Big shoes to fill
Also: go take a peak at Liz's sweet Ellie Jane. Welcome to the world little one!
Sweetness
The last few posts have been so moody and somber...but all kinds of lovely has been happening too: sunshine and a warm wind; chalk drawings and skateboarding in the garage; meandering walks down to the pond; homemade pizza with friends.
And today: a trip to the farmer's market, just Bean & me..to meet my lovely friend & her little boy. A cinnamon danish; boys on bikes; exploring by the lakefront; sunburn; an old-fashioned root beer float.
I can't quite describe how lovely it was to hang out with just my big boy. I hardly ever get Bean one-on-one these day's and he's so charming and smart and articulate and full of mischief.
When we came home we spent another few hours out doors with T and Sprout planting shrubs and building a trellis using saplings (can't wait to show you pictures.) Bean loved dragging the saplings down from the woods after T cut them down, and Sprout was pleased as punch to take up occupancy in the holes we dug for the shrubs.
Tomorrow, a laid back Father's Day (will share the super simple + sweet project Bean & I worked on!) with more outdoor projects planned (unless it rains...)
(More on how the first week of summer vacation went here.)
A small thing
Into the road without hesitation,the other side as certain as the grass and hawk weed parting there, for the brief passage of fur, ears back, paws leaving and returning to the surface of the soft and grassy earth. And then I was there behind the wheel; unprepared for its smallness, for the sudden quiver and tenderness there in the road among the potholes.
There was an instant; a fraction of a second really when we both wavered, I could feel it. I could feel the inevitable, sliding of the future toward this instant, now.
I could see the rabbit's honey eyes, his small slight body, ears erect, brown, no bigger than a loaf of bread.
I hit it. I couldn't help it. It happened so fast.
I cried the whole way to the store; the boys all watching my display of emotion anxiously from the quiet of the truck's cab.
When we returned I couldn't help but look, there, at the side of the road among the quartz pebbles and daisy petals, blood spilling from it's small crushed skull, wasps and flies already there, and later, when we passed again its small body and been lifted into the hazy summer air.
tender.
I don’t want to write tonight, but there is nothing elseno solace anywhere except here with the blinking curser the darkness pulling close around the corners of the room and damn, I want to be like boho girl tonight: I want to be able to say that I’m experiencing tender emotions and am working through this gently but I don’t know how to do this; how to say this or to be gentle in this process of being wherever I am feeling right now.
I always feel like I need to have an answer and keep my chin up. I’ve somehow become so disconnected from my emotional life that all of this could be entirely hormonal and Id never know it was that time of the month.
The truth is days like this just add up—one small iteration, resentment, and minute heartache after the next and then wham! it hits like a stupid ton of bricks, and now, in these post Kickstarter days when everyone and their mother among my of ‘real life’ friends reads here, it feels…
Oh damn, the truth of it is I grew up in a family with a mother who struggled with depression; who was overtaken by her emotions; who became them, day after day sometimes, silently leaving the rest of us out—and I see myself in her some days.
And also this: my father always thought that my mother should chin up, and because my father was my favorite person in the world when I was a kid, I learned it well, and here I am chin fucking up.
Except I want to be the girl who can bring a little grace to this. I want to be able to say that I’m working through this stuff gently. I want, maybe most of all to say that I know how to be gentle with myself—but I do not.
I have no fucking clue.
I want the days back when I could write here without people from the context of my daily life wondering why I haven’t told them about whatever I’m writing here.
I’m mourning the anonymity I had once here.
I want to know why things are so small and so big at the same time. I want to know why men—most men anyways—always see things so impossibly literally and then walk away just when you want them to stay (though of course when they do return it’s the very last thing that you want.)
Sometimes. Tonight. Maybe.
So whatever. Bring on the concerned emails. Life just bites sometimes as it currently does and I don’t want to have to explain myself, and truthfully I might not know how to explain myself. Tonight I’m just sad, and hoping that when the morning comes I’ll feel better.
