Resistance to change, creative habits, and Sprout is growing up

It’s taken us too long, really, to be firm. To take a stand. To say enough’s enough. But to be honest, we were resistant to making the change because we were both a little afraid of what taking it away might mean for the balance in our lives. We pictured bedtimes of wailing, naptimes gone, perpetual whining in between for a week. He’s that kind of kid: stubborn when he wants to be. Also, he has unbelievable eyelashes and the biggest, widest eyes.
Unlike his big brother, Sprout totally loved his pacifier as a baby. It was a great self soothing mechanism, which, while he was small made all the difference in lulling him easily to sleep. But somehow he’s not small anymore. He’s lanky-legged and solid, and when we’re driving somewhere, just the two of us he’ll tell me silly stories about bears and foxes and coyotes that almost inevitably end with all of them putting spaghetti on their heads and tails, and then he devolves into laughter.
And still, the paci has stuck around. It became a habit long past when instincts linger, and lately? The more he’d use it, the more bratty he seemed to become. Whining at everything. Yelling. Throwing fits when he didn’t get his way.
Still we hesitated, and the truth is I don’t think either of us made the connection entirely between his behavior and our reticence to help him give up that final habit of babyhood. We had a lot of conversations around his fourth birthday. There was mention of a “Paci Fairy,” whom he seemed to marginally believe might really come to collect all his pacis and send them off to a baby who needed them. And there was the suggestion that his baby cousin might need it instead and we should ship them to him instead.
I admit the logic was warped in all cases. But I know you've done this. Made some halfhearted attempt to see just how gullible your kid is, in hopes of being able to make a point or change the course with the least amount of resistance? Wool over eyes. An impossible suggestion to make a point. Knowing the entire while that it won’t really work unless you get behind it too.
All this to say: We were afraid of his resistance and because of this we were halfhearted. Our lives have had all kinds of curveballs lately, and every time we ran the scenarios through in our heads, and we’d end up shrugging and giving up saying, “Well, he’ll grow out of it eventually” or, “He won’t go to high school with it.”
But then this past weekend he was a whiny monster all of Sunday, and at one point when I removed him from some utterly nonsensical embittered argument with Bean over legos or blocks or whatever it was that had devolved into yelling, and while I was carrying him downstairs he wacked a block towards one of the newly painted hallway walls. And somehow that was it. My resistance to change was shaken. I was really in.
I plunked him in a chair for a time-out. He wailed. I resisted, and when repentance crept into his voice, he started asking for his pacifier, out of the blue I said simply, “No, you’re too old for pacis. You’re done. Your behavior has been showing me that it’s making you think like a baby when you need to be thinking like a kid. All done.”
It wasn’t a threat. It was completely the truth. That is the phenomena that I’d been noticing. And when T heard me say it, he nodded and said, “You know, you’re totally right. That’s exactly what’s been going on.”
And just like that, we were both in, and he cried for a while and asked for it about seven hundred times and then he finally climbed down from the chair and ran off to do something else and that was that. That night I heard him muttering “Oh, right, no paci.” And it took him all week to figure out exactly what to do with himself at bedtime—but he did, and we did, and it was almost entirely a nonissue.
His resistance in our heads was so much worse than the actual event.
Which got me thinking about how this isn’t just true with parenting. Watching Sprout ajust to new habits made me realize how often the narratives we tell ourselves resisting change are more difficult to overcome than making the change itself. This is certainly true with my own life too. The starting of a creative habit—the waking up daily, the building of an unbroken goal streak*—it’s actually harder in my head in the moments before I commit to it, than when I do.

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So I'm wondering: How many times have you resisted making a change because there’s some story you’re telling yourself in your head? How many times has your own inertia that kept you from swerving off the course you’re on, even if the swerve would inevitably lead to growth? How often do you resist, simply because the story of your resistance is stronger in your than your commitment to change?
What if I told you that all that resistance is far worse than the actual event of change? What would you let go of? Stop doing? Start?

    *More on goal streaks & creative habits in my next newsletter coming out on April 1st! SIGN UP.

Let the choices you make today be the ones that make you glad

  It’s before the dawn and I’m up. The choice is mine. Hello writing practice. Hello day. I lie in bed for a minute or maybe five, feeling the way my mind slips like a gymnast between one state and another: one second I’m here, the next I’m somewhere else entirely, with people I’ve never met whose faces are as vivid as the day is new.
“Are you getting up?” T asks. He’s rubbing my feet, a ritual he started sometime this summer when he realized, maybe for the first time, how I settle into myself in the morning. Head first, then body slowly.
I’m always surprised that I can talk at all then, with my eyes closed, and my body still enmeshed in the silken cobwebs of drowse and dream.
“Maybe,” I say. The choice like a soft purring animal in bed with me.
But the truth is, I’ve already committed.

