It's about this
Oh yes. This is the way things happen.
You get pregnant, have a baby, survive a year or so of sleep deprivation, memory loss, heavenly smiles, and diapers, and then one afternoon while you're making a sandwich your baby is sitting on the counter, nonchalant, happy as a clam.
This is what having a baby will teach you:
That you are not in control.
That you were never really in control.
That there is grace in loosing the battle, just as there is grace in quietly, patiently persisting with boundaries, bedtimes, and broccoli.
You will never be able to hear a story about a child suffering again without tears wetting the corners of your eyes, entirely unbidden, always unexpected, smudging your mascara as you consider what if.
It's okay to start over or give up a million times. No one knows any better than you do--and when it comes to your own kid, you do, actually, know best, no matter what anyone else tells you.
It's all about giggling.
Getting dirty is inevitable and essential. Make your peace with the effing laundry heap. It will never go away. Although--one thing that most certainly will go away, inexplicably, and often, are single baby socks. One by one they disappear until you'll have an entire drawer full of singletons.Think I'm kidding? Just wait.
It's about stopping and getting down on the floor. Especially with boys. It's all about the floor and what can be accomplished there: block towers and tickling matches, and moments of physical affection, rough and tumble that they crave. Moms who wrestle are awesome. It's not just a guy thing. Please don't believe it's just guy thing.
It's about the fact that floor will always have crumbs, paper clips, pencils, crayons, snippets, legos, blocks, matchbox cars, marbles, rocks, crumpled leaves, gravel, sand, bits of grass, sticks. Don't let it get to you.
Don't let the crying get to you either. Whatever feels like the worst day in the world, the worst hour, the worst minute, will surely pass. And then they'll be 20 months old and sitting on the counter, as if that's okay, as if it's not precarious and against the rules. And they'll be grinning and giggling and drooling, and saying "No! No! No!" when you remove them, or suggest an alternative.
It's all about alternatives. About distractions. "Oh look!" That's a magic phrase. Oh yes it is. {more...}
Chaos + golden light
On the radio about a month ago I heard a scientist declare, "there are no miracles," and I spun the tuner away in frustration. How can you look at this wonderment of beauty, or even at the precise minute functioning of your hands or dreams and say there are no miracles? I couldn't live without wonder. Could you?
Today Bean was sick and Sprout was teething--his final teeth (fingers crossed) are poking through, and even so much to do, I spent most of the day outdoors in the mild golden light stacking wood and watching the boys play side by side: with sticks in the mud; in their tree house; in the sand box; in the gathering froth of fallen leaves. Bean desperately wants Sprout to talk, but Sprout is taking his sweet time. He says many words, but enunciates them poorly; always grinning, gesturing, moving. Sprout isn't interested in the names for things the way Bean was at his age; instead he's interested in making people laugh. He is so tuned in emotionally, it always surprises me to see the way his face mirrors mine. When he's done something naughty and I scold him, he bursts into tears of remorse, arms flung wide, running to me to fix it.
But oh, he's got a temper too, that little one. When he want's something and doesn't get it, he'll grab the nearest object and throw it to the floor howling, "No! No!" indignantly. And he does the perfect jelly-limbed all kick and squiggle tantrum. Nothing lasts though, and he's like a summer day. Even when the clouds show up, it's only for a little while. Bean on the other hand will dig in and stay moody for a long, long time. He does things his way regardless of who he annoys, or disappoints. His. Own. Drummer. Oh yes.
By Thursday the week has always pummeled me a bit. My mind spits sparks. The ideas lift off and land like startled birds and I'm always hoping I'll have enough down time and quiet to catalogue them, though I rarely do. My notebooks are bursting. My desktop is a daily array of exploding files. Thursday always shoves me back into the daily, immediate, messy parts of my life. The laundry that's piled up; the wood that needs stacking; boys, loud, snotty nosed and grimy handed with jelly grins and the softest hair in the world.
Today we made gingerbread cookies and apple sauce from the trees on our land--and it was an exercise in letting chaos happen, let me tell you. Flour, everywhere. The nutmeg grinder disassembled. Apple peels on the floor. Sprout on the counter (he climbs everything all the time now, to all of our chagrin.) Sometimes chaos is perfect.