Peace and grace
Yoga tonight. YOGA. I didn't even know this hole in my life existed until I was there in the little second story studio doing downward dogs and listening to the collective exhalations of twenty other people. "Think of going out into your life with peace and grace" the teacher said at some point, and I was suddenly, inexplicably close to tears.
Peace and grace.
Somehow my life has moved away from this drastically. The past several months have been about chin up, mind over matter, power through it, action.
And oh, how I've missed this: being quiet with myself. Simply that. Simply breath, and wonder, and feeling tears spring up suddenly from both relief and uncharted sadness. I've always prided myself in being tough and resourceful. I've always been someone with brains and enough street smarts to figure things out and when the going gets tough I roll up my sleeves.
And for years--whenever I intermittently practiced yoga--I always brought this attitude to it: power through.
But it was not about that at all tonight. It was simply about this: about considering breath, and karma, and returning to breath. Peace and grace distilled into the fluid motions of warrior to downward dog.
I'm going to try for more of that this summer....and I want to know, where do you find or bring peace and grace to your daily life?
How this began
Going through an old hard drive tonight I found this poem written May 5, 2004... three weeks before I'd find out that I was pregnant with Bean.+++
Today I heard that the Voyager satellite, sent up into space the year before I was born, is now nearing the edge of our solar system. Some scientists think it will encounter a shock wave, before going into the space beyond. My life feels like this, nearing it’s known edge, careening, orbiting, drifting off course around some other center I have not quite named or found, but feel. I expect to be thrown up soon, with force upon taking the risks I know I should take but do not yet understand. I imagine that amidst the white-hot vibrations of shock it will be the memories of things, the words and honey comb and lightening storms, that will cradle me. Giving birth, when the moment is right to a new self, among the nebula and stars. +++
I had no idea how spot-on I was. A poem, like a tear in the stage curtain of the present, and there I was behind it, peeking through.
I also found this, from August, 2009. A quickly scribbled note about a conversation with Bean:
"I fell from the sky mommy. I was a star, and I fell into your tummy." If you look back, can you find any inklings, notes, or snippets about the time when life as you know it now began?
evening|summer
As the sky grows dark, the twilight feels heavy like velvet, and sweet like licorice. Fireflies come out, and Venus too, above us blinking from among the pink and pale indigo of heaven. So far up, she twirls, casts off the sun’s bright light, and sends it back to us like a love letter; a secret message.
It's nearly dark and maybe we all make wishes looking up. We see fading contrails; the sky turning to night.
Bats swoop as we gather around the fire with marshmallows on hand-carved sticks; the boys run laps around the house then ask for seconds, thirds, their faces sticky sweet. Sprout eats corn off the cob, then goes docilely to bed, his hair smelling like vanilla and wood smoke; his arm hooked around my neck, a small piece of heaven.
We eat until we’re full then lull; find conversation; lull again. There are kebabs with pineapple and purple onions; fresh corn with butter; grilled nan; steak.; brownies for dessert; wine.
The kids head indoors and their laughter floats through the open window and yellow light spills each rectangle onto the bluing lawn.
I spill wine on my jeans, my feet are grass stained, the boys are covered with dirt and it is perfect. Guitar fills the night air with lilting notes; our faces are light by flame, thrushes call until the sun's long gone.
It’s summertime. Here, this, finally.
A story chameleon
I slip among the cushions on the couch with a book and the edges of everything else grows blurry. Reality becomes the story on the page. I am no longer here, even as outside things are moist and green, and the lawn mower thrums loudly as T. cuts back and forth across the grass. In the air beyond the feeder with it’s shiny red metal flowers, hummingbirds zigzag, lilt, swoop, defying gravity. I look up intermittently and the clock’s hands make no more sense than reading words in Japanese. Hours slide by. I don’t move. This is what happens when I slip into a book. I have no moderation, no ability to read a page, then leave off. It’s such a crush: this thing I have for words.
