Self Portrait

Then & now and yes /  by Christina Rosalie

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado, earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could you know. That’s why we wake and look out–no guarantees in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning, like right now, like noon, like evening. ~ William Stafford

(Found this poem here today.)

+++

Do you ever go back and read your own archives? I do. It's a little like opening a time capsule seeing Bean small, and me, whatever way I was then.

Today I looked back for the very first self portrait I ever took, at the beginning of Self Portrait Tuesday (before it became Self Portrait Challenge)...

I 'met' so many incredible gorgeous bloggers through those weekly challenges.

The funny thing about blogging is you don't get to SEE the people you read unless they are generous with you, unless they share this too, their faces, their work-worn hands, torn jeans, sunglasses, knees, braids, laughs. And I like seeing these things... and sharing them... which is why I'm doing these Sunday portraits...and I hope you will too.

Another thing from going back through my archives is seeing how memes used to fly around the blogsphere all the time. Now, not so much. I can't put my finger on it, but I do think something has changed in the way that people blog and share (or maybe it's just me?) I've read some interesting posts about this recently. About how there is less community or intimacy or something...and more business now. Maybe? Do you feel this? Sometimes I do. And so in the spirit of sharing more:

4 random things about me right now:

* In the morning when I first wake up I feel myself dangling like a marionette somewhere just beyond my body. It's almost painful to be pounced on, or touched much in this state, and the arrival of small boys in my bedroom (with their inevitable elbows and knees) is always a bittersweet thing (I love the way they smell when they first wake up.)

* I got an email in my inbox on Friday telling me that I'm the Albany, NY winner for this. (I entered only because of the NYC shopping spree.) This is hilariously perfect (and a little embarrassing.) I am a good candidate: I only wear jeans. I am baffled by makeup. I have no idea what to do with layers. Or knee high boots. And I need a haircut. (I thought twice about posting this because it's just so... not me...and yet I'm totally giddy about it.)

* I just got this book and this one in the mail today. I wish I could get books in the mail every day!

* I lose sunglasses always, and yet I can never seem to figure out where they go when they're gone. It's not like they fall off my head...or I leave them on the roof of my car (though I have, and watched them get smashed.) They just disappear. Hence the sunglasses self portrait to celebrate a new cheap pair.

+++ Your turn. 4 things. Also, be brave this week and take a self portrait... you can hide behind your shades. Post your photos here, or in the Self Portrait Sunday Flickr pool.

Here & now /  by Christina Rosalie

IMG_8589 A week of friends, and bonfires and playing in the leaves. A week of making choices and getting on top of the laundry situation and soaking up back to back days of slanting shadows and mellow sunlight.

Now: Penguin Café on my headphones. Writing a novel makes everything twirl in my head.

Life is full, and there is a feeling of tenderness just below the surface. It’s hunting season. We put the light on in the coop to trick the sleepy hens to lay some eggs. In the dark we fold into each other and whisper, reconciling the smallness of today with the possibility that tomorrow will be great.

We’re all hugging ourselves in the dark; hugging each other; hungry for something. Or at least I am, he is. Lots happening in the present tense right now, but I miss being here.

What matters to you today?

Drawing blanks /  by Christina Rosalie

IMG_7707 And I can't find the words to write about it. Dislocated. Nostalgic. Missing the way I used to be, as irrational as that seems. Feeling anxious about the future. What if I'll never be the things I dream of? Shit. Even I know that sounds ridiculous, and yet that voice is there in my head. A rejection letter in the mail. Not enough sleep. Whatever.

I am missing the connections I've made here, Internets. I know it's my fault that they've dwindled as I've been caught in this weird place of cat-got-your-tongue moodiness that is my present. Damn. I want to share my life with you more, again. I just don't know how to put words around it. What if this lasts? What if nothing turns out? This is the voice in my head today. Even with sun, even with coffee, even with sitting alone upstairs in a cafe.

Do you ever feel like this? Like there are no words?

What are you afraid of? What will you regret, if you never do it or become it?

August. /  by Christina Rosalie

august2
I have been writing posts in my head all week. I've been swamped, and I love it. I'm doing copy editing. Being paid to write. Life is good.

Except. I haven't had a scrap of time to write--on my novel, or here. Still trying to find balance. Always this. Is there such a thing? I am determined to sink deep into these last summer days with gratitude.

