In constant motion

Five minutes to write is all I seem to be able to scrounge up amidst the hubbub of spring—renovations are now in full throttle, every day, every hour one of us is there. Marathon training is also ratcheting up—and it’s awesome to feel the effects of training: yesterday I went for a nine mile run, ending with steep up hills for several blocks.

It was amazing to feel my lungs expand, to not be out of breath, to just be able to continue at the same pace up and up. I wish I could transfer these effects to the rest of my life, but instead I find I’m whirling about like a dervish, trying to hold on the sacred in small things.

The way the maple blossoms are red and nubby at the end of every twig on the trees that line our block now; the moon, almost full in the early evening sky; playing chasing games with Bean, his giggles filling the room with delight; the five minutes DH and I snatched in bed this while Bean explored the bedroom—just the two of us, warm from sleep, snuggling; the fact that finally, finally fresh produce that doesn’t come from half the world away, is returning to the stores.

I look at the time and wonder how every night it gets to be nearly midnight so quickly. How is it possible that the hours after Bean goes to bed become a mere handful of seconds? Like humming bird wings in motion, a blur of minutes.

Delightful

The theme at Mama Says Om this week is delight. Such perfect timing for today, when the weather is pure sun, the air mild and warm, and our feet bare. Bean helped me add some color to this little list of springtime goodness. He sat on the table, bare legged and chubby thighed, and pressed his fingers into round coins of water color pigment and then swirled them onto my page. He had his own page of course, but mine was more fun, so we made it a project with as many brushes and water and glue as possible. Pure delight.

The taste of dirt.

Spring is all about mud in these parts. The roads are thick with it, and around the edges of the lawn are patches of soaked ground, perfect for poking sticks into or finding pebbles, and Bean has fallen in love with DIRT.

Where my heart finds home

When my heart begins to flutter like the fins of a hundred small fish with worry about the things I cannot control, I seek out wild places where words no longer matter. Where language is the drip of snowmelt, the rat-a-tat-tat of the early woodpecker, or the calling of the chickadee.

Today I explored a small corner of the several hundred acres of woodlands behind our house.

With Bean in the backpack I begin to climb, feeling his weight transfer to my hips. Soon I hear the thrumming of my heart in my ears, my cheeks flush hot, and my lungs find a new cadence as I as I move. At first Bean’s small voice rings out clear among the stands of trees, branches still bare save for snow in nooks between limb and trunk, but soon he grows drowsy with the steady side-to-side movement of my gait, and drifts off to sleep. Then I hear his tiny breath whispering softly above my head.

I smell snow, metallic and sharp, and the tang of newly cut wood where someone has come before and cut away a tree fallen across the path. After a while, I’m not anywhere else. Just here, balancing on small stones to cross rushing streams where the water runs clear and cold and sparkling silt gathers in pools on the mud below. Just here, where everything is still, save for the dripping of snow melt falling from trees and the trilling of an occasional bird. Just here, where my muddy tracks cross the tracks of wild turkeys, then field mice, then a vole’s. Many tracks I see are partly obscured in the slush, their edges melting.

I come to pool after pool of water, each like a piece of amber with last autumn’s leaves glowing from below the surface. Snow fell yesterday here, and everything is saturated, slippery, muddy. Sometimes my shoes stick and as I pull my foot away, the mud sucks it back.

All around me is forest. Above me: a halo of delicate branches. A filigree. A vast network of capillaries: twigs running with sap, buds just forming everywhere. Most of the trees are young—small enough to wrap my arms around, wrists overlapping; but some maples have been here longer—their trunks burly and split open, their gnarled branches reaching up thickly into the sky.

After a while I turn my attention to the worry in my bones and find it has melted with the snow. This is now. This is all I have. Moss adorned with water droplets, new shoots of green pushing up through wet snow. Here my heart is home and this is all that matters.

(p.s. I am feeling better—thank you for your kind thoughts. A day of rest was seriously needed. I may have spent most of yesterday asleep. I'm not sure. :)

Also, more pictures are here.)

Time for sleep

Even now, after a year, sleep isn’t the same. Maybe it will never be like it was pre-baby: eight hours without a single moment of semi-consciousness. Now night is a blur of dreams, wide awake moments flushed with hormonal heat, moments yanked from sleep yet again, moments still nursing.

As a result some days my moods are like salmon migrating upstream. Often, they storm the turbines of my heart. Up, then down. Flailing. Inevitably.

