Yesterday, the vibrant beginning to a new year
It was so lovely read all of your kind birthday wishes. Thank you! Driving back from this show at midnight, the temperature hovered just above 0, and wind sent gusts of snow whirling across the road. The region of Canada around Montreal is remarkably flat—all geographic features rubbed smooth by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. Now, fields stretch out as far as the eye can see in either direction from the road. Every mile or so, there is another dairy farm with golden light spilling out onto the snow in puddles underneath the smudged glass of the barn's windows.
Things felt rushed up to the point of our departure. The company we bought flooring from delivered it to the new house yesterday, and the big truck couldn’t make it up our long snowy driveway—even after we plowed it. So we spent the better part of two hours transferring sap maple flooring into the bed of the pickup truck, and then driving it up the hill and unloading it, before leaving.
We also found ourselves caught off guard by the sudden foreignness of Montreal with it’s maze of one way streets, fast drivers, and French language. The show was intense and amazing. Thousands of lights, and multiple screens allowed the dancers on stage to interact with a computer-generated graphic environment. Once I let go of my expectations of seeing a typical Cirque performance with acrobats and clowns, I became engrossed in the intense visual and musical performance of Delirium, that narrated human being's quest for self-knowledge in a world that is at once isolated and mechnaized, and yet intensly passionate, dynamic and fleeting.
I left inspired and overwhelmed. The sheer volume and brightness almost felt invasive--- the thrumming of the drums making my heart alter its rhythm---but the seeing art in such intensity was also invigorating, and the bright technicolored images of lithe dancers in a forest of sky high dandelions spun through my dreams all night.
Today the air is cold. Hoary fingers of ice travel up windows like the fronds of tiny ferns. In the kitchen my mother-in-law is making cheese cake. Upstairs the neighbors feet make knock-knocking patterns across the floor. The house is wrapped in warmth and early evening comfort—the cats purring in the lamplight, and Bean investigating a pile of blocks. This year was a fitting way to launch the year—with intense creativity, with family, and with a handful of quiet moments.
sunset yesterday
snowy woods at dusk
Canadian farmland
silo silhouette
snow gusting across the road at midnight
Montreal tunnel
Tomorrow, 28
Tomorrow is my birthday, and today my mother sent me a box full of calla lilies. Each waxy bloom perfect, it’s yellow pistil caked with pollen.
She has never sent me flowers before—every delicate stem wrapped in cellophane---and receiving the long lovely box at the door and putting the long-necked blooms into water made me profoundly happy. It is funny that flowers can do this. So much is contained in the gesture of giving them. These flowers were saying: safety, unending love, openness.
This year I became a mother, and as a result, began to see my mother in an entirely different way. Since my father died, my mother and I have been navigating new terrain in our relationship, and it has not been without land mines. So much lies buried in the geography of our shared lives. So much love and wonder and hurt in our souls is brought to the surface when we talk, and sometimes stumbling upon each other’s every weakness—clumsily, hurtfully, without grace. But gradually we are learning to keep some things: to keep safety, to keep openness, to keep love steadfast even when we come up against these jagged edges.
So with my birthday coming tomorrow, I find myself contemplating how this day is wholly mine, and yet wholly hers as well. My birth marked a turning point in her life—that changed everything for her. I understand this now with new wonder and appreciation. I realize the sacrifice, the worry, the frustration of motherhood that she felt—and see myself in her, just as I also see how much I am her opposite.
This is the gift and the challenge of being a parent: to shepherd a little person into adulthood and then let them go to be anyone they want to be—entirely unique unto themselves. My son is already, even before he can talk, totally his own person—and I can’t help but wonder how he’ll see me throughout his life. First just as his mama, but maybe later hopefully as a source of inspiration—-and maybe as the writer, the artist, the teacher and dreamer that I am. And I wonder too what he will be like throughout his life, and how I will see him—-as a child first, and then later as his own person, and a source of inspiration.
