Halted

I've got a world class sinus infection and there is nothing like it to halt me in my tracks; to arrest all my momentum and force me to pause. The floor is freckled with crumbs, with legos and bits of string; sun and shadow making triangles and lines, a geometry of this moment right now. I curl up on the couch and do nothing and realize immediately that I don't know how to do this at all. I'm falling behind even as I close my eyes, turn my face toward the sun and feel it hot on my cheek.

The boys zoom by in circles on their plasma cars. Bean dressed in full pirate regalia; sprout in a spotted shirt. The house plants need watering; my to do list is longer than the day.

I am so ready for spring.

The art of falling down:

I crossed the first item off my 34 before 34 list this weekend: snowboard blue squares, and it felt amazing. They were my last two runs on Sunday. The light was golden and the shadows long and blue across the trail, and it was just me and my board and the snow and random strangers hurtling down at improbable speeds around me. And I did it: carving my way back and forth in a brilliant, precarious, unlikely upright angle, slanting and turning, all the way down, and this is what struck me about the whole process: that becoming something or learning something is always this crazy, amazing, awkward process.

Falling is awkward (and painful) and it isn't something you can skip. You can't fast forward learning. You can't overcome fear by skipping fear itself. You can't avoid falling by not falling. You've got to be in it: messy, face planting, laughing, crying, doing it all over again.

The best thing about riding the lifts is getting a glimpse at a bigger picture. When you're on the ground, your perspective is narrow. You + snow. You think you're the only one, maybe, to every wipe out this horrifically. To skid into the drift at the edge of the trail; to splat off the lift like you don't know how to stand. You collect yourself quickly, looking around, laughing self consciously. But from the air it's all different.

From there you can see: everyone is falling. Even the show-offs. Even the brilliant ones for whom snowboarding is like flying. They know that falling = learning. Falling = risking. Falling = facing fear.

This is true for everything, not just this new obsession of mine. It's true for writing; for making art; for asking for what you want; for extending your reach; finding your voice.

When was the last time you gave yourself the opportunity to fall?

Almost spring

Do you feel it? The days are growing longer. There is more mud and less snow; but still snow. Spring, almost. The boys are drawn to the puddles; to wherever the ice is thin. We kick chunks of snow along the road and stand with our heads thrown back watching the starlings and grackles lift and land.

A few days ago I brought my camera with me for the first time in a little while. I love how having a camera makes you look harder and see more. Have you done this recently? If not, you should!

Two + all the love in the universe

You were the beginning of the rest of my life, little one. You arrived, wide eyed, with a certain calm that has stayed with you. You came with smiles already fluttering; who, and at two months old you veritably beamed. You came to this world loving. It’s your thing, it’s what makes you, you. It’s awesome.

This morning you came to our bed in our still dark bedroom while Daddy was in the shower, and you snuggled with me; your soft hand gently stroking my face. No one taught you this. You just knew it: how to be tender; how to make someone feel the warmth of your big heart.

I adore you. I haven’t spent nearly as many sentences describing our lives with you as I did with your brother because of many things: life is fuller, busier, and there are four of us now. But also because I simply love to be with you, and whenever I can, that’s where I am.

You make us all laugh. You get humor like no other kid I’ve met, in a way that is beyond your years. You’ve got timing, sound effects, gestures. It’s hilarious to watch you string us all on, grinning. We’re all game, always.

You are an athlete already. You love to throw and catch balls; you love to sled; you love to run. You’re at home in your little study body: coordinated, agile, content. And maybe it’s because of this that you go to sleep easily, effortlessly, just a kiss and then you lie down and close your eyes. Today when you woke up from your nap you somehow managed to reach through your crib bars to the book shelf. You occupied yourself this way for almost an hour, quietly, looking at books.

You make things easy. Except for mittens. And potty training.

You are talking a lot now: not long articulated sentences yet; but short phrases: naming everything, saying “thank you” every single time you receive something, saying “I love you” often. You can count to ten, in your sweet little voice, each word sounding like something uttered with marbles in your mouth: soft on the consonants. You sing at the top of your longs.