Chaos and golden light.
solitary moments
The valley is umber and golden and red below me, and the poplar that quivered all summer in turns silver and green has shaken it’s leaves to the ground. Crows call, squirrels churl, and the wind pulls at the house. It’s a familiar sound: the sound of the colder months here on this hill that I call home. It will be our fifth winter here and I know now the things I imagined I would when we first moved: where to find the brightest leaves for pressing; the softest moss among quarts in the woods; mushrooms under brambles; leathery skinned, fragrant and sweet apples.
Today I am inside and alone. In other rooms the floors gleam in the sunlight. In mine, the windows are backlit with the gold-orange of the trees, and the loudest clatter is my own fingers on the keyboard, my own breath. I soak up these solitary times when I can become reacquainted with the threads of narrative in my book, make progress, print drafts, scribble notes. It’s so very rare though, for me to be solitary, or even alone for more than an hour.
I imagine sometimes, dreamily, a little writing hut with months to spare. Time elastic and mine. But then I wonder if my mind would go soft; if I’d lack the discipline to persevere in the circle of my own circumscribed thoughts for so long. Self inflicted deadlines languish the longest, this I know. Similarly quiet rings the loudest in the absence of my small boys who fill the house with ruckus laughter; with the crashing of vehicles into one another; with wailing, with stomping feet, with squeals, with words.
When are you alone? What is the quiet like for you? What do you do that time, with only you? What are you like then?
A list for Saturday
Today: wood stacking and striking skies. The hills are dappled with sun and shade. My boys want to be outdoors all day, their noses running, always heading for the mud, always climbing to the top of unstacked piles of logs.
I'm still getting over being sick--and contemplating the affects of it on my digital and academic life over here. (I'd loove to hear your thoughts on this subject.)
Today there will be chocolate chip cookies and chicken soup and rosy cheeks. There will also be reading. Lots of it. And figuring out how to do a podcast for A Field Guide To Now (!) and maybe a run. Yes. That's Saturday's list. What is yours?
Also: we're entering the phase of toddler temper tantrums around here. Oooh boy. Here we go. More on that and some pictures tomorrow.
Go Boldly
I'm sick and going to take a nap but I just wanted to check in and say hello and share this little bit of art (one of my mottos of late.)
Once I get caught up on sleep and get over this cold I have so much I want to share. Right now my brain feels echo-y. Does that make sense? My thoughts keep bouncing around in there. Kind of like this. (So cool, right?) I can't believe it's already October. What does fall look like where you are? What are you enjoying?
the things that show time's passing:
I spend the day between here and myself.
Outside the trees are turning to vermillion three weeks early and in the evenings the mountains are on flame; the sky purple dark and sudden light the way only a New England sky can be. I spend the day in a state of almost perpetual creative activity and it’s crazy and intense and thrilling. If I could chart the synapse activity in my mind these past five weeks it has skyrocketed. Each idea leading to sequential sparks, my mind like the starry sky when you look up after twirling: blur of streaking gold and dark.
It is inconceivable, almost, how fast the days go. How fast autumn light is gaining. The equinox slipped by like something leaving silently through the closing door of summer. I look now and wonder at how fast time has gone, while all around me there are marks to show it’s passing:
T and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary this past weekend (and our eleventh together) returning to the place where we were married for a marvelous meal. We were married outdoors on a little peninsula reaching out into the lake, and over the weekend we walked back there in awe by the way our lives are now. “Did you ever think?” I asked. He shook his head.
I was pregnant then, with Sprout.
How things have changed.
Do you know that when I started this blog I didn’t know a single “real life” person who had ever even heard of a blog? Little did I know how it would change my life. And it has—wild as that may sound. It has submerged me in the world of digital media where I feel compelled and creative and at home; and it has given me community and audience and escape and reassurance. This week I’ll likely hit the 1000th post mark. (This is the 992st post)…and there are 11,854 comments logged on this site. Pretty awesome.
Since that time blogs and digital media and the internet have changed so much; facebook and twitter and commercial blogging have reshaped the face of personal blogs in many ways—but I’m still so happy to come here. So grateful for your comments, for your shared pieces of existence, for your tips on good music, good food, good books, good ideas, and good ways to solve problems with two little rapscallion boys.
Time is galloping. The garden is scraggly with weeds, plush with overripe tomatoes; overrun with squash. The geese are back, cutting the skies in Vs, and the starlings and blackbirds have arrived in throngs on the wires of the telephone poles I photograph daily now as a part of a daily artistic practice. Tonight I am tackling HTML and CSS (another thing on my 33 before 33 list) and listening to new favorite mixes on 8tracks, and feeling like while time is slipping, it is the best time I’ve ever had. All of it, all my life: the best time. Do you ever feel that way?