Story captures me so entirely it almost becomes a full body experience. I dislocate. My feet grow cold from staying in in one position so long, knees up on the couch by the window as the morning slides towards afternoon.
When I read I become unavailable, altered, distant. T. can ask me a question and I’ll look up moments later having absolutely no idea what he said. I am a story chameleon, becoming blue, or thrilled, or besotted with wanderlust at the story’s slightest suggestion.
I am almost unbearably suggestible when I read. Hardly a skeptic. I go to books to be altered. If the sentences are good, I’m a believer.
I just finished Breath by Tim Winton, and god, I love his stories. Raw, intimate, wild. Read the whole book in one sitting.
What are you like when you read? Also, what’s the most recent book you haven’t been able to put down?
Uneven
Oh my. I seem to have distressed a few of you (thank you for your sweet emails.) Things are just fine. Promise. Things have a way of turning out, even when sometimes they don’t (at least not in the ways that we expect or hope.) Tonight I mostly want to tell you this: when I show up here, it is sometimes with cool palms, and a quiet heart; each sentence following logically after the next. But other days I come with flyaway hair and muddy feet; my heart in a hundred directions; my words haphazard. In times like these, it’s about trying to put a finger on the pulse of this moment that matters. I want a record of the in-between-times. The times of limbo, of breathlessness, of waiting, of wanting, of fleeting wonder. These are the moments I want to look back on because these are the moments I forget.
Today the irises revealed sleek purple buds by the front steps, and I know that in mere months the summer that is just now blooming will be gone.
The leaves will turn the color of flame and rust and fall to the ground. Sprout will be talking (he already is saying words—a new one pops up every day now, in that two-syllable repetitive way that toddlers have of talking. Banana becomes “na na”’; water, “wa wa”) and all the things that are uncertain now will no longer be.
But just as surely as this is true, it is also true that new unknowns will crowd in, playing a forever game of musical chairs in my head.
+++
Today, this: the four of us in the garden, up to the gills with dirt. The season's first sunburn. Lemon ice water. An impromptu trip to the general store for milk & ice cream sandwiches. Also laundry. I somehow can never quite seem to get a handle on that.
blur
Diptychs are contagious.
Wishing I could show up here every day, but this week: everything has come pouring down. Highs and lows. Utter crazy, uncertainty, heartbreak, possibility, sweetness. It's almost more than I can stand, so I escape into the fleeting instant of watching an oriole swoop and land. Such sudden orange among the green. Yes my heart thunders. Yes to this life.
Still, I brim with impatience for all that is unfinished and unknown. My breasts still ache (no one tells you this about weaning, but it's not pain free. That is also an understatement, fyi.) My heart aches for things that are irrevocably different now (with people I love. Sorry about the vagueness.) My quads ache for want of use. I haven't been running much and miss it something fierce, but there are so many things now up in the air with the tilting, diving flight of the orioles that running comes last. It shouldn't, but there it is, a fact. Time isn't on my side this week.
Next week: JUNE.
When did that happen? How? Has anyone else felt like this year is plunging ahead at a vehement pace?
Tonight heat crowds the room. 90 tomorrow. The lawn is still unmowed (another thing fallen off the end of the priority list this week) and I am applying for things and chasing down dreams, and damn, I know I'm being vague but tonight it's the best that I can do.
Joyful fleeting things
Today I am giddy. A new pair of pretty red flats. A to-do list ACCOMPLISHED. An exciting, thrilling possibility waiting to be explored. SUN. A raspberry Italian soda + chocolate croissant. I am absolutely loving this song right now. Holding my breath. Finding four leaf clovers in the lawn. And reminding myself: what if there is no emergency?