With you little one, I want the present to last forever. I want you to be the way you are for as long as long. I want this sweetness to last. The way you give drooly kisses; the way you put your own boots on; the way you drink out of a glass all by yourself, casually with one hand. I want all of it to be indelible in my mind, but even as I write you grow, and I know that one day I’ll push back the hair from my face, look up from what I’ve been writing and you’ll be 10.

Happy birthday, my little Sprout. I love you. I love you.

Breathing room

What You are like at 6:

All legs and knobby knees, always outgrowing your jeans. Mood swings: sweeter than sugar, to darker than a storm filled sky and back in the span of an hour. Messes: a thousand snippets of paper strewn like snow; marbles always rolling off beneath the couches; legos wherever I step; erector set nuts and bolts never put back. Collections: old padlocks; post it notes in rainbow colors; the mailing inserts from magazines; stamps torn off of envelops.

You have a sweet tooth, and a soft spot for stories about gnomes and fairies and and anything magical. Your eyes get large and lost in the land of faraway. You listen with everything, drinking up stories. You fidget. You are stubborn. You take the easy way out except when it's framed as a competition or a teacher tells you to keep at it (then you always do.)

You snuggle. You wrestle. You like pizza and dumplings and requested them together with carrot cake for your birthday. You like looking at picture books and listening to stories read aloud for hours. You are teaching yourself to read and write. "I know how to write LOVE!" you proudly tell me. And you do. You write us all love notes, every day. We find them everywhere: stuck in things and to things; poked into pockets; folded into books.

Numbers are your thing. You just get them, almost without thinking. You put yourself up to new number challenges every day: doubles facts and multiples; adding and subtracting from small groups of things. "If we had three more," you say eyeing the egg box, "We'd have twelve," and if we had one more we'd have ten."

This winter we've started snowboarding and last week after we picked you up from your lesson, we did a few more runs, us following you down the mountain. And wouldn't you know? You went straight for the terrain: the jumps, the trail through the glades, the bumps. I followed after in awe, taking more risk than I would have done on my own.

And that's how it has always been, little one: you make me braver. You make me bolder. You make me want to take risks and dream big dreams. You continue to teach me daily how to be a mama; and also how to be my best self. You fill my world with light. I love you my sweet 6 year old.

Dreaming in the morning

I feel like I am a feather or a tumble weed; something blown about across the vast space of the night. The morning comes too soon. I haven't dreamed enough. I wake, go through the motions: coffee, eggs + toast, say goodbye to T and the big boy (whose birthday is tomorrow!) and pull out my laptop, intending to be productive. But I can feel the way everything resists. My mind still feels slight and suggestible and tossed about, and when Sprout goes down for a nap I crawl beneath the covers of my sun striped bed and sink into sleep again.

Except I don't feel like I am sleeping: I'm not gone entirely. I've slipped into an almost lucid dreaming state. At first projects replay on the inner screen of my mind: the code and the physical dynamics of an interactive piece I'm making spins in and out of focus; other things arrive as well, rotating, repeating, overlapping. The cat leaps up onto my bed and for an instant I am awake, in the room, and then gone again under the opaque sheath of dream.

This time I get up again, go downstairs, do things: except that I am dreaming. My body heavy beneath flannel. My mind testing the length of thread that I can follow through the labyrinth back to myself.

Eventually I begin to have vivid dreams: each one complete, like an envelope with a snapshot in it. In the last one I am standing on sand dunes by the water, holding the strings of five or six yellow and orange helium balloons. I ask the friend I am with to take a picture, and then I run and leap, and feel the way the air catches beneath my feet before I finally land; the water warm, the sand pebbled and golden.