Last year on my birthday I was immensely pregnant, right on the cusp of the unknown. I couldn’t fathom how my life would be, and my days were heavy with a certain anxiety—not to mention actual the actual heaviness of my belly. Then blink, and a year has passed, and here I am, beginning training for a marathon, in the midst of renovations on a new home, and the mother to a small boy who has started taking steps (!) towards me, eyes twinkling and arms outstretched.
Like each beautiful lily drawing drinking water from the jar, the moments of this year have been sweet and good.
Artist's Way week 3
Like several other AW bloggers I Cameron’s emphasis on ‘recovery’ does not resonate with me. Rather, I wanted to do this ‘workshop’ to nurture my muse, to hone my artistic ability, and to develop some creative momentum.
Cameron often seems to be writing for the artist who has left herself behind. She writes: Name five lives you would live if you could do anything. I balked at this. I am still young and carefree enough to be in love with my life—even when I hate it. Even when I come to the page day after day and can write nothing. When there is only pith and rind and no fruit at all.
Yet I also find that there is also great deal of truth for me in many things Cameron writes. Taking time for myself without feeling guilty—and being fully present in the time I do take (without listening to that internal voice that tells me to hurry up, or spend my time better), is something I need to practice, and the Artist’s Way is making me do this. Cameron calls this ‘developing some autonomy with your time.’ That rang true for me. Also: 'show up at the page and pay attention.'
Some things that I have enjoyed doing this week:
• Writing notes in the wide margins of the book. This makes the process of reading interactive. I begin to form my own thoughts in response to the text, and give them validity by putting them down, right away, on paper.
• Being okay with not writing morning pages. I have enough voices in my head making me feel guilty about the things I don’t do every day.
• Bringing a new attentiveness to little segments of time by myself: mini artist dates to the grocery store fruit section, on a walk about my land with a camera, an evening with a cup of tea and collage materials. I think other mothers will relate to this: time for oneself comes in small lurches when the baby is asleep.
• Instead of thinking about imaginary lives, I’ve been thinking about the lives of people that interest me. I’ve been asking myself what interests me about these people. Why do I admire them? People whose lives interest me this week are: William Stafford, Robert Bly, Peekaboo Street, Lynn Hill, Ansel Addams, Martha Grahm, Barack Obama, and Sofia Copola.
• Part of the way I am nurtured creatively is to be learning. I want to make small artist dates with myself to research some aspect of each of the people I listed this week. I want to know: how do they live their lives? What makes them who they are, unique, distinctive, creative?
And I want to know: what makes YOU unique, distinctive, creative?
My answer: I am messy. I get paint on my hands, and glue on my jeans. I am drawn to color. I use bold lines. I am fascinated by language: how it captures the essence of things, how it changes by region by country, how it holds thoughts and love and spirit. I love looking up the origins of words. This helps me know each word’s secret. When I take photographs, my eye searches for texture. When I write, my inner ear searches for a certain cadence that flows naturally. I have a thing for good pens. I use a molskine journal. I eavesdrop constantly. I am each day entirely filled with wonder at the beauty of things in this world.
Your turn.
House work
In a new book by William Stafford that I picked up on my artist date last week I read: “…The process of writing is kind of a trusting to the nowness, to the immediacy of the experience. And if you enter into the artistic endeavor with standards, already arrived-at ideas of what you want to do, you’re not entering creatively into the immediacy of encountering the materials.†Tonight, using a crowbar to pull up section after section of linoleum, I thought about how this is true for work and art both. Always, when I work with my hands, I find myself right here, in the moment. My mind grows steady, in tandem with my hands.
When I let it, the work becomes a meditation. I find the right question in the nowness of the experience. The bare simplicity of wood and wall, of metal and adhesive define a narrative; clarify the answer.
When I was a teenager my father taught me how to use sledge hammer and ax; and also how to true a line, plumb a sink, and wire an outlet. Now, when I am working with my hands, he always feels nearby. He was the kind of man who could fix carburetor or a motherboard. He understood electrical wiring, and architecture; these were the hobbies he chose to stay grounded in a life full of spiritual pondering.