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Yesterday I spent some time with my priorities for this year, looking at how each breaks down into hours and minute spent daily toward achieving them. And writing, as always, was at the top. It’s the most important thing to me, above all the urgent things, to show up and put to the page as the world turns to blue. Before there is rush, and fragment. Before the trees take on the pale color of day, and then are painted gold and blue as the sun climbs up through the tangled ladder of their branches. Before other things chime in, to make arguments of urgency that cannot be avoided.
And so even as I’m lying in the soft warm dark with this purring animal kneading the rumpled edges of my dreams, I know I’ll get up, press a hot wash cloth to my puffy eyes, pull on sweatpants and pour tea (never coffee first thing) and wait with the cursor at the page.
It takes another minute of struggle to do it. To get up, really. But then I’m here.

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Last week my sister sent me a link to the Huffington Post essay, “Leaning In: Similarly Yet Differently” by Carissa K, about two friends whose lives had since high school, run on parallel tracks, careers, companies, promotions, each of them making one choice and then another; each of them progressing, or sometimes outpacing or catching up until the author went and had a baby, and the other friend did not.
Then, inevitably like tracks in a switching yard, their courses changed.
Isn’t that the way it goes?
I found myself nodding as I read, aware of my own narratives about how, and who, and why, things have turned out the way they have for me. The stories I’ve told myself about the life I’ve chosen. Now, at 35, I have enough of a past to look back on roads not taken, and the outcome of those choices not made will always be fiction, played out by the actors and actions of other peoples lives.
What I’m trying to say, I think, is that we all have our own version of Kate. An alter ego. A parallel universe. A real-life or imagined embodiment of what if, or if only. The way we didn’t go.
And truth is: at every turn, we choose, and with our choosing, the inevitable slice; the bifurcation; the way thing sheer off from our lives: opportunities, outcomes, options. The inevitable nature of choice is that there is always another. The what if? The passed-up chance. There will always be something we leave behind in order to make the choice we do.
This is another way of saying: the choices we make matter immensely.The ways we wake up or stay asleep to our lives. The ways we choose urgent over important, or the times we decide instead to do the most important thing, even when other things and other stories thunder in our ears with their urgency.
This is also a way of saying: those things you didn’t choose? Don’t let them define you. The lives you passed up in order to live this bold, glorious life? It’s all fiction. It’s all a story you’re telling yourself in your head. I'm reminding myself of this today, and also, hopefully reminding you:
The parallel path is not your path. Put your time into here, into this now, into this bright new day. Let the choices you make today be the ones that define who you are.

When the universe has been listening all along

So, dear friends, I have been silent here the past two weeks because everything in my world has been shifting and kiltering and truing towards a new more rightly aligned north.
Two Mondays ago, the same Monday we moved to my in-laws house for the week while our new floors were being put in, I found out that my small department of two at the design studio where I worked, was cut. My role and the department represented new capabilities for the studio, and for various reasons, some better reasoned than others, including a tightening of budgets and pressure to reduce overhead costs, there I was at 10:30 am, suddenly cut loose from everything I’d spent the last year working on.
It was a shock, but not necessarily unexpected. Even though I loved the work, many things about the position were lacking in--terms of resources and internal support, and there were many days that I spent quelling a feeling of panic in my ribcage because of the way things felt perpetually out of alignment. Days when I felt like a singular salmon swimming up through turbines too numerous to count., trying to convert a studio saturated in the language of print, into one with a fluency in online engagement. And so in so many ways it was a best worst-case scenario, for now, after three years of sprinting and preparation, I have the time and capabilities to begin doing work that has my heart.
The work I’ve been hankering to do, and have been doing in the margins, in any extra hour I’ve had. First and foremost: writing again, for real, for earnest. Fiction, essays, the mapping of two future books. And next, work I’m called to do as to do as a creative catalyst: providing creative’s and entrepreneurs with soulful brand strategy and business opportunity coaching.
Already, this work is aligning in ways I could never have imagined, with some super exciting collaborations that have emerged with sudden energy and creative force as if they were lying dormant, waiting for just this chance.
It’s as though the universe has been listening all along.
But oh, the disorientation I felt, having neither the habits of home nor work to hold me for two weeks. I’d end up driving places only to realize I’d forgotten to make a turn. My studio in boxes. Our house a sudden construction zone, with insulation guys and flooring guys and a painter, their coffee cups and machines and dirty footprints tracking from room to room.
Now, finally the house is put back together. New floors, and some new paint for furniture well loved. Vermillion, turquoise, and clean, bright white. It’s been so good to move back in, and to catch up slowly with myself. It feels right-timed in ways I can’t explain.
Snow is still falling, fat and wet. But the days feel warmer, and the sun stronger. There’s mud now in the sunny places on the drive, and the taps are in on all the maple trees. Even though it looks like winter, there is a stirring, a calling from the deep. To rise up, to unfurl, to begin anew.
Thank you so much for not deserting this space entirely, even with my long silence. One of the things I’m most excited by with these changes is that I’ll finally be able to really show up here again.
xo, Christina

