What sets you on fire?

How do you write? How do you sit down and break open the cracked clay that paints your heart like a mask? How do you say the things you need to say, or want to, all the while believing in a few unsure things (the threads of a story stringing out like a spider’s fragile gossamer?)

It has dawned on me that I have no idea how to write really. Some days I feel like words are pelting me. Other days everything comes out so boring and uninspired. Most of the time I have no idea what to expect when I sit down at the keyboard. My mind plays chicken with me. The two of us wobble about mostly, looking stupid.

I think my problem is that I can imagine big. I can imagine BIGGER than big. I get glimpses of the whole damn story, from every perspective, the way it all should be. Then I have to write it, and that totally sucks. You know what I mean? Then the sentences tangle. Do any of you write?

What do you believe in? Especially with fiction? What makes you believe you have something to say? Is it story, for story’s sake, or something else? I really need to know.

Part of the reason all of this has me off kilter tonight is that I’m going for a week long workshop with Pam Houston on the coast in ten days. I’m already feeling dry-mouthed and foolish. More than anything else I hate meeting people for the first time. After we’ve met, I’m okay, but I hate those first few moments of unknown: skating out on ice the color of a robin’s egg, wondering if it will hold. I hate parties for this reason; and talking on the phone. And of course, being a writing workshop and all, I’ll have to meet lots of people; and then read them my timorous attempts at fiction. Gasp. Why do I do this to myself?

I feel like I’m lingering in the doorway of an open jet plane: air rushing past it’s metal belly and below a wide topography of green and blue and a geometric jumble of urban shapes, and the outcome’s totally uncertain. You never really know.

Monday

In the studio smoke from the raku kiln drifts in through the open windows, where water runs in rivulets, like tiny tributaries or capillaries, trembling with early summer rain. It’s been raining softly off and on all day, and I kind of like the way it drenches things: scrubbing the sidewalks clean and soaking the tilled soil in my garden making it easier to turn over into raised beds.

Tonight I sit at the wheel and try new clay: porcelain. White and supple and so soft beneath my fingers, like milk. It takes so little effort to center, to pull up cylinder after cylinder, bowl after bowl. I make eleven pieces. More than I’ve ever made in a night. Four soup bowls, four tall mugs, two plates, and a vase. I can hardly stop myself. The clay slips with little effort in a circling center between my fingers, and the studio is full of banter. Marven Gaye is on for a while, then Beck. Conversations rises and falls like a flock of pigeons alighting for bread, then lifting off into the sky to settle on the ridgeline of a roof somewhere.

I love throwing pots in the studio while my guy loafs around, glazing pots in the opposite corner, making people laugh. My mind stays close to its center, at the wheel. I don’t veer into worry, or anxiety or tiredness; like gardening, the simple act of using my hands in a directed purposeful way fills my soul with a sense of even-keeled grace I easily loose track of as the day whips by me, all talk and clatter and eager kids.

I come home empty, in a grateful, open way. Ink and gesso on the pages of an old book; clay on my jeans; a bottle of massage oil on the bedside table. The day is done.

Countdown

Monday morning & rain, hard against the windows. EIGHT days left of school. An unbelievable amount of work to accomplish & saying goodbye to my beautiful friend who has been at my house all weekend & who is moving to California. Everything she owns is in her car & I adore the way she giggles and her courage. Mondays sometimes suck. Today I'm not sure which way it will go. Maybe coffee will help. How's you're Monday going? PS--If you post a comment--do so only once. There is something bizarre and whacky going on with my comments and I get like ninezillion of the same one because they don't show up for the commenter right away (I don't know why.)

New Arrivals

Fluffy, tiny tufts of dandilion fuzz now live in a box in my garage. I'm smitten.

Of course I jinxed it

By writing about the few great nights. Last night he was WIDE EYED, and entirely NOT asleep for over an hour at about 1:30 a.m.

