There is no blueprint for being everything

I don’t realize how fast I’ve been twirling until I settle down with Sprout in his blue room for a nap. I don’t realize how far away I’ve been, until I am here, next to him, with his hand on my clavicle, and his damp hair pressed against my cheek.

I’m home so rarely now, it might be the truth to say that I hardly remember how it feels.

Like this.

Like the sound of his heartbeat and the oscillating fan moving air around his room. Like my body folding into the softness of his small twin bed. Like his hand tracing the lines of my jaw bone, eyebrows, nose.

I watch as the fan stirs the mobile of moon and stars I made when I was expecting him, and feel the way who I am becoming, and who I was then are poles apart. Now, I am made of twirling parts. A dervish, with a prayer of days. A hundred lists, the velocity of now hitting me with full force.

* * *

I keep looking for a blueprint for how to do this well: Being both. Being everything. Mama, writer, artist, strategist, creative, partner, lover.

The moments overlap, unfold, tilt. I write a list of of women I admire on a scrap of paper:

Georgia O’Keefe, Anais Nin, Adrienne Rich, Patti Smith, Isabelle Illende, Elizabeth Gilbert, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Alice Munro, Joan Didion, Barbara Kingsolver, Twyla Tharp, Meryl Streep, Rebecca Makkai, Pam Houston, Anne Lamott, Danielle Laporte, Sabrina Ward Harrison, Brene Brown.

Then I realize less than half have children. The half that do rarely talk of it; of how their lives navigate worlds, and how they must feel a certain push-pull and heartache that comes the tug-of-war between self and children, self and world, self and lover/partner/spouse.

* * *

Is there a blueprint for this life?

Is it possible to be great, to be a Creative in the broadest sense, to live deeply into the world, and still create the measured tempo of home, the rhythm of domesticity, the moments of daily bread and wonder? Some days I think so. Other’s not. I fluctuate, and now is the season when I feel most restless, like the raccoons who wend their way through the summer heat and shoulder-high corn, looking for fat kernels of sweetness.

It’s fluctuation then,that remains my constant.

And this much is all I know: Everything, even this restlessness, and also the quiet stirring air in my son’s blue room, and his childhood too, is temporary.

* * *

Still, I want very much to know: who are women you admire who navigate the tenuous line between motherhood and creativity with grace and verve?

Taking Inventory At The Half-Way Mark:

It was my half birthday on Thursday--and also the 10 year anniversary of my father's death. I like how those two things collide, combine, overlap. I like that each year it marks a midway point for my own year passing. It reminds me to lean into the hours, the days, the weeks that are yet mine. This year, perhaps more than ever I've made it my purpose to say yes. To approach every encounter, chance meeting, and circumstance as an opportunity: to grow, to become, to expand. The universe isn’t binary. Yes and no aren’t mutually exclusive. Our feet know--arrival and departure our temporary states, and we're always in between. Sole to soil, soul to air.

Right now I’m at the ACE in NYC. I’ve slipped off the cusp of my life and arrived at the center of myself. Maybe that sentence doesn’t make sense at all, but it’s the truth. I needed to slip away, to feel the city’s pulse in order to feel my own again.

Sometimes, when you are in the thick of your life, doing the day, one thing to the next, the map of your own meaning becomes obscured. Then it’s time let things fall out of kilter; tip the balance; rock the boat. Then it’s time to find new map, or to make one boldly, even if it means that no one else has arrived yet, on that same course.

Being somewhere new helps me to disentangle from the constructs of my life: mother, strategist, writer, lover, spouse. Showing up for oneself without any of those words is daunting, but gowth is only equal to our willingness to risk, to show up, to be split wide open by our lives again and again.

I think Didion has it right:

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

― Joan Didion, in a 1975 commencement address at the University of California, Riverside.

The unexpected arrival of right now

I'm trying... to find my sense of place again. To locate myself here, now, where I am. But life has been a series of lift offs and landings lately, and my heart like a boomerang some days, like a kite others.

A friend said this week: "Next step: feeling the roof dissolve away from that new room in your head."

And that's exactly it. That's exactly what's happening. Life is full of a kind of poignancy I'm unaccustomed to. I'm working on so many things I love; trying to balance the shoulds with the woulds; the longing with the here and now. Little boys, with big cities; paint on my jeans, with running hard; book promo projects, with all the canvases I want to paint.

I want to hear your stories.

