Update: because I've almost slipped off the face of the earth

* My laptop is in for repairs (the screen split down the side for no apparent reason) and I'm going through withdrawal trying to write on my old, slow HP. * My rooster, who was attacked by a neighbor's boyfriend's dog, is dying. I am so sad, and feel so guilty and awful, not quite knowing what to do to help. He's more severely injured than he let on the day after--and I think I'm going to have my father in law shoot him. He might have crushed ribs--and certainly a broken leg. He won't eat, or drink. This is the part I hate about loving animals.

* I have another writing deadline (the first of next month) and am tangling deep in the middle of a manuscript. Hence, I have no time to do anything else. Including art. Feeling guilty about that.

* I can't seem to shake the feeling of guilt hanging over me lately---can't seem to ever feel like I'm getting everything done well enough, fast enough, etc--yet I can't seem to figure out what to cut back on.

* I'm turning 30 at the end of the week, and am feeling nervous. Shouldn't I have accomplished more by now? Please tell me, what is the best thing about turning 30?

Fairy dust and climbing shoes

Another really long day. And then, the best thing ever. We started our climbing class tonight, and as an early birthday present DH got me a new harness and shoes. In between trying on pairs of shoes--and while waiting for the sales guy to dig through his inventory for my size--I picked up a climbing magazine and leafed through it. Then, while reaching to put it back, this little gift was sitting right there--where the magazine had been.

I've always adored Rosa for doing this kind of thing and have secretly wished I'd someday be the recipient of a little random bit of whimsy. But to find it today was simply perfect.

I was so exhausted, bummed out, and feeling defeated in general. Let's just say it was a looong day.

So we went climbing and it was glorious, and now I have a little magical bag of glittery gold fairy dust and I can't stop smiling.

The only difference

Friday night my heart felt like a hundred rain splattered puddles: each one reflecting a different small circle of cloud covered sky; so many different things to do all in exactly the same few moments.

Friday I was a flood of hormonal mood swings before I start to bleed, and I felt anxious and sad and utterly overwhelmed. Also nearly sick again. Then Saturday came, and the sun was shining through tatters of clouds and I went for a run for the first time in a month, and dear god, why can’t I remember this?

I need to exercise.

Every day I need to feel my body move, outside, among trees and open spaces, side stepping puddles, feeling my lungs suck in cold air. I need to exercise not because I want to look a certain way, but because I need to feel a certain way. It’s the only variable I can think of that genuinely affects how I manage stress. It’s the only thing that really makes a difference: being outdoors, feeling my blood hot in my cheeks, feeling my muscles sore afterwards.

Exercise brings balance to my life, yet regularly in the winter I let it slip by. Day after day I come home, to the sun staining the west a meek orange, and the shadows already those of dusk. I feel selfish then, setting out on a run, having not spent time with my small boy.

Yet without exercise I start to become irrational. Guilt becomes an entire harbor in my heart, sheltering a whole fleet of inadequacies: I do not spend enough time with my son; I don’t cook enough or clean enough or see my husband enough; I am not a good enough teacher or writer or reader.

The only difference between days like this, and days where I feel like I’m on top of the world is that on the days where I’m kicking ass, I’ve also gotten outdoors and moved.

Seriously. It’s that easy. And that incredibly difficult. Does anyone else experience this?

Today as a (totally bummer) postcard:

I woke up late this morning. In the night the power had gone out and my alarm clock was blinking 3:45. I was late to a staff meeting.

The children were needy, needy, needy today.

I came home to a missing rooster who had been chased down the road to my neighbor's house (several hundred yards away) by their daughter's dog. He was dazed and missing tail feathers but alive. I caught him and tossed a sheet over his head and carried him back up the hill in my lap in the passenger seat of the car.

I ate soup with my mom tonight, just the two of us at her place, and felt deeply grateful to be cared for.

I keep forgetting where I've put things: a sign of too-tiredness. I can't find the notebook I use to keep my lists. I've seen it and can remember seeing it but cannot remember where. It is maddening.

How was your day?

Puny

I have unreasonable expectations, constructed on scaffolding I can hardly climb, and from up there I sometimes get vertigo. When I sit down to do art, I feel them creeping up : that I’m not doing more, or better work. That it’s not good enough. It’s so lame, this inner voice. So useless, yet there it is.