What are five things you are grateful for right now?
snapshots like sunspots
From the past week:
1.
Frustration the color of crushed grapes; my fingers in my palms. We’re at a stand off: my five year old and I. He wants to do one thing, I’ve given him a choice of two others. It was like this when he was a baby. People said, “just let him cry it out,” but when we did, a single time, he cried for an hour, then fell asleep but woke up angry, remembering everything. Now his eyes are puffy with tears and allergies and I’ve had far too little time to myself, and far too many deadlines to make time now for this push and pull. I scream. SCREAM at him. I am ashamed, heartbroken. I want to snip through everything I’ve done with a small pair of embroidery scissors, thread after indelicate thread until I get back to the place where our hearts are close and our cheeks touch.
I hate you, Mommy. I hate you he screams.
Nothing prepared me for this. For the way I would feel like I had ruined everything. Like being broken up with, but irreparably worse. (Thank god we have a few more years before he is a teenager to figure things out...)
Finally I backed down. He played outdoors. We skirted each other ashamed by the mess we’d made of things. At bedtime he asked for Daddy to read to him, and slipped by my studio door without coming to goodnight.
2. T carries him into the bedroom before I am awake. The feeling of his bird like shoulder blades; the hull of his delicate ribs; the haphazard placement of his marionette arms against my neck, wakes me. I love you Mommy. I love you so much.
I love you too. I love you. I love you. I whisper back. His elbow makes an upside down V along the line of my chin. I press my nose into his neck where it smells forever just like him: like cookies and grass and autumn air, and slip a little towards a softer sleep.
3. We're downtown at a street festival and he stands watching the fire throwers, just like his dad, hands in pockets, one knee bent, transfixed. I leave the two of them watching and walk with Sprout and my mother to the Capitol green, where my littlest runs like he has something to prove. (He does: joy is everywhere.) His face beams. He climbs every set of stairs he can finds. He stops to smell every single flower; stroking the plush purple petals of the petunias as though they are the source of joy. (They are.)
4. My little one. He is the still point at the center of my heart, and a twirling dervish that colors my heart with of comfort. He is curls and sticky fingers and sweat on his brow and newly found independence and tantrums. He is laughter with juice running down his chin. He carries crushed gingersnap cookies in his fist and grins.
5. I can see them walking towards us across the green grass, both wearing yellow, like sunshine flooding towards me. They walk in synch and they are grinning: they’ve gotten lemonade and a new hat and gloves for him for winter, and they are almost one and the same, those two foreign bits of my heart.
6. The light is golden and the hills are purple and flame. The leaves have begun to turn to orange; tattered yellow; ocher. The grass is dewy now and strewn with the tree’s spent energy of a season.
Light refracts like fire in what remains.
This + that tonight
Hi. Tomorrow I have some photos to share + some stories about the epic tantrums and dark parenting moments that occurred this weekend (brought to my knees, I dare say, by my five year old Bean who holds my heart rather indelicately among the coins and pebbles and twine and marbles in his pocket) Tonight, I thought I'd share a glimpse into what I've been thinking and doing, squirreled away for hours in my studio studying:
I've been asked several times in the past couple of weeks what Emergent Media is exactly, and, as is often the case with my mixed-media multiple genre life, I find myself wanting to shrug and say: it's everything.
Because it kind of is.
It's words, for starters, and everything conveyed and made possible through the evolution of conveying words with letters, first on papyrus, then on the page, now here, on the screen. Simply: within the story of words evolving from speech to writing, is the story of human beings becoming, of human consciousness evolving, and of media emerging.
Thus, to study Emergent Media is to study both the medium, and the message, the chicken and the egg. It means to study words, and to study the ideas that words convey. It means to study media, and the messages they convey. It means to examine investigate the past for patterns, and to peak towards the future for clues. ...[more]
learning things
I want to feel like I am living down into my feet, but today I make it only as far as my spine: curved, contoured to chair after chair, listening, scribbling notes, my mind compressing and applying information as flexibly as I know how. It’s an all out pummeling to be submerged like this on Wednesdays: 6 hours of class, everything entirely new. Like learning to moon walk, or speak Japanese, that is what it feels like to dive into RAW and HTML and CSS; acronyms becoming little dog-eared tabs of meaning in my mind.
