In contrast

Trying to remember what it felt like to lie still against the rock, to turn my face towards the sun, to be wholly in the moment, like I was in this picture with Bean scampering up and down the rock beside me. The air was cool and sweet with the smell of autumn: wood smoke, drying grass, the spicy scent of maple leaves and concord grapes, and the musky smell of manure being spread on the fields.

In contrast, I spent today indoors, watching the sun move across the square diorama of my window, sending long rectangles of bright and shade onto the carpet and tables and the tousled heads of kids. It was a PMSy, moody day with near-tears moments and and no-reason exhaustion by the end. Sometimes the sheer volume of 20 little kids is enough to drive me up a wall. My head reverberates and I feel utterly fragmented. Then I realize I haven’t eaten in hours. On days like today I catch myself longing to be teaching college students—longing to be that me I’ll be in five or six years from now.

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

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.

Self Portrait Tuesday: The enclosed space of sadness

Self Portrait: Psychology of a confined space

Like a flock of birds, I sometimes feel myself alighting into the slumbering weight of my body, just as the morning light first falls across the windowsill. Abruptly, I am there again, in our bed with my arm pressed up against his back, sleep heavy, and tingling. Trailing the gossamer of dreams, it takes a moment or two for my mind to slip back into this place of soft flesh and muscle, this body. Then I stumble towards the shower.

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.

* More confined space self portraits.

Self portrait as: trying to get the balance right

The morning after our fight feels exactly the way it does when you walk outside after a rainstorm: everything is washed clean, and light refracts from a thousand small droplets of water.

He looks different to me: maybe more like the person he really is. And as I watch him making coffee, I see that this is what marriage is: a process of holding the mirror up again and again for each other, so that we may see ourselves anew—and also, so that we may be seen anew. It takes both: to see, and to be seen, to become truly aware of ourselves—and despite the hurt of it, this is what we offer each other in the moments when we hurl words about in the narrow place of our anger.

I catch myself sucking in air, realizing that no matter how long we’ve known each other, I’ll only know a small sliver of who he is. This is why I’m grateful for our moments of tension---because they force something deeper to open, and for a brief moment I catch a glimpse of the him that’s bigger than the picture I already have.

It is so easy to grow accustomed to seeing only the part of him that is us. The person that picks up where I leave off, emptying the dishwasher, sautéing zucchini, running Bean’s bath, or the other myriad things we do together every day. Easier still to see him for the things he doesn’t do—the small, banal things that don’t really matter at all, that my mind alights on like a hungry vulture after a day spent giving, without time to myself.

Today I lie in the tall grass on the hill behind our house, all alone. The green is so vibrant here it almost sings: the foliage is such a riot of emerald hues, dense with insects and ruffled in the wind. I close my eyes and let go, feeling the earth spin.

I feel my cells drinking this solitude, replenishing the part of me that has grown sparse in the past few months, when every moment was jam-packed with responsibility for things that had very much to do with us, but never to do with simply me. I know he feels this too, this fierce need for time spent all alone doing things according to pure selfish whimsy. We both thirst for it, just as we thirst for each other, and this is the push-pull I think we’ll always feel. A struggle to find the balance between our separate selves, and the self that is sum of our love.

Self portrait as an elephant

The giving, the always tugging, scrambling, jungle gym antics that my body has grown accustomed to, since him. ‘Here honey, you can hand mama the toilet paper, but no you can’t flush while I’m going. No, stop. Okay, four flushes is really enough.’

Banal things I never knew to cherish have become ornately choreographed two person acts.

I think of elephants, while we brush our teeth. Our arms like trunks, entwined each morning: his little hand holding my brush, while I frantically wiggle his brush around trying to get all four quadrants of his mouth before he grows board of the process entirely.

Or waking to his fierce affection: an inquisitive finger up my nose, perhaps, or a wet series of kisses planted on a partially open eye. My body is no longer really my own, though I try to claim it. My padded cup bras have returned, now that I’ve stopped nursing.

“They’re really small now, huh?” DH may have commented last night, the way one might comment on zucchinis.

I stand in front of the full length mirror looking at the geography of stretch marks, muscle and soft flab that my body has become, and feel the familiar disaffection rise like bile.

Then I try to remember: tomorrow I’ll wake, and before I’m fully conscious, my body will lift and carry me through a thousand small movements. I’ll kiss my husband, carry my son to our bed, press his tousled head to my cheek, and fend of his clobbering embrace.

Tomorrow I’ll wake, and my body, without being asked, will consent to the daily task of lifting and carrying, like an elephant bowing to permit a human so small, to clamber up onto her back.

More 'self portraits as...' here.

Self Portrait Challenge #2: An introduction

The furrows between my brows have gotten deeper this month. No time to breathe, uncoil, rest. Everything is push-pull, pell mell, full throttle. More than can be done, must be. And every off color remark, every comment that could be recieved as criticism, IS.

