Here’s the thing

My mother in law may have, most likely, found my blog. This blog. This place where I write obstinately and openly and whole-heartedly. This place where one minute I’m cold and the next I’m hot, where I fling wildly from one end of the spectrum of emotions to the other, and where I delve, deeply into whatever the present moment means. The thing is, plenty of people from my ‘real life’ read this blog. Some have obsessively googled their way here against my better wishes, and others have been invited because they get me, and they get that this place provides me with a kind of outlet and solace that my life otherwise doesn’t provide, and they give me space to allow this to happen.

But here’s the thing. My mother in law, though I dearly love her, isn’t someone who knows me deeply enough to create a frame of reference for what I write here. She doesn’t know how to locate the ore in what I write to true the compass needle north; to make what I write a part of a larger topography of meaning for my life. And also, I write here in a way I do not want to share with her, because inevitably, invariably, what I write here will then wend its way back into my life, misconstrued and out of place, in the form of worried queries, small questions, anxious phone messages.

So much spans the gap between us—faith, age, perspective—we couldn’t be farther apart in how we live and think and grow. Which isn’t to say that we’re not close, for we are, when we’re together, in a particular way. We hug and laugh, and she makes the world’s best coffee, and we talk about the latest Tom Cruise scandal, and rehash to it’s minutia every last adorable thing Bean did. And I love having this kind of relationship in my life. I love her easy generosity, her obsession with shopping, and the way that anything my kid does makes her entire day. But the thing is, there is still that vast uncharted territory between us, and it’s there because I need it to be there. It’s there because I am a deeply private person.

Okay, so maybe I’m an idiot to come here at all, having just made that claim. I can see how ludicrous it is to say that I come here to find solace and privacy—because, duh, the Internet is the antithesis of that. Right? I get that it is ridiculous for me to harbor the belief that a public blog is place where I can write and not have to watch my step, or watch my back, or create in endless detail the specific context for everything I write. But truthfully, that is exactly why I come here.

Since I started blogging, I’ve had visitors from Saudi Arabia and Hawaii, from Istanbul and Seoul. Complete strangers send me gifts. People I would never have the opportunity of knowing have become amazing friends, half the world away. I get nearly all my parenting advice from people I’ve never met in person. And yet, almost everyone who comes here, comes here with the knowledge that this small window looks in on the shape of my life, right now, today, and respects that. Most people seem to get that what I write will be as fickle as the tide. Up one day, down the next. That I’ll toss caution to the wind and say what’s on my mind, walking the thin ledge of risk, because I’m trying to reach out and touch the heart of something that is a little bigger than me; because I am hoping that some shred of what I write matters in a new way to someone else. Or so I’d like to hope. This is, after all, why I write here. Because the thirsting part of my writer’s soul wants to grab hold of even the smallest thread dangling from the tapestry of human existence, and make something with it.

So I’m not sure what to do exactly. Not sure where to go with this or how to proceed. The idea of giving up this blog is worse right now than the thought of being plagued by misinterpretation. And perhaps this is all good training wheels. Hell, if I write a book (and I will!) you can bet I’ll be running pell mell across the tight rope of risk, wearing nothing but pair of flimsy paper wings and the wildest grin you’ve ever seen, so I might as well get used to the feeling of being gawked at by the people I love. But I wish, for now anyway, that things could go back to the way they were. That I could write—without feeling like I have to answer for what I write, or explain it; and that the good news and the bad, is taken with a grain of salt, or several, and doesn’t immediately come back to me, via a voicemail. Alas, bridges always seem to be burning while the artist howls at the moon.

Like crushing grapes

I feel myself doing the same thing I always do. Like a rodeo pony at the gate, my entire being bucks up against the process of sitting down to write about the things that matter most to me: about trying to make a life. Invariably this work always takes me to the brink of what I know—and pushes me over, to where I plummet wildly into the unknown.

