Love is...

In the atmosphere above the sun the sky is dark and stars whirl. From there love scatters earthward arcing the distance between the divine and us, --and I am drenched with it.

In the way my small boy, newly walking, curls his fingers tightly around my hand and together we cross the room; or the way my man cups my face in his hands, still fiercely with want and tenderness after seven years.

Self Portrait Tuesday: All Of Me # 2

When Bean was napping and the light was good I grabbed my camera and started making faces. Not my usual camera faces---but the ones I really make when I’m animated, or angry, or being silly. The ones that the muscles in my face revert to unconsciously---the expressions that I know the FEEL of, but not the look of.

It was fascinating to discover what I really look like, ALL OF ME. I laughed so hard going through these (unedited) photos. I kept saying to myself, “I look like that, when I’m doing that?”

The bottom right picture may have been my attempt at looking demur. I nearly peed my pants when I saw it. Is THIS is the look I’ve used for years to score countless men? How has it possibly worked? Later, I asked my husband about it. He laughed, then confirmed that YES, I do actually make those faces, quite often. Then he told me just how much he loves me. All of me. And I’m sure I made some sort of rediculous face.

The shutter clicks and a short second, or maybe two are captured. Moments are not meant to be frozen. They are nimble and fleeting, one always melting into the next organically and without pause. There is something remarkably unnatural about the ability to capture a scene, an expression, light, movement, suddenly and permanently on the page with a camera. For me it has become a double edged sword: with my camera I force myself to notice unique shots; to notice more; to pay attention to light and texture and context. But at the same time when I’m with my camera I’m not interacting directly with my environment---suddenly I have a buffer, a piece of equipment that makes it possible to remove myself somewhat from the immediacy of the moment.

It was interesting to turn this lens on myself—to see what kind of observation and objectivity it could bring.

Instead of analyzing each frame for the negative attributes as I am prone to do, I allowed myself to simply enjoy these. To be wildly entertained. MY LIPS DO SOME DAMN AMAZING THINGS, people (ergo second row, forth from the left).

The best thing about this activity was that it made me take myself lightly. I am so much more than a collection of snapshots—and seeing them made me realize this. People see my smile and tell me it is beautiful—not because it is perfect, but because it is full of life. I smile with my heart. Laugh with my eyes. Talk with my hands. A hundred expressions pass across my face in the span of a conversation, and judging from the few I captured here, they’re mostly ridiculous. But, when they’re stitched together into the fabric of the moment, they make me.

Inspiration Monday # 1

My inspiration for this week comes from: Irene, who made this precious hat for Bean’s birthday (on Thursday), and this lovely neckwarmer for me.

Her way of writing---almost prose poetry---is so subtle, so full of emotion, that it always hits me right here, in my heart; makes me breathe deeper, makes me linger over her words.

Somehow she manages to write every day, take incredible self portraits and raise beautiful sons. She makes me laugh, makes me wish I live in Paris, and makes me wish I could knit. The slivers of wisdom and insight she has shared with me have had a direct impact on my writing life (and yes, Irene, you are SO going into the ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS if I ever write my book.)

A long day

Yesterday, winter festivities

I love living in a place where instead of complaining about the cold, people celebrate it for a good cause. There was hot coffee to be had amidst the revelry, as groups of costume clad folk made their way down to the water and JUMPED IN. There was whooping and gafawing and general yodeling going on as the DJ played "Cold as Ice" and brave souls got wet. Mind you, they needed to break the ice from the water first. I'm not a brave soul, but I took pictures.

We had a wonderful morning outside in bright winter sunlight, an afternoon nap that stretched on until early evening---the three of us to a bed. Then I managed to squeeze in a five mile run at the gym which brought my first week of marathon training to a close with my cumulative total miles run adding up to twenty. This is the first winter I haven't gone into hibernation, and I'm pretty thrilled.

Enjoy the chilly pics. There are more here.

Ski jump eyelashes.

Ice sculpture

Rocks on ice.

Uncarved blocks of ice.

Chilly.

