Perfect

A sublime autumn day. Blue skies without any clouds, and the leaves all gold and red and brown glowing as though they were illuminated from within. After last week of never feeling caught up, this was what I needed: time with Bean outdoors, clambering over fallen logs, collecting bright red leaves, picking apples.

Time to really watch this little boy of mine who is growing so fast—who is talking now in two word sentences. Under his Gran’s tutelage he has become an aficionado of all things nature: he eats wild apple after wild apple, puckering up his face at their tangy, bitter sweet. He gathers acorns, and picks dandelions, and climbs rocks with ease. Today he followed our cat into the woods, farther than he’s ever gone before—a good acre away from the house. He climbed over the old stone wall that zig-zags in and out of the trees and found a woodchuck’s burrow which he promptly filled with leaves. Then he straddled a fallen birch, and sat there contended for a while, as the cat slipped off into the dappled sunlight further up the hill. Here are more pictures from our day.

Last week I didn’t have any of these moments of simple pleasure. Without my weekend (we were in NJ) everything collided every day, leaving me exhausted—unable to climb out of the stress and into the beauty of now. But with today, I feel efuled, and, after spending the past two hours writing lesson plans for the week, feel excited to jump in again. I just wish, somehow, that I could get a thirteenth hour every day. Wouldn’t that be great?

What would you do with a thirteenth hour?

Every day

Every day I tie a dozen shoes, I hug kids to my hips (their heads come up just that far), I smile often, I furrow my brows. Over and over I say, "sit criss-cross" or I say "make a good choice," or I say a hundred other things that remind, encourage, repremand, demand, console, inspire, complement, or direct.

Every day I get marker on my jeans, I write messages to my kids, I sing songs, I answer questions, I model, I redirect, often all at the same time. Every day I am filled with wonder that these children are all somebody's babies--their Beans--and I look into their eyes and try to create a wide open space in my heart for them, even when they push buttons, or tease each other or tattle on each other or do not finish their work.

Every day I feel like I am not good enough, that I do not do enough, see enough, say enough to be what I am to them: the person they see more than their moms and dads all week. Their teacher. Every day there is a stack of unfinished work, of things I need to do, of meetings, of lists, of books. Yet every day I am also greatful for this opportunity to always come up short; to be challenged to grow; to be filled with wonder.

Morning Poem Snippets

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

*

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

*

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

Wanting more

On Friday I took an airplane down to NJ to meet up with DH and the Bean who'd gone on ahead (the prospect of a 7 hour car ride with toddler suddenly overwhelming after a long week of six year olds.) The plane took off through a partial cloudcover just after sunset, and as we lifted above the ash and indigo clouds, the atmosphere above was smudged with vibrant orange, fading to pale yellow, and then to a hundred delicate shades of blue each growing darker as the vast distance of space increased.

Looking out the window, feeling the odd weight of my body pressing back into the seat, bucking gravity for liftoff, I was struck by how miraculous it is that as humans, we've grown used to this. To flying, miles above the earth. To this view above the clouds. Something about it still feels risky to me; I can't help thinking of Icarus falling in flight away from the heat of the sun. It will always feel brave and terrifying to me, to lift off the ground inside a metal jet. To fly without wings, trusting aerodynamics to lift the weight of steel and small human life into the air.

I brought the newest Elle and Vanity Fair magazines to leaf through on the plane, and spent the flight skimmingt through the pages of models with smokey eyes and skinny jeans, to linger over the book reviews and essays. This happens to me sometimes. This sudden thirsting for stuff beyond the parentheses of my small world.

It's a feeling that almost leaves me breathless. A craving. An intense realization that I am somehow parched for culture, for books, for time to delve into novels, read book reviews, attend theater, re-learn the myths of our culture, or wander through galleries. Without intention, my life grows narrow. I stop moving beyond the vocabulary of everyday. I stop pounding on the window that defines my view. And then, suddenly, like then on the plane, I run smack into my narrow vantage point.

All of the morning poems I've been writing this month have acted as a catalyst for this, I'm sure. They've stirred up something deep in me; made me reflect on the gaps I have in my ability to construct metaphors that matter, or to encapsulate with precise langauge, a specific circumstance or emotion.

The thing is, I'm not sure how to get beyond where I'm at. I'm not sure how to pick up a rock and throw it into the window. Not sure even, what the window or rock look like any more. But if giving ten haphazard minutes poems every morning has changed me, I can gather the same courage to toss myself towards books again, towards learning.

So what I want from you is this: what writers, or poets, or artists or films have had a lasting impact on the way you think and live your life? Name five.

