These are some moments: full velocity, full of mess, full of grace
It's been a wild tumble of spring-turning-into-summer around here. I'm in the thick of a full, full summer semester. The deadline for my manuscript is looming in early fall. Everything is converging in a miraculous, glorious mess. There isn't enough time. I'm exploding with ideas. The Kickstarter rewards are still waiting for finishing touches that require more than a handful of free moments to complete.
Bean graduated from kindergarten last Friday afternoon with scratched knees, hair in his eyes, and big beautiful grins. Sprout is potty training and asking "why?" and exploring just how much dramatic effect a super cute pouty face can have on us. Our washing machine broke (I overloaded it.) I never manage to put all the laundry away: it sits on the back of the couch, or in laundry baskets and the boys have grown used to rummaging through them for fresh underwear or unmatched socks.
We're all doing the best we can: full velocity, full time. It's an epic, glorious, silly, catastrophic choreography every single day. Some days we barely make it out of the house. Yesterday a tractor trailer flipped on the our road just before where I needed to turn: it set me back by an hour; made me late to a meeting; and yet those long moments waiting in traffic with windows down were moments of gratitude and grace.
Morning comes early now: 4:30 a.m. and the birds are calling. A salt and pepper chicken has gotten broody. We're letting her sit on a nest full of eggs. Beside the coop another poplar fell last week. This spring has been all about thunderstorms and floods and windstorms that keep tearing things up. Our driveway is a mess of ruts. The garden is just barely dug. Dandelions are going to seed everywhere. Dishes wait in the sink.
Before night falls we walk out together to the chicken coop, T and I. Twilight hums with crickets, frogs, fireflies. The sky is already gathering stars. We wrap our arms around each other's waists: this is the first time, close, skin to skin all day. We kiss, we close the coop, we walk back, stumbling over the army of muddy boots, flip flops, sneakers tossed off at the tile by the front door. Later, as I sit at the kitchen table with the windows open, I hear our neighbor banging on a metal garbage can lid: bears, most likely. Last night, it was a luna moth that came, with enormous pale green wings, beating at the screens.
So this is life, now, this month. These are are my moments.
What are yours?
Community + belonging: online vs.offline
Not social networks... but real communities that have similar functions and values to real world communities: places where like-minded people connect, share, participate, and exchange value.
I'm so looking forward to your thoughts.
What do online communities look like in your view? Where do you go online to share? To participate? To collaborate? Do you have a voice there? What about influence? Are you recognized? So curious to read what you think.
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certain things keep on in their own fashion without us
I don’t know how to reclaim any kind of balance now and so this is what I do instead: I list the day, one thing after the next.
The white herons, a pair, that fly overhead as I drive on a flood closed road, water licking at the front door of a white house the whole first floor a marshland spilling across rugs, abandoned furniture, things left as the water continued to rise.
The lake is engorged, spilling across the causeway washing over the sand bags that are stacked like prayers heavy and hopeful in the hands of men.
After the herons a V of geese confuses me, flying northward several dozen in formation, their long necks like compass needles while elsewhere geese have goslings now; grey and yellow like the tornado threatening clouds that came and went, lightening splitting the sky like an over-ripe fruit, and thunder that made the picture frames clatter.
I’m always on the lookout for the way things will turn out next: the yellow dog, Butters, bounding to greet us; the cat who waits at the door bringing mice; the grasshoppers starting to saw away at their summer song in the fields where grass grows taller than ever, taller than a two year old child’s head, even though the corn still waits, and the garden waits unplanted save for last season’s volunteers: tomatoes always find a way back, and lettuces without explanation; certain things keep on in their own fashion without us.
Not enough
I love you.Good morning baby. Go find Daddy, Mommy has to take a shower. Here is your t-shirt. Are you ready to go? Where are your rain pants? Forget it, just get in the car. Good bye. I love you. I love you. I’m sorry I was in such a rush. I’m running late for a meeting. Do you see the river? Let’s run to your classroom. Goodbye sweetie. Have an awesome day. I love you.