I feel lucky to be able to share this kind of work with the men of my life. Then, with my father. Now, with my husband, who is in every way exactly opposite from the exacting craftsman that my father was, but just as able with his hands.
Where words sometimes leave DH and I tangled when we try to talk about what we imagine for the house, working side by side is something we do well. This is our second renovation project, and together we own many tools.
We destroyed the last of the old kitchen cabinets today, throwing them into the huge metal dumpster we’ve rented. DH leaned up against the garage door, cheering as I swung the sledge hammer into the wood. The each crack echoed a little in of our quiet valley, where the only sounds were a few nuthatches calling from the tops of birch trees.
It felt good to wield an 8lb hammer. The hear the crack of the wood, to make it splinter. And it felt good to look up and see DH smiling, his face framed in dark tousled hair, backlit by the setting sun slipping over the edge of the hill the is now ours.
seed heads in a snowy meadow
ice from the spring water cistern in the field below the house
the woods at the edge of the upper field
the branches of an heirloom apple tree
spring cistern
our house, seen from the meadow below
The lack of blogging is a direct result of this:
With some graph paper and the kind cabinet guy at Home Depot all sanity has been restored. I was actually making sense, it seems and it took all my willpower to refrain from doing the "I told you so" dance."
Our first project is the kitchen, because it is the center of our lives. Ours is a house where people always hang out by the stove, poking spoons into pots, nibbling samples of dinner, sipping wine---so we want this kitchen to be big enough to allow for this.
We started by gutting the kitchen and removing massive amounts of wallpaper. Every wall in the house that was not covered in barn board was covered in wallpaper. High quality vinyl wall paper with bold designs that made me dizzy just looking at it, but gleeful ripping it off: each piece came off in a perfect strip, no ripping, no sticking.
Last night DH and I went back to the house ourselves and just sat in each room on the floor, imagining. It is so facinating to be at this point of BEFORE. Before new paint. Before floors. Before daily life fills the spaces with laughter and talk and running feet. Before we've grown accustomed to living with those stairs and those windows.
It was snowing gently, and we ate jelly beans, and did other unsayably lovely things. I'm still smiling as a result.
I was warned about this
Things feel fierce when you try to talk in three dimensionand cannot wrap your words around something that is not yet there the square foot depth of real things: soapstone traveling the surface of the counter walls, this thick cupboards here.
Somehow because you can’t explain that which you can barely see in your minds eye everything feels like a soda bottle after it’s been shaken up.
You talk and talk and then walk away the plans spread out the table the lines and measurements in graphite, easily erasable, unlike the tone you use to say the things you’re not quite sure of.
Every hardware store clerk will nod and say he’s seen it all before. The disconnect between two minds trying to see the same thing from different angles. If geometry were a language, it would be easier.
Starting in
The Pleiades were rising above our house when we came up the long drive after dusk. The night air was cold and dark. Our house. Such a different feeling than the house we owned in Connecticut, in a jam-packed neighborhood with dogs yapping right next door, and dog poop in our flower beds. Here, the wide expanse of sky spreads out above like the dome of some great church, huge and indigo in the starlight. Here, the silence tucks itself around the corners of the house, wind rushing between the tall poplars and maples on the hill.
We began the process of removing the outdated cabinets, circa the 1970s, and were reminded again (we renovated our last house too) that every project takes twice as long. They used nails with screw-points to install the cabinets, leaving us no way to take them down gracefully. There we were, three of us with crow bars, trying to let our minds slip back in time to imagine what the workmen had thought of, nearly thirty years before. Like a puzzle, each cabinet connected to the next.
Tomorrow we’ll go back with better tools and leather gloves. Tomorrow maybe it will sink in: months of work before the place is home. But tonight in the driveway before piling into the car an hour before midnight, I couldn’t help but twirl a couple of times under the stars, my arms out-stretched. Across the valley the nearly full wedge of a waning moon was rising, like a white teacup, against the tablecloth of night.