This is what I want to remember about August:

The humid hot and sticky days. Making cherry pie, served warm with whipped cream. Yellow watermelon. Friends visiting a lot. Backyard bonfires. The corn almost ripe in the garden. Oscillating fans. Rain falling from sunny skies. My apricot colored cat on the white sheets. The dragonflies circling in the heavy air, waiting for rain. Falling in love again, more, enormously with my guy. New calf muscles, and biceps. Running hard almost every day. Swimming in the pond in the rain. Bean's obsession with helium balloons. My beautiful, gorgeous baby boy Sprout who is six months old, sitting, almost crawling, smiling always. I adore him. Utterly. He is a dream baby, and I don't want him to grow up yet.

I found these lines at the end of a poem today--in the Sun, from A Warning by Eric Anderson Nothing ever goes away enough or arrives enough, and I want to cry when I think of my heart, muscle pounding in muscle, greedy always for joy.

This is exactly how I feel.

***

What do you want to remember about August?

A list happy inventory /  by Christina Rosalie

In January for my birthday, inspired as always by Andrea's awesome lists, I wrote my own: 32 things to do before I turn 32. But then I forgot to post it, until now, when I was cleaning up the post-its on my desktop (how I love the post-it widget!) and found the list again. I was surprised by how many things I've already done, or started to do. Something about putting stuff on the page makes it happen. And I love that.

I'm thinking that maybe as I accomplish things on my list I'll post about it & link to the list in my sidebar. Aside from the sheer glee of writing them, nothing beats crossing stuff off lists. You too should make your very own list. I would LOVE it if you shared. Here in the comments. Or share the link to your list on your blog.

The thing about making a relatively long list of things to be completed in a relatively short time (a year) is that you have to really think about your life realistically. What do you really want to do this year? What do you want to accomplish? What are some of the small things that you have been meaning to do, that will likely get pushed to the side by bigger more consuming (and not necessarily on the list!) things unless you write them down?

Hello winter /  by Christina Rosalie

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.

Enmeshed in forward motion /  by Christina Rosalie

In the Pacific ocean, 1996.

This afternoon I sat among boxes in my studio and dug through relics (an attempt at organizing, gone very far tangent.) I found pictures of high school boyfriends; letters; collages. All small fragments of who I was then, different, yet still me, in ridiculous cut-off shorts and too-large plaid shirts (thank you Nirvana.)

It felt so funny looking back---feeling the way time arcs like electricity, fast and slow between now and then. It seems so impossible to me sometimes, that we can only go forwards. That we can only live today and maybe tomorrow, but never yesterday again. Those romances, back then when I wore converse high tops and baggy jeans were so sweet and achingly awkward. They were all good guys, and I still know most of them. Some, I’m still close friends with, which says a lot about the both of us, I think. But even though we're friends, and we talk and share pancakes when they come to visit my little family here up on our hill, we can still only go one-way: always towards the future. We’ll never be able to slip back into the skin of our past selves—there on the rocky coast, posing for the camera on self-timer in wind-rumpled blue parkas; or there on the cobbled streets of Florence, in hiking boots and backpacks.

Riffling through the box of artifacts I felt myself slip up above like a helium balloon on a string. Suddenly with a birds-eye-view: there I am, in the middle of my life. That is how it has all turned out. That man. That small boy. That house. And not those other men, despite their earnest efforts, and big hearts. It felt like time travel, seeing my name, printed out on numerous envelopes. My maiden name. Those consonants now grown unfamiliar on my tongue.

Has anyone else ever felt like this? Startled, for a brief moment, or surprised, to find yourself right where you are? Not that it could be any different, or that I would want it to. Simply that time moves on, and that on a rare instant I see how I am enmeshed in its shimmering net, the tide pulling steadily forwards, and regardless of my loves and my discrepancies, and I arrive each day, a little further on.

A dare /  by Christina Rosalie

This is a dare. Find good light: late afternoon is preferable, when the sunlight falls in long golden angles through the window or the trees. Take some pictures. Of your face. Of you. Good pictures, that you can love. Maybe go in front of a fan, where the occilating wind tosses your hair about. Maybe smile. Maybe hold the camera out, or prop it up on something sturdy. The important thing is: take pictures. Take enough to be sure there are a few you can look at and immediately love: no criticizing, no rejecting, no nit-picking. Post them. Leave your link. But mostly, just take the pictures.