Four paragraphs & four things beginning with "A"

A full day back at the classroom. They greet me with eager smiles and two-page weekend news letters in ever more confidant print. They use capitals and periods and I challenged them to write about what they felt, saw and said. One little boy wrote, I could feel the wind and I said to J, “Can you feel the wind?” and he said back to me, “Yes I can,” as we biked down the hill. Such sweeties they are, though they seek to wring every ounce of energy and attention from me. If they learned one thing this year, they learned to be kick-ass writers :)

A parent share tomorrow, to celebrate the kid’s final writing projects. Books they’ve planned from storyboard to final hard-cover hand sewn copy. Their smiles and their bright pictures and eccentric text placement is something I’ve been wanting to photograph for a while, so I’m bringing my camera! I miss mixing my life more: art and teaching and writing. I like when it overlaps.

At home, before dinner, we got the chicken coop floor framed out, Bean following after us with a hammer—using it with flawless form. The sun angled long, and for dinner we had flat bread pizza. It’s been the third night in a row Bean has gone to sleep super tired by 8, without much cajoling, and slept through the night in his bed until 6 in the morning, when he patters his way into our room. I cannot tell you how utterly thrilled I am about this. I don’t want to jinx it of course.

And a few more paragraphs tonight. Up to ten pages. The story seems to be fitting together in unexpected ways, as though all the jigsaw pieces are speckled with Rorschach prints. I’m just following along, seeing what I recognize and going with what feels right.

And four things I’m enjoying that start with A:

Azaleas blooming along the back wall of my house, unexpected. Antinori Vermentino wine: delish with sausages and crusty bread. Aching muscles from hard work. Animal, Vegitable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

can't help myself: a picture post

The garden, underway. Sore arms & DH has a sunburn. Bean played all afternoon with his tractor in the newly tilled dirt. A long way before raised beds and fence posts, but closer than we were. So good to be outside. So good to have a man who, because he know's my heart is set on having a garden, spends all day wrestling the brute of a tiller about. :)

I'm heady with delight. With fragrance. With blooming. Everything plunges into growth come the end of May. The short growing season makes everything feel even more astounding and vibrant and urgently beautiful. I cannot get enough.

(real, up-close pics are over at flickr.)

4 days off

have made all the difference. It always stuns me when I realize how entirely a lack of sleep and stress affect my life. How I feel completely altered, weaker, fragile at the center like a soft-boiled egg with days-on-end of stress and poor sleep; and then after a few days of extra naps and time spent in good company (family and friends, both) and suddenly I feel different. Whole. Laughter rises up easily and often like finches on the early summer wind. I remember how much I love making love in the afternoon with windows open for a nap, after. Family time suddenly feels precious and sustaining, not debilitating the way it can feel when I've given everything already and the dishes still need to be done.

This weekend has been full of frisbee tossing, and cutting grass. Renting a tiller to cut soil for our new garden. Listening to night rain, and having our hair tossed by afternoon winds. Getting the box ready for new chicks (coming this Thursday!) and taking Bean and his two-wheel bike + training wheels to the playground bikepath. Watching him fly by, all grins. Making pasta al dente with fresh red sauce and sausages, salad with new mustard greens and fresh corn off the cob. And writing: good solid pages of fiction. I cannot wait for summer.

Two weeks of school left (back tomorrow) and then off to the writing workshop with Pam Houston (! I know, I can't believe it either!) A week to myself on the coast writing and soaking up other writers, and then the wide swath of summer streatching out ahead, humid and lush, to linger, to sweat, to write, to grow a garden.

I have plans: many rows of corn, mounds for squash and pumpkins (DH's favorite), strawberries, peas and lettuce, green beans on poles making an archway for Bean to hid beneath, sunflowers, potatos, radishes, carrots, tall tomatos bursting in the sun. I know so little about gardening really, though I've always coaxed a patch of vegitables out of some corner of our urban yards. Now, it's nearly a quarter acer of soil we've set out to till. I've never composted, but want to learn. So much to be patient about--the eager part of me wants it all now: the tall rows of sweetcorn. The scarlet runner beans and holyhocks along the fence. The chickens feathered and scratching underfoot as we picnic outdoors like we did at lunch today.