Have you've every had a time where you felt you were growing so fast you could hardly keep up? What was that like?

The truth is this right now:

This is the truth: I’m not sure how to start here, on this new site. Not sure, except to show up and hope you’ll show up too.

The truth is that I wake up and do the day. I wake up and write, help the boys get dressed, make fried eggs on toast, and drive to work. And then everything is different than it once was. Remember? I used to be a teacher. Then I was a full-time mama for a while, and eventually things shifted again.

Now I'm a full-time emerging media strategist at one of the coolest design studios on the planet, and every day I arrive and leave, my head brimming with ideas, plans, words, research, data sets, metrics, wonderment, proof, ROI, questions, answers, possibilities, and a perpetual to-do list.

At the end of the day I always walk down three flights of stairs to the ground, and find myself startled by the warm summer air. It hits my face palpably, my skin prickling as it adjusts to the humidity and heat. To the west is the lake, and there are often crows circling as the sky turns from blue to apricot.

I look up, paying homage to the clouds, and take a breath.

Then I drive home, the music turned up high, drums filling me as my consciousness slips out of one life, and into another: my heart tugging at the kite strings of my mind, up in the stratosphere where my head’s been all day. And before I know it, I’m on the dirt road driving towards the house I’ve lived in longer than any other house, between green pastures.

The truth is that lately, I've been feeling inexplicably restlessness--a sensation in my ribcage that is more like a deep hunger, than a reason to run. I can’t make sense of this, except to say that I feel like an entirely new room has opened up inside my head. A whole new room, to which I never knew there was a door, let alone keys and modes of entry; windows, possibilities, stairways. It’s like I’m bigger than myself, like I’ve suddenly grown to be more than whatever I was.

The truth is I feel ready for the changes that this site signify. For my name up there at the top, and for telling more pieces of my story--what it is, and what it is becoming.

Are you in?

Showing Up For Summer (#3)

The third thing I want to show up for this summer is: Reading poems, hungrily, whenever I can. Mary Oliver, and William Stafford, e.e. cummings, Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell. Their words become the circumference that is home. (#1 here, and #2 here)

Showing Up For Summer (#1)

I was thinking how easy it is to fill time with the things that don't matter; how easily we become preoccupied with being productive, achieving, doing just one more thing, all the while forgetting focus on the things we really love. And, because I believe there is great power in listing things, I decided I'm going to do a few posts about the things I intend to show up for this summer.

The first thing I want to show up for this summer is: Running first thing in the morning with the dog. Rabbits cross the road then, and the birds are loud as the mist rises off the grass. My muscles gradually reclaim their grace. This is a way I like to begin the day. One foot, then the next, heart pounding, blood thrumming. Grateful.

// Join in! What do you want to show up for this summer?

The way it feels in the end

I’ve fallen out of practice: noticing the little things, the blue pebbles amongst the brown ones, seeing the sunshine when it happens.

I’ve forgotten what it feels like to run hard: every day, with some conviction and speed, or do pull-ups, five in a row. This year my biceps and belly have grown soft.

Since turning my thesis in and finishing the last class, I've been wavering a bit. My heart feels like a giant squid, startling at the smallest hitch, at the slightest trepidation, to fill my thoughts with an unexpected blur of ink.

I’ve lost the tempo of doing things with my hands: raking wet leaves, or turning bread out onto the butcher block to knead it; and when the people I love ask, how are you? I am never sure what to say. Like the turbulent spring weather, it changes.

I can’t get this song out of my head.

I’ve been in self-preservation mode so long, I don't remember how to ease up and just be curious. I've forgotten how to laugh at the small stuff. I've been so damn seriousness for so long, because I was simply too tired to let any other emotion in traipse its way around my mind like a soft-footed cat. But now that I've finished, that cat has snuck in through the window, ferrel and reckless, spilling everything.

I had a cat walk across a painting once, wet with new India ink. It made tracks everywhere, across the floor. And that's what it feels like now. My emotions are messy. Unreasonable. Hilarious. Devastated. Delighted.

This is what coming down feels like. The hard pull of gravity and the softness of bones. A sudden hard stop, like the wind just got knocked from my lungs.

Maybe none of this makes sense.

The truth is: I'm ecstatic: it feels amazing to be finished, and where I am in my life now is . Yet it also feels so final that it's a little devastating in the way I've heard it is for runners after training for a marathon: 26.6 miles down, and then they wake up on the morning after and have no reason to train, no place to run to, no purpose to push. That feels good until it doesn’t, until the softness of cumulative exhaustion catches up, and what to aim for next is smudged and out of focus.