As I sit down to write about things that matter: about my father dying, about the gunman at school, about fighting with my husband, or loving my son fiercely, and I know that I will be changed by the act of writing. It is the act of putting words on the page that defines the reality of the world I inhabit. And so invariably, I resist because I am terrified that the act of delving deeply into this material will bring me face to face with my own small self and demand that I become more pliant. That I take risks or grow in ways I cannot yet fathom.

When I force myself to write like this my heart feels trampled like grapes becoming wine: something comes from the crushing that is sweet and heady and intoxicating, but also, there is the stain of broken skin and the pulp of the fruit that was once a different shape.

NaBloPoMo

Because I cannot NOT take the bate, and because my stubborn mind-over-matter brain has managed white-out the very important fact that I have thismuch extra time in the day, I have decided to participate in NaBloPoMo ’06. Apparently, I like the idea of having my ass kicked. That, or some terribly pathetic part of my writer’s soul hopes that this will be the needed discipline I need to produce a manuscript for an MFA program by the end of the month.

Either way, I’ll be showing up at the page every day slightly more regularly than I have been; even if it is only to post the indistinguishable string of consonants and vowels is the direct result of pressing one’s forehead into the keyboard in despair.

Morning Poem Snippets

Until I catch up with my life again, a handful of snippets will have to do. Here are a few unedited lines that surfaced in the midst of my morning poem chaff over the past few days. I am so inspired by your lists of life-altering artists, writers, etc. I want to compile them into a sidebar feature--with links to all your amazing blogs. Thank you for filling me up with new places to look for wonder, for solace, for joy, for sustainance. I spent the evening in a bookstore, with a stack of books about two feet high. So good.

*

We twirl gradually towards better days, our knees scraped, our hearts drenched in the honey of love.

*

The moon bright and white, caught in the corner of the window like a lone daisy petal or a wedge of chalk.

* Night comes too soon after sunrise now. The days, turning towards winter, have me stumbling again towards the center in me.

*

Like a pale china bowl, upturned overhead the sky is glazed pink and shades of lavender.

*

Tree silhouettes are becoming sharp, crowns of twigs amidst a hillside of fire.

*

Its hunting season again. Bucks rake their antlers across the sky in anguish. Stars scatter earthwards, becoming dew. Fawns, full grown but knowing nothing of mistrust, lurch to their knees red blood spilling onto the brittle end-of-summer grass.

Learning about showing up

A week of waking up, stumbling to the shower, making my way to the coffee pot and out the door just as the pale fog is lifting. I drive along the dirt road, the gravel slick with mud from the evening rain, and watch each how the leaves are turning. Now, at the end of the road all the maples are golden. I want to hold my breath. I want to slow things down enough to be able to drink up the beauty of the early morning light falling on the backs of grazing horses, and the mountain rising up tall and humble from the patchwork of trees like an old monk seeking alms. I want it to go slow enough to remember the breath of my sleeping son, eyelashes long and delicate in the first light of dawn.

I turn at the end of the road, onto the highway full of cars and make my way towards the brick school building where I work. I love it there, as much as I can. Some days my heart feels tightly wound like the pieces of an old pocket watch, and I tremble thinking of my little boy at home. Thinking of how my life now is like a grapefruit, torn up into sections of bittersweetness. But I’m growing used to the rhythm of this—getting up, leaving, doing what I am good at, and returning in late afternoon. Often I come home to my two guys sitting in the back yard in our two lounge chairs, side by side, sun splashed and handsome. I try to shift gears, feeling an internal lurch: longing for down-time, for solace, and then throwing myself full-throttle into the daily act of devotion that is raising a child and loving a husband. Some days DH and I reach out and touch, hold each other, drink each other up hungrily, and laugh. Other days, we have nothing to give, and in our emptiness we starve eachother. We bicker and get snappish. We hold on to little things, and forget how much we love.