Self portrait challenge: Elements (Water)

Sun high on the meridian, humidity making my hair curl and the cat nap, a sprawling stripe of fur on the windowsill. Reason enough to head down to the local hardware store for a blue plastic kiddy pool. Cold water splashing on our sun-hot skin. A perfect afternoon

Morning Poem # 6

All night the cat slept curledon the chair opposite the bed, content to hear the heartbeats of her humans lost in slumber. Now she wakes and stretches a beautiful apostrophe of feline ease, becoming a comma, then an M before she struts away.

What it's like

This morning, all I could muster after a too-busy weekend with houseguests and rainstorms were these few lines written in dark ink, the words running together as water dripped from my hair.

I throw myself into the face of the day waiting like an expectant martyr to be handed alms or be run over.

I’m at that point right now, before things feel easy, but after things have been at the hardest part. It’s that point between exhaustion and sweetness. That point at the end of being sick for a full week, and not having had two nights of solid sleep in a row---but after spending an evening in the curve of DH’s arm, watching firelight and making love so many times. We celebrated our anniversary today—-waking up to a leak in a pipe in the wall above the kitchen sink and a sick baby.

But we also woke up to another day together. Another day where what I wrote to him when we were first together, still rings true. Now more than ever: your hand fits the curve of my hand and your mind fits the curve of my mind.

Learning about showing up

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

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

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

Morning Poem # 3

I wrap my towel like a turban around wet locksand suddenly I am ten again, tossing rocks with the new girl who wore a turban and was not allowed to ever cut her hair.

We were fast friends, for those short months just shy of summer at the end of our fifth grade year when the sun filled the afternoon with dry heat and even under the sycamores the shade was warm.

She joined the class late, and left before the autumn brought us back, our shoes brand new and pencils sharpened. But in the time between, we played hard and did not stop to ponder how our worlds were really separate stanzas.

Instead, our friendship took place between the parentheses of joy; where sparkly black eyes met blue and spelled out mischief.

It didn’t matter that she wore long cotton pants under her dresses, or wrapped her hair in yards of cloth. What mattered was our wildness, running together faster than any of the other kids, or hiding in the barn where, (I offered her a silver pair of scissors and she cut some of her hair.)

Morning Poem # 2

In the gradual lightening of day,I wait for words to come. Outside my window, the bright flames of leaves speak the language of planetary tilt and early sunset.

Like the widespread skirts of a peasant woman the sky trails tattered bits of clouds; a lone jet streaks overhead. Behind me trail remnants a dream,

smeared with sweetness: the addict gets better, the killer pauses before the bullet breaks glass, and turns away.

The dawn clouds turn to golden and the cup of memory spills. The day begins.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

** I loved reading your morning poems. Post more & link to here!

19 months

Dear Bean, You sit at my feet making a picture all by yourself with the skinny markers I keep in a jar in my studio. Carefully you uncap each one, recapping it after you have added its color in bright stripes to your page. It is raining out and for a few short moments, we’re both working quietly—contented in the semi dark of the room, rain splattering the glass. This month has been all about times like this with you—times of longer concentration, conversation, and activity.

I love watching you close doors or pick up shoes after I’ve asked you to—a grin always spreading across your face like sweet jam. You spend time drawing now, or looking at books. You bring piles to anyone who will comply: climbing into their lap, saying “buh! buh!” And you’ve started to build with me—block towers ten or twelve blocks high. Of course, you’re favorite part is still knocking them down—but I’m excited that we’re on the cusp of this new kind of play. Construction.

This month you’ve become obsessed with walking in my shoes—literally. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that you can walk in them with such ease—you’ve already shown us a thousand times your natural sense of balance and coordination. I’ve stopped worrying you’ll fall and break your neck every single time you slip into a pair of my shoes—and instead have taken to wishing I could freeze you like this forever: goofy, and adorable, and still so small.

Other things you are obsessed with: stuffing toilet paper down behind me while I’m sitting on the loo. Eating peanut butter and jelly tortilla roll-ups. Climbing up onto the picture window sill. Riding on my shoulders. Visiting the neighbor’s sheep. And playing guitar with Daddy.

Driving home after work today I was thinking about how much I look forward to seeing you at the end of the day. How delighted I am to come in and find you and scoop you up. I love your gutsy little laugh as I tickle your tummy. The way you wrap your arms around my neck. And even the way you blatantly ignore me now, when you’re in the middle of a project.

Like always since you came into our lives, each month seems to go too fast. Yet, like always, the lesson you teach me again and again is to slow down, be present, and enjoy the pure intensity of every moment.

Morning Poem # 1

I open the corral gate to a new day andthe white pony of hope gallops out long legged.

Both of us are throwing back our heads, pressing our knees to the mud, praising the sun.

But shadows grow long, and the sickle of sorrow makes the grass lie down. Things are never what we expect.

Already you can see the buzzards circling. The colt’s rib bones, like twelve new moons, make white silhouettes against the greening grass.

** Add the link to your morning poem from today below.

"Think In Ways You've Never Thought Before"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Care to join me?