I forget when I'm stressed to that teary weak point of nothing, how much I love to just ramble. To post about the cluttered mosaic of our days as a family. To make sketches in my flora notebook, or linger by the window watching the humming birds that are nesting in our lilac trees. And I miss all of you. Over the span of time I've had this blog, so many people have become bits of what make me whole, remind me of what I want, keep me inspired. What are you up to?

Tell me: five things you did today. :)

Trembling heart

Sometimes my heart feels like a starfish belly: outside me, devouring the things I love. Sometimes it feels like an urchin’s purple back: a hundred quills around its pliant center. Sometimes it’s like the soft belly of a cat: turning to the sunlight, thrumming with internal delight. Sometimes it’s hard to have a heart this tender, this wide open to other people’s grief.

At work we’re just finally now sorting through the relics of trauma that we’ve carried like splinters through the school year. I’m more okay than many others, in part, because I was new there, and also because I am young and resilient. The middle kid in my family. The peace maker. The relativist who can see both sides, while still seeing the cup half full. I wasn’t rooted, familiar with the way 'things always were.' The lives lost weren’t ones I knew.

And yet, oh and yet, it is so very hard for me to sit in a room with everyone’s emotions running high like floodwaters, just below the surface of their pale blue veins. So hard to see their faces hurt, to see the different sides, to see the grief and feel it all. I try to envision a protective shield to stop some of it from saturating, but the sorrow and loss and anger that fills the building, and eddies as two people pass in the halls, is so present, so tangible, I can’t shake it off. I am devastated, still. And then I read in the paper about the little girl in Portugal, abducted from her hotel room, or about sweet|salty’s beautiful tiny premie boys and my heart feels pulpy and fragile and broken open all over again, as if sorrow were a new ingredient in air.

I came home exhausted today. I think I’ve come home exhausted all year. I thought I was the only one, but in the past two days of meetings, everyone says they’ve been ungodly tired, sleepwalking through the days. Someone said it was like we were trying to fix four flats on a car with the car still moving. And it has really been like that, post trauma, moving full throttle forward because of the wide eyed kids who want to learn about the arctic and the desert and addition and how to spell the word miss-iss-ipp-i.

Then I stumbled on this: I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes on to the next as blossom, and so that which came to me as blossom goes on as fruit.

Dawna Markova

Day by day

Saturday: It hit me in the middle of the night, up again, one more time, because of the small inconsolable wailing and flailing of a sharp elbow having, night terror dreaming, teething Bean, that I was officially one step away from going insane.

I told DH as much, in a whimpering whisper, having already burst into tears at least once between the time I got home and the time I went to bed, and the next morning he let me sleep in. Until 10:40. When I woke up on my own accord, stretched a leisurely stretch, and basked in a hot shower.

At 7:30 he took Bean and went to breakfast and Home Depot and to the coffee shop for freshly roasted beans and the market for a list items we’d run out of, and he left me with the entire bed to myself, with all the covers and the pillows are fluffed just so and the slatted shades drawn so the room stayed wrapped in yummy semi dark but the window was open to let the sweet fragrance of spring waft in.

I was beaming all day.

Sunday: Some people probably (no, definitely) will think I am strange because I derive a great amount of joy from doing yardwork… But I really do. I’m always happy when I have the weedwacker in my hand, it’s loud whine drowning out any stray thoughts, so that I am simply there in the moment, watching the grass and leaves fall in swathes. I spent the morning doing this in the lower meadow, cutting a huge square where we plan to till for a garden, while above me, on the lawn, DH circled back and forth with the mower, Bean perched on his shoulders. Watching them together like that always makes me burst into smiles. Bean clutching two handfuls of DH’s summer-curly hair, both of them grinning wide as they make the turn nearest me, waving.