And then to switch gears from web design and theory, to making pizza and nuzzeling sweet little boy heads.
Over warm apple crumble I’d pulled together out of sheer will power Bean said, “I love Nonna more than I love you, Mommy. Just a minute more, but I do.”
Oh, to find the quite open space to be there with him then. To hold that moment open without filling it up with my own small hurts. I couldn’t help but turn away, picking at a fingernail, eyes smarting.
So this is showing up, this is what it’s like to throw yourself towards the day with the urgency and grace and inexperience of a dancer learning new material. Some moments I feel like I am defying gravity: I hit all the deadlines, I take copious notes, my mind is a perpetual shower of sparks while I am vacuuming the kitchen floors. Other times it’s about falling hard: the way my eyes feel blurring from so many consecutive hours of screen and classroom time; the way my boys see me for less time some days than they do their grandparents.
Tonight the house smells like baking apples, and I read the boys stories in the semi-dark of their bedroom. Then I come downstairs to where the house is humming with stillness. I want to fold like an origami bird, wings to body, head tucked inside a fragile crease of paper and sleep, but this isn’t about folding. No, this time, this year, these moments, are all about learning to fly.
How to take a walk
Watch your little one take the steps down from the door confidently, carefully, the hight still a challenge. Watch him run then, gleeful towards the grass.
Pull your mind back to this: to the gravel on the road; to the clovers in the grass; to the sky above, spread with gathering clouds. Watch for birds. Watch for unexpected delight. Find a wild apple tree and shake it until the small hard apples rain down. Pick one, the pinkest one, and rub it on your shirt until it gleams. Tae a bite. Sweet, tart, fragrant. Offer it to your little one who will be reaching for it eagerly. Watch his delight.
Go to where the road forks and look both ways. Follow your feet. Go wherever. Go slowly. Instead of feeling impatient, look for four leaf clovers. Look for yellow leaves. Look for birds on wires. Look for flags, wind, wires, wings.
The point isn't about going far; or about exercise; or about anything except this: you, outdoors, with your little one. Offer to hold hands. He might take your hand in his, grabbing two fingers at a time, or he might dash ahead, curls flying in the wind. Either choice is the most joyous thing in the world. Follow the road. Follow your your heart, there, ahead of you in blue pants and a red shirt and little sneakers. Watch him discover what it means to run. Watch how he stops, starts, stops, and finds wonder in everything.
Stop to listen. There is wind. Maybe you will hear the sound of traffic, airplanes, windmills, woods, plastic bags rustling; kids calling; horns; quiet. Listen for the quiet. Hear it between the moments of sound. Wait for it. Wait until you've heard it enough to make your heart feel full.
Stop for pebbles. See how many colors you can find. Watch his delight as he finds one, just right, white, the size of his small fist. Watch as he squats down and picks it up.
Here, this one is for you.
Discover just how fun it is to put rocks into your pockets. Go ahead. Try it. Find one. Put it in your pocket. Let your fingers become accustomed to its surface and edge.
Look for beauty. Keep looking. Find it everywhere. {more...}
small discoveries
At some point there will be enough hours and I’ll know it, but for now Photoshop is like sliding down a rabbit hole into an alternate reality where everything reacts and responds in arbitrary, brilliant, and unexpected ways.
I spent the whole day occupied in this way, siting at my long white desk, sheaves of paper sketches spread around me like snow, making images, digital and graphite both.
Outside the weather has turned decidedly autumn like, and today the sky was the kind of gray that makes me moody, and it’s that time of the month where everything seems blunt or sharp depending on the circumstance, and chocolate really is the only solution.
It takes more effort to dig out of my own head space on days like these: to inhabit family life without the residual layers of mood and intellectual momentum. Still, there were lovely moments: French toast with maple syrup from our neighbors, cuddling with the boys on the floor, taking a walk down the road with Sprout in the wagon, Bean holding my hand, T's arm wrapped around my waist. Every single day I fall in love with my boys more. All three of them.
Today I wanted to share a new mix of music I’ve been absolutely crushing on: A soundtrack for making things.
Also into this project: Love 146. And this awesome, awesome site: Arbutus Yarns I love, love, love discovering your sources of inspiration. What are you crushing on lately?
almost a list about today
There were things, hours, chocolate graham crackers, kisses, tears. There was a walk down the road stalking birds on telephone wires for an art project (I've been inspired by this theme. Do you like the new header?) There were storm clouds and hours spent reading, Ong and Havelock and Surowiecki, and pages filled in my notebook ideas bursting like sparks.