So this where I am right now: at the end of something, without being consciously at the beginning of something else.

// What do you do in situations like this? How do you ease into rest, refocus, move forwards?

On Finishing, Persistance, & the reason for everything

I had no idea what my capacity for self discipline was when I began. No idea that two years and a book later, I'd sink to the grass on the Friday after turning in my thesis and cry tears of gratitude that it was all over. But that is what I did.

I lay with my arms akimbo; the grass pressing up into my palms and the clouds moving above me, a symphony of cirrus, and hungrily felt the weight of my body being tugged by gravity close to the barely wakening surface of the earth. How I've been longing for that: to feel my body next to the earth. To feel like I am of it, not just tangential to it. To feel my pulse thrumming steady and slow, keeping time with the pulse of the nearly blooming crab-apples and service berry.

In the weeks when I was finishing, the world was turning to spring: first the coltsfoot like a hundred thousand scattered suns along the muddy edges of the road; then the wood trillium, green and pale with purple freckles, poking up among the pine needles in the shade at the back of the yard along the stone wall. I knew these things because they happen every year, familiar and certain. But this year, I only saw the coltsfoot from the car windows and the trillium in passing. This year, the robins came one day while I was researching. It was the weekend. I remember. The boys were outside playing in the sandbox, and their voices would come lilting up to me through the cracked-open window, the smell of spring coming wild and cold through the screen. I remember glancing up to notice the way the sun was slipping westward, and then heard it. Warbling, golden, liquid: the setting sun in song.

I grew used to watching the day pass from the windows.

And really, it was one of the hardest things to full-out sprint for so long. To try and to keep trying, even when I was exhausted. To work, to go to class, to come home and play with my kids, and have dinner, and do all the bedtime choreography and then sit down to begin several hours of work. To miss the entire blooming of a day: to not have felt rain falling on my cheeks, or hail on my tongue. To have spent week after week circling myself, in front of the computer, making something happen.

And still, though it’s not a pace I could have kept forever, the thing that I feel now, already, after a few days with a little more rest--is that we give up on ourselves too easily too often.

We get the message all around us that things should be easy, and when they aren’t—especially for any prolonged length of time, we tend to panic—it’s hard not too.

But there is something to persisting, to showing up, and showing up, and finishing; to discovering that you are capable of more. It’s the only way, really, to find that out: to do the hard stuff, the impossible stuff, the stuff that makes you want to weep and yell and sing hallelujah all at once.

And now look! The world is full of wind. The treetops are fat with new sweet leaves. The goldfinches have arrived and the sky is full of cumulus and turbulence and new tomorrow will dawn new and bright—and this, this is the reason, again and again for everything.

The slender threads of right now {9 days}

I am trying to slip back into work mode tonight. I've found that it is helpful, after the boys go to sleep to let myself unwind a little, doing some small act of creativity.

I bring tea and chocolate and maybe a handful of raw almonds up to my studio with me and then I mull about a bit, until I find some small thing among the scraps. A raveling, a glimmer, a tenuous thread bit of paper. It might be the smallest act of wetting a brush, uncorking ink, or letting color spread in water to the edge of a line. It is this act of making something from nothing that tugs me right back into this moment, tucking the tiredness falling in front of my eyes back like stray locks.

And even if it is a very small thing, a single purposeful gesture, it is often enough.

What can you make, if you pause right now? If you look around you, what do you see?

Tell me the inventory of where your creativity begins.

.

A parenthesis in time:

All week I've been wanting to tell you About how I slipped away last Friday night with T and my beautiful friend Hilary. We went North on a road marked with farm houses and fields, the land as flat as a tucked sheet. We saw snow geese, hundreds of them, and remarked about the solitary trees that stand like sentinels in the middle of wide fields; their branches some small haven for wild birds and wild winds.

We crossed the river at the blue hour Across the wide metal bridge into a city Where the syllables are soft, and the consonants luxurious.

And found our way to our hotel, among cobble-stoned streets Where the cathedral towers were making love to the fat crescent moon.

We had dinner at Holder: mussels with cream and white wine, duck confit with arugula and garlic, white wine and red, chocolate ganache, and espresso.