But I am learning to be patient with time. Learning that things will come to fruition and fall into place if I give them space to do so. Like the morning poems I’ve been writing. I start with a handful of scraps, a few random lines still drenched in the half-consciousness of dreams. If I’m patient and I return to these lines later in the day, I find small gems I rarely expect. Things I’d never think of if I wrote later in the day, when impatience and busyness saturate my pores. So I’ll keep showing up next week. Showing up at the page. Showing up at the now of my life.

"Think In Ways You've Never Thought Before"

I went to hear Robert Bly speak tonight, and felt, after listening to him read in his Minnesota accent, from his newest collection of poems, utterly vibrant. It was a little like touching the glass on an observation beehive, where the warmth from the thousand beating wings transfers instantly into the palm of your hand. Like that: warmth saturating my being, making me huger for more than I already have---more words, more knowledge, more courage, more poems.

He said: “I asked William Stafford ‘how can you write a poem every morning?’ and Bill said, ‘Just lower your standards.’”

Then he said: “Start with anything—whatever happens, and write one every day.”

My favorite poem he read tonight was this one, from his book titled Morning Poems.

Things to Think Think in ways you've never thought before. If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message Larger than anything you've ever heard, Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven, Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

** I’m making this my challenge for the rest of September. A morning poem every day. Some morsel that reaches out and touches wonder. Some collection of scraps that, when gathered together, contains the beautiful remnants of a day.

“You can say anything in language.” He said, daring us to try.

Care to join me?

Reaching

Tonight the room is supple with heat. On the kitchen counter, new red potatoes, yellow tomatoes, and a half-drunk bottle of bully hill wine---red and sweet. Outside, the dark ink of night pools up against window panes.

Since we moved to this hilltop, wild with poplar saplings and clover, I find myself thinking often of my dad, though rarely in the way I used to do---remembering small fragments of the life I knew with him at its center. Now it is almost as though I’m catching glimpses of him right here beside Bean and me, as we ramble about the yard, walking with tall sticks, or finding small fossils. And as if they were some ethereal proof of this, dragon flies and butterflies as wide-winged as the palm of my hand, often follow us about, or settle near us on windy stems of grass.

It seems as though moving here, I’ve inadvertently moved beyond the bitter sweet of remembering—to some place that follows the improbable zig zag flight of finches towards the future.

I stumble over my thoughts tonight, wanting like I always do, to reach out and touch what the experience of loosing my father was, and never grasping more than empty air. As though the experience were a foreign film that I've watched a hundred times, and still the crux of the story remains a mystery: lost in translation between what the living mind can know and the spirit mind cannot say. He died four years ago, yesterday.

Outside moths with wings like frothy chocolate beat against the screen, trying to touch the light. Sometimes I’m angered by them: their innate stupidity sends them again and again up against the scorching heat of a flame or bulb, and in the morning I find their delicate corpses scattered on the sill. Other times I understand them utterly: that fierce longing to know what exists just beyond the grasp of all things knowable. In a way I am like them, throwing myself again and again at the mystery of death, trying to reach out and touch the light on the other side.

Without directions

We sit in the walk-in closet amid the silent heat of boxes and winter garments, and our words fly around us like an angry swarm of bees. Here, everything requires translation but the lexicons are burning.

What do we do here? In this place where both of us feel like we’ve reached the outer boundaries of love---when really the only boundary we’ve reached is the perimeter of our own large egos. The tool box is locked, and the delicate wrenches of kindness are inside.

In our culture it’s easy to interpret “successful relationship” to mean “effortless.” Friction doesn’t fit the definition we’re so often fed: the quick Hollywood snapshots of couples walking hand in hand, laughter always on the lips. Hurt—-that parabola formed at the intersection of anger and loneliness and loss---does not belong to the stereotypical shape of affection. And yet we find it here, close to us, filling the space between us, even though we are in love.

We feel terror seeping in, the moment we go beyond what’s comfortable. What if we can’t recover? What if the words we’re saying are really the basis of regret or unraveling? What if we can’t rebuild, continue, grow? Now in the heat and silence, there are large gaps between us as we look away, staring at the slope of the gabled eaves, the shelves organized with shoes and belts.