Back to the usual mess making

Last night before I put Bean to bed I took out the new finger paints I'd bought and put paper down on the bathroom floor. Bean was so excited: alternately squealing with glee and furrowing his brows in concentration. He made it a full body experience, of course---and then I plunked him straight into a warm bath. What could be better?

She's okay!

She is okay. Home from the hospital with several bruises---but she was cracking jokes over the phone. She has always been like this---somehow upbeat right in the midst of adversity. When she was little every picture she drew had a sunshine in it---always, and she's like this still a little---though I'm sure she'd be the first to claim that the opposite is true. It's strange to have a moment like this happen: a phone call and then suddenly a whole expanse of unknowns. Your mind wanders out to the brink of what loss might look like and lingers there, shaking.

Tonight hearing her voice made tears spring up unexpectedly with relief. We're different, and we fight sometimes, but today reminded me that this is not what matters. What matters is each moment living. Each moment that we're talking and painting and working things out. Each moment breathing is good. Each moment laughing---better.

Thank you for all your kind thoughts & good wishes!

Unexpected

My sister was in a car accident this afternoon, and I’m here, half the country away waiting for any news---there isn’t much yet, she’s in the hospital and her husband is trying his best to hold it all together while fielding phone calls from us and trying to get permission to see her.

Up until a moment like this happens, you can’t imagine what it will be like. The sudden prickly heat of fear traveling up your neck. The worry that makes your armpits damp, makes your voice quaver, makes you laugh nervously. There is no way of being able to know how the minutes suddenly slow. How you want to bargain with whatever profound forces are involved in such events: want to rewind time and have it happen differently.

Please send your thoughts winging out into universe her way. I love her dearly.

Notes

I wear my shearling mittens and step out into the night. I need some time away from the house; from the repetition of the too-small space of the apartment and the constant narrative of things I need to do.

The cold air hits my face and make my teeth ache. On the sidewalk, a dusting of snow reveals the patterns of foot traffic, coming and going, that are usually invisible. I walk the same direction as another set of tracks for a few blocks, then they go on straight and I turn.

I push open the red door of a small bohemian café, order chai, and wedge myself into a corner booth with my notebook. The room swells with music. On the tiny stage about six feet away, a jazz band untangles a mess of notes that say more about sanguine longing, and bravado, sorrow and wonder, than anything I’ll be able to write.

It takes me a while to arrive. To stop feeling self conscious: with my long legs in a too small corner. But gradually I do. I let the music alter me the way a photograph changes hue under running water. I let the piano player’s wild notes dance across my brain, scattering the tension I’ve felt for days—and then the trumpeter picks up his horn and plays notes that are plaintive and tremulous and bold and I almost want to cry.

In between sets, when my eyes and my entire body are not wrapped up in the music, I take sips of chai and let my pen work its way across the page. First I write about the room: the heat, the red light spilling over the tables, the people in twos and threes mostly sitting around small tables sipping red wine. Then I sketch. Quick line drawings of chairs and trumpets, the drummers hands, the bass player’s back. When I write again it is about deeper things that have to do with love and loss, and my words, like my emotions scatter messily across the page.

Being here is somehow dislocating. I’m suddenly in limbo, not sure who I am. The person I am here in the midst of all this art and energy and verve is not the same person I am at home—where I’m somebody’s mother and dishes invariably need doing.

In the booth next to me two college girls chatter and I love their sloppy, carefree way of pulling together an outfit out of wooly boots, many necklaces and hoop earrings. When did I get so serious about clothing, I wonder? Almost everything I own is practical and understated. My camel colored cable knit sweater and sand washed jeans are boring in this room full of artist types who take risks with what they wear: horn rimmed glasses, hats with sequins, beaded chandelier earrings, plaid scarves and lovely faux fur trimmed coats.

The piano player is wearing a train conductor hat, and it works well with his jaw line. In the lamplight he is handsome—but more so because of the way his fingers move, pulling beauty and emotion out of black and white keys. I let my words follow the notes he plays—wildly, all over the place. I stop trying to write anything meaningful, and instead write whatever comes to mind, drawing lines between incongruous ideas like the pauses the players take between sets. Gradually, the words I scribble begin translating back and forth between the pieces of me, until I start feeling whole again.