An evening spent:

There is Peterson’s Guide To Fishes and Barry Lopez’ book, About This Life that I have not read, and also the heater ticking on beside me. A small oil-filled upright space heater. The temperature still keeps flirting with negative numbers.
The walls are cut open, drying. The floor is buckling more. Little uneven peaks and valleys; so many hours of sweat and effort to lay it all in place. It makes me bite my lip to thinks of what's ahead; ten days living somewhere else. Some other floor put down.
Now T brings up up chai with frothed milk and sugar, and on the windowsill there is a candle, shining its light from a mason jar, and fame burns steadily and low. Ben Webster plays "That’s All” on the sax so perfectly I want to dance and laugh and cry, all at once, those tremulous notes saying more I can ever do with just these words.
The dog shows up, her yellow tail wagging temporarily at my knee, before she goes to find the softness of her bed (I am always ending up with pets like her: too outspoken, too independent, too much like me.)

Glimpses from the weekend:

A Thing Or Two About Resilience

Thank you to everyone on my mailing list who completed my survey this week! I learned so many things--about you, and about myself, and about the things you'd like me to write about and share here. (I'm hoping to do another little post about the results this weekend.)
Thank you also to everyone who bought work in my studio sale! I am so grateful. I love knowing my work will find special places in the corners of your homes and studios and office spaces.
Above are a selection of the pieces that went to new homes in the sale. I had no idea that nearly everything would go in a matter of hours in the pre-sale. That really ROCKED, and it made the fact that my house is being torn apart a little more bearable....
The pipes bursting caused so, so much damage.
The beautiful floors T and I put in ourselves seven years ago have to be ripped out across most of the first level of our home and replaced. Each board buckled up like the hull of a shallow canoe. My studio needs a new wall and new insulation; the garage ceiling needs to be replaced.
Everything will be topsy-turvy for the next couple of weeks as things get pulled apart, and then put back together anew.
But what all this has had me thinking about lately is how even this crazy situation is completely a universal experience. Life happens like this to everyone. Maybe not these circumstances in particular; this timing; these muddy roads and wet walls. But it happens, the topsy-turvy, the tilting of things. Things get pulled apart and then put back together for all of us.
And the truth is, I've been through worse, harder, sadder, more disruptive things and gradually I've acquired a soul-memory for what the beautiful word resilience means. Things will shift, tilt, and warm to become something bright and new. This will happen. Inevitably.
We spring back like the saplings that spend the winter bent beneath deep snow. We spring back with the the inevitable sap of the future swelling up. A thaw will come, and the air will fill with the singular scarlet call of cardinals, and little rivulets of snowmelt will rush down banks and gullies, and then the each twig will whip upright, shaking off snow showers and spring back.
What I'm excited about is possibility this year (even though I'm dreading the forced renovations!) I can feel things are shifting. New possibilities are murmuring.

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What possibility do you most hope to manifest this year?