In this picture, my eyelashes are wet from tears. Haphazard, overtired tears. Hormonal, exhausted tears. Tears because of nothing I can remember today.

We're living off of large cups of gas station coffee, purchased on the way to the house, and determination. I dream of sleep, of a dry basement (many of my paintings were ruined), and SUN (it has now rained for a week and a half, non-stop.)

So this is a different introduction. Another side of me, careworn, frowning, furrowed, exhausted. One more week, and then we move--even though we won't have a kitchen yet.

Self Portrait Challenge #1: An introduction

Kath created a brilliant new Self Portrait Challenge Site, and in honor of it's creation she has challenged us to 'introduce ourselves.' Before I knew you...

there were several ill advised months as a red-head, an adolescence in love with the surf; whole days spent in the my bike saddle following the black ribbon of road up to Canada, or later, along the crumbling edge of northern California, with the pacific right below us.

we stayed out late, and sleep late; could make love any time; skip breakfast entirely, do nothing all day Saturday.

and later, there was the everyday collision of wonderment and exhaustion, my love spread out across the need of so many hungry little hearts with not enough attention at home, teaching words, and poems, and numbers and kindness.

and there were afternoons tossing a frisbee, or playing chess, or walking with our lanky English Shepherd who’d roll on command and was afraid of the water.

then you, making a space in my belly and then in my heart

and now I know you and I am different in a hundred ways.

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.

Self Portrait Tuesday: Time #2

Me as an 8 year old: Lanky as a bean pole with scratched knees, and sun blonde hair. Riding a red wagon down a washed out gully, full tilt. Climbing loquat and eucalyptus trees up to their highest branches, never falling. Rolling down the long stretch of grassy hill again and again and again. Keeping swallowtail caterpillars in a box. Becoming an expert mark with the bow and arrows I carved myself. Telling myself stories—outloud. Drinking root beer floats in ceramic mugs. Running naked with a herd of cattle in Covelo, CA when it was so hot, mirages would spring up everywhere at a distance…. And rescuing this squirrel from our cat. He became my pet for the year. His name was Chipper—because he liked eating corn chips, of course. He’d ride around on my shoulders, under my hair, or in a pouch I made.

Me as a teenager: Lanky and uncoordinated. Getting curves and waging a war against them. Scratched knees, a Lifeguard tan, sun and peroxide bleached hair. Riding around in a mint green Toyota Tercel with my best friend from high school eating cherries. Climbing cliffs at Goat Rock, never falling. Kissing boys again and again and again. Reading Dostoyevsky, Soloviev, Dante and Tolstoy for pleasure. Drinking beer, hating my parents and lying a lot. Writing stories---in my journal. Swimming naked at Salmon Creek beach with friends. ….And keeping chickens (7-8th grade), a rabbit, another rabbit, a dog, and Manx named Tomten.

Me in college: Lanky and mostly coordinated. Trying to learn how not to hate my curves. Scratched knees, East Coast pallor, my first pedicure and professionally highlighted hair. Riding my road bike 500 miles from upstate NY to Canada. Riding my mountain bike all over the woods. Climbing rock walls, sometimes falling. Kissing boys again and again and again, until I found the right one. Reading Diddion, Ellison, Kozol, and Morrison. Drinking wine from long stemmed glasses, learning to be honest with my parents and love myself. Writing poems and stories so furiously and copiously, I was sure I’d die of thirsting for words if I stopped. Running naked into the autumn waves at Harkness beach with my boyfriend (DH!)… And taking care of a python, a gecko, and an oyster toadfish (a work-study gig at a science center), milking 40 head of cows at a dairy (summer of my freshman year), and watching swans in the cove near my college.

Me now: Lanky and as coordinated as I’ll ever be. Finally loving my body for what it does: give birth, run long miles, hold me up right, give me pleasure; rather than for how it looks. Shin splints, East Coast pallor, and no-highlights pony tail. Riding the bike at the gym for cross training. Making plans to spend the summer rock climbing with my best friend from college. Kissing my husband and my beautiful Bean again and again and again. Reading Goldberg, Lamott, Kingsolver, Oliver, Illende and Bly. Drinking lattes for survival in the morning, loving my mother, missing my father, and trusting myself. Daring to write like my voice matters, and feeling certain that I’d die of thirsting for words if I stopped. Sleeping naked….And dreaming of keeping bees, and chickens; rescuing the neighborhood stray cat, missing my dog (with DH’s parents in NJ until we move) and tolorating the constant butt-first affection of my male cat, Mojo (why, why must cats be like that??)

Some things change with time. Other things never seem to.