Then we started on the chicken coop, which, after several debates (not all were pretty, either) we concluded would best be made not in a new structure, but in our existing “barn” shed that once housed a horse before we came to own it. The floor is entirely being reclaimed by nature, but the walls are stick-built and sturdy (ha! knock on wood!) and the roof seems to still work in spite of the moss growing there (or perhaps because of it.) We spent several hours cleaning out all the left-over planks of flooring we’d tossed there hurriedly last spring around this time, when we were frantic to be finished with flooring and could not yet fathom living here.

It seems like it’s been such a long, long time since that time of nailing floor boards and longing, our days painted with worry and exhaustion. Here we are, a year later, and I’ve planted rose bushes along the front of the house and scattered native wildflower seeds down the bank and found purple trillium growing along the old stone wall at the edge of our land. A year, and everything is different.

Bean spent the evening zipping around the wide expanse of our kitchen and livingroom floor on his bike. A few weeks after we bought it, he can now steer and pedal like nobody’s business. He’s getting reckless in that little boy way: looking over at us and grinning while he steers in entirely the opposite direction. He rarely falls. It will be a different story on the packed dirt of our road, but inside, where the floor is smooth and the way unobstructed, there’s no stopping him.

Monday: Before 7 and the sky is gray and I’m huddled in my bathrobe smelling the heady scent of lilacs that my sister picked and brought to me before she left (I miss you!) and listening to the birds calling back and forth. We have a pair of Orioles. Bright orange and black brushstrokes fluttering across the canvass of green woods. The first time I saw them, I held my breath.

Nonstop

The kids stare longingly at the windows and look like second graders already. I watch them read now, and see they have hardly a ny memory of the time when the stragled in at the beginning of the year, wide eyed and tangled in short syllable words. Assessments are mid-way. It is gratifying: they're doing well. But also laborious and utterly one-dimensional. Tests only say so much about a person, and in my opinon that 'so much' is a rather small fraction of the whole.

I'm still burning the candle at both ends, as the saying goes. Can't quite get myself to settle down and go to bed early enough, and when 5:30 rolls around I'm stumbling and bleary eyed. The staccato of the keyboard and strong coffee gradually bring me to up to speed, but then I'm out the door.

Bean got a fever today, unexpectedly, after a weekend of visiting with my sister (whom he followed about and pesterd, a long-eyelashed grin ever ready to bat her way.) Now he's curled in our bed. Twenty seven months today. It dawned on me that I didn't write him a letter last month, and now there's almost too much to say. Tonight he feverishly pats the spot next to him on the bed and says, "Here mama, a cozy spot for you."

The spring rains are here too, torrenting down. Everything is finally lush and green and blooming. We have chickens arriving in two weeks. No physical arrangements for them yet--but that's a must-do this weekend, or they'll be in our bathtub. Five Aracuna day-olds. Bean talks about them as if they're already here.

I'm trying to find ways to wind down this week. I'm one of those people who needs big chunks of decompression time, and at the end of the day I find myself sighing as I try to bring awareness to snapping bean stems off and sauteeing them with butter, lemon and toasted almonds. What do you do to settle back into the quiter corners of your self? How do you unwind after a nonstop day?

Wishing on dandilions

Sometimes, blowing on a dandelion gone to seed, I wish for superhuman capabilities. Then I count my wishes as the tiny seed umbrellas lift on the wind and scatter, and my popsicle juice-faced boy laughs wildly in delight.

I wish I could be okay with just four hours of sleep, instead of the seven I must have to function. I wish I could whirl through household tasks, setting things right, watering plants, doing laundry, and still have time to sink into a corner and read chapter after chapter in a good book.