Delight
In the Artist’s Way this week it says: “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight.â€
Here are my reasons for delight:
*I went on an artist's date to the grocery store last night and let myself revel in the scent of mangos, the big glass jugs of milk, the ripe avocados. In line I ate raspberry chocolate. And the best part? It was just me.
* We bought our house yesterday, in the middle of torrential rain. It is officially ours!
* Today it is sunny and DH’s parents have arrived to help us with babysitting and initial demolition for renovations.
Indigo Leaf Magazine has been launched and I’m so excited to be a contributor!
The Mama Says Om STORE is open, and the t-shirts are fantastic!
Eleven Months Old
Dear Bean, You are now officially one month shy of a year old, and flying. Well, almost flying. You’re cruising about and doing this funny falling thing towards the next piece of furniture with no hands, and it makes you look like you’re ready for take off. I have every reason to believe you’ll learn how to RUN before you learn to stand or walk.
This month things have become unpredictable. You climb now. You reach things impossibly high and far out of the way. You cry on demand when you want something and can’t get it. You’re getting three more teeth in at once (you currently have four), and it’s making you clingy. And you’ve stopped liking to eat any solid foods except for macaroni and cheese, green peas, pear-strawberry sauce and yogurt. You show your disapproval for all other foods by rapidly spiting it out while making totally disgusted faces and ptttt noises..
You are so funny and thoughtful. You love to make us laugh, and you furrow your brow like I do, when you concentrate. You still love to dance, and certain music makes you boogie more than other kinds. You love anything with a Latin flavor, and you shake your bootie and bob up and down to the rhythm. It makes my heart melt with happiness, watching you dance! (Nothing is better than a guy who can dance, little man. Remember this when you’re in college.)
You’re also starting to babble in long strings of sounds that sound remarkably like words, and you’ve taken to not only copying my tone but also my gestures. Apparently I shake my head when I say ‘uh-uh’ (no), and now you do this. Not just when you mean to say no, but all the time, until it makes you dizzy. You and daddy have head shaking contests in fact, over dinner. You both give up when you can’t sit up anymore.
I’m beginning to understand that everything I say and do is absorbed by you. You watch what I like and how I like it, and what I do not like. You calculate where I’ll be going, based on where I’m looking, and sprint of full tilt, especially when it’s towards doors to forbidden rooms. You love kisses. And pushing buttons. Thankfully, though you do on occasion push MY buttons, mostly the kind of buttons you really love to pushing are on phones and remote controls. You’ll sit for a very long time pushing the buttons on the phone, but when it starts beeping at you, signaling the line is dead, you look up terrified and fling the phone away from you.
You’ve started calling me ‘mama’ regularly now, and Daddy, ‘dada’ and I think it is not a mistake that when I say ‘kitty’ you say ‘di-di.’ You point to things that you want, you reach out your hands, and when all else fails you wail. You must be so annoyed that we can’t read your thoughts already. I can’t wait until I can say that I love you more than anything else in the world and you’ll know what I mean. And I can’t wait until you can say you love me too.
Until then I’m content with your fierce little hugs wrapped around my neck.
Love, Mama
HE'S BACK!
Oh glorious day, he came back! Skinnier, scragglier, and definitely hungry, but he’s here!
DH thought he saw tracks in the back yard shortly after he got back from printing up more LOST CAT posters, bringing me flowers to cheer me out of my gloom. Today I felt like giving up.
“I think I hear Mojo,†he yelled to me from the snowy back porch. “Come quick!â€
I sailed over the furniture in my way. I was at the backdoor in a heartbeat.
“There are your shoes,†DH called, “Hurry!â€
I ran out into snow in my pink cashmere socks. Sure enough, we could hear Mojo’s signature yowl. He was somewhere. It was faint. DH went out into the driveway, and I went back inside to get cat food.
“I think he’s by the front door,†DH yelled excitedly.
I could hardly move fast enough, pebbles of cat food raining down about my feet from the blue bowl.
And there he was.
He ate for about twenty minutes straight and is now cleaning his paws in his box on the radiator. I cannot quite get words around how happy I am to have him back. But let me say this: thank you to everyone who wrote with such touching stories and positive thoughts. You helped. A lot. And now excuse me while I go pet my cat.