So I'm weaning Sprout. He's the same age more or less that Bean was when I weaned him--and he was ready. He'd been nursing only at night before bed and in the morning upon waking... and my trip to the city was the perfect time to make the transition. He never even fussed. Just snuggled in with T. in the morning and went back to sleep--and now we have this lovely snuggle time in the morning when he's still all warm and sleepy and our cheeks press up against each other, and then Bean comes in and the three of us snuggle and chase the tails of our dreams while T is in the shower. That first morning time with both of my boys is often my very favorite part of the day.
But oh my. I have two little boys now, suddenly. It's the end of babyhood in our little family. Blink, and here we are, four of us, all bipedal, grass stains on our toes. I can't quite describe what it feels like to be here at this point. To know our family is complete, to know who my kids are, to be US. I always pictured this, but had no idea what I was picturing, you know?
Here we are. Two boys with impossibly long eyelashes, and thousand dreams like dandelion fuzz blowing on the wind. I can't even imagine this fall. Can't fathom what we'll be like by summer's end.
Yesterday I went down to the garden for the first time and was stunned by the knee high grass. In my absence the wild has taken over and reclaimed the little plot of land I've been tilling each season. Saturday: the garden and I have a date to get down & dirty. But my whole life feels like this--when I look back on the past ten years, it's exactly like looking at the garden suddenly verdant and overgrown with weeds and volunteers (tomatoes, peas) that I never expected, and yet there they are. It will be like this from here on out, won't it? Every decade faster than the last.
Tell me, what is fleeting and joyful right now in your life? What do you want to remember about today, this May?
A weekend away and the photos I did not take
The lilacs are fat; my boys cheeks are sticky with apricots; the lawn is overgrown. Today T. wraps his arms around me at the table. We sit side by side, plotting our next moves while our boys escape out the front door and head to the sand box together. We can see them from the window. They sit side by side in the sand; hair blowing back in the dandelion-down strewn wind. They giggle together, and seeing them this way makes everything worth it. They’ll always have this. I went to NCY for the weekend with a lovely friend whose sister has an apartment on the Upper West Side. I haven’t been to the city since Bean was tiny; and my camera battery died before I could foray out to take many pictures. So instead I offer this:
The pictures I did not take.
The green Central Park lawn strewn with picnic blankets, and above it two bright yellow balloons lifting up; floating beyond the buildings at the tree line and into the blue and cloud flecked sky.
The two girls with red hair ribbons tied around pigtails, running among the picnickers with a pink and blue kite on a short string; feet bare, knees skinned, the littler one stopping to just stare for a while at the bobbing improbable flight of the kite in air lifted by the sheer momentum of her sister’s strong brown legs.
The desiccated crumpled body of the baby blue jay on the sidewalk beneath a tree, legs drawn up, blue-gray feathers crushed into the cement; and the look of revulsion that the lady had, in her enormous black Prada sunglasses, dark skinny jeans and ballet flats, her skin pearly, her hair frosted, her stroller a Bugaboo Frog. She skirted the bird and shuddered, then walked quickly on.
My friend’s face; beaming with emotion that mirrored the sun yellow of his fleece, the two of us seeing each other for the first time in ten years (except in photographs). His profile against the backdrop of the dancing fountain at Lincoln square: curly eyelashes, dreads pulled back, a smile playing on his dark lips,
The view from 230 Fifth at night; an indigo sky and lights scattered like a diamonds in a jewelry box. The Empire State building right there, smack-dab, lit in green and yellow; potted palms, crowds, champagne. Hair blowing in the wind.
+++
I wore a wicked dress, you guys, and I looked amazing. Super heels, a tiny chocolaty shoulder bag, smouldery eyes. I had a few twenty-five year old boys in a state of euphoria and then shock when I spoke to them, then offered up my wedding band as proof. To further the short circuit in their minds I murmured this: “I’m a mom, too.” Best expression ever. Utter disbelief painted over sheer attraction. I couldn’t stop grinning and thanked them after they docilely hailed us a cab.
