Saturday Notebook
I breathe. I sleep. I carry the loss of life and injury in a fragile compartment next to my heart, each moment grateful, each moment heartbroken. And then I remember to be right here.
No farther than this moment with birds spiraling up into the evening sky. No farther than their flight of air and feathers, silhouettes against the bright balloons of hedonists, drinking the good beauty of the day drawing to a close.
Then I breathe again. I breath in air sweet with drying hay, and leaves turning hue. Again I am learning how to bow at the alter of the moment. Again I am learning that now is all I have.
Friday Notebook
Know this: Your life is precious. YOU are precious. Carry the gift of your life in both your hands with utter awe and gratitude. Everything can turn in a moment. Everything.
I'm sorry I can't write more--I'm not sure about this medium of blog when it comes to matters of deep crisis and privacy, but I also love the community I've found here and need to share some small image of what has taken place in my life in the past few days. Those of you who know me well will probably understand this post. Those who do not, should read it simply as a reminder. Live your life fully. Love yourself and your family. Be grateful for every single day.
Edited to add: Thank you for all your concerned emails. I am okay and my family is okay, for which I am deeply grateful. I was in shooting at the school where I work, and not all of my colleagues are okay.
Wednesday Notebook
Have you ever felt like your heart is outside you, irretrievably scattered like the thousand small pieces in some jigsaw puzzle without a box?
Was it like this? Coming home after hours (like decades) away, and your little one doesn't want to accept your hug, and then calls for Daddy when you're putting him to bed.
Tell me, have you ever felt this fragility, this quaking tenderness, this dislocation?
Monday notebook page
weekend amusement:: edited to add--it was a really crappy day
This. I've always sucked when it comes to popularity contests. A haircut at Aveda. A whole hour of time to ponder my reflection was apparently not what I needed today. My stylist wore shiny black knee high boots and a black dress with several buckles and studs. Also not quite what I envisioned.
Shopping. Without 18 month old company. DH and Bean ended up joining me for lunch. Bean was a grump, and DH ordered pancakes which suddenly made my avocado and melted cheddar openface seem just exactly what I was not in the mood for. I hate ordering something, and ending up wanting something else entirely.
Flowers & chocolate yesterday for no reason from DH. Still really nice.
And a breve latte. For some asinine reason, I got a pomegranate frappucino instead. And then spilled it on my favorite shirt.
No complaints.Somehow I vastly overestimated the potential for today. It was overcast and humid. Ocassionally it would rain lightly and it felt exactly like being spit on. Bean is getting what appears to be a final set of four molar-ish teeth and he's a disaster. Whiny, clingy, needy, and honestly, totally irritating. When he was in my arms he wanted Daddy. When he was in DH's arms he wanted Mommy, when he was at the table he wanted down, and when he was down, he wanted up. He put a bowl full of shells behind the couch; pulled the cat's tail while the poor guy was coughing up a hairball, and is now throwing a bedtime fit, and I'm really entirely sick of hearing him whine. Grrr.
Oh, and apparently I have autumn allergies.
1.5 years old
Dear Bean, I come home after being away from you for hours, and gather you up into my arms. Your hair smells like wild grasses and sun. Your feet are bare; knees scuffed from climbing rocks and logs. On your collar, the crumbs from the small lemon vanilla cookies you ate by the fistful. Daddy tells me you finished the entire box on your way home from the grocery store, and you look pleased.
This is what you are like now: always hungry—devouring two eggs and toast at one setting for breakfast, and then coming back for melon and yogurt a little later on. We get glimpses of the future you: a lanky teenager, eating the refrigerator empty in one go. And like that boy you’ll be, you’re skinny now too. All lean muscle, with a little round belly leading the way.
I skipped last month’s letter, and in the turning of that calendar page, you were weaned and never looked back. I can’t believe it was only two months since stopped nursing. I can hardly remember the way you were then, still linked to me by those moments of sustenance, because the you of this moment occupies my mind so boldly. You are a whirlwind of running feet; a sky full of wild grins, a pocket full of mischief.
