August 22: decided
So I am going.
It's for certain. Even though things will be tight, tight, tight financially. And also time, it will be a figment, and invention of imagination, a delirium, a dream. Who cares? I'm going. A full time student, this year, this week. I'm giddy. Happy. Content. Terrified.
I didn't even imagine this last year, now.
It's been such a year.
A year of big huge changes. Of beginnings. Of this: every day I face uncertainty on the page and keep going. I put my words here, and here, and here again, around the moments that I am trying to say. It isn’t arrow straight or clear, but it’s got a pulse, and it keeps unfolding, like something new and wet, or something very old and furled and fragile, and I keep waiting, and showing up, fingers crossed, with more determination in my rib cage than I’ve ever had for anything. This book is happening. There is no other way.
And now school too. Complete reinvention. The beginning of so many things.
Have any of you done this: full time school + full time parenting + full time writing?
Full, full, full.
{big smiles}
A love letter::1.5 Years
I have been wanting to write you a love letter for a long time now. 18 months more or less. Since the day I met you to be exact.
The first thing I did was count your toes and fingers. Then I kissed you, still new, still wet, still scrunched and red and purple. Oh how I loved you in that instant. Irrevocably. Utterly. The very first thing you ever felt in this world was me; my skin, my beating heart beneath it. We looked at each other for forever. You were content in that moment, and in this world still you are content; filled with laughter and delight.
Now you arrive in my room in the morning with your hair invariably tousled and softer than corn silk, your face radiant with smiles. I lift you into bed, and while your big brother is dressing himself in some outfit involving numerous Hawaiian prints or plaids, you lie with your head resting on my chest, and hum a little song. We begin nearly every morning like this, and you smell like heaven.
Next you climb up the mountain of pillows to look out the window at the world below us; at the dawn becoming day; the purple mountains; at the sky spreading with early morning light. Often when your brother comes to snuggle in, you join him, pressing your cheek against his cheek, grinning, cooing. How lucky he is to have you, spilling with affection, as the one who adores him above all else in the world.
I’ve been wanting to tell you a hundred things, wanting to snatch a moment to write them down, and here are some: you play with balls with sheer delight: tossing and catching as though sport is a thing you came into this world knowing. You lift up your shirt and point to your tummy to be tickled. When someone hands you a doll or stuffed animal you hug it instinctively, and carry it around tenderly, rocking it in your arms.
You play peek-a-boo, hide and seek, and a hundred other games of your invention with your brother or by yourself, contentment surrounding you like a halo of bees around the sweetest honey. You stack blocks, and jump from precariously high places with more ease than I ever imagine is possible for someone your size. You are coordinated and physically adept. You climb both up and down our steep staircase; you sit at the stools by the kitchen counter without assistance; you drink your milk or water only from a glass (refusing sippy cups entirely.)
You eat independently and willingly: tomatoes, chicken, corn on the cob, tuna, PBJs, Indian curry, peaches, anything. You love cookies, fig bars, milk, berries. When you are eating something and you discover something you’d like to be eating more—you simply remove whatever is currently in your mouth and hand it off to me. Thanks little dude.
You cannot help but smile. You smile at everything, always. You have begun to say words: mama, daddy, mooah (more), ba (ball), wa wa (water), no, oh nooo!, uh oh, uh-uh (what we say to you when you are doing something you should not be), papa (your grandfather), nona (grandmother), though words have come slower to you than they did to your brother, just as drawing isn’t something you are naturally drawn to: you want to eat the crayons or paint your hands with markers instead.
You have the best giggle in the world. You sleep, easily, effortlessly.. This was something I never wanted to write about because I feared jinxing it; feared that it would change; but no, it’s just who you are. We put you in your crib for a nap or at bedtime and you simply go to sleep, humming to yourself softly. You sleep for two or three hours back to back. You are easy going in every way: even teething only results in a fuss here or there, and you only cry if you are hurt or if your brother takes a toy away from you. Really. You hardly ever cry. Mostly you laugh. You smile. You climb onto your red radio flyer wagon and stand—not holding on—and surf back and forth and grin with glee.
I guess the truth is I expected you to be like your brother, who was all intensity from the minute he was born. (This morning when he came in to snuggle with us after dressing he was already talking, telling me about how to tie different kinds of knots. He’d pause every so often to visualize, then gesture with his slender hands and he described the images in his head. And this is what he was always like. Intense, articulate thought. He squirmed, wiggled, fought sleep. He cried often, and still to this day gets upset more easily than you. My sweet firstborn: so thin skinned and aware of the world.) I guess I couldn’t fathom that you could be so entirely different, so entirely your own little self from the get-go. But you are, oh you are.
And you blessing. I love you so. I love you, I love you, I love you.