Here’s why: You will not always be the age you are today, and someday you, or someone who loves you will want to look at these pictures, lingering over the way you looked so beautiful right in that moment, in good light with the wind in your hair.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. How life moves at an exponential speed. When you’re two, one year is half your life. When you’re thirty—a year is one thirtieth. Time compresses, blurs, flutters, but always moves forwards, and with it, you. Always changing. Who you are right now will be a smudge on the window of memory in a handful of years. Take some pictures. Like a watermark or a timestamp. Something to remind you. What are you like, right now?

I’m at this point in my life where I’ve just started to notice that I’m aging. Tiny crows feet dance at the corners of my eyes; a furrow between my brows forever marks the way I frown. Some days, when I kneel in front of the mirror with my little boy, his skin fresh and flawless, I am startled by how changed I am. How old I look. Of course, I know that for someone a dozen or two years older than I, nearly thirty is spring-chicken young. But that’s what I mean: sometimes in the moment it’s hard to just appreciate.

So go do it.

/  by Christina Rosalie

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.

June Self Portrait Challenge: environment # 2 /  by Christina Rosalie

This place is big with words, with ideas, with art. The walls remember e.e. cummings and Stanley Kunitz; Grace Paley's voice and Mary Oliver's eye for noticing the profound in minute details. A fish weathervane tilts out my window. A long catwalk connects the studios; roses tumble wildly below. I stand in the mirror taking pictures to remember this, so that when everything else pushes in, I'll have snapshots with light flooding through big windows and the fan whirring. I'll have Pam Houston's voice and the laughter of other students sharing work. I'll have the images of Robert Yarboroughs paintings dancing like sunspots on the inside of my eyelids, and Wired Puppy coffee, and houses painted lavender and lemon and ocean blue. I'll have the memory of hours writing, quiet pooling up like water around me; and I'll have the seal's slick wet heads bobbing up out of the water to eye me sitting, sand flecking my calves, alone on the shore.

Self Portrait: new haircut /  by Christina Rosalie

I got a new haircut today, and I had my eyebrows done. I always feel so much more put together & pretty when I do. It's been too long since I put any effort into my appearance. The entire winter, in fact.

Afterwards I spent a few hours by myself. Sitting at a cafe people watching and scribbling in my notebook; smiling at strangers. Then using gift certificates I've been saving to buy some new things: a pair of dark jeans, a hot pink tank top for 2$, some classic t's I've been needing, and a new pair of earrings (pictured). I hardly ever get to spend this kind of time, just for me. I had to stop myself more than once from lurching out of the dressing room in just a bra when a toddler yelled "Mama!" just the way Bean does from the room next door.

It was kind of my own private celebration for taking the plunge and going after something I want. This is what I'm in the mood for right now: ready to revamp things, to gear up, get busy, plunge in, and DO. Spring has this affect on me, and though we just got snow last night, I know it's on it's way. I'm making lists today, ready to kick some butt.

Self portrait challenge: black & white # 2 /  by Christina Rosalie

Unexpected gratitude at 5:15 a.m., snow already piled high, and more steadily falling. A morning to myself, writing, with coffee. My studio a haven for a few hours, while I flail about like a spawning salmon, trying to get the words right. Working my way paragraph by paragraph towards the fresh water of what it is I'm really trying to say. Snowplows scrape the roads below our house, and out the window, a blur of white on white. Like love, like staying married, writing requires this: hard scrabble perserverance. So again and again, I show up at the page. And last night, on my way home, I stopped to buy a dozen roses wrapped in brown paper, for the man I love.

Self portrait challenge: black & white # 1 /  by Christina Rosalie

Polarity.

Wine. Water. Whimsy. Substance. Chaotic. Rhythm. Impulse. Logic.

The past few weeks have gone by with fewer posts than usual, and it’s because I’m never home and always busy and I feel like I haven’t hit the ground and I’m already running. But. There isn’t anything more busy about my life than previously. It’s just I’m trying to handle it differently. For one, I’m going to bed earlier, and waking up before the sun to spend an hour writing for real in my studio, with my feet tucked up under me and the cat purring around my chair legs.

I’m trying to undertake a gradual, though massive shift in priorities; really committing to work towards the things I know I want, but haven’t gotten yet: published work, an MFA, more order in my life. I’m a chronic forgetter of small things and not so small things: phone dates, emails, meetings. I can’t plan a week’s worth of menus to save my life. The refrigerator always lacks at least on essential item. Laundry is always piled in my bedroom, not clean.