There was an afternoon self portrait session when the light was temporarily good. Three self portraits are due in another week, in deferent mediums, and I've settled on a theme I think, of how we occupy ourselves in this illusive way: we are beings being. I feel this particularly as a mother--the way so many different piece of me are occupying the same space with myself. Does that make any sense at all? I am interested in the way we converge with ourselves, and are at odds. The way the words mother | writer | artist | designer don't necessarily overlap in any kind of orderly way.
There was giggling on the bed, snapping more photos, twirling, and heading for the door. There were white rocks found and stored in pockets. Wild grapes eaten that stained our lips. Birds caught in flight, in pixels. Birds in silhouette, black over blue.
There was an evening sky filled with pink, and fallapart tired boys and more tears and bedtime snuggles, and then T and I found each other on the couch, soaking up the light, soaking up each other, our fingers running lightly along each other's limbs.
Now there is night, windows are mirrors, lamplight makes circles and words fill the page.
Tell me about your day... I love reading little glimpses into your worlds.
an unexpected rescue
It wasn’t the way I expected it might happen; in fact, I didn’t expect it at all. In the back seat the boys were eating peanuts and chocolate graham crackers, on the way home from picking Bean up at kindergarten. I was thinking absently about school projects; about this book that we are reading this week, and about how it’s maybe true: you do know. Yes you.
And then we were on the dirt road, going around the corner and I could feel the way the mud grabbed at the tires of the car. I wasn’t driving fast. Slow enough that I could slam on the breaks and the tousled maple-syrup scented head of Sprout barely tugged forward at all.
“What, mommy, what?” Bean asked.
But I was already out of the car. Like that: like instinct, my body moving before I could think about what to do next.
In front of me: a car entirely flipped over, roof to the ground, in a ditch, on a rock, windows shattered. Smoke threaded its way from the broken windows.
There was a girl inside, alive, and I felt my heart want to explode with relief. Alive, and secondly, her neck wasn’t broken. She was dangling from her seatbelt, her feet were stuck, her face smooshed into the roof of the car. She had already called 911 (I am guessing here—but I am pretty sure she was on her cell or texting when she crashed—because she wouldn’t have been able to locate her cell phone if it hadn’t have been in her hand—everything was strewn everywhere among the broken glass.)
She was shaking, and I could feel my own body quiver with adrenaline and empathy. I asked her if she could move. I asked her if her head hurt. And then I carefully, carefully pulled her legs free. And she was totally unable to help me—she just shook and sobbed. She hung upside down until I reached around her and unclipped her seatbelt and then she collapsed into my arms.
She was 17. Gorgeous pale skin, freckles, smudged mascara. I held her until she could stand.
And all she could say over and over again was: “My parents are going to kill me.”
No, sweetie. They will be happy you are alive. I wrapped her in an animal print blanket we keep in our trunk for impromptu picnics and I brought her to my car. Other people stopped. One man had stopped while I helped her to get out. He was too scared to help. Afterwards he said, "You should have a medal." But it’s really not like that at all: I am a mother. There wasn’t anything else I could do.
So I kept her warm and kept her from hyperventilating, which she was slipping towards several times as she panicked about her parents. She called her work first. Then her mom, lastly her dad, who came, tall, thin, without a smile and stood beside the state trooper answering questions before he finally turned to me and said, “thank you for stopping.”
He didn’t hug his daughter. He didn’t reach for her or stroke her hair or tell her he was happy she was alive.
How does this happen? How?
My boys meanwhile were so good. They sat in their carseats for 45 minutes—because the first responders and then the EMTs treated her in my car before finally taking her to the hospital. Bean watched everything quietly, unafraid, wide eyed. He was in heaven watching the firemen come and clear the way for the car to be towed. (The smoke was from the airbag, thankfully.)
One fireman, seeing Bean, went and got both boys Junior Firefighter medals from their truck. Bean was over the moon proud.
I drove home slowly, grateful, grateful. And it was a peaceful, mellow afternoon of story books and me doing design work and Bean drawing next to me at my big long desk (while Sprout slept.) Oh how I love them, my sweet, sweet boys.
Also: What is with texting while driving? Why do people—and particularly teenagers do it? Also: her seatbelt saved her life. I have no doubt about that at all. If you have teens or know some, tell them.