Illustration Friday: E is for...
Working on this painting I thought of an exerpt from The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride. When I picked up the book, with paint still on my fingers, the first page I turned to contained the text I wanted. I love moments when the universe and I agree. "...One afternoon on the way home from church I asked her whether God was black or white.
A deep sigh. 'Oh boy...God's not black. He's not white. He's a spirit.'
'Does he like black or white people better?'
'He loves all people. He's a spirit.'
'What's a spirit?'
"A spirit's a spirit.'
'What color is God's sprit?'
'It doesn't have a color,' she said. 'God is the color of water.' "
Full Moon
The moon fills the sky with light. According to the weather station, the temperature feels like -15 with the windchill. Ice has formed hard and transparent below the gusting snow on the sidewalks and stoops.
When I was a teacher, full moon days were always the worst. The kids were wild and peevish, and the air would almost crackle with pent up energy.
Now I feel the same angst. All day Bean wanted to be near me, touching me, preferably ON TOP OF ME. And all day I kept going to the door, calling my cat.
Many of you have told such great stories of cats that returned. I hope this will be the case. But with the wild moon, and the plummiting temperatures, I can't help but fear the worse.
I try to remember that this is the way things happen in nature. Without any warning, things shift course. I'm trying to keep up.
Lost
He ran away on Friday and we were sure he would return. But he didn’t. The weather turned cold. It snowed inches last night and today I put posters up on telephone poles and contacted the Humane Society. He’s such a love of a cat. Totally dopy, but will tolerate even Bean’s aggressive affection. He’s not savvy at all though. He’s run into walls before, and has never seen snow. I’m not sure whether to keep hoping he’ll show up, or give up hope now before I spend any more time teary-eyed at the door yelling out into the winter air. Kind of how I feel about my writing right now also.
Pickup truck prose
Rain is falling today. The cat feels the change in temperature, and meows restlessly at the door. The snow is melting. The gutters are rife with slush and garbage. The clouds press close to the pavement, hugging the curves of the road and nestling into the valleys.
We spent the morning in the car, driving to the capitol check out a used pickup truck DH has been eyeing. Right now we’re a one-car family, but with the house closing coming up in a couple of days we’re going to start needing a truck to haul drywall and refuse. It makes sense up here, where the snow falls often in the winter and our driveway is long, to be able to plow it ourselves or haul wood.
Growing up my, my dad always had a truck. It was a 1969 Ford Ranger Camper Series Pickup with a long bed and a stick shift that was connected to the steering wheel. The seats were maroon, and the steering wheel wrapped with leather. I learned to drive in that truck—and steering it felt like maneuvering a boat. Whichever way you turned the wheel, ever-so-slightly, the whole truck went. In the winter we’d put concrete blocks in the back to improve traction.
My father was already sick when he sold it, though at the time he was still in denial about having cancer.
“I sold the pickup today,†he told me. “There were a number of calls, and the first man to come out made a deposit on it, and is bringing the rest of the money tomorrow morning.â€
“Really?†I said with a smile, remembering countless adventures in the truck my mother had nick-named Bessie.
“Yes,†he said with a little laugh. “It will almost be like having one of our daughters leaving home. I’ve had that old girl longer than any of you girls!â€
“It’s true,†I said. Then waited, as his pain interrupted us, and his voice grew taught and shallow.
“That’s all I can do now,†he said.
The truck we looked at today is also a Ford. Dark red, with all the plushness of modernity: power lock windows, airbags, antilock breaks. We make a plan to come back to haggle over the price after we've research its blue book costs, and then drive back along the rain-slick highway.
I notice a lone crow on the high branches of a bare tree. The road is often obscured with fog. I grow pensive. Right now my life is abundant with firsts. Each day Bean makes another discovery: yesterday he took his first wild wobbling steps towards me away from the couch he’d been holding on to. Now there is a lump in my throat and I catch myself wondering what it is like to be at the end of one’s life, to have each day filled with lasts.