I wish I could come home after a day of teaching, when I’ve felt every fiber in my being be endlessly tugged and frayed, as though my heart were a rope toy and the children a pack of eager pups, and still have something rich to give. I wish, after a day of reading, reacting, redirecting, reconciling, and reconstructing all the little important fragments that are meaningful to the children I teach, I could regularly have energy left for here: in my studio, after daylight has ebbed away from the walls, and lamplight pools at my desk. Energy to write two thousand words instead of two hundred.

I wish I could feel patience overflowing the bowl of my soul every night when I’m snuggling in the dark with my boy. Patience, as he reaches out his thin soft arms in the dark and wraps them around my neck, fiercely, in a lock hold. Patience as he begs again for one more snuggle, one more hug, one more kiss. Patience as time slips by and I become languorous, my eyes aching, my body sinking into the spinning dark as I sing tuneless melodies into the curve of his small ear. Patience, as I want to be right there and anywhere except there in the same breath.

I wish for more times when, tumbling into the sweet curve of my husband’s body, the prospect of following my tongue and my red-hot whimsy isn’t in a dead heat with every cell in my body screaming or one more hour of sleep.

Becoming a parent brings your life abruptly to full capacity—or full catastrophe—and sometimes both, at the same time. You don’t really get this before becoming a parent, though everyone tries to tell you.

There is no way to understand before you’re in the thick of it, how you’ll simultaneously feel like a circus act and a soothsayer, mumbling, “Isn’t that what mommy said would happen?” when the lightening fast extension of your heart falls headlong over the handlebar of his wagon after he's pushed it full-tilt into the couch, and then comes to you wailing, his perfect cheek already swelling.

The acrobatics of this kind of love leaves me breathless and aching. Also, often, it leaves me entirely blindsided. My compass spins wildly, truing to an imaginary north. I want so much, yet feel so small and brittle and insufficient as each day splatters at my feet overripe and bruised with too many demands for my time.

Maybe it doesn’t hit everyone this hard.

I wasn’t ready for it, the day the two blue lines showed up, and most days I still feel like an interloper. Arms akimbo, trying to balance my enormous ambition, my longing, my wanderlust, and my fierce sense of self preservation with the endless needs of my sweet boy.

At the playground with Bean, on a day off over my vacation, I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t belong at the green metal picnic table, discussing toddler clothing labels and snack foods. I feel the prickly heat of guilt rising up as I notice a thousand thoughts that have nothing to do with the fact that I’m somebody’s mom, crowding my mind. Pushing him on the swing, my heart swells with complete pride. He’s so adorable, tilting his head back and smearing a perfect grin across the sky---and then seconds later I’m somewhere else entirely: lost in thought.

A part of me understands that this intensity will ebb, or at least alter somewhat, as he grows more independent, but this fact seems so abstract right now when all I long for are six days back to back to sink up to my ankles in fiction.

Each time I pick a dandelion going to seed, I hold my breath, examining the fuzz, planning just how I’ll release my breath so that every seed will detach and float away. I’m good at this, and also good at finding four leaf clovers. I know how lucky I am in my life. I know how good it is, how blessed I am to be a mother. But I also know that most times, when I exhale in a quick burst of air, a few fluffy seed heads will linger like tiny javelins, right close to the stem.

Sometimes I realize just how lucky I am:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

(I am totally aware that he looks like a little urchin in this pic. As he put it:"I got some CRUD on my face." Don't ask me where he learned that.)

Urnalizing

Alas. One day he will be big enough to use a urnal. In preparation for this event, I've done extensive research on the subject. What follows are a few directions to hopefully help him navigate that complex, highly technical piece of machinery. 1. Aim. 2. Go where you aim. Do NOT go on the floor or the surrounding walls. 3. Do not shake dry on the floor or surrounding walls. 4. Flush. 5. Please for the love of god, wash your hands. 6. Zip up before exiting .

I know, sounds easy, right? I think so too.