And then found our way to the Corona theater, which is truly lovely and just the right size place to hear Gotye play, up close and intimate his music still new and experimental and sweet in the way that it wasn't utterly rehearsed. Kimbra played first. So much soul in that small slender body in a crumpled champaign dress; and then the drums of Gotye, making our hearts thrum.

It was good, so good to get away. To slip out of my mind for a night; to be with two people who I adore; the easiest of combinations.

The next morning we had breakfast at Olive & Gormando which quite possibly has the most lovely pastries in Montreal... And then we wandered around taking photographs.

I can't help myself: I must share them all. They make me happy. Even now, as I'm in the thick of one of the hardest weeks; with too little time. Far too little, to finish all the work that I must for my thesis to be done in two short weeks.

Here's to parenthesis! To moments stolen. And to trying to let the be enough.

xo!

Make today your work of art.

This phrase slipped into my head today while I was running at lunch time. It was cold, and the sky was as gray as it ever gets and the waves on the lake were choppy and sharp, and still it felt AMAZING to be out running, feeling my body do this thing that it knows how to do.

And this is the truth:

It doesn't matter how much time or how little you have.

It doesn't matter if everyone is counting on you, or no one is counting on you.

It doesn't matter if whatever you're doing is something you've done a hundred times, or have never done before.

What matters, simply, is doing whatever you are doing with everything you've got.

Where ideas happen: a documentary of small moments

In the slight slender seconds of pause when the tea is hot and the quiet is steady, or at the stoplight, waiting to cross the street beside a billboard, and then the galaxy of staples are all invitation I need to linger, to take a picture, to look and then look again.

It happens in the washroom at the little vegetarian cafe, where the picture of Bukowski, likely piss drunk, is a lurching reminder as I dry my hands to be irreverent and bold with what I know; in the same way that the ink-spattered sink promises that being in the midst of the mess is the best if not only way to find the truth.

And it happens always, in the cafe, a frothy cappuccino its own evidence of creative collisions and circumstances that invite recollection or collection; And also always staring out my office window at the sky, where the moon, white and round, offers endless chances to describe its pale face anew, and so I do.

// An invitation: Tell me your way of talking about the moon without talking about the moon at all. (I love the way you think.)

On loving someone for a while:

There is a slow magic to knowing someone for a while; to loving them for longer than a decade; to waking up beside them morning after morning. It isn't an effortless thing, or something you just stumble into. Rather, it's a thing of shared dreaming: Of taking each other's hands, of walking side by side, of saying yes, and imaging what our future holds together.

I don't take a single day for granted. Each day I wake up committed and eager to try again, to grow, to live this life side by side, and so does he. I think this makes us among the lucky ones.

Yes.

The truth is, after a dozen years, he's still my favorite.

I love him more than I ever did when we first were dating, that's for certain. He has better biceps now; more smile lines; less hair; more scars; deeper laughter; wider love.

Have I ever told you about how we met? He asked me to go downhill mountain biking the day after we'd met, and I said yes, even though I'd never done such a ridiculous thing before. We road the chair lift up the mountain together, and somehow while taking pictures with a disposable camera we dropped it, and even though we rode down and looked for it, we never found the camera that had the first evidence of us together on it, his arm around my shoulder.

He let me ride his bike because mine was not really cut out for hurtling down such steep terrain, but somehow he broke my front wheel in the process, which was a great guarantee, really, that we'd have to see each other again.

And when we did, I remember thinking: How could anyone be this good, this solid, this open hearted? And then he kissed me.

We were in college still.

Now we're at a stoplight driving into town with the boys in the back seat and the dog in the trunk and we both stare in wonderment at the group tour of the UVM campus that's crossing the road in front of us. The kids are so young; so fresh faced and slouchy and hesitant in their posture. Their parents stand upright, arms folded, or hands clutching catalogs and brochures or handbags; and they look anxious and skeptical and worried and old.

How is it possible we'll be them in ten years? Instead of the younger ones, looking careless, their arms and legs like question marks, their clothes too baggy or too tight. How is it possible that Bean will be one of those boys, his sandy hair all shaggy, stubble on his cheeks?

We shake our heads. He reaches out and rests his warm palm against my thigh. Then the light turns green.

The wildness of crows and the wonder of taking note

For a few weeks just at the end of winter before we set the clocks ahead and the evenings were filled with yellow light, I'd leave work just after the sun had set; the sky still stained blue and tangerine with the remnants of the sun's grandur, and I'd look up, reacquainting myself with the wideness of the heavens and the moon and the geometry of rooflines and I'd see them:

Crows.