I wonder if my father thought about the last time he drove. About the last time he walked. And then there were those days where each time he awoke, he must have contemplated the awe of waking, and wondered when he would not.
It always catches me off guard when I find memories of my father occupying my mind in the vivid way that they are today. I’ve grown used to not having him around, and recently my life has been so abundant with other things I don’t stop to contemplate the emptiness I sometimes feel.
***
Even in great sorrow your eyes are like a pair of darting bluebirds, across a stormy summer sky. Two bright flecks of all that has come before and will return, to the eternal clockwork of the earth.
Right now you seem like the edges of a lake in early spring, ice turning black and hollow waiting for the shuddering crush of a turtle’s first foot print; the rising of water levels; the tug of vernal currents; life that surely follows winter’s shallow death.
Napping
Bean and I just awoke from a nap. I’m still recovering from being sick so I gratefully accepted the opportunity to nap this morning. He’s so funny when he wakes. His eyes open, and then boing! he’s up, his body still rocking with the velocity of his sudden movement.
His eyes are always wide. His cheeks flushed with the roses of sleep. Then a grin spreads out to the corners of his face and he clambers over my body to look out the window. He drags his monkey with him, and then starts playing the peek-a-boo game I showed him: where we put the monkey’s paw over his eyes and then Bean removes it and I say “PEEK-A-BOO†and then I make the monkey dance. Bean giggles then, and starts dancing too, his little bootie bopping about amongst the pillows.
I love our moments together in bed, still drenched with sleep. While he tumbles about, I sift through my blurry sleep-scented thoughts, gathering the fragments of my dreams like a beachcomber picking shells. It is time where everything is present: before the lists crowd in, before I am scattered back over the surface of the day.
Some days feel like the top of the mountain is always just a little farther
Yesterday I woke up with a sore throat and spent the day mostly trying to sleep with an almost-toddler who wanted to mostly NOT SLEEP. This involved several low points in parenting, including DH and I getting on each other's last nerve, while Bean pulled CD after CD of the shelf and let it go shattering onto the floor. We did manage to resuscitate the evening somewhat, with a trip to Barns & Noble where we drank tea and leafed through the most recent celeb gossip magazines. (Yes, I do that. Shamelessly.) We also poked through a tile store with the most exquisite handmade tile, and I grabbed several leaflets showcasing exotic glazes and mosaics—thinking I might use them as ephemera for collages.
But last night was mostly like an extension of the more tedious moments of yesterday---with Bean nuzzling up against my face, as if he needed very air I exhaled on his cheek to believe I was there. The minute I got up to pee he began wailing so fiercely, you'd believe that I had left him in the woods surrounded by a pack of wild dogs, rather than in DH's big strong arms.
Now I’ve got him occupied with various kitchen containers and blocks, but this was only after a meltdown of mammoth proportions that involved the proverbial river of snot and much gnashing of teeth. It’s sure to last all of five minutes before he makes his way back to directly underfoot. Where he’ll stand clenching my leg and whining plaintively, before he melts entirely into a little angry puddle on the floor. I’m such a fuzzy headed wimp when I’m sick. I have two deadlines I’ve been procrastinating on and I suddenly can’t imagine meeting them. I can’t imagine staying awake or thinking anything cogent long enough to meet them.
I’ll leave you on a high note though. The Artist’s Way this week asks you to think about five lives you would live if you were not living your own. At first I had a very hard time answering this, because I LIKE living my life. Most days (when I’m not sniveling and sick) I like who I am becoming and love who I’ve decided to travel this road of becoming with. I’m passionate about the things I’ve chosen—writing, and art and teaching, even on the days when I feel like I’ll never really amount to anything in any one of those fields. But, if I had to pick, here is what I’d be—or whose life I would live:
• A homeopathic OBGYN/Family Practice Doctor • A photographer for National Geographic • Barbara Kingsolver • Scarlett Johansson • Mary Oliver
Of course, the AW also tells you to figure out some way to do something that lives out even the very smallest part of one of those lives, but I'm too blurry to think creatively at the moment. Instead, I'll put it on you: What would you be? Or who?