Blur and beauty
So Wednesdays are the longest days for me around here now. Two studio classes with so much awesome my brain basically explodes by the time I'm through at 5pm. Then the long drive home where I can feel my body practically humming still with the energy of thought. Like a whirring halo of ideas that glisten over the surface of my skin. It really feels like that.
I'm grateful for the drive; for the almost forty minutes (with evening traffic) to pull myself out of my mind. To reconnect with my muscles, breath. It's a good transition time so that when I get home I can melt to floor level where Sprout comes to find me, folding into my chest. He strokes my bare arms with his little sticky hands. "Hi mama. Hi."
This is the hardest part and also the riddle: not being around him all day, even though when I am around him all day I long for exactly what I have now--heady intellectual conversation and artistic challenge.
Why must this be so?
Tonight T was out late, so it was just me and my two boys after their grandparents left. We said grace, ate polenta with cheese and sauce, giggled a lot. And then already it was about teeth brushing and diaper changing and bedtime and now more than ever I want to sneak in and kiss their faces. Am I missing everything by not being here every day to police the endless tussles over toys; to clean up the endless messes; to catch their endless smiles? No. That can't be. Their lives are rich with grandparents and Bean is in Kindergarten (!) and oh, how I love this crazy intense busy mind expanding stuff of being in school. Little by little I'll be posting a few more tidbits over here if you are ever interested in following along. I'm also on twitter pretty regularly, sharing all the inspiration I'm finding daily. Like this (so fun!)
It's starting to feel like fall here. The garden has reached that prolific wild state of neglect and bounty. There are potatoes with a thousand sleeping eyes waiting to be dug; crickets still in the evening; the first yellow and red leaves. Something I'm going to try very hard to do on the days when I don't have class is to get outdoors for small snippets of time. There is nothing more restorative than walking under the open sky, or lying in a field of tall grass, or feeling the wind hard on my face at the top of a parking garage with a glorious view.
after midnight | in the morning
There is a quiet now that I’m unused to. The way the house almost hums: the ambient noise of all the things we use all day, plugged into their sockets, sleeping with green blinking eyes open. The baby sleeps; the boy too, spread-eagle on his bunk. I can hear them breathing. Outside there are crickets in the dark, calling with their stick-legs sawing legs for summer to last a little longer, and also to have the of encounters with a mate.
It’s 1am. My mind is a hive of whirring thoughts. Heidegger and his mysteries coupled with all the things I do not know about how to make a video capture of my screen, or how to alter images the way I see them in my mind, and there are also things about aperture and chance and promise. And this: what will I do when the day comes fast and hard and I’ve had only five hours of sleep, backing up against a handful of other nights with barely six. How not to take the world personally then?
+++ I wake up with "you are the best thing... that ever happened to me.." running through my head in loops and I can hear the boys downstairs clattering, laughing, fighting over the fire truck. My husband has let me sleep in some, and when I slide into the skin of my waking self I feel still, like the hive of bees swarming through my limbs, each finger quivering slightly, and the thoughts I went to sleep with are still there, like a trace of sugar on my lips. I remember, I gather, the thoughts coming faster, too fast until there are words before sentences.
Heidegger. Oh my. Have any of you read Heidegger? The piece I was working through last night was called "The Question of Technology" and oh, how his circular, mysterious sentences thrill me. I am a girl for whom philosophy speaks truth. I'm versed in this. The way words, when traced to their origins reveal certain truths. I love it, even as the questions themselves make me uneasy.
I keep meaning to show up here in a more reasonable way: with a complete story, with a real update--of all the things and thoughts and ideas that have filled my days, but I can't seem to yet. So the fragments will have to do. The snippets, whenever they come, making a patchwork memory of these moments.
Noise and light
I bump into things. I walk in a slant. The sky is overcast and moisture holds onto the air like something desperate and weak. I wake up and my days are smattered with sparks of conversation: I live with three boys, two of whom can talk, the third, almost, each day his words becoming clearer. And even without words, it doesn’t matter: they make themselves clear. They yell and grunt and sneeze and exhale air quickly and with irritation through their teeth. They grab things, push past each other, point, reach. Outside are flickers and crows, calling the way such birds call: abruptly and then silence, each instance of sound a purpose, a communication with the wet leaves and the semi dark and within it, the other feathered hearts of similar birds, their dark wings folded, claws holding damp branches.