Tonight I insist on quashing this inner critic and cut squares at random from magazine with Bean on my lap. At my floor, a widening circumference of scraps. I am a messy artist. I wrap my hand over Bean’s smaller one and show him how to brush gel medium over the scraps I’ve assembled.

It’s not much, not pen and ink or watercolors or even really any work I generated myself. (See, there’s the voice. Where does it come from?) And yet I force myself to go with it tonight, making a mosaic of color. Pictures of spaces, dishes, fabric, dreams. For an instant I imagine there: in the restaurant with the red-backed chairs, or the windowed room with the pale green blown glass baubles hanging from the ceiling.

I try to let it be enough for a Tuesday, when my temples ache and the cat vomited on the kitchen table and the dishes are still in the sink.

Sigh.

Dig in and read.

It is midwinter here in my small corner of the world and also in my blue-roomed heart. I’m tucked in, my pulse moving slowly and full of trepidation like water running under pale knocked together shards of ice. Self doubt circles like a pack of coyotes, their tracks mushy and dark where the earth collapses, pressing up close to icy ribbon of river.

This is what winter always brings: a bareness; an uncomfortable edge; inadequacy. Things seem so blatant; personal deficits larger than life, like the huge fiery orange sun we watched today. It tangled in the bare branches of the trees near us at the top of the sledding hill, then slipped away, leaving the snow stained pink with longing.

I spent the morning in a quiet house reading Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer, and coming face to face with the blunt edge of my own lack. In the back of the book, “119 Books To Be Read Immediately” and I’ve read only a small handful. I’m a slow reader, with a tendency to dally in the text. I soak up sentences. I read with a pen, marking, dog-earing, rummaging back through previous pages. But I’m also a sporadic, undisciplined reader, and I’m ashamed of this.

Books have a way of inhabiting the drawers of my mind, like so many jars of gesso and paint, easily jostled, staining the surface of my day. I have a hard time shaking free of them, and carrying on, so I have a certain reluctance grappling with anything weighty unless I have the means to hunker down and read it for an entire day.

Also, I am lazy. I drag my feet about finishing books that don’t catch my interest in the first few lines (fickle, I know). I lack analytical fervor. I read simply for the joy of language, story, and words, which I’ve always loved and carried covetously around in my pocket on the scribbled pages of a 4x6” Mead memo book. But I lack critical finesse, and also time, clarity, and a hundred other things have thus far prevented me from reading the list of books I probably should already have read.

Somewhere along the way I’ve also let myself start thinking that time spent curled on the couch with a book frivolous leisure time, less meaningful than time spent clicking away at the keyboard, constructing jagged sentences about blue shadows falling long across bright snow. Have no doubt: I’ll devour books by the authors I love (mostly contemporary writers: Kingsolver, Diddion, Munro, O’Brien) and I’ll jealously leaf through books by new authors who are rising like sudden shiny stars into the literary sky. But I’ve rarely gone back to the masterpieces, the ones that have endured: prose and plot and construction indelible and profound across time. And lately, as I’m grappling with my own writing more and more, I’ve started to feel a hunger for these texts: knowing that as I read them, I’ll be carried across time, into the world of ideas, word by word.

Word by word, closer to what I need to know.

So I’ve decided to make this my year of reading. This, simply, is my mondo beyondo and my one little word. Read.

{ Tell me: What two books most changed the way you see the world, writing, life, etc?}

Leap

I sat down tonight to paint the way Bean does--with color first, then the image taking shape. I had no plan, no illustration in the back of my head, just the commitment to take a small corner of time out of my day to do art this month. It feels good to keep returning to my studio. To give myself this gift of quiet moments, paintbrushes clinking in jars of chalky colored water; tubes of paint and stamps and papers fluttering to the floor like moths.

When the turtles showed up, I pictured them poised to leap into a sky filled with stars, mythic and dreamlike. Because isn't that what the moments before anything are like? Before you leap? Before you know the outcome. You're just there, with a possible bucket of stars below you.

My secret inner superhero

The other night I was talking to a friend. He said, “I don’t know, I guess I still feel like somewhere inside me is an inner superhero.”

I’m right there with him.

I still have that feeling: like one morning I’ll wake up and miraculously be able to live full throttle—without the shredded edges of tiredness that come with staying up late and waking up early and doing a job that requires me to be one-hundred-and-fifty percent on every single minute of the day.

