threw myself into the unfamiliar, beautiful, terrifying territory of illustrating. I was wholly, utterly, entirely consumed. I spilled india ink twice. I wore the same jeans for a week, paint accumulating across my thighs. I skipped class. I considered only this: How the images I was creating might tell a little more of the story. How they might be a hook, a glimpse, some kind of emotional spark of evidence that might help you find your way into the moments I was describing and also into your own. I imagined making every postcard just for you: 22 notes from me to you about ways to be right here, to fall in love with this life, to hold on, to keep on, to become, be present, persist.

It was harder than I thought: To say just exactly what I meant to say with images. To get the right lines, the right metaphors, colors, shapes, words, gestures down on the 4x6 canvas of a repurposed postcard. Words are so much more precise and unambiguous. Illustrating is like writing poetry: It's all about gesture and suggestion, nuance and hue.

Each time I finished a piece I would instantly fall in love with it or hate it... then lapse into a state of doubt, hanging it on the wires spanning the wall above my desk for a couple hours while I worked on other things and eyed it warily. Sometimes I'd look at it with new eyes and certainty; other times I'd scrap it and start again.

It was so incredible and scary and amazing to start, and start again. To make some terrible pieces. To make some pieces that made me proud. To become fixated on a piece and have it throw off everything: Becoming too precious, so that all the other pieces following it would feel derivative or contrived. To question everything. To commit to something. To find the right lines, the right color of a moment captured.

I discovered I was capable of more than I imagined. This is always the case, I think.

You are always more capable than you imagine. It's buckling down and pushing through and doing, doing, doing the work you say you want to be doing that is So. Effing. Hard. But oh, so rewarding.

I discovered how much farther I could push, under the creative constraints of a deadline and the requirement of producing a cohesive body of work. There is something to this--the creative constraints part that I want to explore more here. I'm also going to be devoting some upcoming posts to exploring the relationship between word + image. It's a powerful one, and one I would love to explore in conversation with you.

If you haven't read the comments from yesterday's post, you should. Such amazing leaps of courage + faith + joy.

Today I want to ask you: When have you pushed yourself past a point you believed yourself capable of?

Making a book (Part 2): Finishing and starting

I want to tell you about finishing at 3a.m., when every last image was uploaded, processed, and correctly named, and every combed over.

The house so quiet that it seemed to hum. Coyotes called when the moon came up, and later owls. A pair of screech owls in particular held a caucus: One shrieking to the other from the branches of dark trees—some kind of ruckus promise people don’t usually hear.

Each night for a week I watched the sky go from black to indigo in the pre-dawn hours, slept less than a handful of hours, and then woke to continue again, because the night hours are the only uninterrupted hours around here (when the only sounds are of dreams, and wind pulling around the house, and wild animals doing what they do.) Then, on a Wednesday night, finally, I was finished.

I went to bed quietly, folding into the pocket of warmth beside T like a small origami bird, with no one awake to witness those first moments just after I hit "send." And in the morning I woke to coffee and fried eggs and little boy yelling and the fact that I was at the beginning of something utterly new.

A new voice. A new angle + slant. A book for your hands to hold next fall.

There are so many things I want to tell you about the messy, beautiful, exhilarating process--and about what's next: The ideas and dreams and plans to come. On Monday: A post about creative constraints and the process of illustrating the book...

But for now, simply this: I couldn’t have survived without Coffee. Or chocolate (in terribly copious amounts.) Or hot showers. Or my small legion of superheroes: T, my in-laws and two friends in particular who, on their respective coasts, nudged and encouraged and pushed me to be my biggest, bravest, truest self.

And YOU.

You, the wanderers and wonderers who come here with bright words and big hearts. I'm so grateful, always for you and your comments. Tell me: When was a time you took an enormous leap? What did it feel like? What happened next?

On making the book (Part 1)

I’m not sure where to begin: at the beginning, or at the ending, or right here, this morning, when I woke to the moon just slipping between the branches of the trees along the edge of the field, and Venus, a little higher up like a diamond against the pale lapis blue of the dawn sky. This is what I know now: that after a week where I stayed up so late I saw the brightening blue that comes before the dawn each day: the way the sky changes from dark to bright, the way the world begins to swell then with the sounds of birds, the way the trees shake off their silhouettes and begin to rustle and flutter with all the dimension of bark and branch and turning leaf.

The hills now are flame the way they turn each fall, and I stare at them in wonder, in awe that somehow together we’ve arrived here: Me and the hills, in fall. That the summer passed I have only this evidence: The garden entirely overgrown with weeds this year. The bright red peppers glowing like sparks among the two-foot high tangle of radishes grown to seed; the Mexican sunflowers offering a hundred yellow centers to the bees: bumble and honey and ground bees all coming and going with an urgency now, storing the last pollen they can find to turn to honey to stave off winter’s length and bite.