Self Portrait Tuesday: Time #1

I ran 11 miles today. It felt like an eternity and I wanted to give up many more than eleven times, but I didn't. I chose to run indoors after my last long run left me chilled to the bone, but regretted my decision. It was sunny outside even though it was cold, and the scenery would have kept me engaged. Running indoors is synonymous with boredom, and though I brought these stories to listen to on my iPod, and could be seen from time to time grinning from ear to ear as a result, I couldn’t shake the monotony of running in place.

One foot after the other, staring at myself in the mirror for 1 hour and 45 minutes makes time do crazy things. This much I know: time is not a constant medium. In the last half hour of running, when both knees were burning and I was dying for Gatorade (which I forgot to bring) and I had to pee, it felt like each minute was stretched out the way a tape sounds when the tape film gets pulled. The song blares at warp speed, all blurry and ridiculous.

Other times —-like when on the couch and write in my notebook with the bright morning sun flooding in through the windows---an hour or two feels like a small pocketfull of minutes. I could sit there forever, writing. No amount of time feels long enough. Bean always wakes too soon.

So I've found that staying present in the moment: running only for these steps that are happening now; holding my mind in check, right NOW---is the only way humanly possible to make it through 11 miles. This is also how I make it through the rough days when everything's off kilter; and how I plan to make it through 26.6 miles.

Taken moment by moment, the quality of time evens out. Now is NOW. Thid moment I can bear—and then suddenly this moment has become the next.

***

Here is a brillaint piece of writing about time.

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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.

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.

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!

Self Portrait Tuesday: Personal History # 1

We were camping. I was ten or eleven years old. I’m not sure where we were, but the memory I have attached to this photo is very specific. My dad and I were playing on the grass. I’d throw my body onto his feet and he’d bring me up over his head. Then I’d land, and walk myself forward on my hands, giggling, imagining I was in the circus.

It is the only memory I have of playing with my father like this. We played often with words and sometimes with chess, but rarely just the rough and tumble kind of play that kids love best. Somersaulting head over heals, giddy with laughter, climbing up, rolling, wrestling. Both of my parents were intellectuals. To have fun was to read a good book together or maybe play a board game. I have dozens of memories curled up on the couch with one or both of my parents laughing ‘till my sides ached over a good story, and I recall a handful of times sitting at the table learning strategies for playing chess or scrabble and loving it.

But there is a empty place in my being where I remember my child self longing to play ball with my dad, to ride piggy back, chase, or hide and seek. I’m not sure if my parents chose to avoid these things purposely, or simply didn’t think of them—neither being drawn to play or sports themselves. What I do know is that every single day I get down on the floor with my son and let him turn my body into a jungle gym. We dance together. We shimmy. He rides on my shoulders and twirls in my arms. He giggles. And his laughter is balm to that child part of myself that clings to the memory in this photo.

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Self Portrait Tuesday: Reflective Surface # 4

This is me doing my long lanky leg thing in the dual mirrors in my inlaw's bathroom. I've always been told I'm a bit of a gorilla because my legs and arms seem to be disproportionately long in comparison to my body. And to capture a reflection of myself, in a reflection of myself, I had to do a fair amount of contorting. Like trying to write using a mirror, I kept bumping into walls expecting my body to be going in the direction of my reflection. Sometimes I feel a bit like this, especially after not having a minute to myself in a house full of second generation Italians, a first generation Korean and a baby—-as though the different pieces of me bump up against themselves, and at the end of a day all that’s left are a few disembodied thoughts that don’t quite sum me up, but almost do.

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Self Portrait Tuesday: Reflective Surface # 3

I posted a different spt last night, but this morning, fickle as I am, I liked this one better. The artist in me is somehow unused to the fixed dynamic of a photo. I want to keep coming back and changing things, like I can with a brush.

When I woke up this morning, the fork and spoon reflections seemed brittle compared with this surreal image. I love the color of it, and the blur---how only the corner of the label is in focus, and my finger is pointing to some blue angle of light picked up by the lens, as though gesturing to a dream. I like how the reflection shows mostly my hand reaching, and then my dark silhouette. Somehow this is a truer self portrait: there I am, reaching for the things that can hardly be defined.

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Self Portrait Tuesday: Reflective Surface # 2

There we are, a whirl of color captured in a shop window. This is what we do every day: walk, bundled up, to get coffee. Snowflakes kissing our cheeks, the wool of our hats pulled close against our ears. This is me: the one who takes note of small things. The one who documents with words and images; the topography of our little family.

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Self Portrait Tuesday: Reflective Surface # 1

Taken in low light, at night, indoors. This is my hands holding the lense of my camera--reflecting into the lense of another camera and blue ceramic bowl on the table. It was nearly an impossible shot---but I wanted to try because it says so much about my new found interest in photography. I am discovering a new piece of me, still blurry, reflected in the images I take with my camera.