If I listen, I can hear the apples falling, and my fingers moving like a hailstorm across the key pad, a clatter like water on a metal roof, and downstairs: “No, no, get down. What is it with you boys? That’s enough of you, go play with your toys!” And then there are pots that clatter and his words don’t last.
On the road there is traffic and I can hear it, a rumble, gravel crunching, the sound of someone driving away, and in my heart, blood pounding with everything: heat, love, regret, delight, irritation. In the apple tree a solitary urgent finch cheeps, cheeps, cheeps. Above the cloud cover in the quiet sky, there are jets crossing, trailing contrail and higher, satellites, without sound, no atmosphere to hold the rumble in, no small thing to contain the noise of their velocity traveling through the dark among the lighted memory of stars.
I linger where it’s quiet, reluctant to go downstairs to where the littlest is making a racket with wooden sword, the bigger one has some small toy he’s tinkering with, discovering what makes it’s lights flash in the dark. Then he counts his quarters, four by four until he gets to seven piles and he comes to tell me, I have seven dollars, a shadow at the doorway. A shadow, everything, bearing sound, until the light begins and spreads.
I need your help!
First of all, a little bit of giddiness: I must just have pause here to say how THRILLED I am to be in an MFA program.... To have weekly artistic assignments in multiple mediums I have never explored. To be engaged in daily discussions about how ideas and words and images shape who we are. YES. Indeed. It's been such a long time coming and it feels incredibly incredible to be here finally. So awesome. Now that that is out of the way, because you are all reflective and brilliant and generous and truly amazing, I have a favor to ask. I need your help. 5 minutes of your time and a little bit of your brain to be exact....
One of my first assignments is to explore some ideas around design--and to create some type of presentation based on that exploration. I've decided that because my art and writing has come to life here on this blog through my interaction with you--that I'd like to ask you a few questions and then turn your answers int a super cool mind map representing how you collectively think about the answers to these questions.
I need your info by Friday at the latest...All that is need is a one or two sentence response to each of the following questions. (You can leave a question blank too, if you want..)
What do you get by being a contributor? My undying gratitude--and a a glimpse at the final product (if you'd like.)
UPDATED: Thank you to everyone who contributed. I can't wait to figure out how to represent your awesome responses. xoxo!
an impossibly possible project
I feel like I am in the looking glass, slipping towards an alternate view of everything that I know, everything I can imagine, be, do.
I’m wearing a blue dress and it’s just me and the quiet and then, eventually, NPR as I wait at the stoplights and I want everything to feel the way it does tonight: full with opportunity, yet not saturated with the stress that will inevitably come as deadlines press and the hours cannot hold enough. Right now, anything feels possible. This is always the way things are before you begin them. You can be anything, right up until the moment when you try.
Then it’s all about sweat and grit and talent. I’m not leaving any room for doubt.
I have the feeling that I will be coming here often with words; with the little scraps of thoughts I invariably carry around in my head; with the wonder of all of it, and the terror too. I’m the only one in the program with two small kids. The only one living at the end of a long dirt road thirty minutes away. The only one nearly bursting with words for a book. It will all be possible, right?
If there was ever a time this blog had anything to do with balancing motherhood and a creative life, it will be now, for these next two years. I'm thinking it should be my new byline: My Topography: An Impossibly Possible Project.
{grin.}
I want to remember this: just before parking for class tonight I watched a middle aged couple, both blind, navigating the sidewalk together, their bodies a dialogue of halts and movements, their dark glasses reflecting the setting sun. They held each others arms, each tapping out a path for future steps with a long white stick. They encountered the park bench, a tree, and navigated around these obstacles with a kind of faltering grace. Without sight, they were wholly devoted to the task of being present in the moment of walking.
The only place I can be is right here, encountering the unexpected with joy.
I also wanted to tell you that I'll be posting links and inspiration and essays about emergent media and design here. (But I'll also be taking full advantage of all your awesomeness here. Stay tuned. I have a project already in the works that I need your input on.)
August 25:: Working Together
WORKING TOGETHER
We shape our self to fit this world
and by the world are shaped again.
The visible and the invisible
working together in common cause,
to produce the miraculous.
I am thinking of the way the intangible air
passed at speed round a shaped wing
easily holds our weight.
So may we, in this life trust
to those elements we have yet to see
or imagine, and look for the true
shape of our own self by forming it well
to the great intangibles about us.
~ David Whyte ~