When they take a break, the bass player, the drummer and the pianist go up to the bar and order dark beers in tall glasses. They stand around laughing, sipping their drinks. The place clears out a little an I let my shoulders relax. Opposite me, the trumpeter sits, still playing softly, eyes closed. I listen as he follows phrase, then carries out one string of notes until it becomes a wavering song of keening or rejoicing. He plays so tenderly, so quietly, it’s hard to hear against the ruckus gafaws and rowdy greetings.

More people push through the door, bringing the cold air with them, and as the musicians settle down for one final set before they count their tips in the big metal bowl, I toss my dollars in and leave—grateful for these moments of heat and wonder and song.

Clutter

February always gives me cabin fever. It is that month before anything noticeably spring-like happens: before buds swell or mud arrives—but after the magic of winter has worn off somewhat; when it just feels cold out no matter what, and all the stores rub it in by displaying only flip flops and little skirts (this should not be allowed, I think.)

It doesn’t help this February DH, Bean and I are living in about 900 square feet of space and we’re straining at the gussets. Maintaining tidiness here feels like trying to keep a house of cards erect in a windstorm.

I’d give a lot for a dishwasher tonight (the sink drain keeps clogging, and it gives me the heebie-jeebies to unclog it.) More for a basement that doesn’t flood with every rain storm (our boxes of books and summer clothes sit damply on pallets).

Tonight I am restless with longing: for a bedroom that is JUST a bedroom (not a nursery, and the epicenter for endless heaps of laundry), for a studio (that is NOT the dining room table), for ample cupboards and closets and shelves to store things in properly

I’m bumping up against my own thoughts like clothes on tumble dry. I feel wrung out.

Self Portrait Tuesday: All Of Me # 1

My nails are almost always dirty and I have square hands. Usually my cuticles are stained with paint, my nails trimmed irreverently so that they’re short, not shaped. My knuckles boney, veins bulge.

I used to be embarrassed by my hands, boyish and un-ladylike. But gradually I’ve grown to love all that they are. My father’s hands—a size smaller. Able hands, strong hands.

I climb crags, wield a hammer, kneed bread, and paint all with my hands. I make love, bathe my son, pet the cat, and pull weeds all with my hands.

They don’t dress up well. They are not made for “hey Vito is my car red-y?” red. But they are capable of a thousand finely tuned maneuvers. In the kinesthetic memory of my fingers the expanse of my keyboard is stored.

I can type almost as fast as I think.

Synchronicity – events that seem related but are not obviously caused by one another

A week ago I saw a flyer advertising baby sitting and took down the number. DH and I had been talking about how we’re finally ready to start letting someone take care of Bean for a couple hours during the week while we work together on the house, so we called. She was wonderful, and tonight she came and spent an hour with Bean while DH and I walked down town together like teenagers—just us, holding hands.

We stopped for chai (for me) and espresso (for him) and a chocolate filled pastry (to share, licking the chocolate off our fingers), and then went to the bookstore where I devoured (on a mini artist date) the glossy spreads in design magazinesand DH wandered off to the fantasy section.

When we left the bookstore it is snowing gently. Back home, Bean was happy and the babysitter was happy (which made me unbelievably happy, and terribly relieved). After she left, friends stopped by and we had an impromptu takeout dinner—pad thai, dumplings, tofu, spicy noodles. Then I took over the table with my boxes of scraps, paints, gel, glue sticks, brushes.

I've booked three art showings in cafes this week, and I'm unbelievably excited. (One thing I have done as a result of the Artist’s Way has been to acknowledge and set the ball in motion on some of the things that I've had on my dream list for way too long. Cafe art showings has been one of those things.) For the first time since I was a kid, I’m finally allowing myself to say it regularly. I am an artist.

Meeting the neighbors

We went to the house around noon today, with plans to walk the boundaries of our property—and discovered an entire field that is ours, that we didn’t know about. It is an old meadow, grown tall with hickory and crab apple saplings. The week has been warm, as though a chinook wind were blowing from the east, already bringing spring. Almost all the snow has melted, and the mud is thick along the road approaching our house. Only on the shadiest slopes of the hill snow still lingers in white patches like an Andrew Wyeth painting. Shelf fungus and moss grows thickly on the fallen branches—ripped from trunks in the ice storm last October.