When I do finally wake to Sprout calling, it's like he is calling me from the other end of a tunnel, and I can't just snap to. I trail myself. I feel the way the dreams still flutter like prayer flags. I look about the room expecting that I will be wearing the clothes I dreamed that I put on. My disorientation is almost physical: it has a weight and color to it. And then finally I am here again, in this body, bare foot, and stumbling down the hall.

I haven't been getting enough sleep and I think I'm running a deficit. I think I haven't been dreaming enough. Not metaphoric dreaming; real dreaming. This kind of dreaming that filled with irrational beauty and wonder and disorientation and utter belief in circumstances of disbelief. I can feel the way I need this dreaming time to be wholly creative. It's vital, but I can't quite put my finger on how.

I'm curious: what are your dreams like? How do they affect your creative life?

What I see when I blink

Last night I came home late from working on a collaborative project and slid beneath the covers to find the embering heat of my guy, dreaming. Now the morning is here again, too soon, jostling, clattering, and filled to the brim. I blink, and when close my eyes I see my life in snapshots, like sunspots, the minutes compressed to just these instances, mid air, mid action. My big boy with a voice that sounds like the bark of a dog who woke up at 3 am feeling like he couldn’t breath.

Blink.

The little one in a pointy Hannah Anderson hoodie and his brother’s Sambas running around with jam on his face and a paci in his mouth.

Blink.

Squirrels that have figured out how to leap from a stack of broken wooden lawn chairs through the gravity of air to the bird feeder, where they twirl with fat furry bellies exposed, eating seed with their dainty little paws.

Blink.

The startled chickadees who fly down to find these furry beasts their tails whirring, their cheeks chock full.

Blink.

Out the window the icicles taller than me; the sky bluer than the ocean; the clouds gathering over the mountain tops like the breath of dragons; the floor that has not been vacuumed in days.

Blink.

Everywhere I turn there are things: to be done, held, watched, waited for, unraveled, sorted, replied to, invented. This is life, mid motion, captured.

Blink.

More glimpses of winter moments captured here.

spark + blink

I feel like I am a forest fire; the way I move, the way I do, the way I am being in this life right now, this day, this week. The minutes are match sticks, my forward motion flint, the hours bursting into flame. Blink, the day gone in the heat of the moment.

Outside the snow is high above my head where the snow has been plowed to clear the narrow path for our cars to leave or arrive. I should be out shoveling, carving wider paths for our feet: to the woodpile, the chickens, the front door, but I am not. I am in the a state of perpetual mid-production; I am not in motion only when I am sleeping.

I miss running outdoors; I lingering. I need some unwind time in a big way, but I don’t think it’s going to happen this week. There isn’t a single thing that can drop off the list of absolutes except exercise, intimacy, and sleep.

What do you do in the midst of weeks like this?

in this moment

Just stopping in quickly to say hello this morning with these photos from my sunny, sunny bedroom... and to nudge you to go play. Do one thing. Today. You'll be so happy. (Promise.)
I'm finishing a big milestone for the book today (later than I'd hoped. Typing with fingers crossed makes things difficult.) And it feels good and terrifying and true to my heart. I wish I could tell you more, but I don't want to jinx it.
Today I'm crushing on this sweet song.
Reading the archives over at Slow Pony Home.
And swooning over every single afternoon here.

Flirting with chance:: it's your turn

Hello lovelies, I had no idea so many of you would play along on my little game of chance. It was an amazing day, and a challenge to try to fulfill at least suggestion from almost everyone who commented and to document it in some way. But it was also so much fun.. It was an adventure filled with many moments of resistance and joy and delight. Here is my the interactive piece I did for the class project.

I want you know know that the best thing I rediscovered through this project was just how amazing YOU are.

You are generous, sensuous, playful, romantic, and thoughtful.(Yes, you.)

You nudged me stop and take care of myself and pause; drink warm tea, luxuriate in a foot bath (the first I've ever given myself), throw myself in the snow; dance, twirl. Mostly the whole thing pushed me outside of my comfort zone and made me contemplate when I started taking things so seriously.