August 15::The only way
This is what I will keep saying, even when things seem impossible, or impossibly hard, or just straight terrifying, or daunting, or uncertain. Over and over, yes.
Two phrases in my head today (the second one makes me giggle):
"There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way." ~ Wayne Dyer
And also: "If you're going through hell, keep going." ~ Winston Churchill
August 14:: Country Fair
Still on the August Break and posting every day over at flickr.
Yesterday we went to a country fair. Fun. Sun + sun, livestock, lemonade, maple cotton candy, ribs, tractor + truck pulls, pig races and rides. Sprout's first carousel ride = total glee. An awesome day, except: my gimpy ankle and the long drive home.
Today I feel nostalgic for summer, even though it's here still. I hate that it's ending. I'm not ready for the yellow leaves that are already on the ground; the cricket songs; the shooting stars. I want the live long light and languor of July a little longer. Although the peaches now are making me smile, and the promise of apples soon. Today the sky is pale, pale. The color of sun on cement; the color of white with shadow. The color of a day slipping by with wind in the trees. I want to nap. There are things I must do: two chapters, an InDesign project, always a to-do list. Two weeks more of summer and then who knows. Everything upended, likely. Everything different. I don't remember how to be in class. Don't know, yet, still, if I will be. So it goes.
How are the last weeks of your summer being spent?
One more lesson on the things I cannot control
Here is the truth: I was a certified swim instructor for years. I have taught every kind of person to swim: a 2 year old; an elderly woman; a teenage boy who only spoke Chinese; an autistic 4 year old who would sink blithely, fearlessly to the bottom of the pool if I so much as blinked. I was a lifeguard for years. In California. At a water park and at hectic health club pools where kids would do the deadman’s float just to addle my brains.
Simply: I love the water, and I’m good in it. I can tread water for minutes; swim a mile at a reasonable pace; do the butterfly; snap a flip turn; float forever.
But teach my kid to swim: this, somehow I cannot do. More...
Interlude
Running last night, after a day that felt so very long, I tripped and sprained my ankle. Damn. It was shockingly swollen immediately, but our awesome neighbor who is a doctor said it wasn't a particularly terrible sprain (thank god) and that it will take about 3 weeks to heal.
Hi universe. How are you? Oh, what? You haven't noticed that I have a lot on my plate this month huh? Well I DO. So can you please ease up a wee bit? Thank you very much.
August 10::Tuesday
I am permeable and split wide open like a summer melon overripe with the sweetness and sun and with all the things that are still unresolved.
I am like a diver, on a cliff with a blindfold leaping on promise, daring to dare.
I am girl caught in the morning light, caught by the beauty until I can hardly exhale, wet hair dripping, light slipping golden and honeyed across the floor.
I have just exactly these superpowers: I am a questioner, a seeker, a storyteller, a finder four leaf clovers everywhere; I am brave; I love the ones I love to a fault; and I find my salvation day after day among the pebbles on the path, the spider’s weaving webs, the sun rising and then setting in a sky filled with rain and contrails and wonder.
What are your superpowers?
August 9::Monday
August 7::Saturday
All about friends. The best of friends. (Miss you Jess.) Long walks to fields dappled with light; clouds above, laughter, the kind of honesty that comes from knowing someone for more than a decade; good wine and pasta with fresh corn, and chard, basil and tomatoes from the garden; the promise of Sunday bacon and a few more hours to watch my kids play with some of my favorite people in the whole world. (Also love that seeing my family through someone elses lens...)
August 6::Friday
A couple of snapshots from the festival of fools today. Tired, enthralled boys. (The first shot was a happy accident.)
What are the things you juggle? What are the balls that can drop, or the ones that are made of glass? (This man also juggled machetes twelve feet up in the air on a pole.)
August 5::Thursday
This boy makes me smile all day long. I snapped these right after his nap... when he was all sleepy and mellow still. Love his little bum in the air.
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Today was all about long walks and conversations with my best friend... Conversations interrupted by little boys asking for snacks and finding caterpillars and banging on drums. Conversations about purpose, about passion, about direction, about contentment.
About the difference between these three terms:
Self absorbed.
Selfish.
Self confident.
What do you think of when you read these words. What does each mean to you? How do your definitions change when you apply them to your best friend, your lover, your mother, your child?
August 4::Wednesday
Humidity; swimming in the pond; watching airplanes land at the airport observation deck; cherries and chocolate; what it feels like to be surrounded by your favorite people in the whole world.
August 3:: Tuesday
the kitchen counter cluttered with fruit. }
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Summer is slipping. Thunderstorms rut the roads and send lightening forking through the afternoon sky of late. Across the world, people sit bare headed without shelter in fields flooded with rain. My heart aches for them. Since becoming a mother the news is almost too much to bear. I don't know why this is, except I know now, how my sons' little round bellies mean everything to me. How the fragrance at the back of their necks is heaven. How their laughter fills me up. How I want everything for them. Every single thing. (This makes my heart ache too.)