Except every time I use a unisex bathroom (or slip into the mens room because the line for the lady's is immeasurably longer than my blader's capacity is big,) the floor invariably has a sticky yellow trail edging downhill from the general direction of the urnal. What is up with that? Do you guys LIKE that sticky feeling on the soles of your shoes, and that horseflies-in-summer stench? Or is it really more complicated than I imagine?

Moving on.

Except really, we're not. Because all things potty have become central to our daily lives here at casa mytopography. On good days this involves much cheering and hoopla for a job well done on: prior notifcation, proper underware removal, etc. However, there are the other days when Bean thinks it's particularly intreguing to hide, in say, the central island cupboard, while pooping in his underpants. And then there is still his all consuming affection of going outdoors, which he does on his own, whenever he can--except that he can't quite tilt his hips in the right direction so it likely goes all over the bib of his overalls or the waist of his jeans. Clearly there is more to this than meets the eye, people. But I can't quite figure out what I'm missing here. Alas.

Feeling the earth spin

I used to be able to lie down on the grass and relax into the very center of my solar plexus and feel the earth spin. Really. My whole body would tune to the thrumming velocity of the earth twirling on its axis very fast, gravity pressing my body into the ground. Then one day I couldn't do it any more. Now, I'll lie down like I did today after a run, and for a brief moment I'll feel myself almost slip to that place, but then I'll snap back into myself, like snapping back from almost falling asleep. Has this ever happened to you?

Changing things up a bit

A new header & with it, a commitment to share more art and stories about the small moments of daily life. I've been caught up in big ideas too much of late, and haven't given enough attention to the small things. Diggers. Bulldozers. Apples eaten round and round their equator to the core. Chimpmunks and snakes and wild things blooming everywhere in our yard. Little boy stuff. I don't want to blink and have missed it all, and already the baby has been replaced by the little boy who says, "Mama, I Bean want a digger. Bean want to go in da digger and turn it on. Bean want to drive digger. Bean want a BIG road to drive da digger on."

Hard to fathom how much has changed since this time last year.

Ingredients for a perfect Saturday:

Waking up to sunshine dappling our sheets and faces with zig-zag zebra stripes as it slips through the slats on our bedroom’s wooden shades, we stretch and lazily stumble out of bed. I haven’t slept in all week, and suddenly 7 a.m. seems decadent. Bean is big-eyed and delighted to find himself smack dab between Mommy and Daddy, and he starts the day as usual, with nonstop chatter. “Want to make a dort,” he says, not quite getting his ‘Fs’ yet. He slips down under the covers between DH an I, squealing with giggles when we reach for him.

At breakfast I read a New Yorker piece aloud and DH and both of us are laughing as he makes iced espresso in tall pint glasses. Then the boys head outside to mow the lawn. “It’s gonna be loud,” Bean says, his eyebrows furrowing. I hold him in my lap while DH pulls the cord and the lawnmower starts up with a purr. I can feel Bean’s body startle slightly, but then his boyish passion for all things motor takes over, and he scurries after DH as he makes looping arcs around the yard. The first mowing of the season. The grass smells sweet and sharp, and the sunlight prickles on my skin. Along the house, dandelions bloom in a row, weeds for sure, but both DH and I love their sunny lion’s manes, and so he doesn’t mow them down.

Then we head off to a Touch A Truck activity put on by Parks and Rec. Bean is in seventh heaven. Eighth. Ninth. He cannot believe his luck: they’re serving chocolate ice cream cones, AND he can climb on the diggers and investigate every button and knob in the cement mixer and fire truck. His grin is impossibly huge. We meet up with friends, and chat while our kids dance to the music booming from the local radio station that has set up in a corner of the parking lot under the pines. We try to wipe ice cream off of faces and fingers whenever we get a chance, but it's a loosing battle. Bean clutches his too-big plastic construction hat, and murmurs about diggers all the way until nap time.