You are becoming yourself every single day, and watching you I long for that kind dynamic growth: to wake up each day open to learning things abundantly.
Every morning you are fresh to plunge in again. Always, you want to name your world. You open your eyes, then point. Door, window, kitty, Daddy, water, Mama. I hardly can imagine what it must be like to jump like that; to submerge oneself into the rich variety of experience, from the moment of waking, onwards.
My first thoughts rarely have to do with embracing the day. For me, it’s more about prolonging sleep, then coffee, then a list of obligations. It’s as though because I am ‘grown up’ I’ve come to think I know the world, and have as a result, stopped loving it as much as you do. I’ve let cynicism creep in, and it fills the small chinks between wonder and exhaustion in my mind.
Being with you, I’m learning how to dive back in; to feel wholly, to awaken to the bright fullness of the moment. When we walk down the road to get the mail, I stop expecting to actually get the mail. I stop expecting anything at all, and simply follow as you lead.
We go through tall grass to a big rock. You climb it’s sloping side, and when you’re at the top you lie on your belly. We are eye level now, and for a minute we stay this way, grinning at each other, feeling the warmth that the rock has absorbed from the sun. Then you swing your body around and climb feet first down the sheer side; your toes finding small foot holds.
You grin when you land on the grass again with a small thud. Then you run back around, ready to climb again. Once is not enough. Twice is not enough. Each time you climb and slide, you soak up the experience anew with pure exuberance. Each time you come to the experience with an open heart, expecting only joy.
I breathe in deeply, and feel the heat rising through my palms resting on the rock’s smooth surface. Above us, the sky is flecked with small clouds, and the field sings with a million insects.
Summer is coming to an end, and it’s as if they know it: their treble song is louder now, merging at dusk with the staccato of the night creatures. At the edge of the field woods behind us, a few branches on a one maple tree have turned vermillion, like a single chili pepper in a vast green bowl. On the hilltops across the valley, the evening light is falling rosy on the trees.
You’ve had enough of the rock now and want me to put you up on my shoulders. When I do, you grab my cheeks and laugh. I bring your toes to my lips and kiss them, and they smell like sweet clover, and are stained green.
If you were going to daycare this fall, my heart I’m sure, would be shattering into a thousand small pieces. But instead, you will be with your Gran, who has moved down the road, and so I’m looking forward to having a new routine, to being newly challenged by work, and to the time away from you. These moments with you then, are all the sweeter. Scooping you up after hours apart, I want to drink you up.
Your Gran is always bringing us small treasures: fresh eggs from the farm where she pulls weeds; amethyst crystals; bright zinnias. And it’s been nice to have her here—nice for us to grow into a new relationship, to see each other differently, and perhaps more accurately, as we are. Someday maybe you’ll understand this. Someday, impossibly, you’ll grow up and want to be wholly separate from me.
But for now, we’re both content to be thisclose. Your nose pressed against mine, your arms wrapped around my neck.
Love, Mama
Field notes
The waist high grass bows
to the mowing blades
Slack heaps trail the field like discarded snakeskins drying in the slanting summer sun.
With clear skies, the farmer spends each day on his blue tractor, turning bales.
Along the borders between fields, their round weight casts dark circles on the grass, a home beneath them now for worms and voles.
Above, the moon like a scythe hangs against the pale barn wall of heaven.
time management
It was also Bean’s 1.5 birthday today, and he was so precious and independent and sweet, watching him nearly took my breath away at least a hundred times. He came to my classroom with me, and spent hours playing without direction or fussing: climbing chairs, investigating keyboards and reading books. Tomorrow a Bean letter for sure. Tonight, let it suffice to say that I love him exponentially each day, and that those moments with him curled against my chest, just after he’s gone to sleep, are like bright garnets in a handful of gravel.
The rest of my day was a pmsy, moody, blur of productivity. Hence the run on sentences. I’ve been meaning to post all night, but haven’t been able to dig myself out from under everything else I’ve been trying to do (I missed a call to my sister, planned my class schedule, developed literacy curriculum for the beginning of the year, and mourned the loss of Allison on Project Runway, fast-forwarded on Tivo, among other things.) I suck at time management.