Why are we here? Away from everyone, this unventilated room is the only place where we can fight tonight with no one hearing. But really, why are we here, in the middle of this place, exchanging oxygen for anger? Because we are unskilled and unpracticed in this kind of action. Few share this part of the journey; when the rubble strewn mess of for-granted and regret collide.

We ache in this small space, trapped by our egos, and our inability to really reach beyond ourselves and meet the other. Shame drenches us, and makes us stubborn. In the balance of things we keep believing a loss of face is somehow greater than a loss of love.

So suddenly we’re there, at the breaking point. You’re walking away from me, too tightly wound, and I’ve given you nothing for everything you’ve tried to say. You’re starving but somehow I can’t offer you any bread of apology. I’ve taken yours and thrown it to the sparrows.

You stand to walk away, and as you do I finally break open, no longer caring about being heard or being right or being sad. The brittle shell around my heart breaks all apart and with the greatest effort I say it. Like Atlas lifting an entire world, I strain under the burden of my own weakness.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “For not giving you an inch.” Your body turns slightly, and you smile, just a little. Then we try again.

We do not know how to fight this way: one to one, face to face, navigating the battle map of our hearts, and this is our cultural loss. Personal conflict is always locked behind closed doors, a thing of shame. We’re taught never to talk about our family’s heartbreak, about the endless ways we hurt each other, and recover.

Yet all around us conflict is glorified in external ways. The media is saturated with constant acts of aggression. And we hardly stop to think about this lesson we teach our children, generation after generation. I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a link between our failure to share the unmarked maps of our personal conflicts with our children, and our failure as a culture to live together peacefully in the world. Each generation grows up just as unskilled as the last, in matters of the heart. Each generation encountering it’s own inadequacy in understanding how the mystery of loosing and winning, of giving and receiving, of selfishness and selflessness is contained within the greater mystery of love. Could we do better than this for our children?

Everything is at stake in the moment I reach beyond the brittleness of myself. And when you turn back, that smile quivering at the very edges of your lips, we’ve made it to the other side.

But it takes both of us to move ahead. Waving a white flag of apology does nothing by itself. Too often you say those words trying to end the strife before it’s started, before we feel ourselves raw and exposed, on the operating table of each other’s mercy. Too often, you say “I’m sorry” before either of us know what we’re really talking about, before we reach what matters buried beneath what matters less. It takes great effort and great risk to keep talking beyond apology, beyond blame, beyond embitterment, without walking away.

We stay. And now at the breaking point, we hover like surgeons, over the open wound of our growing love, attempting at once to remove the malignancy and repair the damage. We are untrained and clumsy, yet our effort counts for something, and after hours of this mess, we are sitting together on the bed. Your arms are around my shoulders, my hand traveling the contour of your knee. We are through the worst of it: through the time of where transfusions were needed, where openness needs to replace bitterness, and the chances of survival depended not on how much we were willing to loose, but on how much we were willing to give.

Now I write, because writing does something alchemical to experience; transforming it from a blur of things merely felt, to something better understood. I write so that I can remember—so that we can remember; my words bearing witness to the things we hardly ever say (that hardly anyone ever says), that are, in the end, the words that matter most.

From a family of writers

You know how it is when you get an email from someone and it’s so good you can’t bear to just click ‘save’? I got one like that from my older sister last night, and I have to share. She’s a sales rep for the uber-cool new woman-specific clothing company Lole (“Live Outloud Every Day), and she’s traveling through a whole bunch of Western states showing their new fall line. 9 days on the road. Dear Family,

Miles and miles under the belt, streaming across the lands of the Nez Perce. Cheyenne and Shoshone, the engine laboring under the cruise control as rolling hill and pass grind under the tires. It's amazing and not surprising that they call this the land of the big sky. It's breathtakingly beautiful. I can imagine those native faces crossing the waist high grass on horse back, moving swiftly and efficiently from summer to winter camps, leaving nothing in their passing but the slight traces of a camp fire pit. It's amazing what we've done to this country, and by we I mean us white folks. The mine tailing piles high, filling entire valleys in some places; toxic streams trickle from the fetid flanks and poison entire communities. It's so hard to take, this mix of breathtaking beauty and life-taking toxicity, Montana yet another state of juxtaposition, the awe-inspiring amazing with the equally deadly amazing.