I was struck by how infrequently I really allow myself luxuriate in the moment. My life has gotten so busy that I'm uber focused on tasks and projects most of the time. If I stop to linger, it is to browse through my favorite photography blogs, to read something, or to stare out the window. Text and images have become the only way I fill up this hunger for beauty that lives in my soul.

My fingertips and taste buds, tendons and feet were grateful to be remembered; to be used, engaged, made to move, revel, relax, reach beyond.

How often do you flirt with chance? When do you allow yourself to step outside of your ordinary? Do you allow yourself the chance of random conversations with strangers? Moments lingering over tea? What senses do you nourish throughout your day? Which do you neglect?

To thank you, I am sending you on your very own chance encounter mission this week. It felt so taken care of by you in this unexpected way. I am so grateful for the opportunities you offered me to dig into ordinary moments of my day, and to find in them so much beauty. I hope you feel the same.

HOW TO PLAY:

In the comments share a link to your blog with photos (and words) documenting your discoveries. One person chosen at random will receive an original tiny art piece in the mail, and I'll feature some of my favorite of your photos/posts later this week here.

YOUR MISSION: This os permission to allow yourself to play; to follow whimsy and to explore who you are in this moment.

1. Make yourself your favorite breakfast. Use extra butter. Cream. Real maple syrup. Bacon. Whatever it is that you love . 2. Buy yourself tulips. 3. Take 10 minutes and pin, tape, or post some images that you love to a wall in your workspace. 4. Go outside, set a timer for 4'33 seconds and just breathe and listen. 6. Buy a pint of raspberries. Stick them on your fingers like you did when you were a kid. Eat them one by one. Don't share. 7. Do something for a stranger: buy the person in line behind you coffee, pay a toll, fill a parking meter, give them a flower.... 8. Clear a space, get down on the floor and stretch for five minutes. 9. Dance to this song. 10. Take a self portrait, of your face, in good light. Revel in your beauty.

Document in some way. Ready. Set. Go!

The possibility of chance

Look what T gave me for my birthday! I can't wait to take some pictures: but the stakes are high. With only 8 pictures per pack of film, I want to find just the right moments. Hard for this girl who likes to squander photos: taking so many of everything, always hungry for the beauty that the image captures and reveals. Thank you all for your awesome birthday wishes. I am a lucky girl.

Check out the sidebar for my new list. 34 before 34. Yes, croissants made their way back onto the list., dreamy and unrealistic as they are. I've been crushing on all things French recently (including this lovely mix.) The trick for such a list is dreaming big and dreaming small. I like to think I do both. May the goodness manifest.

Today I need your help. One of my assignments for one of my classes this week is to inject an ordinary routine or day with chance--and to document the outcome in some way. Will you play along?

In the comments list one thing that you think I should do, find, see, taste, hear, smell, or touch tomorrow. Keep in mind these things need to be things I can do realistically within the scope of an ordinary day...but they should extraordinary or unusual in some way too! I will try to do everything on the list and document the results.

I have to say, I'm kind of giddy about this. I'm hoping you play along. I can't wait to see what chance encounters your ideas envite.

Happy Thursday!

33

Hello friends!

Today is my birthday. 33. It feels like it's going to be a big year. This past year was awesome, heart-wrenching, and amazing. It got the ball rolling for so many good things.

This year: so many more good things.

Today: so many things to do, including attending a first grade preview evening at Bean's school (marking another thing that fills me with wonder: I'm going to have a six year old in a month.)

Tomorrow: a little more downtime to share a new list with you. 34 before 34. I think I did pretty well on my list for this past year (on the right sidebar.) Certain things just stopped being as important (query letters), or realistic (like camping with a toddler or making croissants from scratch: what was I thinking?) The manuscript is in progress. Thursdays and Fridays are my writing days. It takes so much to birth a book. So many hours stitched together. I get antsy when I don't get the time. I love every minute when I do, although there are still days when the whole thing terrifies me and I procrastinate something fierce.