Nap time. DH leaves to help a friend, and Bean and I eat lunch and settle in together among down comforters and striped sheets. One of those dreamy, sweet, snuggled afternoon naps that stretch on and on. We’re drowsy and sleep for hours. HOURS. Three to be exact. Maybe more. Finally I roust myself from my stupor, and soon after Bean sits up tousle-headed and grinning. We fold laundry. Or rather I do, as Bean figures out the best possible angles for launching himself into the baskets of folded clothes.

Now I’m sitting with a stack of fig bars and an iced latte in my quite studio. Outside DH is mowing the back yard and Bean in his lady-bug boots and his safari hat, is causing certain mischief. I love the hum of the lawn mower, and the way the light looks out the window. The hills are finally soft now—the twiggy skeletons of branches hazy with delicate new green. Leaves just barely unfolding, clouds in perfect sheep like clumps across the wide blue sky. I’m heading out now to start in on a flower bed. Turning soil, and tossing rocks. Then dinner at a friend’s house: pizza, wine, letting the kids twirl. Such a good day.

How did you spend your Saturday?

The shape of anxiety

There comes a point when habit pulls me here, to this place where I tell myself stories about the things I cannot do. Invariably after a week of rising early, making coffee, and touching my fingers to the keys, following words about where they will travel at dawn, my mind becomes like a child terrified of the monster under her bed.

This week, more than anything else, I have been watching my thoughts as I wake up and stumble like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase into the moment of the present, with my mind and body disjointed in a hundred little ways. I’ve realized that without any intention I put a great deal of effort into constructing thoughts that cut me off at the knees. I tell myself: you don’t know anything about fiction writing. And, you don’t have time to really produce anything worth publishing. And, I suck at this, what am I possibly thinking? And six or ten thoughts later I’m in a tailspin writing incoherent mutterings.

But this week I’ve been trying stubbornly to not listen. Trying, being the operative word, of course. Have you ever noticed how damn hard it is not to listen to your negative thoughts, and instead tune to the positive ones? I feel like I’m almost hardwired to tune in to these thoughts, like a freaking hand-made transistor radio that can only pick up a one station. I buy my own bullshit ninety-eight percent of the time, hook, line and sinker. And then I sit down to write, and it’s a wonder I still remember all twenty-six letters, let alone how to construct a few sentences that reflect any small piece of how my heart moves.

But that is the reason I write. The reason you write. The reason we both read. Because writing is an act of turning our inner ear towards the divine breath of creativity that moves across the harp strings of our hearts, and turning that other-worldly song into words; opens our hearts, so that when someone else reads strings of their own heart resonate in recognition. Writing then, becomes something huge. Words have the immense capacity to reach across the divide between individuals, and to inhabit the private spaces in our hearts and minds from whence new ideas spring. The stories we choose to tell shape us.

Maybe this is all very obvious, but the trolly part of me that crouches in the corner of my mind and repeats idiotically a mantra of fear really needs to hear this today. So as I sit down to write this morning, my windowsill cluttered with jars of brushes, I grab a the most recent Sun and find this, by John O’Donohue:

Fear is the greatest source of falsification in life. It makes the real seem unreal, and the unreal to appear real. In The Courage To Be the theologian Paul Tillich draws a distinction between fear and anxiety. Anxiety for him, is this diffuse worry that has no object or point of reference. This is the atmosphere in the U.S., the land of the free and the home of the brave. There is a huge anxiety just down under the surface.

Fear, as distinct from anxiety, has an object and a point of reference. Tillich says that in order to handle anxiety, you have to translate it into a fear that has a definite object. Then you can engage with it. Part of the intention of growth is to overcome one’s fears.

It makes so much sense I almost laugh out loud, my hearstrings thrumming. What if I pushed farther? What if I tried to narrow the huge anxiety I have about writing, especially about writing fiction, into a fear that I can grow past? What if? I’m not there yet, but it’s a good point to launch from.

Do you have wide anxieties or pointed fears? Is there a false story you tell yourself again and again unthinkingly? What is stopping you from accomplishing the things you dream of?