I needed this. I needed to encounter a part of myself I haven’t seen much of since becoming a mother. Wine, French food, a hot dress, crowds parting just so I could pass. Who doesn’t need a day like this to remind them of what they are?
As though everything that I am is contained in a composite shell of moments hauled about to contain the soft-bodied hermit crab soul that is mine. Right now it feels like I’ve clambered into some new place. Inside a Fibonacci spiral, the sound of the city comes rushing back. It’s endless traffic and hubbub and movement thrums in my eardrums still. Be still my restless heart. Still I am happy to be home.
An ending & a beginning
+++
This weekend big things are happening. A Field Guide To Now on Kickstarter is ending tomorrow. 28 hours left. (Become a backer if you haven’t. This is IT!)
I’m leaving on a weekend adventure today with my camera and some pretty shoes in tow. I won’t be here when the project time runs out, but I want to tell you how grateful I am. I am astounded, joyful, terrified, delighted, eager. This is such a big deal… and YOU made it happen.
xxxo!
what matters most?
The way things go + some current crushes
Hi! I have so many things I want to share with you today. First, some crushes:
These luminous folder icons have completely revamped my desktop and seriously upped both my cool factor and organization.
These fabulous planers are also rocking my organizational world. I am so not an organized girl when it comes to creative projects. I see BIG PICTURE and details sometimes get sidelined. This in particular has really helped me to narrow my focus and get things done.
And I've been wanting to share this glorious camera bag that arrived in the mail a few weeks ago (I was the Shutter Sister's giveaway winner) and oh man... I can't even begin to tell you how lovely and awesome it is. It's big enough to fit my camera and everything else I schlep around, and pretty enough to make me look put together even when I'm not. (THANK YOU Maile!!)
These photos (swoon) and this blog.
Some news:
I was interviewed here and here this past week by two of the most amazing, inspiring women in the blogosphere.
Last night I put some new prints up in my little shop!
And at this moment: the weather is all over the map still. Rain, sun, wind, rain.
Everything is exuberantly green in the same way that kids color the grass in their pictures: GREEN EVERYWHERE. And while I love what green stands for (summertime picnics, gardening, bike rides, bonfires) I wish the apple blossoms could stay longer. In a single afternoon they exploded into full bloom with bees everywhere, each tree its own secret universe of pollen and petals, and then today, just a few days later, there are already as many petals on the grass as on the trees. So fleeting. So fleeting. Everything is this.
We hung out with the very first friend we made here last night. He was sitting on the porch across from our new apartment as we backed over the curb repeatedly with an enormous moving truck. I remember feeling utterly out of place among the scads of college kids with 7 month old Bean in tow and actual real furniture instead of futons, but M. walked over and said hello, and Bean thought he was the coolest person ever and we've been friends since. Now Bean is five and M. is moving to Austria for an unbelievably awesome job, and wow. Time. There it went.
There is no more of a tangible way to notice time's passing than to watch a child grow. This, and then this. SO FAST. I'm carrying on about this today because I get it this time. I get that these moments right now are the ones I'm going to look back on and say, oh, that was when it started. That's when we had no idea. (Sprout is still small-ish, but the next time I stop to think about it he'll likely be riding a bike. )
I've gotten the most wonderful emails from some of you about being at similar points of transition--and I so love them. I think it is incredibly helpful to tell each other these stories about how things begin. About the moments before beginning when all we're doing is imagining and waiting and things feel scary and at large (because they kind of are.)I want to hear more about these moments in your lives. What is beginning right now? What are you on the brink of?
An open doorway
At this very moment, I want you to share a dream that you want to see happen. If you could open a door and walk through it into any possibility, what would it be? One specific thing. Go!
Snowed in
Now I'm at a friend's house (she is a lifesaver) and the sun is shining and I'm popping in here to tell you that a guest post is up at Wishstudio that you absolutely must go read!