Today, after a weekend of sun, fun, extroversion, and no naps, I woke up exhausted, with mastitis. Again. The cumulative lack of deep sleep has caught up. Things feel tangential and disconnected.

Most weeks I stay up late into the evening. These nighttime hours are my time for painting and writing; for locating the fragile connective tissue that holds my days together. This only works if I get a nap in with Bean in the morning, though.

We curl like puppies, a tangle of limbs under the down comforter. His bare feet pressed into my belly. We sleep like this for an hour at least. Sometimes two, and everything is okay. But last week there were no naps. Days of go, go, go. Days of longer sunlight. More to do. Friends visiting. Deadlines. It’s easy for me to try to live on credit with myself. To take out debt after debt in the sleep department.

I’m trying to learn how to listen to my body. To heed the warning signs. But it’s hard when most days I feel like I accomplish so little. A handful of sentences written maybe. Possibly a load of laundry. (And of course caring for Bean.) It’s hard to allow this to be enough. I’m so goal driven, so pushy, and impatient. It’s hard to bring myself back to the present and wait for the well to fill again.

Weekend mosaic: sugar on snow & framing walls

We wake up baffled about the time. As usual, the three of us are a tangle of limbs, warm skin against skin. Bean has taken to nuzzling into the nook between my chin and shoulder when he wakes up, and today he snuggles in and starts humming a little ditty that is tuneless and dreamy. Unlike us, he’s ready to start the day when the first sun rays poke through the shades. He scoots off the bed before we can catch him and runs to greet our houseguest.

We head to Starbucks for coffee this morning with our guest, and then to the little bakery kiosk for warm croissants with ham and swiss cheese. We take the paper sacks to of goodies to the park, where Bean runs after pigeons and tries to climb everything in sight. We take turns eating mouthfuls of flakey pastry and running after him as he goes after his fancy: up the courthouse stairs, after the dog he sees at the other side of the park, or towards the gulls that have gathered for handouts. “Buh, buh, buh” he says pointing at the birds.

After our friend leaves in a flurry of waved goodbyes (waving being Bean’s newest fascination), DH and I slip away to a sugar on snow party at our neighbor’s house while Bean and the babysitter head to the park. At our house we walk hand in hand down through the field with the gnarled apple trees and stalky grasses to the neighbor’s drive. Their dog lopes down to greet us, her ears as soft as rabbit’s fur.

We meet other neighbors over bowls of snow (saved in a cooler from the last snowfall a few weeks ago) with hot syrup poured on top. The syrup turns to taffy and is sticky sweet. Everyone we meet is kind, down-to-earth and genuine: the doctor who keeps sheep, the family down the road with teenage girls dying for baby sitting jobs, the stone mason, the carpenter who also is an avid cyclist. This is what home is like.

After hours of banter we make our way back up the hill, finding time to kiss in the sunny, sawdust filled dining room before embarking on the task of framing yet another wall. It’s hours of measuring, cutting, re-cutting, laughing, kissing, hammering two-by-fours into place, with a stop for Italian sodas and a trip to the general store. Like out of an old movie, it sells everything: ice cream, panty hose, hunting rifles, sandpaper, milk, wine, fishing lures, twinkies, steaks. A good place to know about when the roads are bad.

By six it’s still light out and I pull into the driveway to find Bean digging in the dirt in the front yard. He is so absorbed in his project I barely get a hello. For dinner we share a bowl of chicken soup, Bean using his very own spoon, and somehow the stars are already out.

Feeling giddy

What a difference a day makes. Not that yesterday was really so bad—it’s just that more than twelve hours of non-stop one year old can lead to moments of well, that picture said it so much better than words ever will. But the weather has been the perfect antidote to the stir-crazies, and today we went on our first bike ride of the season—just a lazy jaunt down to the waterfront & along the bike path to the beach.

Everyone everywhere is suddenly out and about, baring skin, kissing, or lying face up to blue glazed bowl of sky that was perfectly empty of clouds today. There was a certain aliveness in the air today. Everything is getting busy. Literally and figuratively.

With the onset of warmer days, drenched with hours of sun, everything is suddenly sensuous after a winter of comparative deprivation. The college kids are everywhere, in throngs, performing intricate mating rituals, much like the pigeons in the park and the wild circling gulls at the beach.

It was Bean’s first experience of sand—he went last summer to the beach but was so small then. A tiny, barely crawling big eyed boy who stayed on mama’s lap. So much changes in a half a year. He was running every where, willy nilly down the hill. Falling, stumbling, rolling, laughing. And then he came to the sand and stopped. And sat. And promptly fell in love.