Sometimes just a few, other times so ten or twelve, or even dozens flying all in the same direction, their harsh calls filling the darkening air; and one day looking out the window of my car I saw their silhouettes gathering in the tree tops in an empty patch of land between the electricity co-op and a renovated factory building.

Not ten or twelve, but hundreds, thousands of crows.

The first day I kept driving, smiling to myself at the strange figment of wonder I'd witnessed. The next day leaving work the sky was full of crows again, and when I drove past, I drove more slowly, starring. On the sidewalk people were walking to and fro as if it were a normal occurrence; as if the thousands of crows covering every tree top above them were something utterly ordinary.

The third day I left work a few minutes early on purpose. The moon above me was completely round and white, pinned on the azure blanket of twilight like a cameo brooch, and when I got to the maples, they were already black silhouettes against the sky.

I parked behind the factory and walked out to the edge of the trees, and oh, I've never heard anything like it.

Pure wildness, the sound of thousands of crows. All calling, all cawing at once, their wings simultaneously beating the air and the settling.

I watched until my fingers grew cold, and my cheeks flushed and then I turned reluctantly to go.

The next day there were only a few--maybe a dozen in the trees, and today there weren't any there at all.

//

This life. Take note.

Make time for the reckless detour, the irrational urge to pause and be transformed by wonder.

the truth

Some days there is a part of me that wants it to be easy already; some sleepy-head part of me that keeps wishing I’ll wake up one morning to someone handing a blueprint for how to live these final days of graduate school + work + boys + writing, so that they become a symphony, rather than a collision of hours.

Remembering my father:

I have to use the calculator to remember: he would have been 78 today, which means the inconceivable. He died ten years ago.

None of this makes any sense as I rock back and forth in the mostly dark with Sprout on my chest. Bean, up in his bunk bed is humming along with me as I pick up a tune and begin to sing and then I realize: I'm singing the song I sang to him over and over as he lay dying. I'd sit there for hours beside his bed, watching the shadows cast by the dancing leaves of the cherry tree on the pale yellow wall.

The song is an old Gaelic blessing. I learned it in school as a child, at the end of my fourth grade year before all of us were released for the summer to climb trees and run wild. By then I lived in a tract home in the Northridge hills. There was an olive tree that spread over the front driveway, and the driveway would get stained by the dark purple fruit that would also stain our feet when we ran on it barefoot. In the backyard we had a redwood hottub that my parents could never afford to heat, but in the summer we filled it anyway and lolled about ducking to the bottom and popping back up, the water running in rivulets off our cheeks and eyelashes.

What I remember about my father from that time was his office that was separated from the house by a workshop. It had sliding glass doors that opened on to the back patio, and you could reach it by either going through the workshop, picking your way through pipe clamps and table saws, or from that sliding door. I remember watching him at work through that door, his back to me as I'd swing on the swing he'd hung from the patio veranda. It was something I did a lot, growing up: Watch his back as he worked on his computer.

My boys will likely have a similar memory of me.

"Shush, Mommy's working."

I try to sit at the dining room table and let their busy world spin around me, but like my father, I crave the silence of uninterruption; the solitude of that comes with focus.

Now I'm rocking in the tender dark of my son's bedroom. Sprout's limbs are already lanky in my lap. He's three; the years are galloping.

After I tuck him in and rub noses with both boys and kiss their cheeks, I search for a box at the back of a closet: With photo albums in it from a decade before I was born. I sift through the pictures of my father then; wondering what he must have been like in that alternate lifetime before I was even an inkling in it.

This is just it, this life: An inkling, a hundred inklings, and then blink.

On writing: The song of my music box heart

The snow is wet, but it's falling. The first snow, really, of this entire season. Flakes like goose down drifting from the torn featherbed of the quiet nigh time sky, yet I've already seen the robins with their fat vermillion breasts, and even though it's a leap year, February is almost spent.

I have until April. Until the twentieth, to be exact, to pull off something bright, provocative and well-researched for my thesis, and I have dozens of articles in a printed stack beside me; sheaves of evidence; proof of where my focus should be in every spare minute; in every fragment of time left at the end of the day.

And yet the only thing I want to do at the end of the day is write.

Like this.

I can feel myself, in the weeks when writing is scarce, become like a Bread and Puppet specter; a disjointed creature with long limbs and dark circles under her eyes.