On Turning 35

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Thirty five feels like something. An arrival. A beginning, maybe.   In my head 35 has always been the mythical age I pictured when I thought of what it meant to be "grown up." It was the age I pictured I would be, when, with due process and appropriate seriousness I'd take up all the tasks and undertakings I'd put off in my twenties for more impulsive and less permanent things. It was always the age of someday, always the age I pictured my future self becoming before now.   But now I'm here at that someday. And it struck me with both surprise and odd delight when I realized that I've stopped picturing someday as any other day than right now.   It's true. For whatever reason I've stopped imagining "someday" as an imagined time that exists at any point in my future. Instead of putting things off for some future self to take up, I'm aware now, with each passing day, that there is a grave, bittersweet river of time passing through me.   I have smile lines now. Some days I have dark circles under my eyes. I have stretch marks. I have boys who are no longer babies. I have kids who dress themselves and hold my hands and tell fart jokes and kiss my cheeks. I have a man who I have loved for thirteen years. I have the memory of the landscape of his body at the backs of my lids when I close my eyes, and it is once familiar territory and still new to me. I have days passing, and a dog, and ice on the windshield and sisters and friends with new babies, and these things all insist upon the utterly and poignantly present tense of right now.   The minutes are what matters. Today is some day. Tomorrow is someday. Someday is whatever day it will be when I wake up after today, my eyes blinking with the milky morning light.   So I've arrived at someday. I like that. I like that I've arrived at a point in time when the extent of what I've told myself about my life has been reached--as though the fragile nets of genetic inheritance and childhood could only be cast so far and claim so many of the little silver bellied fish of dreams. I've caught some and others have gone slipping through the nets, and now here I am, arms flung wide in front of the wild, wide, wide ocean.   Is this what it's like for most people? Is 35 the age when time stops in your mind, and only keeps on in your body? Is this when the incongruence begins, when the tenuous alignment of self in heart and self in mirror break apart, one timeline moving on, quite fast, the other staying where it is, gradually slipping backwards into the past? It feels like such a feat of magic: to age, to grow, to become novice and new and experience and old all at once. 35 here I am.  

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Like I've done for the past many years, I've made a new list 0f things to attempt and manifest before my next birthday... and I went back over my list from this past year .   This years list was a bit of a catch-all. I surprised myself with several things that I was able to cross off--including watching the sunset on the top of a mountain (in Hawaii) and leaving the country (a weekend in Quebec.) And as is always the case, there were several things I almost achieved--like painting with encaustic (a new friend has volunteered to teach me, we just need to find the time!) and screen printing (I now work in a place that has a gorgeous screen printing studio in the basement, and it's only a matter of time.) Other things were a far cry, and to be honest, I never had the time to even consider them like developing film and throwing a set of bowls. Maybe this year. And still others just evaded me entirely--like hearing Elizabeth Strout, and painting the rooster series (a goal I've had on my list for a few years now, but still, to no avail.)   This year is, I have a feeling will surprise me. It's an open field; an empty garden plot; a shore that the highest tide has left exposed for wandering. It will be a year for wonder. A year of finding things, and mapping them, of following new stars. A year of germination and cultivation. A year to fertilize the new bright shoots of possibility and plans with patience and perseverance.   I haven't always been easy with such things. With the wide open. With the unknown. But one thing that came from the process of writing my book, was learning how to sit in the same place with uncertainty without expectations; to hold my attention there without fleeing or fluttering or forcing anything. Nothing about writing the book, or promoting it, or about the material itself was something I was prepared for. And perhaps that's partly why I've arrived here on the cusp of my birthday without expectation, just here, with a certain gladness, even as I came home tonight, tired after a long week to find that our pipes froze and burst, and water is pouring through our living room ceiling.   At some other point, I might have raged against the injustice, the timing, the way things pile themselves, one on top of another (I'm also feeling a wee bit sick.) But now, no matter. This is just it, this is someday.   This is the someday of my life: broken pipes and subzero temperatures, delicate pink sunsets and the tenderest kisses, chicken salad with bib lettuce, white wine in a glass without a stem, Hemmingway read by the quarter chapter, boys in mis-matched pajamas, the smell of woodsmoke and also of wet drywall, the feeling of thirst at the back of my throat, the restlessness that tugs at me like tides, the longing for being near a shore with tides, the eagle I looked up to see out the window today, the dog lying with all four paws in the air. This, this is my beautiful, reckless, heartbreaking, perfect life.

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I'm so glad you join me here to be a part of it! Thank you always! ~ Christina

Holding quiet in my heart

I have so much to say. And yet so little. Words don't measure up. They take flight, like birds lifting off a wire; the score of their song like a smudge of ink, a blur of notes across the treble clef of lines.   Here is what I know: I was deeply, personally affected by the tragedy in Sandy Hook. I was affected in ways I can hardly put words around. As I heard the news, I was there, body memory replaying detail (look back through the archives; it's all there). And also: I interviewed at Sandy Hook the year I graduated from college. It was my first job offer in fact, though I passed it up, eager to work in a charter school with inner city kids. Still, I remember the art on the walls. The freckled face of a red-headed boy; the blonde pigtails of a small girl.