5 good things

A recent painting (that I made for DH’s birthday). What do you think?

A three mile run tonight with DH along the muddy road. Rain falling softly. Leaves the color of ocher and rose drifting earthward. Cattle, with their ruddy brown fur and white bellies all facing the same way, grazing in knee high grass. The creek, a ribbon of indigo with cattails up to my waist.

Thai food, the three of us out on an impromptu date, at a tiny restaurant near here. The chalky sweetness of traditional Thai iced tea. Moo Ping. Tom Kha. Bean using a grown up fork to shovel fried rice into his mouth (his overall bib pocket was full too!) The leisure of sitting back, aimless conversation, and no clean up.

Ben & Jerry’s and a the latest Project Runway on Tivo.

And rocking Bean to sleep in the dark, his heart against mine. There is nothing sweeter in the whole world.

What are yours?

Riding the waves

It’s so funny hanging out with six year olds all day. We read a book about spiders and learn that the babies fly away on silken threads soon after they are hatched.

“Cool,” one little boy says. “It would be SO FUN to fly away and not have any parents. We could do ANYTHING.”

“Like what?” I want to know. Watching a grin spread wide across his freckled face.

“Like STAY UP ALL NIGHT!” he says emphatically, waving his arms about at the possibility.

The magic of that idealized independence hovers in the air.

“Yeah, and we could eat candy for every single meal,” another boy chimes in.

I remember that time, before grown up. That time when days sometimes felt like years. When yesterday was so far off it hardly mattered. Now grown-upness saturates the air around me like a heady perfume: replacing the oxygyn of whimsy with the dioxide of worry.

Maybe I’ve been feeling this now more than ever because death has pressed close up against the periphery of my life, or maybe it is simply because I’m in my late twenties—and this is the time when most young people invariably start feeling old.

Talking with my sister on the phone the other night, we agreed, when we were eighteen we knew it all. At least that’s how it felt for me. I was at the top of my game at eighteen: ballsy, headstrong, self confidant, and completely invincible. I wrote reams of poetry, jotted pensive philosophical notes in the margins of my books, read Shakespeare and Whitman, and regularly skinny dipped in the ocean. I knew everything then. I’d take up conversation with anyone. No argument was too complex, no social challenge too awkward. I attempted almost anything: rock climbing 1000 feet above the Mediterranean, sleeping with men I barely knew, volunteering in an HIV positive community in Harlem, jumping from fifty feet into an abandoned marble quarry filled with still green water. I had nothing to loose.

Now, ten years later, I am humbled. My heart each day feels the breathless immense weight of Love. Now there is everything to loose.

It seems like instead of seeking challenge like I did then, challenge finds me. The sum of my experiences, like a few small crusts of bread in my pockets, do nothing to feed the hunger of the beasts I now face. Over and over I find my words come up short; my hands empty. Then it was all about pushing the envelope: how wild could I be?

Now it is about other, fiercer, more tender things.

Navigating the terrain of love, seven years in (this month, our anniversary); making new meaning in the context of near death; finding words to express even a small sliver of the immense protective love that comes with motherhood.

I wouldn’t go back. I love the challenge of now: the tender grace of meeting someone’s needs unconditionally, the fierce affection that comes with having woken up day after day after day next to the same man, or the ease that comes with starting out again, for the fifth year, with a class of children. But some days, especially the long ones, when my heart feels worn and scattered like a handful of sea glass, I get nostalgic for that time before DH, before Bean, before a career. It would be nice now and again to feel that rock-solid certainty that comes with inexperience.

Stumbling towards normal

A beautiful weekend of good food (made by DH!) and good company. Late nights, zinfandel wine, walks with the Bean in the red wagon, and a harvest moon. The first crisp days of fall--where the light is rosey on the mountains and the air cold in the shade. This morning the first frost in the darker parts of the woods.

My heart is still aching though, despite the goodness of the past few days. The vast realization of ten hour days away from my sweet boy makes me breathless driving home from work, just as his day is winding down. I'm still stumbling towards the center of a normal routine from somewhere far out on the periphery where things are spinning far too fast.

I know I'll get my stride again, but the learning curve sucks. You know?