The texture of moments on a winter hike
Bright winter sunlight like a pitcher of lemonade spread across the morning sky. Today was one of those days where each moment was saturated with goodness. A long nap with Bean curled in the nook of my arm, my nose pressed into the softness of his hair. Pad thai at the local noodle shop with painted paper umbrellas hanging from the ceiling and pink plastic chopsticks. A hike up a small mountain in late afternoon. The land around rubbed flat ages ago by a glacier. Tall black pine silhouettes and the sun setting into a ragged cloud line, like someone’s white laundry hung out to dry after being washed with a lone red sock.
We passed two old men sitting on mono skis, taking a rest shooting the breeze in the middle of the trail while their dogs sniffed the tell tale yellow signatures that marked snow banks. A dad and his son on a sled shot by us like a rocket, the grin on his kid’s face spreading out into the whizzing air around his head.
The moon was so milky and almost full on our way back down the trail that our figures cast pale shadows on the ground, our bodies backlit. Bean in the backpack sang the whole time and stuck his tongue out inquisitively into the cold air. His cheeks like cherry stains, ruddy and round, tucked into the hood of his snowsuit.
Heading towards home we stopped at a coffee shop to eat nutty carrot cake and cappuccinos, and the warmth of the cup made my hands tingle.
setting sun
me & the Bean
moon tree
underbrush
twilight over the valley
Total self-absorption (in the best way possible)
First:)I want to do a little giddy dance and say THANK YOU a zillion times to all you exquisite people who nominated me for the BOBS best Art/Photo blog! I am blown away every single day by the generocity and encouragement and positive feedback I get from the people who come here often.
Second:) Krystyn is sooo super spiffy with her web design skills. Check out the absolutely rockin' desktops she created at MamaSaysOm using some of my art. Heart her!
Third:) I'm officially jumping on the de-lurking bandwagon. I totally check my blog stats (ah-hem, on ocasion.) I know you're out there. If you're reading this and you don't usually comment, now is you're time to say hi. It would make my day!
Finding what it takes
Running along the lake in yak tracks, the late sun on the horizon above the lake looked like someone spread apricot jam across a rent in the clouds. Snowflakes hit my face. Ice below the snow along the path was slick and see-through. The lake waves cut up onto the cold pebbles of the shore, like a thousand icy tongues. The air was cold when I sucked it in, and each exhalation left a cloud of heat and moisture hovering just behind me for a second in the winter air.
It was the first time I’ve run along the bike path since snow has fallen, and it felt just like running in sand. It took more effort and balance than running on macadam, but there was also a certain new thrill to having the terrain be constantly changing. Today I realized that I’ve gotten to a new place about running in my head: my mind wants to run now and my body follows.
This didn’t happen accidentally or suddenly. It’s taken six months of repeated motion to get my brain in the habit of running—to form a groove in my being where my mind slips now with ease. And I know that if I stopped, given a couple of weeks—no more than a month—it would be gone. But today I sort of marveled at the capacity my mind has to move beyond the immediate intense pain of shin splints (the product of new shoes or the crazy jackrabbit sprint I’ve been doing) and for a few moments at least allow me to feel like I can do anything.
I know this is why the Juila Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way that it is vital to do morning pages and to go on ‘artist dates’ with oneself. Because it is exactly this inner freedom that gradually develops, creating momentum. I would never have imagined I’d be on the brink of committing to start training for a marathon (!), and yet here I am, wanting to test my outer limits. Wanting to do more than just run a couple miles. And I know that after if I can stick with writing every morning, taking time for myself to fuel my artistic soul, I will develop a similar kind of creative momentum.
Right now when it comes to writing that tricky shadow side of myself (that is quick to sabotage the best of my intentions) prickles up every time I sit down to write. I chicken out, write only first drafts, balk at following through. But I’m starting to realize that just as this side of myself exist, so does the fiery side that enables me to burn through my own resistance. This is why I’ve jumped in.