Already I am itching to keep field notes in a new moleskine where I can press beech leaves and wild grasses into the pages, or sketch the deer tracks and raccoon turds I found today along one of the old stone walls that skirt the property. Today I brought my camera and clambered up the quartz and granite boulders at the back edge of the woods, and then down to the splashing creek. It sounded deeper than it is—the ground is so satturated from recent rains, the water echoes off it like a drum.

The stream meanders down a channel of mud and rocks towards the road and the neighbor's land. We walk there next to say hello—something both of us are kind of hesitant to do. But, as is generally the case, those first encounters are more awkward in our heads than they are in person and when we knock at the neighbor’s door they both answer, soot on their hands.

“Come on in,” she says, without asking us who we are or why we’re there.

So there we are, crossing over the threshold into their snug living room, and mumbling about how we just bought the house on the hill.

He is cleaning their wood burning stove, but stops, brushes off his hands, and shakes ours. He has big limpid blue eyes, graying hair, and a dark smudge over one shaggy eyebrow.

As I say the words, “the house on the hill,” her eyes immediately tear up. I ask, “Did you know the woman who lived there?”

“I was with her when she died,” she says. “We were very close. She was the nicest lady in the world.” Then she tells us about the flowers she’s planted in our yard that will surprise us in the spring—and all about our other neighbors.

He stands there grinning, adding tidbits to the story. Egging her on when she leaves the juicy details out. “You’ve got to know about Crazy Bob,” he says. And also about kooky Kay, whose husband died years ago and her floor hasn’t been cleaned since, or so the story goes.

But they also tell us about our immediate neighbors—a doctor, a mechanic, a vet—who throw a sugaring off party each spring and go cross country skiing together, and who’ve known each other for years.

We can’t help but feel young—most of our neighbors have kids our age. But they put us at ease—extending an invitation already to the sugaring party, where, they promise, we’ll meet everyone. Before we leave she promises to help me with my garden in the spring, then blows Bean kisses in the drive as we walk back to our house.

Inside, the house is warm. The air is dusty, the floors stripped down to the plywood. DH has been going over after work, ripping down walls and reframing, and already the difference is huge. Like any renovation project things are unexpected: the set of oak stairs masked beneath hideous carpet—but also the furnace so old it will need replacing before next winter. We stand together—the three of us—eating hot pastrami sandwiches and planning out where walls will go. Bean takes bites of the bread with his new teeth and squirms in my arms. Soon we will be able to come here and let him run around on the grass. Soon, this will be home.

Give and you shall recieve

I have now finished half of the postcards for the swap I organized (of course, they were supposed to be mailed by February 1st, but I'm terrible with deadlines.) You can go here to see them up close. It has been absolutely delightful to make them—each piece is mixed media: watercolor fish with vintage stamps, bits of ephemera, acrylics and varnish.

There is something so freeing about creating little pieces of art and sending them off. A part of me falls in love with each piece I create. A part of me wants to hoard them. But I also believe that there is a principle in the universe that says: give abundantly and you shall receive abundantly. So I continue to send my art out into the world. Little pieces carrying the joy of my soul--and in return I find I am continually showered with a profusion of good things. Sudden opportunities, fresh creativity, new friends, and kind accolades keep pouring into my life. I am so grateful.

Thank you to everyone who voted for me in the BOBS! Your friendship, your support, and your kind words satisfy a much deeper part of my being than the actual win does. Though I admit, I’m terribly tickled. :)

My monkey boy

Since he has started walking he has become a BIG KID over night. One who can eat a banana all by himself. If it weren't for the fact that he's started waking me up in the morning by stroking my cheeks and hair, an cooing loving little songs in my ear, I think my heart might not be able manage his independence.

Words that fill me up

Blue Poppy calls it molting, and the gawky, awkward, half-feathered stage of creative flux is a bit like that, I think. This week I’ve begun to realize just how easily I allow myself to loose sight of the deeper currents in my life. How I smear over them with surface stuff, act overwhelmed, or antsy or angry, when really my inner self is asking to be heard. I’ve started to stop, when I hear myself take on a certain impatient snippy tone—and doing a little check in: asking myself what I really need, what I’m really feeling anxious or antsy about.