TGIF

My Image upload plugin still doesn't work. I have so many pictures and art to share, but it will all have to wait until later in the weekend when I can devote time to such things. I stumbled through the past two days quite well. I was asleep last night by 9:30, utterly exhausted. Tonight, not much better, but my students had a solid first two days and Bean and I had a wonderful early evening hiking the perimeter of our land: watching monarchs, picking crabapples, eating the last wild black berries, checking out frogs, and pointing at crickets. So good to spend some quality one-on-one time with the little guy, who by the way, is growing SO FAST. I have so many funny Bean stories to tell, but, like the art/photos, they are pushed to the back burner until I've had oh, twelve hours of sleep and a stack of pancakes. :)

Incoherent

Feeling wiped out tonight after a ten hour day, and an open house. Freshly sharpened pencils. Smiling until my cheeks ache. Wishing I’d stopped at Starbucks for an iced latte. Trying to make every parent feel like I will be teaching for their child alone. The past few days have been rocky, not because of the work-related stuff, but because some days are just like that. Everything comes out edgewise and sharp, without meaning to. My foot has spent its time permanently lodged in my mouth. My skin is breaking out, and shopping over the weekend I was devastated to discover that the eighties are entirely BAAACK and I want to gag. I thought the trends were dumb in the eighties: legwarmers, frumpy ankle boots, and, dear god, skinny jeans, which look terrible on everyone except maybe Kate Moss. Really, why did that decade have to come up in the fashion rolodex THIS YEAR? I have enough to worry about right now. Buying jeans should not be a distressing pastime. All I can do is pray the whole pegged jeans look is not about to be revived.

So yeah, a rocky couple of days. Bad fashion. My image upload plugin isn’t working properly, I apparently have lost all tact when it comes to saying things to DH, and it’s his birthday this Thursday and I’m a little bit bummed about that because it’s the first day of school and I hate not being able to devote more time and energy to him. If it’s not raining we do have a fun evening planned though: a hike up to the lean-to at the top of a hill to build a fire, drink hot coffee from a thermos, and check out stars through his telescope. If it does rain, I’m screwed. I am bad about having a working Plan B. I wing things. Probably to much for my own good.

I guess I’m just way outside my comfort zone right now: in limbo, waiting for the routine of work to kick in. Making this huge transition on top of the post-traumatic stress of the incident at work has resulted in me gaining probably five pounds too, and that really doesn’t help perk me up. The only thing to redeem all this is that my best friend is coming for the weekend, and she always hits me like an extra-bright sunbeam. Love her. There will also be pedicures involved. So there is a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel (though as she puts it, sometimes that light is an oncoming train—ha!)

What type of person are you? Do you plan things out or wing them? Are you more spontaneous or predictable? What makes you feel like your outside your comfort zone?

The ecology of resilience

Like a dislocated limb being reset, it was almost easy to slip back to where we were. A little pain for sure, but the ingrained rhythms of preparation (making charts, sorting crayons) quickly resumed its drumbeat in my heart. Everything had been put back, repaired, restored. Outside, kids and parents came en masse to weed and landscape; to plant trees and put up bird houses. The front doors were painted a bright new blue. And tonight, the community will gather again to hold hands all the way around the school.

This is the ecology of resilience. To choose not to be defined by tragedy, and to bend instead like a new sapling, toward the green sap of hope.

Tonight

Today I feel the earth has tilted on its axis farther from the sun. The air tonight is cold, and the earliest of the maples are vermillion on the hillside. Monarch butterflies have been everywhere in the past few days. They fly in their delicate aimless way from flower to stem along the roadside, and I wince as one hits my bike tire. It’s beautiful wings falter, but it’s no use stopping. It is not like a bird, whose body in shock can be revived with the shelter of warm hands.

In the flats below our house the mountain rises up from the wide field of grass like an elephant on bended knee, purple in the late afternoon sun. We make a fire after dinner, and sit in the quiet of early evening listening to the last of the crickets and the crackle of burning wood. The first frosts will be here in a week, and then the nights grow silent. The fire licks logs, and quickly turns the wood to pale ash. A snake, curled in a flat crevice of rock awakens with the heat, and glides from its hiding place, tonguing the smoky air. Above us, the moon is exactly half full, tangled in the leaves of a maple tree, and across the field our cat, a streak of orange and white, pounces on a mole.

When the sky turns from cerulean to indigo, we pour water on the fire and go indoors. In place of smoke, steam rises up. Tomorrow we go back. Back to the place where havoc happened and everything that mattered most was encapsulated in each pure second of staying alive. Tomorrow we go back to where we were before tragedy scraped across the surface of our souls. Back to where we were standing before the gun shots and the breaking glass: near the sink cutting paper. The new geranium in the bright sunlight on the windowsill had already dropped its first petals on the floor.

Yesterday I went with others to see the colleague I had been standing with who was injured. Just out of the hospital, her face was radiant with smiles. In place of guilt, she offered up forgiveness, easy and immediate, despite the fact that we all heard her cries but couldn’t come. Didn’t. Because we placed our own lives first. Self preservation lurching up in our throats, a part of the hardwired code being human, followed immediately by the bitter taste of regret. Seeing her was good. It gave me room to breathe again, room in my heart to stop replaying every broken moment, and to move instead towards preparation. And seeing her also made me think of this again: forgiveness is an act of love.

Night fills the bowl of day. The window becomes a mirror.