*
Hi my little guy! I love you, I love you, I love you. I’m going to get your tummy! Pppppptttt. Hi sweetheart. How was you’re day? Go wash your hands for dinner. Only one cookie. Wipe your face. Yes I’ll play alligator. Go brush your teeth. Please put on your pajamas. Put on your pajamas right this minute. One, two… Yes, I’ll read you that book. It’s you’re last day of kindergarten tomorrow, remember? I love you little guy. Here is your bear. I love you too.
when I listen to myself, this is what I say
// Here is what my heart is saying today:
Take the time. Get more sleep. Let exercise be a part of every day. Soak up time with my boys more. Focus on making this book incredible. Stop being so scared of the potential for failure. Just let the fear sit there next to me. I will not fail. Narrow my attention. Breathe.
I wake to rain
The roadside fields have become wide brown lakes,where the sharp stalks of last summer's corn stipple the surface marking the rows that already rose knee high with promise: sweet ears for thieving raccoons and combine harvesters in the fall. This year, the corn is late. The farmers wake to rain and wait, hope spilling from rain-torn holes in the pockets of their lives and the pregnant sky draws close, bearing storms and songbirds tilting on the windy air. And when we least expect it, sun.
Sleep deprivation + inspiration + some springtime glimpes
+++
I’m still humming with wonder at the work that I do now: that I have this chance to write, create, share, make. That this is my job, finally, truly. And that this book is emerging slowly from drafts and chapter outlines pinned across the wall in front of me.
Today though I’ve accumulated some serious sleep deprivation, and combined with conflicting deadlines for class, I pretty much just want to do this.
Instead, I think I’ll be trying this for a week or two. Are you reader’s of Patry’s blog? I just found her, and am soaking up her words with immense gratitude.
I’m also still thinking about this podcast by Jamie about supporting the artists and bloggers and creatives who inspire you.
She’s new to me, and I’m grateful for the discovery—especially since I’m working on making my own podcast this week to send out to backers. Alessandra, the goddess who created Gypsy Girl’s Guide did an interview with Jamie at the end of the podcast and shared the link on Twitter. The interview is truly inspiring for anyone with a wanderlust heart such as mine. (Also I adored hearing her accent! It’s something I miss when reading words: how much emotion and passion and story is contained in the tone and cadence of the spoken word.)
+++
Who are few creatives who are inspiring you right now? What do you love about their work?
+++ Also, if you're a twitter type, follow along. The inspiration I find there is plentiful every single day.
Being Six: or how we're all learning to focus on the positives
We decided to start using a marble jar a few weeks ago after a series of ruckus days where everything seemed to be “No!” and “Stop!” and “Don’t do that!” Both T and I were exhausted by the constant reprimanding and redirection, and both of us agreed we needed to do a better job of pointing out the positives; of noticing the small, awesome, kind things Bean does daily—and of pointing those things out to him and affirming them.
Being six is hard, I think. It’s hard for me as Bean’s mama, for T, for Sprout, and maybe hardest of all for Bean.
Being six means being at the cusp between being small, and maybe not being quiet so small any more. It means being on the verge: of ending kindergarten, but not quite starting first grade. It means utter pure distraction one moment (he has this habit of pulling his socks off wherever he is and never ever remembering where he left them) and then absolute focus the next (he’ll draw for an hour now, his pictures the detailed blueprints of a future engineer.)
Being six means understanding that the world might not be all good: overhearing the news, wide eyed in the car; it means dreaming of Tsunamis, of thunder, of tornados, of things that can come out of closets at night. It means unwaveringly believing in fairies and gnomes and in one very special plastic alligator named Honey Honey who mysteriously eats the food he leaves on a small china plate for her before bed.
And most importantly, being six means trying to learn how to be in charge of yourself—-which often looks like trying to be in charge of everyone else. Especially his brother. And somehow the marble jar shifted the focus away from the struggle to the good stuff.
Keeping a marble jar has made us more aware of all the ways that he is helpful and thoughtful and self-reliant, and it makes him more aware of how he can grow those behaviors. Less frustration, more easy moments. Less negotiating, more helping. Less yelling, more hugging between brothers.
His first goal was easy: ten marbles would result in a family trip for ice cream cones. The next goal, harder: twenty marbles would be an indication that he’d be ready and responsible and caring enough to take care of his very own fish. And he did it. We did it. We all noticed and helped and laughed and shared.