I’ve discovered I have a torrent of irrational worries running just below the surface. Many of these worries revolve around my son: the pedantic little whispers of guilt and anxiety I think every new parent must hear. But there are also other voices that whisper the narratives of my unvoiced fear of failure—or success, depending which way that coin is tossed.

This week’s challenge in The Artist’s Way, was not to read anything. And, as Cameron predicted I balked at this, but not for the reasons she laid out anticipating my resistance. Since my son’s birth, I don’t have the chunks of time commuting back and forth on the train that I used to have to sink my teeth into a book, and the leisure of reading over a bowl of cereal has gone out the window (along with sleeping in, or being able go to the bathroom unattended). Overall I have read much less this year than in any year prior, and this week I realized that there is a great hunger in my being for good stories and true words.

So instead of NOT reading this week, I decided to bring new attention to my reading life—and to make conscious choices about reading, or not.

Instead of reading my favorite blogs, tonight I did art. For hours. And it was exhilarating to sit with a big pot of tea—talking on the phone with one of my beloved friends, and paint. But it was also exhilarating this morning to make the choice TO read, consciously and deeply from The Answers Are Inside the Mountains by William Stafford.

His words about writing, about poetry, and about creating are food for my soul. His sentences are saturated with intent observations about being human in this world, and his writing conveys and a deep sense of gratitude. This resonates with me, and I feel satisfied when I take the time to read his words.

I continue to watch myself teeter back and forth on a tightrope of annoyance and gratitude at having begun The Artist’s Way. I do not find Cameron’s writing to be rich with original thought or nourishing for my soul in the way that Stafford’s poems are, and often I resent her presumptions about audience (I do not feel in recovery, nor I do not feel stifled creatively.) But much fruit has come from responding to her questioning and pushing. I am growing as a result. Molting even, and I’ll welcome a new set of wings.

So for the rest of the week I will continue to read, but to be alert to it. Each time my eyes are pulled to the page I will take note. I want to try to understand this hunger I have for words—and I want to be clear about the times when I use them as escape. Like eating well, my intent is to read well.

(The above image is from a series of small pieces I'm doing for a postcard swap.)

Self Portrait

Creative Womb gave this challenge: take some pictures of yourself in good light---that you like; that you don't allow yourself to pick apart right away. So, in preparation for the harder stuff, and in honor of my own creative self, here are a couple shots I took today by the window looking at the calla lillies my mother sent. This is hard stuff. Looking straight at yourself. Allowing yourself to be, without revisions, without commentary. Try it. I dare you!

First steps

Bean started WALKING today. For the past couple weeks he’s been doing these graceful nearly-running transitions between pieces of furniture, hands free, and we’ve been able to coax him to let go of something and sort of stumble-tumble towards us for a few steps for the past week or so. But today he really walked.

I saw the exact moment when it clicked for him—when he realized “I’M STANDING, AND I’M NOT FALLING, AND NOW I’M MOVING FORWARD.” He was holding onto a chair and then let go and took a step towards me, and I started clapping and he stopped moving and just stood still. All on his own. In the middle of the room.

It was as if a lightening bolt of recognition shot through him. He started beaming this wide, pleased grin. And then he took steps towards me. Determined little steps, one after the next, all by himself.

Since that moment he’s walked nearly all the way across the living room, his lower lip sucked in with concentration. Like quicksilver, the neurons in his brain are sending a thousand instantaneous messages urging him to try it again, and again, and again. Out into the middle of the room, away from the peripheries, the furniture, the safety net of mama’s legs—and into the wide expanse of open floor. Suddenly bipedal. Upright.

These steps are his first independent steps towards me, and yet his first steps away from me, as his own person.

This leaves me breathless with wonder and love and terror all at once. There are mornings like this morning—and nights like last night, where everything is awry and he pushes every button and I am left feeling frantic and angry at the end of wrestling him to sleep, or calming him down. He has become so clear about what he wants—and so frustrated and mad when his desires are not met. When he can’t have my cell phone to play with, or worse--when he wants to MUNCH on me while nursing, and I pull away with a fierce yelp, he dissolves in tears. First of remorse, then of fury.