I passed a forest fire today. Burning bright against the hills, smoke searing lungs of all in range no matter the air setting on the car air conditioner, fire fighters huddled against the shade of a helicopter watching the flames move ever closer no matter the effort of the air tanker above. This land is so wild it steals your heart; just like that kitten found behind a dumpster so weak and starving you have no choice but to take it in.

I am exhausted today. The odometer measures nearly 1500 miles so far. Tomorrow I drive north to Flathead Lake and Kalispell. To the cool of the mountains, a welcome break from the heat of the valleys, I will turn and twist, following the flanks of the hills and peaks that make this part of the world so famous. I have had only about four hours I can call my own so far this trip. I am a maniac for stretching my personal limits of endurance. Let's see, Kalispell is three hours drive from Missoula that means I can show three accounts, tour the town, stop at the local dive for lunch and then race for the hills, arriving in a blur to do it all over again. But something about this job inspires me to be my best and that is all I can ask of a job.

I miss my husband I miss my animals and most of all I miss the green, color so achingly hummingly green it hurts my teeth to look at. Out here, it's all brown: beautiful but brown indeed, interspersed with irrigated farms….

Good, huh? So are their clothes. I’m in love with several hoodies, and some of their pants make you look like you have the perfect ass, regardless of your actual ass. Check ‘em out.

A year here

A year ago, more or less, I started this blog hoping to find a reason to come to the page every day. I have. You. Thank you. For your kindness, your friendship, your encouragement, your humor, your beautiful art, your appreciation. This blog has become a kind of lens for me, allowing me to look from a different angle back at my life. Most months I have come to the page almost every day and given something up. Some shred of my day, some moment, some thought. And the act of writing it, and sharing it, has altered it. Like sudden small diamonds pressed out of the carbon of daily life, I’ve learned to see things differently through this process.

I could not have imagined this outcome. When I started writing here, I still felt like I was an imposter as a parent. I was still in a riot of shock that I was somebody’s mother, and this was the place I came to start exploring this new role. Now a year into the thick of it, scraped knees feel second nature. But also, I’ve found art again: my brushes, camera, keypad. I’m so grateful.

PS—Tonight we sat outside at the edge of the lawn where the last of the evening sun fell in large swathes of yellow on the grass. We blew bubbles, and watched them float weightless and dreamy through the light. Bean, his hands outstretched towards each swirly blue and rainbow orb. Me, shutter happy as usual. See ?

I just said the following phrase:

"....but you know that 98% of my daily happiness comes from my laptop," and then I gasped, because I really just said that. And because it's true. I use my laptop more than any other tool: for writing, photo editing, web stuff, music. And tonight after I came out of the bedroom from putting Bean to sleep, it had gone and fried itself. Just like that. Nothing works. It will start, but refuses to run any programs. It sounds like a jet preparing for take off. And me? I'm like an old Datsun spinning in deep mud without it.

So anyway, I'm typing on DH's computer. I hate his keyboard (it feels HUGE because I'm used to using my laptop keypad), and it's in his office, being used all day, so until the situation resolves itself, I'll be forced into an internet sabbatical. Probably I'll be feeling the effects of this more than you will--but still. Feel my pain. Whimper with me.