Thankfully he seems to be past the stage of eating it. Instead he fingered it, looking in utter amazement at his disappearing and reappearing toes. He stuck sticks in it and stirred it, and scooped handfuls and stirred some more.

DH and I played with him on the beach, feeling the same wild spring fever as every other creature in sight, and managed to steal a handful of moments just us, after we got back. I’m still smiling.

This pretty much sums up how I felt tonight

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.

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT by Mark Haddon

A wonderfully constructed story that it forces you to become attached to the strange habits and foibles of the lead character, Christopher, who is autistic. Without being pedantic or obtuse, the narrator's voice is exacting and transparent, bringing you into a world where the color of cars passing on the street decide the mood for the day: red cars, good mood. Black cars = bad mood; and where the mysterious death of a dog leads to an unraveling of family complexities. It is a book about love and loss, and it made me contemplate again how people make sacrifices for the ones they love, and how misunderstandings almost invariably arise when words are not enough. Hadden’s experience working with autistic youths gives his character’s voice validation, and he writes with a lithe humor and sensitivity, even when exploring issues of depression, anger and self doubt. A quick, easy read, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT pulls you from one chapter to the next with wry observations about human nature, wit, and well constructed sentences.

Self Portrait Tuesday: Time # 4--A sense of humor is about timing and possibly furniture

Ikea furniture is always packaged flat—for easier transport, and because it requires less packaging this way. It is up to you to haul your boxes of furniture home, usually tied to the roof of your too-small car or shoved precariously in the back, with the trunk open, and when you arrive, you stumble inside with the long cardboard rectangles containing what will be your bed or nightstand, and begin the hours-long process of assembling things. It takes a lot of patience, and with any luck, your techniques improve as you go along.

You take a heap of flat boards, pegs, an allen wrench, and follow the schematics that, if they have words at all, are printed in fifteen different languages. You are aware that what you’re doing is a little bit like magic. You are turning the nearly two-dimensional stack of wood and particle board, glass and wicker, into something three dimensional and useful.

You build a wicker backed chair, after putting the legs in place wrong twice. Your cat will later love to sharpen her claws on its rattan and soon it will no longer be presentable, but when you first put it together, all you see are its clean lines and lovely promise. You imagine dinner parties, and sunny mornings over coffee.

Or you put together a glass-topped table that will for years, show every condensation ring but you still can’t be bothered to buy coasters. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to make sense of the arrows and dotted lines: connect region B with point C using tool A. It might not be fine furniture, but it’s a start, and though you dream of owning REAL furniture, the kind you see in the windows of the home wares store you walk by every day, you’re happy with these flat-package creations for the time being.

This is pretty much exactly what the process of acquiring a sense of humor is like.

If you’re me, that is, and you were raised in a home with two of the most earnest, somber parents on the face of the earth. My home was also devoid of TV which contributed to a) the blossoming of my wild and vivid imagination an b) the utter absence of pop-culture sensibilities and all the accoutrements of humor that come with this terrain.

For me, sarcasm, silliness, wit, and comic timing did not come preassembled: an already functional part of my personality from day one. In fact, for years I was almost entirely lacking of anything that could possibly pass as an acceptable sense of humor.

Unfortunately sarcasm is still mostly lost on me. And, though you can slay me with a good play-on-words (my father, in all his etymological neerdieness would, on a cheery day, toss out one after another at the dinner table, and you’d have to be well versed in homophones and double-entendres to find them laugh-worthy, which I was), no amount of hanging out with boys has helped me to understand why it’s SO FUNNY to repeat one liners over and over again.

But I am gradually starting to get the hang of funny. It’s taken years for me to assemble, but I'm finally starting to get that it’s okay to JUST TAKE THINGS LIGHTLY sometimes. To NOT be serious every single minute. Years for me to finally understand that having a sense of humor, first and foremost, means having fun. It means giving yourself permission to make a fool out of yourself—to jump into things, arms and legs akimbo, laughing all the while.

And Bean is like the schematics that come with the furniture. He makes being silly easy. At 13 months, he watches everything I do, and then replicates it, often with unbelievably comic effects. He’ll take a sip of water and then let out this delightful, over-exaggerated sigh, and everybody just dies laughing. Or he’ll hear music and start wiggling his booty around with complete uninhibitedness. Finally, I'm starting to see that this is what humor is all about: over-exaggerated uninhibition. Gusto. Glee.