And then I found that one of my friends (one of the first of my friends to have children after I did) lost her nephew in the tragedy. A chubby, bright-faced boy with a smile so infectious I'd catch myself often grinning back at him, in the photos she would post on Facebook, of her son and his cousin: arm wrestling, jumping in the pool, tucking in to candy on Easter, or sitting together on the back stoop.

It's been so personal, so utterly heartbreaking, that I've been unable to gather words in any adequate way. I've been moved by so many posts flitting around the Internt. And I have so much compassion, and so much simultaneous rage. Mental health. Hours of brutal video games. Gun control. There are dots, like terrible constellations to connect.

I saw first hand the way the system fails: the way the boys (and sometimes the girls too) who need the most help, are almost always met with isolation and medication and discipline that is reactive and restrictive instead of healing and supportive. Families fragment. Things fall apart. The center doesn't hold.

Here we are.

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I am breathing. I am looking out at the rain soaked grass and letting the raindrops and the grass blades and the dozens of wind-tossed birds be my prayer. I am letting my prayer be the familiarity of ordinary things, and the way these things reclaim us, every one: pulling on socks, fart jokes, the dishes, sticky lollypops. The prayer of ordinary things. That is what I am holding in the quiet of my heart for the families who lost their loved ones; their children, their sweet babes, their mentors, teachers, friends, lovers, daughters, wives.

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I've been gathering this quiet, and holding it, while trying to still hold close my commitment to self care: to cultivating habits that hold, even when things fall apart.

I've been running daily, and writing morning pages scribbled in script with a ball point pen.

What love looks like today

  We've known eachother since we were 21.   I still remember how shortly after we started dating we agreed that we were each allowed to cull a few "deal breaker" items from each other's closet. He insisted a pair of my very awkward and proper pointy-toed lace-up shoes needed to go; and I swore that if he ever wore the glasses with frames that went below his cheekbones again, I'd have to break up with him.   Still, we were complete dorks. I wore sneakers all the time, and sweatshirts that were perpetually 3 sizes too big. He wore khaki pants with pleats and suspenders. We both wore a lot of spandex (mountain and road riding.)   Once he grew a goatee at my request (don't ask.) Then I accidentally dyed my hair carrot red the weekend he proposed. We were both still baby-faced: whatever all-nighters we pulled they didn't amount to anything near the cumulative tired that would come with little ones, marking our eyes with raccoon rings and crows feet.   The years in between then and now have flown by in a blur, and many of them are recorded here in the archives. How we moved here with a 6 month old. How we made our own rituals. The way we fought. The way we laughed. How we adored watching our first kid discover his world. Buying our house here and gutting it. Creating this home from scratch. Navigating depression. Being tossed headlong into financial uncertainty. Finding out I was pregnant. Having our second baby. Quitting. Starting. A book. Graduate school. A new job. Graduating. Another new job. Finding purpose. Co-piloting. Always becoming.   And now here we are on the other side of those pell-mell early years suddenly, with kids big enough now to leave behind for long enough to reclaim the spark and delight that caused us to flirt, and say yes, and make babies in the first place. Mmm-hmmm.   New Orleans was exactly that. Sun drenched, with enough time for a nap on Friday, and then music and shrimp and grits, and daiquiris after running (because that's the recovery drink of champions, right?) and lots of laughing and hand holding and ducking into doorways and kissing and people watching and all that good stuff that happens when the "Do Not Disturb" sign goes up and doesn't come down until 11AM the next day. Mmmm. Yes.   Then of course, there was the flight back--three legs in all that took us to Minnesota and then Illinois. But still, even that was fun, sitting in cramped seats side by side and talking and talking like we'd just met. If having kids does anything to people who are in love, it makes them appreciate what a boon uninterrupted hours are--because on an average day around here to finish a sentence feels miraculous, let alone to have a conversation about poetry and possibility. Several uninterrupted hours? Amazing. And so worth it. Even though reality hit the minute we touched down in Vermont, and all the work we'd left behind had apparently mated and produced more work.   Since autumn this has been our commitment--to ourselves and each other. To nourish, to sustain, and to rediscover.   Tell me, how do you nourish your relationship with the one you love?