Doing

Doing so many things, there are hardly enough moments to pause with cup of tea and post and read my favorite blogs. To sum things up for the past few days: * Painted my studio blue this weekend, and rearranged furniture. Today Bean stepped in the drying paint tray and then onto the hardwood floor. "Uh oh, mama! Uh oh!" He wailed. I promptly scooped him up and tried to pass him to DH over the top of my work table. He planted his panted on feet squarely on DH's jeans. Naturally, following the utter rediculousness of this particular train of events, DH tossed his jeans into the sink (as per my instruction--hot wanter will remove latex paint, if treated immediately) without removing his cell phone from the pocket. I'm sad to report it didn't make it, but because we know we're prone to bizarre accidents like this one, we have cell phone insurance, so it's all good.

* Threw some new pots at the studio tonight and finally figured out why my back has been hurting for weeks: hunching over the potter's wheel.

* Signed up for a writing workshop right after school lets out with one of my most favorite authors. Whoo hoo! (I'm not telling whom just yet as I'm still feeling a queasy mix of utter excitment and terror at the prospect of workshopping with someone I so admire.)

* Got back into the groove of things at school today. Suddenly the kids all look tall to me. Like second graders. They get jokes now, and can work independently. It feels good to be here, at this point in the year. To see the product of all my hard work in the faces of my eager kids. We wrote an acrostic poem today that I simply must bring home and post because it is brilliant.

* Mopped the floors for the first time (almost, well, no not almost...really, for the first time) since we moved--over vacation, and did aproximately nine million loads of laundry. DH folded the entire mountain today while I was at work--and put up all the dining room window trim that's been missing.

Whew. I'm sure I've missed a zillion other things but my brain is zinging from a lack of sleep. I miss blogging though. Miss hearing from all of you. What have you been up to, since spring has come?

When being Mommy will no longer be enough to keep him safe

He sat up tonight in bed, after I'd tucked him in and he was breathing steadily and I'd gone next door to my studio, and yelled, "Mommy, mommy, come in here!" And when I did, he said, "An alligator is trying to come in here."

His eyes were wide in the dark.

Now comes the hard part, doesn't it? Now begin those moments of helplessness that unravel in every direction: nothing I can do to stop the ugly parts of the world from rising up to meet him. Nothing to stop the fear he'll know, or the anger, the assaults, the guilt, the loneliness, the anxiety that invariably tattoos the skin of our existence as human beings.

Until now, he's been so small and so close to me, the world could barely wedge itself between us. I was his world. There were no alligators. But now, suddenly he's twenty six months old and listening to everything that's said around him, taking it in, digesting it, and the shield I make around him with my fierce she-wolf love, is permeable. His dreams are colored now with language. Words paint the landscape of every waking moment. Everywhere, he follows me about, almost breathless, with a question, an observation, some piece of whimsy. He copies everything. He says everything.

I kissed him a hundred times, pressing my face against his warm cheek. Then sang the tumbling notes of a lullaby I made up recently, to which he seems to know all the words, and requests nightly. But after I'd left the room, left the hallway, left the house with an armload of books to trade for store credit at Barnes & Noble, he woke up. As if he knew I'd left.

He pattered from his big-boy-bed to the doorway of my studio, where yellow lamp light exchanged space with the darkness pressing close, and called for Mommy.

After DH called me, saying he'd been waking up every ten minutes, troubled, calling out for me (which he has never, ever done before), I drove home anxiously. Skimming through blinking yellow lights, listening to haunting jazz tunes from faraway places. Saxophone, played well, always breaks my heart.

I came upstairs as soon as I got home, and found the two of them lying in the dark of our bedroom. DH was awake. Bean was asleep, spread horizontally across my pillows. I bent near his cheek and whispered, "I'm here now, baby. I'll watch over you. You're safe."

But how long will I even be able to say those words?