There is something wonderfully satisfying about making such a list. The simple act of writing each small or big dream down pulls them closer to realization. I am convinced. (Do you write yearly lists? If you do, I'd love for you to share.)

Love, C

Right This Instant

Reason #921 why we haven't even considered buying a new couch yet.

At the window:: a morning poem

I am at the window eating oranges sent from a friend of my mother-in-law’s from Florida: the only place now in our country without some fringe of snow,

and they are sweet fire.

I suck the juice off my fingers, sticky and grateful as fat white snowflakes fall again toward the earth beyond the glass.

I am still not tired of watching.

Still not tired of the way the world is now, like a line drawing in graphite, all gesture, all movement, all white on gray on white;

and so I watch until I feel things settle within like snow, softly

I watch, till the blue jays arrive in the lilac bush for the oily seeds I put out at the feeder and my soul drinks up their color: blue on gray on blue,

and the sweet round fire of the orange,

and I am sated.

A morning snapshot

So far this morning Sprout has.. ...pushed a stool over to the counter while I was in the bathroom, and started swigging maple syrup from the gallon jug. ...found a package of guitar picks and insisted on me opening them, giving him one, and then taking down a guitar for him to play. ...pushed a stool over to the refrigerator, selected a cup, and attempted to fill it with water (he succeeded. I then figured out how to implement the child lock feature. I'm not sure if I can figure out how to undo it.) ...tried to pour the remainder of the water out in the sink and poured it all over the floor. ...found a dishtowel and mopped up said spilled water, muttering to himself all the while. ....stuck a pacifier down his shirt and got it stuck in the leg of his pants. ...put on funny glasses (above) and made hilarious growling sounds, thereby uproariously cracking himself up. ....asked for foamed milk, and then a spoon to eat it with.

I love him.

Circling

I stand by the heat of the wood stove, circling the present moment in my head like a dog preparing for sleep. It’s snowing again, although dawn was bright and clear: the truest pinks and the most pale persimmon clouds. Now everything is back to white on white, and the bird feeder needs filling. Today I am torn by what I want to be doing and what I ought to do. All morning T and I attempt conversation, fail, and attempt again. At the root of it: we miss each other desperately. We both want to fold into each other’s arms and have an afternoon just us in a café somewhere, but instead there are boys, and homework, and book work, a party tonight, and so the day ends up mostly being about adjacent circles rather than concentric ones, and in our longing we miss our mark, push each other away, and feel the distance more acutely.

If only I could stitch all the moments together today, I’d have a quilt of him to wrap around my shoulders now as I write. Him, in Sorrels in the driveway pushing the snow blower into knee-deep snow; him on the couch, buried under the lot of us this morning, all trying to tickle him and make him laugh; him cleaning the downstairs bathroom toilet, shirtless and muscular after a workout.

Now he’s taken the boys and gone on errands in spite of the snow falling harder, and I wish I could have gone with him, but reason and responsibility and the off kilter awkwardness of our morning convince me to stay instead.

I’ve been interested in exploring this thread interaction lately, since I wrote this post. I'm fascinated with the way people navigate the in-betweens and daily happenings. Neither hilltop nor valley, but the places where things even out and we’re just in it, doing our lives, side by side. There isn’t always grace in these moments, or courage. Often tiredness paints the whole picture a bleaker hue than it would otherwise be (and today this is most certainly the case.) Living with someone and loving them never ceases to be startling to me; unexpected, delightful, or painful to the point of wincing.

So this is my life. I always grin when I say this in my head, encountering myself in present tense, inside this moment (now: at my desk with cords strewn everywhere in the silence of a house now empty of the boys that fill my world. So this is my life: and I am so grateful I get to share it here, and show up, and find the threads of your stories too in the comments.

I am so interested in all your responses to my last post about blogging (thank you!)

I’d love to know: what are a few of your current (new) favorite blogs? Where do you creep, peruse, become inspired?

Today, I am loving this beautiful piece by Pixie. This is awesome. These images caught my eye.