Then, everything in me resists the pre-determined course I've vowed to take at 8pm: research, interviews, and organizing paragraphs to defend a logical conclusion. I become like a vintage music box too tightly wound: impatient, stuck, off key. It is the practice of writing; the meter of showing up; the tempo of reflection here, at the page, after twilight has been tucked into the soft dark pocket of the night, that unwinds the thin filament of my soul, and aligns the brass pins of my music box heart so that it can play again its winding calliope of song.

I don't know how she does it, guilt, and telling another kind of story entirely

I don’t know where I am going yet, but I know that this is the beginning. The beginning of finding true velocity: a unity of moments, a lithe tempo, a right algorithm of speed and grace.

I am still rather far from it now, in the final semester of school, with my new job already nearly full time. And I’ll be the first to admit: The days don't always offer the time I need for pondering, for the daily practice of writing, for rest. Until I’m done with graduate school, I know the hours will ignite, one after the next at a certain pre-determined heat, each one double booked, precious, full to saturation. And I'm humbled by the process. By being here again, at the outset again, new to the particular set of challenges and opportunities my life offers and asks. I spend my day tripping, sprinting, catching my balance, careening, laughing with sheer delight.

There are wins and losses: I drive Bean to school every morning; we have a part-time nanny who helps with the laundry; Sprout is finally making headway with potty training; T cooks weekday meals with the grace and kindness of saint. And I'm still trying to find an hour that offers itself for writing; time for running is inconsistent; I have a birthday party for Bean to plan, and no time to make it to the store for favors; I see my husband less than I'd like. And in the midst of it all I've realized I've somehow reached the life velocity that causes people say, “I don’t know how you do it” to me now.

I find myself shrugging at that remark. I don't know how anyone does it. We've all got our own particular mess of moments and necessities; priorities and stumbling blocks. Each life is remarkable.

But beyond that, I shrug because I'm particularly resentful of cultural paradigm from which that statement springs.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the book that spawned that phrase. Both it, and its movie counterpart have been suggested to me by no less than six women friends as a seminal narrative that “tells the story like it is.” I’ve been given two copies of it in fact, one from my mother. And I ended up watching the movie on the way back from California in the plane, but regretted my choice upon landing, as manufactured guilt clung like burrs to the back of my mind as I greeted my boys; drove home with my husband; and then helped my kids put on their pajamas and brush their teeth and go to bed.

Guilt.

I don’t think it is a terrible book by any means. It gets many of the details right, of a full-velocity life. The pace, the tumult, the jam-packed days. What I resent is the paradigm it perpetuates. It’s that Kate's primary emotion and modus operandi is guilt: About her work, about her husband, and her kids.

It gives fule to myth: That you should feel guilty as a woman if you work away from home; and that the smug comments of stay at home mothers are both assumed and justified. I call bullshit.

Women who work at home, and who work away from their home, and who stay at home each have the choice to frame their lives in terms of guilt or fulfillment.

Whatever you slice it, you see a different slice. There are challenges and advantages to each way of being in the world, and to tell the story of a woman who works and has children as a guilt riddled narrative does a huge disservice to all women, regardless of their childrearing status.

So as I’m writing now, about the early phases of doing this full velocity thing called life that includes work and kids and a thesis and whatever other bits fall into the mix, my hope is that I can begin telling the story in a slightly different way.

Less guilt, more fulfillment. Less culturally perceived “shoulds,” more personally perceived moments of sheer awesome.

I am at the beginning of a new phase; an epic; an adventure. It feels off kilter some days. There are days that I don’t have enough time for anything more than the barest essentials. Still, unless I read about it somewhere, guilt doesn’t factor in to the equation.

My life is asking for new definitions and capabilities. It demands that I cultivate the ability to adapt to the speed of things moving in multiple dimensions and directions simultaneously. It pushes me to imagine bigger constructs; and to see time, and speed, and distance, and success as new non-linear relatives.

My life is being altered by the nature of the work I am doing; by my expectations for myself; by the sunlight gradually softening towards spring; by my sons turning three and seven; by a dozen years with the man I love; by my thesis; and by all that is unfinished at present. And instead of guilt, what I am striving for is to acquire a certain degree of nonattachment. To do my very best, to pour my soul into the work I do, to love my boys when I am with them, to trust that when I’m not that they are flourishing, and to let go and know: Our right lives are happening now, in dynamic unison, every morning, every afternoon, every night.