My secret inner superhero (who is tucked into the pocket of my heart, along with my first-star-of-the-evening wishes, and all the instances where find four-leaf-clovers, or cross my fingers for luck) is someone who doesn’t hesitate, second guess, forget things, or feel totally scrambled and drained at the end of a week, and isn’t prone to weird allergic reactions to any form of allopathic medicine (I totally am & am currently so disposed) or bouts of unnecessary snapping at the people I love.

My secret inner superhero can ski triple black diamonds, ride a mountain bike downhill without fear, run triathlons, contribute to magazines, publish a novel, do art, paint her toenails flawlessly, send packages to friends and loved ones ahead of important dates, show up early, hang glide at least once , travel to every continent, speak another language, spend a week a the Louver, actually reads all the books I should have read in high school, and meditates regularly.

The thing is, I attempt all of these things, but sometimes just feel so small, so fragmented, so insignificant, compared with what I dream.

I throw myself into the day, and then blink and it’s over. I made a perfect latte this morning—first time ever. During writing workshop at school, the classroom hummed—pencils scratching, the chatter of kids reading their work to each other, the clack of the keyboard. In the afternoon I caught my breath in the cold, walking to my car. The sky was a frosty, pale orange. The sun was setting. Birds, quiet in the winter twilight, made black silhouettes along the telephone wires. I gathered Bean into my arms. Together we painted, and giggled, and read stories. Then in the dark, I pressed my head against his hair, and inhaled. Just that.

Maybe it’s not so small after all.

(P.S. What is your secret inner superhero like?)

Vermillion

Across the snow, the cardinals dart, the vermillion hearts of winter. The wind pulls the mercury down below zero, and the air bites bare skin. Water is glassy under ice in the chicken coop in the morning, and the sun, when it shines is followed by a sun dog, the sky frosted but blue.

Create, live with abandon.

The snow is falling outside, making everything like a milky dream. The trees are flocked with white, and I can’t remember the scent of summer: cut grass, ripening blackberries, dust rising up from the dirt road; in the same way I can’t really remember what last year was like, so much uncertain, heartache like broken dishes gathered in a paper sack. I never imagined that I’d have to reach out and cut my fingers on the shards to grow in a marriage; in fact I never really pictured this life at all.

This small boy, this man, this house, these fields dappled blue and white with snow and shadows. How can you ever really imagine how your life will be? Dreams are so fickle, so rife with longing. It’s good to have them—and to send them on whispered breath out into the world like so much dandelion furze. But I’m grateful that the Universe has a bigger dream for me.

Grateful that in the year between then and now, we’ve come together again, pulled towards one another inevitably like the tiny magnets on the backs of Bean’s toy trains that hitche one to the next. Grateful the embering heat of the wood stove, the heat of his love, and the inches of powder that keeps falling out of the sky, making it possible, finally, for me to learn to ski.

Yesterday Bean spent the night at his grandparents for the first time ever. We went out for dinner with friends, sipping champagne and honeyed martinis in a restaurant with silver painted walls. Gold and white balloons bobbed from the backs of our chairs. Our voices carried certainly to the neighboring tables, our laughter rising up ruckus and often among forkfuls of roasted garlic, olives, flatbreads, crab cakes with micro greens, carpaccio, crème brule. Then we came home and were just us, in the soft flannel of our bed when the pale morning light pulled us from slumber. Just us, and the siren song of bare skin and warm shoulders calling for an embrace.

Then we made coffee, buttered raisin toast, and eggs, and talked about our resolutions for 2008.

Mine: Publish at least five pieces of writing. Get more organized (with everything from regular writing time, to planning what’s for dinner.) Kick some booty as an athlete: get to be better at climbing, yoga, running (maybe a triathlon?) and skiing. Grow a garden. Live with abandon.

Good times + Art Everyday

Happy & merry to all of you!

It has been a BUSY week. (Thank you for all the well wishes!) I've somewhat recovered from the most horrible sinus infection/fever combo I have ever had. The word misery does not even serve it justice. Seriously awful.

But, I'm mostly better, and we had a wonderful Christmas. I made baked pears in wine with orange zest and served them with mascarpone, toasted walnuts and chocolate, on Christmas Eve. Delicious. Bean was rediculously cute Christmas morning. Eyes WIDE, wide, wide. We used tissue paper and colorful ribbons to make the unwrapping that much more fun--and it was. He's been playing with his toys non-stop ever since (a wooden kitchen, a Plan City parking garage, lincoln logs and tinker toys were the big ones.)