Uneven tempo

It was magical to be away, and upon return everything collides: parent-teacher conferences, busy schedules, and everyone in the house sick with one form or another of a nasty virus that's been going around. Now, trying to catch up. That's what vacation always does for me, like the few seconds of pause between fast-tempoed songs on an album. I'm looking forward to the weekend. To sharing about New Orleans, to getting artwork ready for my studio sale, and to making a bonfire. Right now though, I still need to make it through today and tomorrow.

Music always helps, and I'm dying for some new tunes.

What are you loving right now?

Almost enough

Almost enough time to recalibrate. Almost enough time to remember who I am when I feel like I am enough. When the hours stop racing. When wet leaves become amber gems under foot and umbrellas become hideouts for kisses. Almost enough time, across the boarder and far up north, falling asleep on hotel pillows with French vowels in my mouth.

Almost enough to catch my breath, remember what it feels like to be carefree. Almost. Still. I wish it could have been longer. I wish there were days, back to back. A week, maybe. Time slowing to honey.

Instead, it was brief and golden, and then back to the pell-mell of too-full days.

It's that time of year, when I'm wishing for extra hours. When I'm feeling the way that as the days grow darker earlier, and the time veritably speeds up; the hours become more compressed and even more things call for my attention.   * * * Do you feel that with the season's shift? The way the rush hits? The way there suddenly is so much to do before the year ends? It feels somehow unnatural doesn't it? This pace. It goes against every fiber and sinew of being, to rush as the world prepares for the stillness of a gathering winter.

On the cusp of a new month, I want to find a different syncopation; a truer tempo between stillness and motion. I'd also like to show up here daily, even just with photos, as evidence: of being enough. And of the moments. One after the next. Golden. Passing.

A few highlights from the weekend

Roasted potatoes + eggs in the bonfire. Wine in mason jars and wood smoke. Falling in love all over again. Mowing the fields in preparation for winter. Slow dancing in the kitchen with my littlest held in my arms. Nearly finishing a new tree fort for the boys. Reading poems before bed together aloud.   How was your weekend?

Today, like any other day

Today is like any other day: a hurdy-gurdy collision of who we are and who we want to be. Two boys, not enough sleep, too many things on the to-do list. The same ordinary fears and falterings and hurdles that always find me, find me still.

And yet, I have this inexplicable gratitude: That I am alive. That this body moves. That each morning when I wake up I find one or two emails in my inbox from complete strangers telling me that my book has made a difference in their lives.

For the way T wakes up, and after showering finds my feet and rubs them, one and then the other, while I'm still trailing dreams.

For good espresso and the way the leaves have been a display of splendor: every shade of vermillion, every hue of gold. For running with T at lunchtime. Three miles next to the blue, blue lake.

For seeing my dear friend, even for only a handful of moments, her new hair cut slanting bangs and layers across her gorgeous cheekbones.

That my boys run to me when I get home. That first one, and then the other clamber into my arms, covering my cheeks with kisses. For the way we all gather around the kitchen counter then; T making curry and chicken, and me kneading and frying chapattis with Sprout, while Bean flips through the latest issue of a food magazine, pointing out recipes and reading the titles of things he's curious about or wants to make.

For reading Secret Garden with Bean at bedtime, which is, hands down my favorite book from when I was a kid.

For the way the air smells under the nighttime stars; like snow soon, and decomposing leaves and woodsmoke. And for the way T's skin feels, warm and salty and supple beside me as I crawl into bed for the night.

A day, this one, in it's entirety: a handful of moments.

What holds your attention? What small things overtake you with the feeling of gratitude? (I love to read your lists!)

Inspiration for your weekend:

{Printable Download}

Because showing up matters. I think it matters more most days than having a good idea. Everyone has good ideas. It's how you show up for them, daily, that makes them into something real and tangible and great. And showing up doesn't mean doing something epic. It means doing something small, daily.

It's the ritual, the repetition, the cultivation of habit that ends up propelling you forward. It's the fact that eventually, if you show up every day for ten minutes and just stare at your computer screen or your blank canvas or your notebook or whatever it is, you'll eventually start to create. And the momentum of that daily act of showing up will become a cumulative creative force.

It's hard though, to do this. There are plenty of days when admittedly, I make every excuse in the book about why I don't have enough time, energy, clarity, focus, whatever...to wake up, to show up, to be intentional with my time--particularly when my days are scheduled to the brim, and leisure time is scarce. But that's the point: to spend those five minutes even when those ten minutes seem insignificant.