Soundtrack of my heart

Sound • track: a thin strip at the edge of a movie reel or videotape on which sound or the soundtrack is recorded

At the edges of my mind there is a narrative, a song, a whisper, a laugh, a sob, a steady pulse. Even in the wildest times, the times most pressed with worry, when there is little air and even less time for reflection, if I listen, I hear it. In the place between the reality of every day, and the wonderment of dreams, is the thin strip of lyrics, the soundtrack that plays out across my consciousness, defining my world.

In bed just before sleep; in the car driving the half hour stretch between our house and apartment listening to jazz on VPR; in the shower with hot water running in rivulets between my shoulder blades where wings would be, if I could fly; or standing at the stove stirring soup, I hear it. This is when I tune in to the words that slip edgewise into the conversation I keep with myself. The things I hardly say out loud, or never. The things of intuition and inkling, that shape my drive, my fears, my love.

Right now I’m trying consciously to tune in. It is hard to do. The dialogue is illusive and when I try to pin it down, it is as though static is lacing the airwaves. When I listen closely I hear this: below the joy of being offered a job I’m excited to accept, and beyond the worry of finding a daycare program for Bean that will nurture him, is the battle cry of my creative self begging not to be abandoned with these upcoming changes.

It is startling to find myself here, on the brink of so much change, again. It’s been just over a year since change tore through our lives like a river in flood, redistributing everything, shifting our very geography, altering our sense of home.

Last May we were packing our house in CT and trying to imagine what life here would be like. I remember sitting at our kitchen table (I loved where it stood, in a nook off the kitchen with a big bay window facing the backyard) looking towards the living room, the hall, the front door, noticing with sudden clarity and attention how familiar those angles and rooms were were. Noticing the quality of light on the tiled kitchen floor; the Prapluie-Revel umbrella poster between the front windows, the jars of sugar and rice on the counter, and wondering how it would be not to call that space “home.” Our first real estate investment, a noteworthy stamp in the passport of adult hood.

This May everything is different, and yet we’re packing again. On the brink of moving to a place saturated with promise. Like honey comb, drenched with sweetness this house is drenched with our hopes, our longings, our dreams. Everything in it bears the mark of what we have become: a family.

This time, as everything shifts; as the river fills with spring rains and floods its banks, and the shape of the valley is forever altered, I want to be more conscious about holding on to the things I’ve grown to love: my artist self, my writer self; my camera’s lens, my runner’s thighs. Looking back I’ve started to see how easily these things slip to the margins of my life, when other louder more demanding things push to the fore. This time I want to keep an ear to the ground, attune to the beating of my heart. This time I need to remain whole, even as my life divides.

The Swan Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air - An armful of white blossoms, A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies, Biting the air with its black beak? Did you hear it, fluting and whistling A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall Knifing down the black ledges? And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds - A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet Like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river? And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?

--Mary Oliver

Ways of looking at the pieces

The past few days have been piled with small fragments. Tesserae. A jigsaw puzzle in a box. The deadline for the house is rapidly approaching: five weeks until our lease is up here. Five weeks to do: drywall mudding, paint, floors, kitchen, and both bathrooms.

My mother is here for a visit, and seeing her come towards me from across the wide foyer of the airport, I felt a lurch of familiarity and distance all at once. Her shoulders felt small when we hugged—smaller than the shoulders I perpetually remember from my childhood. It always takes us a few days to synchronize, our interpretations of each other always slightly off at first encounter.

Sitting on stools at the kitchen island we sweet mandarins and talk about her past, my childhood, our futures. Words that keep coming up: comparison, criticism, home, happiness, choice. Hearing her describe the threads of her biography (misplaced affection, intense shyness, an affair, a baby, and then she married my father: a man she hardly knew, but whose ideals she loved) makes me feel a bit like I’m a bird trying to swim in the lake of her perception.

She’s brought good chocolate: hazelnut and currant, and I nibble on it, hardly able to fathom the gap in perceiving that spreads out between us. But we find much to laugh at together, and she makes incredible food.