So we make time for this every day: we sit on the floor, roll around some, and act silly. I’m hoping that by the time he’s big, both of us will have a rip-roaring sense of humor.

Weekend sweetness

Syrup making in an outdoor evaporator, old iron spiles, sap dripping into galvanized buckets with lids to keep the squirrels out. Standing around with people we barely know (our neighbors to the west) it feels so easy to be ourselves. To laugh, to throw the slimy tennis ball for their spaniel, and lick syrup from a paper cup, still hot, unselfconsciously. We share conversation the way two friends might a sandwich, snatching juicy bits here and there while Bean crawls about on the wood pile and gets licked by the dog.

“Doggy,” he says, over and over again. “Doggy.” And we can’t help but laugh with wonder and scoop him up. He’s starting to talk!

All weekend a friend has been visiting, and our house is full of the quiet harmony that occurs when someone you love is around. An extra set of hands. Dishes done. She laughs at all my husband’s jokes and and Bean adores her. Between us we've probably had six bars of chocolate. And in the moments in between everything else, we’ve been sorting out our souls over cups of tea or red wine , talking until we’ve gathered many bright words like handfuls sea glass.

Hair cuts today (I got bangs—see above), and playing in the late evening sunlight at the waterfront, chasing Bean about the lawn and drinking up the light.

Before and during

Out in the field of trampled grass we sit under a gray bucket of sky, looking towards the roofline of our house, angled and steep against the gentle slope of the hill. Redwing blackbirds call from their perches on budding branches. Maple sugaring tomorrow with the neighbors, and the electrical wiring is done, the walls finally framed. Drywall this week, then paint. These things feel like progress but there is always more to do.

This early part of spring is always a time of disbelief for me. So long since foliage was familiar, I can’t remember the soft outlines of trees, fuller with leaves, nor can my memory slip comfortably around the color of bright green grass or blossoms. Yet it is only a matter of weeks, a half a calendar’s page of days before the landscape’s contour changes. When the peepers come and the new sap stops dripping into the buckets in the sugar maple stands, it will happen. It is the same way with the house now. We walk the rooms, so accustomed to the film of drywall dust, the nails underfoot, the exposed studs. Picking paint samples is an act of faith. But soon we'll have floors, the kitchen cabinets in place, tile underfoot in the bathroom.

Before and during feel so much longer than the after, when in reality, of course, the opposite is true.

Growing

The sun made me happy today. Bean & I went to the park and I think he felt it too: that glorious springtime light splashing our cheeks and making shadows look like blue cut-outs in a collage. We squinted and laughed and climbed the jungle gym and then went for a latte and a vanilla milk.

He’s becoming his own little self. Thoughtful, interested, pointing out everything. It seems like this past week all of a sudden he’s started to notice the most minute details in things. He points to airplanes in the sky---and last night we came home late and I cradled him in my arms so he could see the big night sky and he pointed up at the stars and started babbling excitedly, turning his head as we walked up the steps to the porch, so that he could get one last glimpse before we came inside.

Chiaroscuro of the heart

I sit at the dining room table with a good mechanical pencil and some soft lead. The house hums with the regular quiet of evening. Into the corners of my mind the hubbub of the day still seeps, like spilled ink soaking into a paper towel. I give myself a task: focus wholly on these two little boots. Let my eyes move along their contours. Stay focused. Follow with my hand.

I sketch the outline of each boot. My mind slips into a place between thinking and not—a place without language where I hover like a humming bird, millimeters from a flower anticipating sweet nectar. I start painting the shadows.

I’ve been trying to do this more: directing my focus towards everyday objects. To notice how things are. To try to accurately observe. Everything doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be.

I've begun to notice this week how often I put value on moments, on whole days: “this is horrible,” I hear myself saying, or “I hate this.” Often I am overcome with these emotions—the value I give the moment obscures it.

The shadows are hard to capture. The quality of shiny rubber catches the light. The boots are still new, only used indoors by Bean’s small feet. He’s walked about in them like a bowlegged cowboy, high stepping, with a big grin on his face. Soon they’ll be muddy, their sheen tarnished with a glaze of puddle mud.

The shadows are important. They give depth and angle. Without them the contours I’ve drawn will look distorted and not like the boots at all. It is the shadows that bring dimension, and I’m starting to understand that about my life too. It is hard for me to allow the shadows to simply be, without resenting them, or allotting them a value. Hard to come face to face with my sorrow, anger, or aggression, without letting these emotions spill over my entire perception self. Hard to let them exist alongside my breath, without holding my breath.