Seriously, I want to know your strategies. How do you manage your time? What tools do you use? How do you plan for rest and play and productivity? How do you avoid over scheduling/exhaustion?
Sunday antics
A walk down to the mail box this morning with Bean to collect mail from yesterday. I lifted him up to open the metal box, and inside? Such cool housewarming CD's put together by the most wonderful Teri. You made my day, woman!!
Bean picked pockets full of acorns on the way back, and during his nap, neighbors we hadn't yet met stopped by to bring us divine blueberry banana bread and an open invitation to dinner.
And after a four mile run with DH, lounging in the backyard with family, soaking up the last rays of summer afternoon sunlight. Bean's giggle wild and heady with glee.
The unbearable sweetness of being alive
Two nights ago DH’s blood sugar (he’s type 1 diabetic) plummeted suddenly, without warning. It didn’t come back up, despite him taking several hundred carbs over the period of a half hour---and hovered nstead in the low-low double digits, just at the fringes of consciousness. It was one of those surreal times, when I could see myself from some other vantage point: my hair pulled up in a messy pony tail, going through the motions of wrapping dryer-warmed towels his shaking shoulders, pouring more juice, trying to remain calm and easy.
Every small shred of my being was at once saturated with the sweet intensity of my love for him, and the bitter taste of fear at the back of my tongue. Like the taste of snow or nickels, I think fear tastes like metal.
After a half hour we called the paramedics, because we’d reach that point where we weren’t sure how to proceed—not knowing if things were going to improve or worsen. As we waited, the moments stretched out in long arcs across the darkness between our little house and the ambulance somewhere moving towards us, its lights like an aurora borealis of red and white. When they came through the door nearly a half hour later, his sugar had just finally escalated to within the normal range. Still, his pulse was bounding and his blood pressure surged and waned as he shifted positions. But he was okay.
They couldn’t say why what had happened, had. They couldn’t know if it were some irregularity in the chemistry of his body or in the insulin he took. But he was okay, and we went to bed, exhausted, just shy of 1 a.m. In the dark of our room, with the moon spilling onto the floor like milk, I curled my body around his. His skin smelled sweet and warm in the dark, and his breathing soon regular and even with the onset of sleep.
You can’t ever be prepared for these moments that come out of the dark to meet you. You can’t ever know when they will come or what they will bring. Therein lies the lesson: remember the sacred sweetness of each moment. Bow down to it again and again with humility—reaching over and over towards the better part of yourself that can overlook of the fact that your loved one forgot to unload the dishes, or left a circle of soap scum in the sink after shaving again, and can see instead the wonder of who they really are: eyes filling with the fullness of a smile; heart spreading out the periphery of their hands.
This much I now know:
2) That there are so many amazing, talented and wonderful people that read my blog. Some I’ve known about…others, I’m excited to explore. Your feeds are now all on my reader! Look for me, I’ll be commenting on your blogs this week.
3) I’m also in the process of including all of your links on my sidebar, but right now my in laws are here so it will have to wait until I have uninterrupted internet time.
4) Summer is suddenly dissolving at the edges: the last sun drenched stretching out between chilly mornings and evenings where the dusk lasts for hours.
5) The Eastern field has a maple tree with leaves already washed in vermillion, and the grass is higher than my waist.
6) I passed the test with only a small flash-back to my high school test taking fears, and a very early morning.
7) My classroom is starting to look like a place where kids might like to learn: a cozy library is taking shape, a center for science investigations and for art. Yet I still have an endless list of things to do. This is what every single day is like as a teacher: always wanting to accomplish more than is humanly possible.
8) And this: I hardly ever check my stats, but I did recently and nearly died laughing at the search strings that lead people here. Really. Worthy of a post by itself. See?
rss what?
It has been brought to my attention that there is an easier way of doing things! Easier than routinely clicking through all my bookmarked links (a list that far exceeds the hodgepodge of links I’ve pathetically compiled in the margin, which has begun to spill over here, and still is vastly incomplete—I have a case of sever blog love, it seems) every single day, sometimes repeatedly. Apparently I can just use an rss feed reader. Duh.