“This is the very best day of my life!” Bean said as he walked through our front door carrying the small plastic container with a carefully selected Beta fish inside.
Meet Cookie S. Fish (short for Cookie Sandwich Fish). The very newest member of our family.
This boy I love
Trying to describe him now defies my ability to avoid cliches: every time I take the minute to look at him, really look at him, I'm stunned by the fact that he's six. That he is my first baby, and now he is this lanky boy, all gestures and adverbs, storm and sunshine, drama and antics.
He came into my room this afternoon in his looking for socks and his little knobby needs just about made me melt: the way they tilt in toward's each other just a little; the way one knee has a scab from when he fell off his bike last week. His hair was damp from playing outdoors in the rain, his eyes huge as always seemed to fill up his whole face.
It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't have children what it's like to fall in love with your child over and over again, even when they annoy the crap out of you, as Bean routinely does. He's pushy and edgy and impatient; he's convinced he's at the very center of everyone's world; he has a hundred questions nearly ever minute; he is inordinately invested in being right. Yet every single day when I see him after I've been gone his presence fills me with a brightness.
He wraps his thin arms around my waist: "let's play alligator, Mama!" he begs.
Alligator, like almost every other game he invents, means tussling and wrestling on the floor.
And though I'm often preoccupied when I arrive, I oblige, wrapping my arms around his wriggling little torso, chomping the air with enormous imaginary teeth. And just like that, I'm in it. In this moment, in this love.
making it so
All weekend I’ve thought about your answers; pondered them, and wondered at their incredible honesty and longing.
There is such enormous power in putting into words the things you long for. I believe this with every single cell in my being. Things become, align, respond. Even when what we ask for is far grater than what we’re capable of manifesting ourselves: the universe moves too.
The thing that is hard, of course, is feeling it move.
We spend our whole life on an earth that spins.
Does that ever startle you? I used to be able to lie on a grassy hillside and feel the earth spin if I closed my eyes. Then I grew up and convinced myself I couldn’t any longer, and that is just exactly what we often do: we tell ourselves all the ways we can’t and won’t and shouldn’t.
It takes guts and nerve and passion and some kind of enormous trust to lean towards your longing. But mostly, it takes imagination.
We’re much more comfortable with considering what we believe is the impossible, than with actively dreaming it possible.
This is true:
This small black bear showed up next door to my in-law's house this morning. I loved it so much, I had to use it in a little piece of art. A good reminder: things show up, if you let them.
So let them.
What do you long for? Let your answer be an invitation to the universe.
Go ahead. Say it.
glimpses + books
Speaking of books, here are a few I cannot wait to get my hands on:
The Recent History Of Middle Sand Lake // Molly writes the blog field | work. Enough said, right? She has an eye with words. A way of noticing. Really can't wait to sink into this collection, like putting my feet in cool lake water.
Delancy // Molly's book A Homemade Life gave me the courage to be bold + simple with food. Butter + raddishes. Chocolate + baguettes. And just as naturally brilliant as these pairings are, so are her words with food. Simply cannot wait for this book about the birthing of the restaurant Delancy.
Contents May Have Shifted // Pam is my hero. My mentor. And the person who made me take my writing seriously. Enough Said.
The Selby Is In Your Place // Because truly, I can spend a whole afternoon perusing The Selby and always, always feel utterly inspired.
And Susannah's yet to be named book, because her words + images fill my soul.
What are you reading right now?
Signs of life
Riding 33.2 miles per hour on a back country road does something for your soul. It makes you grin, for one. It makes your hair, pulled back in messy braids yank like kite strings in the wind. Being that close to the pavement you see things differently. No, you feel them. The fragrance from every newly blooming roadside flower hits you like a cloud blossoms: magnolias, cherry, daffodils in front of every farm house the color of breakfast: scrambled eggs and pale yellow butter.
Where the sun has been the longest the heat lifts off the road embracing your calves and thighs and bare arms with sudden softness and warmth; and in the shady pockets where the road dips down, the cold air comes at you like something from a dream.
You see things: beaver ponds abundant with newly chewed logs and saplings. Geese with long black legs and wide feet, paired off, nesting. Turkey buzzards with wings as wide as your arms, their shadows quick and black across the road. New lambs, some just days old, their knees knobby, their ears swivling at the whir of your wheels as you ride by. A bearskin tacked to the side of a woodshed; two women sitting on lawn chairs smoking cigarettes, their pale legs bare and almost glowing in the late afternoon son.