Work-Life balance: Daily routines and the quality of light

I leave and arrive now in the in-between light; the light first spreading from the un-tucked hems of the morning, or the light leftover at the end of the day that spreads like a stain across the tablecloth of evening. On the way in, I drive with Bean. For the first part of the drive we’re mostly quiet as I sip a flat white in a ceramic cup and eat fried eggs wrapped in a soft flour tortilla, and he watches me from the back seat, patient, knowing better than to demand too much interaction before caffeine and quiet have set the internal tuning fork of my mind to thrumming with alertness.

Then we talk.

He asks me to tell him about summer when I was small, and when he asks, I smile, my mind slipping to the far off drawers of memory I keep inside my head.

I tell him about going to Bryce canyon and riding horseback with an old guide named Pinky up and down the steep canyon cliffs. I tell him about packing just enough clothes to fit in a sigle drawer in the camper; about the sketch book I always kept; and about about the way my older sister would yell at me every night when it was time to set up the tend and I’d just stand there holding the stakes, staring off at a neighbor’s campsite or into the sagebrush, stalking stories with my eyes.

I tell him about the jackrabbits with their enormous ears and big hind feet, and about the full moon above the canyon and the silvery pink rocks; and then I picture what it will be like in another summer from now when Sprout is a little older and we can travel together, all four of us, across this wide, wide country through the dessert to end up at the wild Pacific where we’ll collect sand dollars and blow on bull kelp bugles.

And abruptly we’re there, in the snow covered parking lot of his little school, and I pull up in the drop-off circle and he unbuckles his seatbelt and leans forward to kiss me and then grabs his backpack and goes in.

It seems improbable, all of this.

That I am leaving and arriving in the nearly light of early morning and the twilight of a spent day; that I have a job like this, full on, full time, full of possibility; that I am the mother to an almost seven year old who does the things I remember doing. Kisses me on the cheek, grabs his backpack, goes to school.

I remember that same routine with the indelible clarity of long term memory. The feeling of my backpack, the way my sneakers looked against the walkway cement leading up to my classroom door. I had a favorite cobalt blue sweater and my bottom teeth were missing, just like his—though his are growing in crooked like T’s were.

Bean's little boy smile is almost unrecognizable to me some days. He's a certifiable kid, now. Half way to fourteen already.

And so I kiss him quickly and then he slams the car door and goes into his blue school building where he spends the day discovering the world, while I drive off into the city and park, and then climb three flights of stairs and settle into my little brick and windowed office where I watch the light shift across the walls above my head.

I drink more coffee in a white mug, and at lunch I go running outdoors along the bike path that I used to run on every day when I first moved to this city and started running years ago. It feels strangely familiar: each turn and slope somehow written into the kinetic memory that the soles of my feet recall.

Snow cakes under my shoes, and I have to kick them hard against the ground every so often to loosen it, and above the lake the light is almost entirely flat gray, save for a place where the clouds are ripped and a rosy apricot spills through.

When I return, I am red faced, sweating, and focused and the rest of the day slips by in an ellipsis of concentration; the dark gathering unexpectedly, without my watching. When I return home, the house is full of lamplight and yelling. The boys are hungry. Dinner is on the table. The dog is whirling under foot.

This is the new tempo of things. The new state of leaving and arriving; the way the quality of light reveals much about this new process of becoming.

// How does daylight mark your daily routines? What do you spend your day doing?

Taking inventory on my birthday:

A year of self portraits on the go, in the middle of the action that is my life.

My list for this year turned out better than I imagined. I crossed off more things than from any of my previous ones. I even made croissants over the holidays! A lovely lingering process spread over two days and involving three sticks of butter. I also went ice skating on Frog Pond with T while in Boston, and miraculously managed both a visit to the ocean and making face to face visits with faraway friends happen in the past week.

What I love about making these lists is the record they create: of attempting, of longing, of wonder, of achievement. And even though I missed the mark on a couple of line items, in all, 33 was an amazing year. An exhausting, thrilling 365 days of determination and perseverance and pushing boundaries and joy. A book. A new job that I adore. Friends that make my heart smile. Boys that make my days bright. And a partner that makes it all possible. I'm a lucky girl.

I've posted a new list in my sidebar. And I'm curious: what are a few things on your list for the year? There is such power and possibility in claiming the big and the small with a few purpose-filled words.

xo! Christina