10 minutes focusing on a singular goal. 10 minutes writing flash fiction. 10 minutes doing sun salutes. 10 minutes meditating. 10 minutes journaling. 10 minutes making art. 10 minutes behind your camera lens. 10 minutes _____________. How will you show up for minutes today?

The way autumn begins (on finding moments for rest)

There is a storm outside. There is a stirring wind that makes the chimes clink in the lilac, and the rain rat-a-tat against the dark glass where reflections from candles dance. There are little tea candles in jelly jars, flickering yellow and soft against the creamy walls; and purple gladiolas in a turquoise vase that T bought while I was away. He cleaned our bedroom too; rearranging the furniture to make it a sanctuary of softness, white on white, save for the bed frame which he painted turquoise, my favorite color, instead of the black it was since college.

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We built the frame together just before we moved to NYC for the summer, his senior year. We were still nearly kids, sneaking into the woodshop late with borrowed keys, cutting boards and planing them, using regular hardware store bolts to hold at the corners. And somehow, it’s made every move with us -- expanding to allow for extra slats when we got a king sized mattress to accomodate Bean when he was still small and spent the night between us, arms splayed like a starfish.

Now he is long limbed and in second grade. He's missing both front teeth, and reads things over my shoulder and bosses his brother around. And Sprout: he started preschool two weeks ago.

Blink. Preschool.

And the bed holds all of us on Saturday morning. The sun angles in from between the wooden slats of the window shades, and we all nuzzle and doze. And even on a weekday mornings the boys will often come running down the hall, while T is in the shower, and tuck, one under each arm into bed with me, their bodies warm and wiggly and still supple with dreams.

* *

It's the end of a long, fruitful, busy week.

I meant to write other things tonight: about reading from my book in Boston, and about other book promo things -- but the truth is: I tire of that some days, and I miss simply telling you about where I am just now, in the middle of things. About the turning of the seasons and my dog's cold nose pressed against my wrist as I write. And about the way she comes to curl beside us, her body knowing what I must relearn again and again: that I too am an animal in need of rest.

I'm looking forward to slowing down this weekend. To stacking wood, to uploading photos from Squam, and to spending some time in my studio making things.

How about you? What are your intentions for the weekend?

Upon returning -- Squam Art Workshops Love

Oh Squam. I am so grateful, so wonder-filled, so satisfied.

  It was such a gift to spend time with the brave, strong, gorgeous women whose days overlapped with mine last week beneath the ponderosa pines and red maples and birches of New Hampshire, and on the docks beside the loon-filled lake, blue against a bluer sky; cloud tossed and sun kissed. Being there among those beauties filled my soul and re-grounded me deeply.

  It was just the right combination of pure solitude and true companionship. It was both the experience of being seen—really seen—and also of having time, finally, after a whirling, confusing, busy summer, to finally sit alone at the end of a dock, listening to acorns fall into the lake from the trees above, and watching the ripples spread from each epicenter, until I found my own center: re-reading my journal until I caught up with myself, caught my breath, and found my pulse.

And now I’m back.

 

Really back. Here, now, in this space after an inadvertent break from the Internet that had as much to do with doing some really big growing this summer, as it did about being wildly, failingly busy (which was also the case.)

* * * A quick book update * * *

 

I sold out of the books I brought to the Art Fair. That felt really good. *Grin.*

And the next few weeks are full: with adventures and readings and a book launch party here in Burlington, and a blog tour (soon to come.) And tomorrow I'm making the long trip down to Boston--to read at the Trident (one of my favorite bookstores ever)—and back. I'm excited. And nervous. But mostly excited. If you're in Boston, I hope you'll come!

The heart of things

At the heart of things there is sweetness, and also the thistles of whatever mess we least expect. At the heart of things there is motion, continual and turbulent, or tremulous and shallow. At the heart of things there are veins and rivers: sap, blood, water, tears. And also the deep pulmonary channels of longing and belonging, and these things spread in a wide, wide filigree of wonder out from my very core.

At the heart of things, each day brings something new. One day I wake up hungry, and I eat a peach, the juice dripping down my wrists. I follow the rivulets with my tongue; lick what remains, and feel satisfaction fill me. Or I tell T to get oysters, and when he brings home a dozen, I find the sharpest, smallest knife we have and pry them open, eating them straight-up, with a little lemon, their wildness still fresh on my tongue, salt water, and tides all there.