Yesterday we went skiing and I am finally good enough to not be horrible, and I love the thrill of zipping down the mountain carving great curves in the snow. I'm still pretty terrible, but no longer terribly afraid and that makes all the difference. In fact, I LOVE it. DH also gave me a gift certificate for a climbing class in January, and I am thrilled to get back on the wall. I haven't climbed in years now, and I miss it.

For the month of January I've decided I'm going to do some art every day & post it here. Anyone want to join me? It's so easy over the holidays to get all blurry around the edges. To forget to focus inward, even though I think that's what the heart of wintertime should be all about. I'm looking forward to having a commitment to create something every day, as my life seems to be chronically busy of late, and I've been struggling to stay focused amidst the tornado of things that clamor for my attention daily. I haven't done any art in months, and I miss that part of myself. If you want to join me, respond in the comments and I'll make a special sidebar links for Everyday Art in January.

Feverish brain fuzz

I keep thinking I'll wake up and feel better--but whatever I have decided to kick it to me. I am STILL sick with a fever, and feel generally misearable. My brain feels like a dust bunny. I cannot think straight, let alone post anything coherent. Gah.

And so the week is gone

I've been sick. A major yucky head cold + fever combo that has left me wimpy and whining watching re-runs on TV. I hate being sick. Especially around the holidays. To distract you from the abundant LACK of posting going on around here, pretty pictures: My boys whispering in the early morning light, while I got up, snuck downstairs and slipped something into Bean's advent box.

Breakfast this morning. The thrill (yes, it really is) of going to the coop and getting freshly laid green or blue shelled eggs has not warn off. Talk about fresh.

The kitchen, post breakfast. The penguin's name is Snowflake, and Bean is in love with him.

Feeding the sheep & lamas is a regular weekend activity. I love the lama's eyelashes, and the way the barn always smells sweet with hay and is warm with animal breath. Our neighbor's always put on a full nativity play in their barn every year. All the local kids act out the parts, and everyone sings carols and eats cookies & goes sledding afterwards. So fun.

Getting the newspaper on the way back from our walk. We sled down to the bottom of our drive, then pull the paper up.

My little mischief maker, "helping" me make Christmas cards.

I miss you

This week has been crappy/busy. Every day filled with eighty-nine OTHER things to do, so that every time I sit down at the computer it's usually nearing midnight and I'm officially mushy headed. I am looking forward to the weekend: to skiing on Sunday, and writing, and posting, and catching up with all of your blogs... what have you been up to this week?

satisfied

Outside a wood pecker hammers into the trunk of a poplar and the sky is the color of snow. I finished my manuscript yesterday, and couldn't have felt better about it. The stories work, I think, and they've begun to carry themselves, the characters leading me to new discoveries and scenes. It's how I mostly imagine writing should feel--and I've decided there is absolutely nothing better writing for two days straight, hours blurring, in a quiet house. DH too Bean over to the inlaws, and I cozied up by the wood stove, clacking away at the keyboard as content as a clam.

Other delights:

My lovely hens have started to lay eggs! Regularly! I've been particularly enjoying them soft boiled with a little salt and pepper.

I was inspired by Ali's beautiful advent boxes to make a set of my own for Bean, and he's delighted at the advent fairy's tiny gifts: yesterday a miniature tape measure; today a handful of tiny dinosaurs that grow when submerged in warm water (remember those? So fun.)

I spent the morning vacuuming and straightening, and mopping. The floors now gleam, and this makes me happy.

This afternoon, after a wee nap, I think we’ll head to the craft store to pick up tissue paper and card stock to prepare for the holidays; and also to a home store for throw pillows. Every couch needs a good collection of throw pillows, and we have too few.

What are you doing/eating this Sunday afternoon?

Tidbits

Bean said, "Mama, why do we wake up instead of down?" *

My spine feels looser after yoga. I had fun, watching him, hearing his breath, moving through the sun salute.

*

We bought pfeffernusse cookies today; a holiday tradition from my childhood.

*

Snow is falling in fat, wet flakes outside.

*

UPDATED: My brain = mush. Too little sleep. Too many words. I'll resurface on Sunday-ish. Until then, tell me what are three of your favorite things to receive in your stocking?