I’m not good at allowing these emotions to rest in the open palms of my soul, without clenching my fists.

Some nights when I paint, I let things distort, grow wild, brilliant, abstract, but tonight I want to capture things as they are. Tonight I want the chiaroscuro to be as it is, there on the table before me. Light where the bulbs above my head illuminate the toe tips. Dark where the soles touch the table top. Light where my breath comes freely. Dark where my mind comes up against the sharp edges of undefined worry.

I recall reading about this years ago when I was trying to learn how to be mindful, rather than just being mindful. I never got it then: this process of acceptance. I never understood how hard it is to sit side by side with frustration, with self pity, with a knot of anger, and allow these things to be without allowing them to flood the page with darkness. To accept them, but not to give them reign. To see them as they are, without the distortion.

I go back over the boots, working with watercolors, adding layer upon layer of red pigment to create the shadows. I begin to notice that there is shape to the shadows. They have borders. I focus my mind on the page. The meaty part of my palm rubs up against the fresh paint, smudging it. A trail of dark pigment flecks the outer edge of my hand.

I realize that often in these past few days, when work has been highly stressful for DH, I’ve allowed myself to absorb his aggression and frustration. I’ve internalized it and allowed it to spread: an unidentified fear spilling across the page of my heart, and my whirling hormones (after two years, nearly, my cycle is finally returning) have added to the blur.

When I look closely, this is what I see: the boots. Two tokens of puddle-stomping joy to be had by the small boy who I love. My anger: not really mine, but absorbed from the environment of stress I’ve been in this week. My worry: money, always money. My fear: that I am not good enough.

When I observe closely this is what I feel: breath. Tension. Focus. Acceptance. Release. Here are the boots, and my soul as I see them tonight.

Self Portrait Tuesday: Time # 3---Playtime

By the calendar, spring is here now. Yesterday the equinox, and today, a few moments of daylight more. But at this latitude it is still cold, and we are feeling cagy. Bean and I went out into our tiny urban yard today: a mess of lumpy lawn, a broken mower under the deck, the tall gray picket fence leaning in. He raced about on the uneven ground, falling often, laughing, bringing me dried leaves (this is what he does now—bring me small things he finds: lint, a scrap of paper, leaves. And these thing suddenly are precious.)

It was good for me, after days like the past handful, to go with Bean outdoors and watch hid body fill with bubbly wonder like soda in a cup. Good to remember how easy it is pocket these small instances of joy.

We twirled until we were both dizzy and then we sat and watched the world spin. I could see his eyes still tracking the orbiting yard around him, and the grin on his face wide like the grin on mine.

It’s been an interesting week of sinking deeply into words, and now I’m longing for easier things: for messy collages, for magazines, anything where the image does all the work, and words are only for decoration. I’ve realized how important daily writing is for me---not just morning pages (though they help); doing the kind of writing that requires me to return to previous work again and again, crafting sentences on a daily basis makes it possible for me to refine meaning: like making maple syrup, so much sap evaporates before there’s real sweetness to be had.

This push I’ve had to write fits with the season. This piece of Earth has turned it’s axis again toward the sun, and everything feels it: receding ice, new shoots, and randy stray cats who come yowling around our door looking for handouts. The shift in season also reflects another internal shift—my body is going though some sort of hormonal reordering, and my moods are wildly flailing all over the board.

So it was good to go outside in the cold bright air, soak up sun and twirl.

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.

Some nights I wait with an empty cup

Some nights I wait with an empty cup for the water to boil in the blue metal pot.

Some nights there is too much to define: the places where I begin and end, where my heart leaves off loving and begins needing unsayable things that make me flutter like winnowed chaff in the wind.

I want more than water and tea leaves, more than steam. Some nights the world stops in my soul and I must wait like a heart attack victim for the pulse of words and meaning to return.

I pour the liquid into my cup and burn my fingers on the steam; then bring them to my lips, hold them there, caressing their blistered heat.

Some nights, I wait for words to rush up like the steam, to catch me unaware.

13 months and running

Dear Bean,

Today was one of those days I’d prefer, mostly, to forget. You started screaming practically the minute you woke up this morning—after sitting bolt upright and immediately pointing to, and fiercely wanting, every off-limit item on my night stand (a glass of water, a pen, nail clippers). You wailed your way through getting dressed, howled shrilly when I put you down, and proceeded all day to become a wet mess of tears any time something did not go your way.