That summer came and went, I have only this: a six and a half year old with two missing teeth, and a two and a half year old who talks in full sentences and is afraid of owls and hot air balloons and loves to bring me pretend cups of coffee. “Are you writing again Mama?” he asks. “You want some more coffee?”

That summer came and went, I have only this: a six and a half year old with two missing teeth, and a two and a half year old who talks in full sentences and is afraid of owls and hot air balloons and loves to bring me pretend cups of coffee. “Are you writing again Mama?” he asks. “You want some more coffee?”

The monarchs have left the fields; and when we drive, we pass fields where the vines have dried to brown in the first hard frosts of the season, and the pumpkins lie exposed and orange like so many dots in a Serat painting. The hills are turning to flame. At night owls call, and coyotes wake us. In the morning the grass is drenched with dew or frost.

And I am here, at the beginning, at the end, right here in the heart of a vibrant autumn, and I finished the book.

I made a book. (And Yes. I totally got goosebumps writing that.)

I created an entire body mixed media work, turning my studio a storm of snippets and spilled India ink and gel medium and postcards and so many empty coffee cups. I spent the past three weeks working intensely

I want to write more about that process this week—because it was a glorious, immense undertaking that brought manifold lessons about what is possible, about creative constraints, about accepting help, and about urgency and drive and passion.

It split me open, gave me courage, terrified me, and made me absolutely certain of this one thing: This work is exactly what I am meant to be doing.

More tomorrow...Really, truly, excited about being back here.

{I am still here}

...Finishing this book.

Breathing.

Getting paint everywhere.

Discovering + remembering what it means to be an artist like this: Courage. Revisions. Messes. Risk. It is time consuming. All consuming. It is terrifying. It is transformative. It is glorious. It is exhausting.

(Hoping to be finished Monday.)

What I really need now is good music to paint to. What have you been listening to that you love? Please share!

What is real right now

I'm so quiet here, because everything is brimming now. The book, almost done. The illustrations too, are getting close. But also, a dozen other things, everything converging into this brief month: other deadlines, contests, and the new routine of school. It would be a lie to say that things feel easy.

Things, in fact, feel terribly fragile. My bedroom is a mess of unfolded clothes. There are cobwebs in the hallway. The garden has run wild. Bean lost a tooth. Sprout is a wild child, full of laughter and stubbornness, and hot headed Italian blood. The chicken coop needs cleaning. There are holes in my jeans. And still, still, I wouldn't change a thing.

Except to get more sleep.

I am in labor

It feels like I am in labor, to be this close with the manuscript.

So close. But still, not there. Not where it needs to be. The final chapters dogging me, not quite right, not quite what they need to be yet. It's like some part of my mind is sabotaging me into this stasis: Like if I never finish, I won't have just risked everything, given everything I have.

Today the air is still heavy with humidity even after dark, and I keep circling, circling, trying to find another angle, another entry point to the words, to what I am trying to say, to what remains to be said.

The hardest part is that the whole thing is so many words. I get lost. I have to print the whole thing out and spread it about in fluttering sheaves across the floor. My studio is strewn, in shambles, with drafts. Some cut apart, taped together in new directions. It's like conducting an orchestra, this final compiling: Making each chapter vibrate in tempo with the next.

I'm experiencing some serious mental kickback. Exhaustion. Frustration. I second guess. I doubt myself. I read, re-read. Give up. Feel euphoric. Feel terrified. I'm at the same point just before transition in labor, where during the birth of both boys I yelled, "I can't do it. I can't."

That kind of close.

Today this was my distraction: Looking for awe in simple things. In the color green. In the gulls on the wind swept air. Now, back at the page.

When doing the work you love gets hard, what gets you through?

HELLO, I MISSED YOU! I'm back from my offline adventures. Some highlights:

Hello friends!

Thank you for holding this space for me. Your comments when I came back on line a few days ago made my heart smile so very wide.

It was spectacular to take time off from the online world. To write, and write, and write. To notice things at a different pace. To fall in love again with dictionaries, with the sound of quiet, with paint on my fingers and my jeans. To feel fully focused, fully here, with only this intention: To write well and daily. To pull chapters together into a symphony of moments. To make sketches of illustrations still to come.

Now I'm back online, back to school on Tuesday, back to the pell mell pace of things. This September is crazy busy. I'll be contributing to a blog I love next week; finishing a piece for the fall/winter issue of Kinfolk (swoon!); finishing the illos for the book; prepping for a panel discussion on digital storytelling at the Burlington Literary Festival... and sort of holding my breath until it's all over....

In October I'm planning some lovely (and really big) changes around here, and finally, finally the rewards for my dear enduring Kickstarter backers who have waited more than a year now for me to send these goodies out... And the interview series here that I've been wanting to launch for so long. Super goodness. So excited.

Between now and then, I have so many photos to share from the past two weeks, and so many small stories: About tooth fairies, and rainstorms, gallery openings, quick summer meals and the process of making illustrations for the book...

Now it's your turn... Tell me: The 5 very best things that happened in the past two weeks. Go!