The second day of her visit she stays with Bean, while DH and I hang drywall for hours. We work at first like giddy high school sweethearts, saying goofy things, laughing, so happy to be together. Then we grow steady, a rhythm evolving. Our movements become synchronized: each moving one step ahead of the other, our actions overlapping only when necessary (to hold each piece of gypsum up; to wield the drill, dimpling screws into its papered surface.)

When I come home for dinner, my mother has done the incredible: the house is clean, Bean has been fed fresh cooked squash with brown rice, and all the laundry is done. To me this is an incredible feat. Most days the house limps by, in a state of constant neglect. The laundry is the worst of it, and my best friend knows me well enough to say, “Oh god, you must be really stressed,” after checking on the status of our clean towel supply--- and finding none.

DH and I are a team with housework as with other things. We clean together, cook together, and neglect housework together. But we are also lucky that neither of us have particularly high standards of clean, or else we'd drive each other mad. My mother on the other hand: the domestic superwoman. I murmur my thanks between bites of succulent herbed chicken.

She doesn’t see her strengths: afraid to trust in her own innate power, she is terrified of finding a ‘real’ job. Work. Of creating a home that no longer has, for her, its customary center (my father). After Bean is in bed we try to talk about this. Try, though the words feel like they are weighted differently: meaning one thing to her, and another to me.

And then DH calls with low blood sugar, feeling off. Exhausted maybe, or worse, possibly. He’s type 1 diabetic, and every time he calls to tell me that his blood sugar is going low it feels like I’ve swallowed Draino and it’s making it’s way down my limbs, melting them. He doesn’t feel okay by the time he makes it home. The test strips read one thing but his body another, and he’s shaking (fear? or something worse?), so we go to the emergency room.

After a few hours everything returns to normal (we think he accidentally took extra units of insulin at dinner), and we are tear-drenched and grateful when we hear the first raw cries of a newborn baby entering the world a few doors away.

It shakes us up, in a good way. Sometimes this is needed. When working on a jigsaw you can look, and look, and look and not find the piece you need until you shake the box and let the pieces fall anew, and there it is. For us, this reminder: life is precious, sweet, and fleeting. No house, no deadline worth its loss. Stress, like a tangle of barbed wire, needs to be coiled and set aside.

So today we played. A late breakfast (omlets, jammy toast, iced lattes), and then went to a home expo where Bean batted at balloons and DH oogled viking ranges and slate roofing. Tonight, just the two of us got to take a walk along the empty streets of the city under one umbrella, our feet and knees freckled with raindrops, our bodies touching.

Blueprints

After a few days off I’m back to writing, fingering the blueprints that make me who I am. I’m going back to my childhood in the Colorado mountains, and to the stories of my parent’s love and faith. I’m looking for meaning in their loneliness and isolation; I'm looking for maps that can help me to describe the context of my own life. Sometimes it feels impossible to make words describe the things my heart needs to say. Sometimes, barely, the right ones arrive on the page in the nick of time to save me from the heartache of knowing but not being able to explain.

Following the path of the dead

Opening and folding, flush petals move towards sun, where warm life stretches to the boundaries of stem pulling nectar upwards against gravity.

In the moonlight moths flock to the ghostly silhouettes of backlit petals. Their wings beat aimlessly, falling for the sham of appearances.

Hovering at the edges at twilight times, at dawn, worlds open and close like the finning gills of fish, pummeling the air like the call of a coyote.

Here perceptions shift ; the shape of the sea star gathered up becomes an interior space.

I write, I have written

I tried to think of something clever to write to describe the weekend, but I couldn’t, because all I’ve been doing is writing and I feel squeezed dry tonight. (The yeast infection, the serious shin splints and the ridiculously cold weather haven’t helped.) Every spare second for the past three days, writing. I have about 10,000 words of stuff that in the good moments I think is actually decent. Then there are the moments that I feel like flushing it all down the toilet. These moments occur in abundance. But it’s some kind of progress. The deadline is tomorrow, so it’s up to the stars then.

The highlight of the weekend: see below.