We took a hike with friends along the river and came to a spot where a tornado must have recently touched down among tall pines: each trunk broken in half like a handful of toothpicks; the river was swollen and fat with rain. Ahead of us the boys leaped; carrying nets; feet bare. I didn't bring my camera: my hands were full with Sprout who is is a daredevil, a water baby: plunging towards the rushing water headlong, arms and legs covered in mud, in sand, in pine needles, in glee.
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T. starts his job tomorrow!
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How is your week shaping up?
August 2::Monday
Today: crushing on Leonard. (Really, it's a forever crush.) Makes me want to re-read Cities of the Interior. For some reason the two always go together in my head.
Today: a storm came crashing through; rain so hard the sills were wet in seconds. Thunder above the maples; sky the color of whipped wet ash. I always feel giddy in storms: equal parts anxious and delighted. After, the air was cool and the sky such a beautiful blue. Already evening comes sooner. Summer's ending.
Today: my very dearest friend in the whole world just booked a flight out to see me. This week. I am over the moon.
Today in no particular order: the best piece of writing on the web right now; the sweetest peach of summer; these photos; and this quote (from here):
Z is for Zoometry: Originally a term from zoology (pronounced zo-ology, in case you were curious), zoometry is the science of instigating and learning from change. This is the revolution of our time, the biggest one in history, and it's not just about silly videos on Youtube. One by one, industry by industry, the world is being remade again and again, and the agents of change are the winners.
August 1::Sunday
Starting the August Break today. Of course I'll be doing it my way: many pictures + a few words.
This month will be all about:
Dreamy summer light + cicadas + playing badminton after dinner.
Writing, writing, writing.
Wrapping up big summer projects for work.
T staring his job + me juggling both boys.
Finding out about school.
Taking pictures every day + sharing my favorites here.
What does August hold for you?
Ripe with sunshine, ripe with joy
Today I spoke with the people from the program and we're in a holding pattern for another week to ten days (I'm counting on the latter.) So I'm smiling and letting go of expectations and looking forward to whatever comes. Everything is possible.
+++ Some things to share:
Sweet as a loon * This photo looks just like where I grew up. * Shona's little tree imp reminds me of myself when I was small...
I am totally smitten over this blog (especially the dreamy writing.)
And this quote (I found it here):
“Our wishes foretell the capacities within ourselves; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours, in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is already possible into dreamt-for reality.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I hope you have a glorious weekend! xoxo!
With grace
In other news, there is still no news. I am learning gradually, slowly, to just settle into the present and let it be. I have begun to see how the mind in limbo becomes a trickster; how worry springs up when there is nothing else for the mind to do. When in a place of uncertainty, it's like the mind wants to be productive, wants to be doing something, and so, for lack of anything better--the untrained mind defaults to worry, to distraction, to imagining all the ways that things might not work out.
I am trying to do this part with grace. Already, some things that felt like they took forever to happen are behind me now with certainty: T is starting his new job next week, for one. I remember how we both obsessed over that situation, how the worry felt like a plum in my throat, swallowed whole. So we'll see. I'm trusting now that the right things will happen; that this is my right life filled with early morning sun, and words to write, and small boys playing harmonicas underfoot. Also: I spent all of yesterday thinking it was Tuesday. Imagine my surprise to discover today is Friday. Has this ever happened to you?
A studio glimpse + a way cool anthology
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Mostly, I wanted to share this with you tonight ~ three of my pieces will be published in Milk & Ink this winter. I am so honored to be among this group of incredible authors. Go take a peak at the Facebook page...there are some profound, delightful, heartbreaking and wonderful stories being shared over there. And the very best part? All the proceeds of the book will be going to the charity, Mama Hope supporting women and children in Africa. Awesome, right?
I am 32.5 today; he was 68 eight years ago
I'd started my first master's program that summer; a master's in Education. I remember exactly where I was sitting when I got the call: on a boulder in a field in New Hampshire. Above me, the full moon hanging low and round, and the air was sweet and heavy with the scent of blackberries and newly turned earth.
I flew home the next day. Home to the place that I still associated with that word. My childhood home: the 6 acres of hilly Northern California land where I'd broken my arm, become a teenager, and yelled fuck you at my father, then ran out the door and down the hard-packed path to the barn, to the hill beyond where I always went in sadness. I was 16 when that happened, and he was strict in an archaic sense of that word: he expected me home by 10pm until I graduated; thought women looked best in dresses; counted on my mother and sisters and me to cook and generally keep the place presentable. I don’t remember the fight, save for the fact that he followed me and said: what if I’d left and those had been the very last words you said? (He was leaving for a trip that afternoon.)