Okay. So maybe I am the only person in the blogsphere that dosen't already use one. Stop laughing.
And then help me. Leave your rss feed in the comments. Pretty please?
If you also leave your website url, I’ll add you to my sidebar and we’ll have that going for us…which is nice.
EDITED TO ADD: By rss url I mean, leave your website link with the additional rss feed information so that I can plug it into my feed reader without doing any work at all. Yes. I'm lazy. But I'm also 1) studying for a really aweful test I must pass in order to become certified to teach in this state, 2) whimperhing because I've started learning how to lift weights at the gym today--and did a lot of squats. ouch. 3) procrastinating about # 1, 4) sighing because I have oh, probably 500 books to sort through at school and sheesh, do you know how long that takes?
Monarch.
Purple stars.
Leaf lace.
Rock.
Fall on its way.
Bark.
Moss in fallen log.
Field flowers.Capturing a childhood moment (throwing rocks)
We take Bean to a small stream burbling under the shade of pine trees. The pebbles are smooth and round, bits of fossilized choral, quartz, granite sparkling in the sunlight. All three of us are barefoot at the water’s edge, mud pressing between our toes. We show Bean how to toss in rocks; this primal thing that everyone seems compelled to do near water. All three of us grin as each one breaks the surface with a splash.
Up the trail teenage boys are jumping into a swimming hole, their muscled backs slick and tawny in the afternoon light. On the rock above them, a girl sits, laughing, her toes dangling in the current.
I watch Bean go for the big rocks. Rocks the size of my fists and heavy. He carries them with both hands and hurls them inches from his tiny toes. Each time a grin spreads out across his face like sunshine; he is completely enthralled, so sure of himself. He’s grown so nimble running barefoot on our land, and here, in the dappled shade, he seems suddenly so big to me, as though it were only moments between this moment now, and when he’ll be that big---jumping off rocks into too-shallow water to impress a girl.
After an hour of navigating stumps and uneven stones, we come home, heading to the soft green slope of the back lawn, each with an apple in hand. DH and I play Frisbee, tracing long thermal -arcs between us in the air, while Bean climbs the wood pile, and then his tricycle, always craving the thrill of being someplace where high above the ground.
As the sun sets, I rock Bean to sleep. The warm sounds of the summer evening drift up: crickets, tree frogs, and the whirring of the fan. It is one of those days where I feel my breath catch in my throat: he’s growing so fast.
Too two.
The house is dubiously full of snoring. In the past hour and a half I somehow managed to put three humans of the male sex to sleep. Well, two, technically. The third one happened to just come into the bedroom where I was hunched over my laptop in the semi dark rocking our friend’s baby in his carseat while reading blogs, and the next thing I knew it he was on our bed and snoring. If only the other two were that easy! But Bean, in a fit of what can only be called jealousy, needed an extra-strength session of cuddling, pressing his small face against mine to be kissed over and over again while I rocked to him and sang. And the little baby, well, he did his little baby thing: squirming about a bit, and in general just living up to the proverbial witching hour. It’s been one of those nights that feels like some sort of sci-fi time travel film: “A glimpse of what your life would be like if you had two under two.†We’re babysitting our friend’s gorgeous little three month old pip, while they attend a wedding reception, and it’s been quite the head trip spend an evening with someone so small. DH and I kept sort of marveling to each other at all his tinyness. His feet! His hands! SO SMALL! And also, he just eats and sleeps!
It is also fascinating for us to watch Bean, who is now almost 1.5 years old, and 100% true toddler, around the baby. At first he sort of treated the little guy like maybe he was a new cat, interested, but not entirely. But when I took over a bottle feeding, Bean was no longer amused. He was sure he was being replaced, and he flung himself on my legs. He tried to take the baby’s burp cloth, threw his dish on the floor, and when DH tried to carry him off for a nap, he wailed in the most pathetic way possible, “Mamamamamamama!†Poor guy.