This is what happens when you stop holding so fiercely to what you must do: the world gets all up in your face with its green and manure and potholes, and it’s utterly glorious.
For 26 miles the only thing you think about is whatever is right in front of you: every pebble, sharp curve, rut, and roadside marsh. You see a blue egret on one leg; a swarm of insets illuminated in the mossy golden light; a hairy brown goat let loose to wander in front of a barn; a barefoot teenage boy with shoulder length hair walking up to the open door of a grey log house.
You feel only this: the way your body does this thing nearly effortlessly in concert with this sleek machine; improbably balancing, moving fast, faster, until it’s only an intuitive, kinetic and immediate, and not a thinking thing at all. And when you return, the world is closer and newer, and you are more of it, than apart from it. Yes.
Tell me how you do it
I'm feeling stuck. I come here to write, to share, and I just look at the screen. It's been an intense couple of weeks. The end of a semester. A dear friend visiting with a heavy heart. A week of being "on" at all times with the boys. Not enough sleep. Deadlines, still, always. This is my "vacation" time and I'm struggling with deciding what to tackle on the infinite to-do list that has been accumulating while I've been studying and writing. Hard to give myself permission to just read Bossypants and nap.
Do you feel like you can really, truly, unwind and relax in your own home? Tell me how you do it. I need some instructions.
These are things that happen
These are things that happen when I circle back into this present that is mine: sunburn on unaccustomed cheeks; blisters on my palms after an afternoon in leather gloves raking lawn debris; the unexpected delirium of forsythia and daffodils; bumblebees; wet marks on my knees from kneeling to look among the clover.
I cannot help myself: I slip into a neighbor’s yard and pluck a handful of daffodils, carrying them in a closed warm fist up the drive, pulling the boys behind me in the red wagon with the other. I grin secretively the whole way. I smile rinsing dishes; but am near to tears when the red-winged blackbird swoops low across my path. These ordinary things stun me. The way my life folds back around me, and this is where I am: in the thick of spring, at the end of a dirt road, with a restless cat, two boys, and a writing deadline waiting for the evening.
All day the sky was blue; all day it was just me and them; two changeable constants. Mood swings, bare bellied tickles, cookies and milk, sand at the backdoor. Five loads of laundry; sun dappled sheets; jumping on the bed; exercise.
It will be this way all week: just me and them the sky. T is out of town on a business trip so it will be us, making the best of allergies and hilarity; less urgency, but no less full throttle: “look mommy, look! Did you see, did you see?” So this is what I’ve been missing.
tonight
“Mommy,” he says, sitting up like a small bird in his top bunk, “I just have the feeling stuck in my head that the lightening can strike and kill me. “ I can’t see his eyes, but I know they’re huge; red rimmed from allergies, lashes so long they get crisscrossed when he rubs them.
I’ve been in class since one; in meetings since eight this morning. I’ve had a cumulative fourteen hours of sleep in the past three days. There are circles under my eyes; I haven’t exercised; deadlines still defining every waking hour.
I hear him sniffle, rub his nose, squirm under the covers, his thin torso still propped up on an elbow. I can see his silhouette: he’s watching the window, even though the shades are shut.
I want to snap at: Stop being silly. You’re fine. Go to sleep. I want to plunk the little one into his crib instead of holding him in my lap, rocking as he squirms around, not settled either, also anxious about the storm that has arrived suddenly, just as T drove off for a meeting. I can feel the impatience thick on my tongue.
Instead I take a breath. I zero in. I let the breath expand the place where my ribs join; let my love for these two boys flood me like the storm.
“It’s okay," I say softly. "I’m right here. Mama will be right here,” and then I begin to whisper, “Shush, shushhhhhh.”
And the lightening comes, the thunder comes, the sky grows dark, darker. The windows pelt with rain, and I rock and whisper and then begin to softly sing Brahms’ lullaby, until I can feel Sprout’s body soften, his hair suddenly damp and warm with the onset of sleep. And I keep singing.