And this.

The medium

What's different? Do you think that blogs are dying? Sharing about Sprout potty training seems off topic now, oddly. Even though today involved a Sprout + poop + the destruction of his brother's legos story that I'd tell you if we were in person, and I wouldn't have thought twice about sharing it in 2006. Is it just because he's my second and my focus is elsewhere--or is it because the topic doesn't fit the medium any longer? I can't decide.

So I'm curious: what kinds of posts/blogs do you love? What holds you and keeps you coming back?

+++

Second semester has started + I'm getting back in the swing of things.

Some inspiration this week:

Crushing on this mix (good for writing to.)

Twyla Tharp's Creative Habit

And this project (I'm so hoping to knit this into the upcoming weeks. Love, loving all the beauty in this pool.)

Taking this as a challenge. Planning to share my answers here this week.

What does your day look like right now? What are you inspired by in this brand new year?

How to love someone after eleven years:

Wake up. Shower, fumble for the hair dryer, grab a load of laundry before heading downstairs. Find his face across the room over a skillet of eggs; find his eyes, and meet them. Feel how his smile fills you up like good bread. Fill the washing machine, add soap, press the illuminated buttons and wait for the machine to start. Walk away, walk back, keep walking until you encounter the warmth of his back. Reach out for him even though things are unresolved and will be unresolved again. Wrap your arms around him and press your body close until you can feel his heat through your shirt; through his.

Say only a little until after you have had coffee. Pick and choose between complaining and being heard. Notice the things that you love: the way he makes you maple lattes and kisses the boys heads always and again and laughs and the silliest of their jokes. Eat eggs fried in a cast iron skillet with the pancakes he made from scratch while you showered. As you dressed you could hear your little one asserting: “I do it, I do it” (his first true three word sentence.) The pancakes are made with cornmeal and buttermilk and tenderness.

Fill the bird feeders and make small talk until you are present in yourself and the torn edges of sleep have been brushed aside like cobwebs swept. Then laugh. Then say what you need to say, and listen as he says what he needs to say.

Learn to ask questions that don’t assume answers.

Questions that are empty like a jar before rain. Questions that offer neutrality: how can I help? What do you need? How do you feel?

Learn to ask yourself these questions too.

How do you feel?

What do you need?

How can you help yourself?

Let the spinning orbit of your day pull you in: finding snowgear for two children and leaving and arriving; buying gas and water and Cliff bars. Kicking snow off your boots. Laughing in line at the lifts. Across the table over rootbeer and salty fries find yourself reflected in his gaze (again and again this is the way it goes.) Find your heart spread across the surface of his words, spreading out like ripples in the lake of his laughter. A decade feels short and long, just as days often do. Reach for his hand and feel his pulse.

unfamiliar familiar

This is where I always slip: where the snare of expectation catches me off guard and I’m unaware that I’m expecting anything until it doesn’t happen and my feelings are dashed.

Sometimes even then I don’t know what I want. Sometimes I just can’t say what I’m hoping for, and it’s one of those times, back at home in the small world familiar things that are my life: fat snow; hazelnut shells in a bowl; T beside me at the table eating curry + chicken the fire flickering behind us; the boys after their bath with damp hair and new pajamas; marbles rolling around on the floor; laundry to fold.

I don’t expect the vulnerability I feel until I feel it. It’s jet lag maybe; hormones; whatever.

“We’ve known each other for eleven years, it’s safe to say I know you,” he says.

We’re in bed, lying stiff like boards, shoulder to shoulder. It’s not an argument really, and yet it is.

“I just want to feel like you’re curious about me still,” I say, not really knowing what I mean.

And yet it’s exactly what I mean.

We're so familiar we’re unfamiliar some days.

And sometimes it’s easier to give in to the laws of physics; to push away; to walk away; to look away. Equal and opposite reactions.

Tonight we move our shoulders towards each other in the dark. A small concession, but the night is already half gone.