It has occurred to us that there is no way we’re having another baby for at least a couple of years—if not a handful. Somehow, though we both see the logic of having little ones close together, neither of us can quite wrap our heads around the idea of no down time, double the diapers, and bedtime routines that involve juggling small humans. We’re just not superhuman enough.
We’re the kind of parents who had to figure out that our kid might actually appreciate it if we BRING SNACKS with us when we go on errands. We routinely forget the diaper bag. We loose his shoes. (Really. I currently know where one of each of three pairs of shoes are, but haven’t the foggiest where their mates might be.) Sippy cups accumulate in the sink.
And we’re always late.
Therefore it occurred to me tonight that if YOU are a mom and you have two little rascals under two, I hereby bow down at your feet in complete awe.
Vanatage point
It is raining softly, and the sky is the color of goose down. The fan oscillates back and forth, blowing paper ellipses across my studio floor. I’m starting to love this space. This place for leaving tracks across the page of my heart, for wandering and wondering, both.
Finches dart from twig to branch outside my window, calling each other and shaking raindrops from their wings. I’m grateful for the rain today after yesterday’s warmth. The past few nights we’ve had heat lighting, illuminating our bedroom with stark white light, and the days have been so hot and damp, clothes stick and sleeping seems impossible. Now the air is cool and gentle, and raindrops fleck the wooden windowsills.
I’m gearing up for a shift back to teaching, to being pulled in hundred different directions. I feel myself wanting this abundance. I love challenge. I thrive when I’m pushed, when an economy of action develops out of necessity, when my days are bursting
The past eighteen months away from work have been something I needed down to my very core. I needed this time to realign myself, to relocate my foundation and settle again into the house of my spirit. Like a bowl of water I gulped eagerly after a long hike, this time away from work with Bean ameliorated my fractured creative self, grown used to being pushed aside.
Now I have a studio instead of an office—I’ve given thought to where I put my paints and tools rather than storing them in boxes under the bed. I’ve adorned the walls and sills with artifacts I love: rocks from Long Island Sound; shells from Puerto Rico, prints I’ve made, photographs in faded black and white. This is why I feel ready to go back to fullness of my work as a teacher: because I have recharged and grown. I’m going back to something I’ve done before, but my vantage point has changed.
So I’m looking forward to returning to the daily activity of meeting small minds and giving them handfuls of ways to learn. I love the opportunity teaching provides me: to think ever flexibly, to see each child as an individual, and to discover how I can help them learn. I learn so much from this.
It’s such an interesting opportunity: to take time off, and to return to something that you love. A bit like time travel, I settle into the familiar setting of the classroom, with younger, less experienced versions of myself in attendance, as I gather papers and sort through books.
I’ve often wondered if other people have moments like this---where they encounter themselves and discover how abundantly they’ve grown. Because of the very nature of growing (organic and chaotic,) we hardly ever have the clarity and calm to glimpse beyond it while we’re in the process. We’re simply doing it. But then there are occasional moments like now, where I feel like I’ve landed on a smooth rock amidst the turbulence---and can see below me the vast topography of where I’ve been.
I’m always shocked at this. To see myself, different than I was. To catch glimpses of younger selves; to find their outlines smaller than the shape of now.
Self Portrait: Psychology of a confined space
Every morning there are a few moments of disconnect: where my mind and body stagger towards each other like drunken lovers, in blurry recognition. The bifurcated pieces of me come back together under the shower’s steady spray. I linger there, in that tile enclosed space; often it is the only time I have unaccompanied, uninterrupted, with just my sore shins, bare skin, and slick hair. These first moments are almost a prayer, a meditation, an act of worship, bowing a the temple where body and mind intersect. It’s here, of course, that I have my best ideas. The most perfect, raw lines of poetry arise in my mind unexpected. Dreams come back to me in shreds, each piece jaggedly sewn to the next like the fabric of an old quilt. And then eventually the day creeps in. I hear noises from the kitchen below: the clatter of dishes being unloaded from the dishwasher, Bean announcing he wants more milk, DH making espresso, and almost immediately lists start to crowd in.
But for those first moments of waking, it feels like I’m teetering on the brink between two worlds, my face soaking up water and my mind wringing out dreams.