Other days I wake up hungry, and there is no morsel of stone fruit, no bread, no sea-filled oysters that will fulfill the kind of craving that begins in my solar plexus, and causes a stirring for which I have no words. At the heart of things there are days where I feel like a wild horse bucking against whatever lasso that's been tossed, claiming some small loop of life as mine, and on days like that I drive to work playing the same mix on repeat, songs with big drums pounding and the windows open, and then I try to make sense of the way life seems always to be simultaneously and beautifully falling apart and falling together.

At the heart of things, I like the quiet. I crave an empty house, the way it is tonight. T is on a trip this week, and now, at the end of August darkness already comes by 8:30 and the crickets are calling and calling, a tremolo of knowing what it is they know: that things end, begin, end. And at the heart of things, I like the sound of cities after dark, where all the wildlife is human, and when the day ends, a different kind of living starts.

At the heart of things there is a spark. The inkling that occurs before the action, the glint before the flame, the breath before the whisper, the rustle of wings before they lift off in flight.

I'm at the heart of things. Doing many things. Trying to remember to show up, to record this intensity. To be right here, and also to breathe.

A Field Guide To Now: It's here!

Guess what?

It's here.

If you pre-ordered my book, it's on it's way to you. (And if you were a Kickstarter backer, it's on its way to you too, with lovenotes, and backer rewards and tremendous gratitude.)

I am giddy. I am terrified. I am excited...

And I'm proud. It's damn good writing, my friends. Truly. It think you'll love this little book of mine, for all it's worlds and words and wonderment contained within it.

It's a reference manual for being right in the thick of things--and proof that making an extraordinary life from those moments as they unfold is possible...

Go! If you haven't, order your a copy. A blog tour is in the works, and so is a New England book tour. Stay tuned... and join me... won't you?

* * * Also, did I mention giddy? (And terrified.)

This is BIG.

One of the biggest things I've done: Put my heart right there on the page, and then send it out into the world.

* * *

If anything, A Field Guide To Now is an adventure guide, and also a survival guide. It's about the hardest, messiest moments, and also the most wild, and beautiful, and grand.

Life is like that, isn't it? One moment follows the next, and if you're in each moment, extraordinary potential unfolds.

Yes. This book is about about the potential of right now. And about becoming whatever you are meant to become. It's about leaning into the moment until being becomes becoming; util ordinary becomes extraordinary; until now yields to the future that you've made.

Are you in?

Get your copy.

The wisdom of animal totems

I was with a friend recently who asked me what my animal totem was, and without thinking really, or hesitating at all I said, "A bird, because of the view that they have, because of the way they can lift off and see the topography from above. The bigness of it, and the smallness of it too: the way perspective shifts: the way the tree becomes minute, the waterfall insignificant, the sky infinite."

But if I were to get specific, it’s been the blackbird lately that’s been calling me. It's the blackbird's sooty feathers and silhouette that I picture in my head. And when I took the time to look it up, I really paused. Delighted and in awe of how right the meaning is for my life right now.

Every time I encounter this truth, I'm always wonder-filled again by the fact that there is such wisdom in everything if we stop to listen; if we pay attention to our selves, and souls, and inclinations and leanings.

“Blackbird awakens the mind with awareness as changes of perceptions are unfolding…. At this time there is a magic of the unseen worlds coming forth that is paired with the balance of grounding within the earth as you walk your path. Blackbird will guide this new awakening…. Blackbird will teach much and bring new surprises when you least expect it. Pay attention and listen carefully." >>

The blackbird knows secrets.

* * *

Try it. Quick, before you do anything else, what animal speaks to you right now?

Don’t think about it. Don’t hesitate. Just say the very first thing. Write it down even. Maybe here in the comments. Maybe you're rolling your eyes, but I say: everything is an indication. Everything is an omen if your eyes our open. What can you learn from your own heart?

The process of becoming sometimes feels like this:

Last night I watched the rain storm move across westward sky towards us; hurtling, sweeping, overtaking us without permission and with utter wild grace. I know what this feels like. To be overtaken by wild grace; by the unexpected thunder, by the way the rain washes everything away, making every memory new.

I know how it feels to stand at the screen and feel the ozone tear, feel the sky open, feel the way things will never be the same, and always are.

This is always how it feels, at the heart of things. Tempestuous, urgent, simple, bright. The rain moves through the valley obscuring the mountains. I lean into the vulnerability: learning to ask, to answer, to show up in the heat, to make things new.