Something has definitely shifted for him. He is aware of himself differently—and aware of his own needs differently. He has preferences. He longs for me intensely when I’m gone and wraps his arms around my neck tightly when I return. He looks up for approval when he tries something new—or stops, just before he does something dastardly, to check in and see if he’s allowed. He has begun to understand that there is an order to things. That there are boundaries. And with each boundary, he pushes to find just how far he can go before he finds it.

It amazes me that this deepening awareness coincides with the beginning of upright independent mobility. Just as he is beginning to discover that there are both obvious boundaries (he no longer crawls headlong towards the edge of the bed without stopping) and implied boundaries (he looks to me, with a wily grin, just before he reaches out to pull CDs off the shelf, because he knows I’ll stop him), he has suddenly gained an entirely different perspective on the world. This is the beginning of doing it his own self.

Already he wants to drink from a cup, his own self. He wants to eat, his own self. He wants to claim this world for his own self. I can only pray I’ll have the patience to navigate this new terrain. Already he has learned how to shake his head “no” and when he wants to do something himself that I am trying to do for him, he shakes his head, “no, no, no.” I nod my head, “yes, yes, yes.”

Now begins the challenge of being consistent. Of remaining steadfast like a buoy, providing him with the security of limits. But also, this is the beginning of a new dance. One where he leads sometimes, and I follow after.

Pause

The days slip by, a blur of busy moments. Sometimes before I really feel like day is here, night returns. I catch myself going too fast. I try to pause. I make tea and savor the whole cup: chai sweetened with raw sugar and milk.

Face to face

I joined a marathon training class last week, and on Tuesday I sat in a room with twenty other people (all but two of which were women) for the first class, where we got to meet each other, talk about our goals, and take a peak at the crazy running schedule we’ve all decided to partake of that will have us running 40 miles a week by early May.

It was funny sitting there, looking at each woman’s face. I imagine all of us were doing the same thing: looking at each other. Sizing each other up in one way or another—looking for inspiration or camaraderie or competition. Yet aside from our names (written on blue and white labels on our shirts) and our previous running experience, we shared very little with one another verbally; most of the information we gathered about each other was based on our visual impressions.

I think it is interesting that when we encounter another person face to face we immediately label them based on the visual information we gather in those few split seconds of meeting. First we label gender. Our minds get hung up on this. If it isn’t easy to discern, we keep looking for identifiers—long hair maybe, or breasts or an angular jaw. Then we look for similarities to ourselves: age, attire, and physical stature, all become a part of the equation we seem to use to decide if we have enough in common to take the risk of starting a conversation.

It takes so much to get past this visual labeling system, and because of it, it often takes a long time to get to know someone new. There are many delicate ‘first date’ conversations as we seek to align ourselves compatibly with one another. Information is conveyed through actions and looks just as much as it is conveyed through words. By comparison, the medium of the blog makes this visual labeling system take the back seat. Through a blog, it is easy to get right to the heart of things—to just out and say things, divulging our selves without the varnish we put on for first impressions.

Through blogging I have found many women who I am inspired by, and feel connected to because of our shared experiences, or insights, or humor, or art. Yet I wonder: would we have made these connections if we had initially met as strangers face to face? Sitting there in a room full of other women, each of us looking with wide eyes at the training schedule for all the remaining weeks between now and the end of May, I wanted for just a moment to not see them, and to have instead see the things that really matter to them.

I would know so much more about the woman sitting across from me if I could know that she likes dark plums, black tea, and writing with India ink, and that she just broken up with her boyfriend of four years. Instead all I could gather was that she was probably in her early thirties, has short hair and red shoes, and took a really long time to fill out the marathon registration page.

I can’t help but wonder: am I the only one who feels this way, or is it something innate in the way we interact? Is it easier to take risks with friendship when you don’t have to think about that coffee stain on your shirt or the way your breath smells. Is more at stake when we meet face to face than there is across the page?