I am painting the wrong kind of picture. He was formidable and peculiar to be sure. He was stubborn, foolish, and sometimes clueless (particularly about teenage girls and their boyfriends.) But he was also wise, funny, astounding, tender, and proud of me.
He admitted this before he died: I have no idea why I was so strict with you three.
Maybe in part because his father was a Lutheran minister; because he was one of nine. His own childhood was marked by obedience and hard work; berry picking to make the family budget, a paper route with a too-big bike before the age of 9. As a result he parented peripherally, often illogically. He didn't have much of a model. I'm not sure if this is a reasonable excuse. Who would I be now, if I had had more freedoms then, less boundaries, more team sports, less time spent doing work to earn free time?
I resented him at 16, certainly, but only with the kind of fleeting resentment that most teenager have for their parents. It didn't last. And even through those rocky years, mostly, I adored him. Adored the way he could fix anything; and also the way we could talk.
He opened up the world to me, with his ideas. He shone the flashlight, and let me take the lead. He asked me questions, then listened, and let me feel my way to my own truth. Up late, we’d sink in deep into conversations about Aristotle, Goethe, Steiner, Da Vinci, Saint John. He encouraged me to take risks too, to climb tall trees; to lie at the edge of cliffs and look far down; to sit on the peak of the roof and watch the sky.
I quit the program: knowing the rest of my summer would be utterly unfathomable, uncharted, disorienting. I wasn’t wrong. I lost my north star, my childhood home, my sense of who I had valued myself most to be: my father’s daughter. I’d spent my teenage years bucking up against his antiquated parameters and steep expectations, sure, yet as a result I’d become someone who felt confident with words and tools because of all the hours, years, spent by his side in dialogue, in partnership, his shadow, his helper. He’d taught me to use a weed cutter and a chain saw; to operate the table saw; use a hatchet, an ax, a maul; to drive in nails with a hammer, straight and true.
I was with him when he died today, eight years ago, on my half birthday. I secretly loved that he died the 26th; a day that we could share. It felt then as it was our final link; a secret handshake; a promise that I meant everything to him the same way he meant everything to me.
Damn.
How I wish it didn't happened that way at all. How I wish that he were alive still; that he could spend time with his first grandson, my Bean, who is so like him. That we could still spend nights up late, talking, or afternoons discussing the universe over Lipton tea and toast with cheese.
I look at Bean and see my father as a child. He has the same startling intellect; the same way with observation, with words, with plans. He understands numbers and machinery as effortlessly as if he came into this world knowing. And just like my dad, he’s exquisitely sensitive. Just the same: he’s smitten with hay fever; he wonders about god; he builds elaborate machines with Legos; he handles a carving knife with more grace and skill than most ten year olds, even though he’s only 5.
I wonder what grandchildren would have done for my father. Softened his edges, maybe? Let him slow down, linger, and enjoy without the intensity he brought to every interaction. Everything was a full-on discussion, an inquiry, a puzzle to be solved. Again, so like my son.
So like me too.
The things we take from our parents; the things we borrow, steal, keep unaware. The habits we hold on to, the ways we think, wonder, see the world. So much of who we are is shaped from what we received, or didn’t, from the people who raised us, who gave us love or failed in this enormous way.
I think of this now as I watch both my boys. My second, so like T. Sunshine, pure sunshine. Laughter always, smiles always. He’s action and play and physical finesse. He’s an athlete already, coordinated, sure footed, in love with games: with playing ball and peekaboo and hide and seek.
I didn’t mean to arrive here, at this wonderment at my sons. I meant to say: it’s my half birthday today. 32.5 and I'm at the brink of possibly going again to school, for the third time (remember, Sprout arrived on the scene unexpecedly the second time I enrolled?)
The past six months have been the best, and the hardest, and the most rewarding. I can only gape, wide-mouthed, at what the next six months will bring; nevermind the next eight years.
Who will I be when who I am now is my former self by nearly a decade? Tell me: who will you be?
Still between here and there
Earlier this week I got news that financial aid for school may be a question and it's such a complex situation, our lives, our finances, the lot of it...and so here I am again, in limbo, opening my heart up wide to the universe.
I want to trust, to believe that all will be as it should; that things will align and fall into place. But oh, must it be this intense, this tenuous, this thinly threaded? Must everything come like the rains, abrupt and last minute, tearing down dead branches, and leaving everything rinsed and and astounded and green? This seems the way now, that things unfold around here.
So. A little more wondering.
More fingers kept crossed.
More breath held.
It's their busy time in the financial aid office, and so I don't get my answers any faster than anyone else gets theirs. Seven to ten days, more or less. Damn.
Will you cross your fingers for me?
Love, C
PS: I hardly have the words, for grinning, at how all your lovely offers for my art made me feel. THANK YOU. I'll be shipping the pieces tomorrow--and enjoying more space in my studio to create new things.