It didn’t help that today of all days our landlord decided to have the insulation in the apartment re-done---without telling us. For hours (all morning and most of the afternoon) we listened to the sound of insulation being blown into the walls, pumped through feet of wide corrugated tubing by a very loud air compressor. Hours of drilling, of metal ladders being put up and then taken down. You ran from window to window, pointing and yelling, interested in all the commotion until it was well past your regular nap time---but the noise kept you from sleep.

When they left in the afternoon, the two of us were quite grumpy at each other but grateful for a soft bed, and so we curled up together like a set of measuring spoons and slept until 5p.m.

Not every day is like this. Though you HAVE begun throwing what appear to be tantrums: your legs turn to jello. You wail. You fall to the floor. It is really very dramatic. And you’d think that perhaps I’m torturing you, or maybe, at the very least, that I’m cruel and unkind and am preventing you from a happy childhood because I won’t let you try and figure out how the outlet covers come off, or how to turn the knobs on my easel (it WILL FALL! I Promise.)

Most days however, you are a delight. You love spaghetti, the baby sitter, swings, and taking the tops off of chapstick and pens. You bring us books to read—and use our fingers to point to stuff that you like on the page. You point at everything. And you hug and nuzzle us when you’ve missed us (even if we’ve only been gone five minutes.)

Your sudden explosion in receptive language has left me floored. You understand so much now. You can follow simple directions and know the names for many things you love: book, shoes, swing, breakfast, milk, nap.

Yet I can see how the gap between receptive language and expressive language has you frustrated—and I’m sorry when I can’t figure out or anticipate from your wild “uh-uhing” and pointing what it is EXACTLY that you want. It is also wildly frustrating to you every time you come up against a boundary. Trust me kiddo, it’s wildly frustrating for me to0---especially after you do it again, and again, to see JUST EXACTLY WHERE THAT LINE IS THAT YOU CAN’T CROSS.

You are already so different this month, than last month. Last month you were a brand new one year old. Now you’re a pro at this whole toddler bit. You run—everywhere. You run away from Bella, your little girlfriend, with HER sippy cup in your hand. You play chasing games with us, and with the cats. You want to run with the big kids at the park. You want to be just like them, and I’m not sure if my heart can grow fast enough to take this. Yet I know I’ll adjust—and you’ll help me. Now when we go for walks you reach up to take my hand, as if to say, “this is the way mama!”

How I love you!

Dislocation

I just finished this painting, and am fascinated by how it turned out. The process of painting is so organic for me: far more wildly right brained than writing is. I start with a canvass, and just push paint around. I let the background sit for a couple of days, there on my easel in the middle of the room. I allow it to saturate my subconscious. I think about it in the still moments when I’m nursing Bean, or rocking him to sleep, or when I’m lying in bed just at the cusp of sleep myself. If I’m attentive, images will often alight on the cinemascape of my mind. I’ll see stalky bird legs, or a particular wash of color. Or I might pick up on a mood.

Days go by this way. Until I find the right image to follow, and then I do.

In this painting the colors of the background were so moody, I struggled with how to extend an image beyond their sheer rawness. I wanted this piece to be another in the series I’m making for upcoming café shows, so I wanted to stick with the theme I’d chosen of juxtaposing organic and inorganic; detail and chaos.

Flipping through the bird book DH gave me for Valentine's Day (along with a pair of incredible binoculars! Yes we’re like that. I gave him a telescope. And no, we didn’t discuss our presents in advance. That’s just how we think.) I found myself lingering over the image of the great blue heron: so majestic, wild, fierce, lonely.

After I’d made the bird, the dark city landscape evolved to go behind it. I was writing about dislocation and creating home at the time, and these ideas became the narrative of this painting.

In Connecticut, where I used to live and work, I’d drive along 95 and I’d feel heartsick at the trash, the urbanization, the acres of cement overrunning coastal wetlands and marshes belonging to egrets and herons, red tailed hawks, grebes, and mallards. Now I’m living northwards by several hundred miles and things seem more in synch. There are wide swaths of open space designated for the birds. Along the sandbar heading towards the islands in Lake Champlain, and huge osprey aeries sit atop telephone poles every mile or so.

But I can’t help feeling like somehow it’s up to me to be a part of making this last. It’s easy to feel entitled. Easy to say, “this is my land.” Harder to make actions reflect the fluttering wonder of my heart.

I am interested: what choices do you make consciously to protect the natural habitat where you live?