A positive counterbalance

It's the end of a week off and I feel at once relaxed and utterly frantic. I keep trying to remind myself not to let amorphous anxiety paint the backdrop for the entire day, and to instead pinpoint the underlying fear that causes angst to spread like a dark stain over calmer moments. This week my fear is that I won’t have enough time. My writing deadline looms at the end of the week, and although I love the work I’ve been producing I haven’t had the undivided time to sink back into it in a week or two, and this week is particularly busy.

I have decided to focus on the positives this week as a counterbalance to the stress. I am excited because DH and I are starting a new class together: a beginner series in ashtanga yoga. I can’t wait for my new yoga pants to come in the mail, and am looking forward to bring more attention and focus towards being consciously in my body next to DH being consciously in his. We’ve missed each other like crazy for the past couple of weeks. Bean has been sick, and this always results in him cozying up in our bed, needier than usual and full of toddler snores. We had an afternoon napping date yesterday, and though not a lot of sleep happened, we’ve been grinning at each other ever since.

Small good things that make me smile: my orchids blooming again on my windowsill; chai tea with sugar cubes and milk; discovering new settings on my camera today; carrying around a list notebook in my back pocket (instead of obsessing about the things I’ll otherwise forget); the first green and blue eggs from my Ameracuna chickens; and my new subscription to Cookie magazine. What are some things that make you smile?

Hello winter

I’ve blinked and it’s winter; the lush carpet of crumpled brown and yellow leaves is obscured by downy blanket of white. I sit at the kitchen counter, my back to the wood stove, watching snowflakes drift to the ground. My mind slips into a reverie, tracing the twirling track of individual snowflakes as they fall; the view straight from a Courier & Ives postcard. I take a deep breath. Hello winter.

It would be a lie to say that I’ve been looking forward to winter. I love the snow, and the first flakes falling every year make me giddy, and certainly I am eager to haul out the sleds and the snow shovels. It also helps that this winter I have toasty warm Sorrels to keep my feet snug, and a new powder blue down jacket. But winter brought out the sharpest edges last year, and it’s a bit like getting back on the horse after being bucked off to return to these cold months where the sun barely slips between the cloud cover for a few short hours, and in the night the mercury slips below zero. It was this time last year that my relationship with DH felt like it was imploding, as it underwent the fierce growth of a relationship moving past the seven year mark.

In my writing I’ve begun to explore how dialogue always overlaps. How really, there are only a small handful of moments (if any) when two people talk and both of them are actually talking about the same thing. Last winter, we were a caricature of this, aching to be close to each other yet sparring endlessly, our words the serrated objects of separate agendas. I still can’t put a finger on the pulse of the pain we caused each other: what it was for, or why. Most of it was reactionary; the product of external stresses from work and life that became distilled into the small orbit of our love, but it was also the product of a hundred small things: a cold house, anxiety over dreams unrealized, a toddler with insistent needs and disrupted sleep, and an accumulated lack of time to ourselves.

So the trepidation is there, if only faintly perceptible when I stop to take my own pulse. A slight blip. A snag in the fabric of these early winter days with snow falling and warm firelight and laughter. Every small argument bears undue weight, even though I know we’re so far from there, our love like maple sap grown dark and sweet in the heat metal evaporator pan.

It’s strange how the seasons bring things up. How certain days recall others; and for the longest time I’ve hated November. In college, and for years after, I’d get stir crazy. I’d try to break up with my boyfriend, or move to a new state, or write reams of dismal poems. It makes sense in that context, that last November marked the beginning of a season of angst, and it thrills me to no end to realize that I’ve actually this year I’ve bucked the trend. November was full of yellow leaves, a filigree of frost, and page after page of prose written with more confidence than I’ve ever had with a purpose and a deadline driving each paragraph towards completion. It’s all about climbing back on the horse, and then asking it to be Pegasus, and expecting to fly.

Daily chatter it is, then!

Happy Thanksgiving! Bean was sick with the stomach flu last night. All over everything. He's better today, but we're all a little delerious, and are getting ready to turn in for a nap. Rain is falling steadily and the air is heavy with fog. Brett Dennon is playing; the stove is toasty. Nap time it is.

I failed NaBloPoMo

I didn't even mean to. I simply forgot to write yesterday--amidst snow falling and my father-in-law's birthday, and conferences at work and, well, life. Now I'm torn. I can either revert to my pensive ever-two-days posts, or continue to bombard you with daily chatter.