I keep singing as the lightening lights up the room, once, twice, six times, twelve. I lose count and keep singing until I can hear Bean settle, curling like a small animal in his covers. I sing until they are breathing in time, steadily, evenly, with the sweet magic of sleep.
what it's like :: midweek
Dark to light, then light to dark: a filigree of shadows on the windowsill, a spattering of rain on the outside of the glass.
I spend the day mostly in doors, watching the world from windows, focused, determined, tired, anxious, triumphant, moody, and delighted at once. I look toward the near future of concurrent deadlines and feel the way my heart pummels my ribcage for more breathing room, more time spent doing little, but that’s not what this time is about. This time is about passion and pushing through: when the hours are fractions, the minutes precious, and the outcomes hopeful.
I leave in the morning carrying fried egg sandwiches; drink too much coffee; and spend the first half of every week mostly sitting, creating things in abstractions: in pixels, in code, in words.
I drive down the muddy road, navigating ruts so deep they suck the wheels in and cause the underbelly of the car to scrape. I drive past feels burgeoning with runoff, past new grass starting to be green, past the trees fluffy with buds, past the coltsfoot like a thousand small suns blooming at the side of the road.
Some days I drive in silence. It’s the most I can do to true to some kind of center: following one thought after the next, listening to my heartbeat, finding my breath.
Other days I’m too exhausted, and I need a different kind of force to make my inner compass stay the course. I put on bon iver, white hinterland, adele, and turn the volume up until I can feel it in my pulse.
I go, say yes, do, create, ask, answer, appease, promise, push, pull, question, stumble, fall down, get up, try again. And then again, all over, and again.
When I come home some days under a twilight sky, and I find the full throttle mess of the house. I can’t win with the laundry. I never could, but now I don’t even try. A clean pile is better than a dirty pile; forget about matching socks. I come home to the prospect of dinner: sometimes made by T, sometimes an abstraction I must dream up from the bare shelves of the fridge when neither of us have had the time to stop and replenish.
It’s an underfoot, all at once, messy, strenuous, silly, glorious time: dinner, with my three guys. Teaching the boys ones manners at the table is an endless, often hilarious uphill battle. They are primal: they want to eat with their hands. They want to make us laugh. Blowing bubbles into milk never gets old. Stuffing cookies into their mouths whole seems to be the only way to eat them. Then teeth brushing straight way; snuggles; books; pajamas; bed.
I sing to them in the dark, and it’s often then that I get a glimpse of the long view: how this time is so perfect and fleeting, how they’ll be teenagers in an instant, and I’ll be so much farther on my path. And I grin, looking forward to it, and grin being in it, even when there isn’t enough time to pause, or hesitate, or linger for but a moment. Then I turn the lights out, kiss their soft cheeks, and return to the brightly lit corner of my studio where projects are waiting to unfold.
hello, sunday
Hello rain and wind and skies torn like shreds of cotton. Hello blue and green, poplar pollen and birch catkins. Hello little boys playing with friends in the sandbox. Hello deadlines.
Oh yes. Deadlines. On them like honey butter on toast today. Still, I wanted to drop in + share a few things I've stumbled into this week that I simply love:
♥ Skinny Love cover by the amazingly talented 14 year old Birdy.
Noise Trade. (More awesome music.)
Over my shoulder by Gracia + Louise.
Little Indian Girl ~ a must read for any mama with a quirky/different/special kid. Oh how I love the way Alegra writes.
What have you found this week that you love? Share please. I need rewards for pushing through the mountains of work that lie between now and next weekend.
Right now
Between now and the end of the semester is a complex choreography of dividing every hour into fractions. There is persistence, determination, and an unavoidable lack of sleep.
Between now and the end of the semester there is a book deadline: the revised chapter titles; and another chapter. I dream in type. I dream the Scrivner interface. I dream sentences, and when I wake feel myself swimming towards the now of this book, this chapter, this day, with everything I have.
Between now and the end of the semester spring will bloom for certain, the buds on the lilacs tell me so. The grass will sing syren songs. The peepers will show up. The air will warm. And I will be indoors hunched with terrible posture at my desk, making things happen.
And right now: there are so many things I should be working on that I don't know how to start. Every project feels like a glass ball. Which one do I toss into the air first? What do you do when you reach a point like this? How do you take the first step toward the rest?