Because I’m an Aquarius and an artist, an idealist and a creator, I’m struck with wanderlust and whimsy and find it miserably difficult to put things into the tidy square boxes on a calendar, or plan ahead. I’d like to, though. Because I know everything in my small world would run more smoothly.

So I’ve been forcing myself to start somewhere, and that somewhere is painfully, less blogging and more real reading. Less posting, and more time spent revising the half finished application pieces I’m still feeling delusionally semi-optimistic about. I pretty sure my life will always contain a bit of this struggle between necessity and wonderment, between substance and desire.

It’s hard for me to buckle down, but I miss my athletes’ body and my reader’s mind. I miss talking about god, and reading about spiritual practice. I miss devouring books the way I used to in college. And yes, I have excuses now that are legitimate, but if I want to ever get to anywhere further than here, I have to start here, now. So I am. Small step, by smaller step. But still, I’m starting. Do you have any polarities you struggle with? If so, what are they, and how do you find balance?

More black & white self portraits here.

Tomorrow, my birthday /  by Christina Rosalie

Tomorrow is my birthday. 29, and I think I look old this year.

You spend all your late teens and early twenties wishing you were older, and then suddenly, without realizing it you’ve slipped to the other side, where you consider getting carded a complement, and for some reason you can’t get the fact out of your head that some guy at work asked you if you were 36.

Our culture’s idealization of youth creeps in and airbrushes away all the brave, vibrant, sexy sides of aging. On a bad day I buy into that.

But the thing is, deeper down a big part of me that likes getting old. I like my crows feet and my perpetually furrowed brows, because they’re a testament to the life I’ve lived. It’s been wild, and sometimes heartbreaking, it’s also been passionate and full—and I’ve barely been alive three decades.

I’ve always thought Georgia OKeefe was one of the most gorgeous women in the world, especially in her later portraits. Something about the way she held her head---up, fiercely, with her chin forward, that spoke volumes about her courageous life and passionate arte. Also something about Tasha Tudor’s wild white hair and ruddy cheeks that spells out beauty to me: she’s a woman who does what she wants. In fact, when I think of women whose features I admire, most do not adhere to the modern, product enhanced perception of beauty. I want to look real still in thirty years, with some lines to show for it.

But tonight, on the eve of my birthday, I can’t help taking stock. Can’t help going back over a handful of self portraits I’ve taken over the past few months, looking for some outer clues about the woman I’m becoming. Maybe I do look older this year.

Driving to work by myself in the morning, as I pass the field where the frost has turned everything into a delicate filigree of white and the pale purple mountain is suddenly flooded with the first golden light of the sun, I’m utterly grateful. Grateful for these hands with wrinkles finely cross-hatching the backs. Grateful for soft expanse of my belly that gave birth. Grateful for my brilliance of my heart and mind that rush up inside my soul like the wild circling flight of the lone hawk I watched this morning, above the snow covered meadow, with the sun turning it’s wings to fire.

And if the consequence of this giddy passion for life is aging, I’ll take it, crows feet and all.

Self portrait: standing at the back door /  by Christina Rosalie

I stand at the back door watching the rain. The air smells of water and sweet dying grass. The oak leaves still cling to the trees like bits of rust, and the wind stirs them wildly.

I’ve spent the past three days doing nothing. I keep bringing my mind back to now again and again, asking of myself only to heal. My body is weak from the fever I’ve had, and as I left or right, my eyes ache from the sudden sharp movement. My body feels fragile like a porcelain doll’s.

I can tell that I’ve been pouring too much energy out lately, and have been doing nothing to fill up my inner well. I look in the mirror, and see once again, I’ve aged. I step on the scale, and though the pounds haven’t changed, the percentages have—I’ve lost muscle recently. Lost muscle, and courage too.

So I spent these past three days lying mostly still, watching the light change, folding laundry, making simple food. I don’t feel ready to go back to work yet, but at some point, today or tomorrow, I know I will. It isn’t a choice. So I try instead to imagine a different outcome. I try to envision strength and boldness and verve. I call a therapist and make an appointment. I feel heat rising up in my body as I talk to her on the phone. It is so hard to admit to needing help.

I’ve been so damn independent my whole life, and always, I was that girl who everyone else came to when they had problems. It’s hard to be in the passenger seat now, fumbling for words, for tools, for anything to give context to this new vantage point.

I stand at the backdoor watching the rain fall in dark splotches on the smooth slate threshold. The sky is the color of crushed violets and ashes. I put on my boots and go for a walk.