And so I am learning to moon walk

The sky is grey and yellow and thunder moves about like a restless god above us. Rain falls then stops, and the gutters drip. In the yellow dark after the storm the birds sing twilight songs. The trees become silhouettes. The sky turns to taupe, then lavender, then black. Curled inside with my feet tucked under me like a cat, I can feel the way my breath catches in my ribs. The way I have to consciously remember to breath out. The way this week I’m always close to tears.

This summer I feel like I’ve landed on the moon: my third semester in graduate school, full time, in an immersive program that is, by it’s very definition a moving target: emergent media.

And so I am learning to moon walk, which is a lot like learning to fly except for the inevitable part when gravity always catches up in the end.

It’s work that requires leaping again and again toward the very center of what I love: telling stories with words, with images, with media that moves through time, with interaction. And inevitably: coming down hard again and again, as I fall short, underestimating what I think that I can do, imagining a project too big and wide for the scope of my limitations. Most of the time my limitations are about time. Ironic, isn’t it? Because of course, I’ve dared to write about this thing called the present tense. Of course I’ve leaped into the very thick of this glorious mess. Wanting all of it, hungrily, the way the humming birds come again and again for simple syrup we fill the feeders with. I keep coming back, even when every the nanoparticles of every minute are filled to the brim.

Some days being a mama and a partner while doing school and writing a book in a genre that blurs (personal essay + mixed media illustrations) makes my breath catch in my ribs like I’ve swallowed the pit of some magical tree that will burst forth from my ribs in full bloom.

Other days it feels more like standing in front of a fire hose. To move at the speed of emergent media means to be endlessly and simultaneously processing, considering, noticing, reading, questioning, answering, creating, making asking, and doing, all day, every day. But to write a book, means to dwell, linger, revise, consider.

It’s a brutal, brilliant, overwhelming combination. And time dissolves like sugar.

Maybe it's no wonder I've been feeling exceptionally thin skinned lately: as though the barrier between me and the world is as slight now as the screen that separates me from the night that arrives softly, filled with the trilling of tree frogs and bull frogs and the sounds of moths fluttering with their incessant, fragile wings.

+++

I’m so grateful for your comments in my last post. You have no idea how much courage and joy they gave me.

elsewhere + back

Hi friends. Missing this space, but feeling too overwhelmed to be able to share more than a few images from my week with a conference in the middle of it in NYC and two huge deadlines met.

I am exhaling into the memory of a different skyline: everything manmade, geometric, gorgeous, crowded, teaming with people and their endless urgent need to produce and create.

And I am breathing into the moments today of kissing my boys and making Mexican tortilla soup and eating apple chips and holding hands, and trying to be patient with my need for rest and with all the things that are uncertain and that must be accomplished.

Also: I'm feeling a little shaky of late in my niche here. I'm so different now than when I began blogging six years ago as a new mamam. I'm wondering how to make this space change to fit the work and life I'm growing towards, and I'm wondering: Why do you visit? What do you like about this little space? What do you want me to share more of, or differently?

Always this

On the gravel drive, a sleek-skinned slug moving slowly, antennae swiveling about. A bumble bee, flying along side me as I run its wings moving a thousand times faster than my feet. Horses in the pasture, does at the edge of the woods, a new fawn, thrushes, blackbirds on the wire and buttercups by the armful strewn across the fields. This is my prayer, my alter here, to move among this tall clover, to run one foot after the next, and to take note of this always and again blooming glorious day

A full heart

Feeling an immense sadness tonight at the fact that my mother has zero interest in being in my life on any terms but her own strange, bitter, peculiar ones. Letting that relationship go for now.

Aching nonetheless.

+++

Feeling immensely grateful for my incredible friends who have become my family over the years, and for my in-laws who are like solid rocks in a turbulent sea. They make so much possible.

+++

In love with my wondrous sweet boys. All three of them. Bean sent me a love letter in the mail from his Nonna's house today. Melt.

+++

Grateful for you + this space and the inspiration and joy and community you share with me here.

In all honesty

I feel like I'm in the spin cycle and I can't get my feet under me. It keeps raining every single weekend. It's freezing. I have a space heater on in my studio for effs sake.

This week both our washing machine and our vacuum broke. It's impossible to feel like you have your shit together when everything is strewn about: dirty socks everywhere. Sand under foot.

Two projects for school are eating me alive. One keeps taking my team back to the drawing board. That bites. Big time.

I'm also accumulating a sleep deficit that I can't make up. Even though I hit my pillow at 8p.m. on Thursday night and didn't wake up until Friday.

I miss my kids. We have a rockstar babysitter two days a week now, and the boys love her. But I want that time: those giggles, those tears, that laughter, those fistfuls of wildflowers. I miss my husband. He's been flat out for work two this week, and our relationship basically consists of a series of night time collisions and daytime texts.

But I also want every single thing I am doing. These projects. This love. This work. This book. I want all of it.

Now what?

Talk to me.

Learning to be productive at super capacity: full-on focus, full-on giggling, full-on being in this moment right now.

Now is a time of full velocity everything: love, little boys, projects, deadlines, dreams, and to survive it, I'm exploring my tendency to want to overfill each moment.

I let my attention get messy.

When I'm writing, I keep open too many tabs. I bookmark a dozen articles, skimming too many without letting them sink in. Who am I kidding? When will I have time to go back and read them again? And if I do, will they still be as current or relevant as right now?

I try to answer emails or read assignments for school while I'm also attempting to orchestrate dinner.

I can hear myself: nagging, repeating things, becoming irritated. The boys whine, argue, drive over my feet with their plasma cars. They can tell I’m not really present, even as I toss salad or put soup on the stove.

I know I'm most successful when I am able to in the moment, absolutely, whatever that moment is, and then make a clean break when it's time to move on. And it's when I let my myself be distracted from where I'm at with what I think I should be doing, or what I will be doing next that things fall apart.

I’m committed to exploring what I have to do now, in the context of this super capacity life I seem to be living this summer, to live into the moment as fully as I can, and then move on.

I’ve been exploring what happens when I do less multi tasking and more ultra-focused mono-tasking. When I put all my attention into a supercharged, super focused sprint to complete a single thing, instead of skipping between things.

Full-on running, full-on writing, full-on racing matchbox cars on the floor. I’ve been using this timer (especially for writing goals.) Pretty cool. Very productive. This week I’m specifically committing to actually reading with full attention each article, blog post, poem, or link I click to, instead of saving it for “later.” Full on focus. Move on. Enough said.

What about you?

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

// Good morning. Here are a few glimpses of my favorite (new) place to get coffee. Bikes + bright, bold lattes and big reclaimed wood tables. A place to collide, connect + get work done... which has me wondering about a topic we've been discussing in class lately: what is the value of online communities vs. real world communities. How are they different? How are they the same?

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.

.

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.

It is enough to simply notice this

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

Everything has turned green suddenly, and on a brief walk around the house last night this is what I saw.

+++

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

Oh yes. Some serious silliness with my big boy. I love how this series captures us..

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

A few glimpses of the place where everything happens around here: in the kitchen. I've taken to writing long hand the past couple of days; carrying the chapter I'm working on everywhere, the pages mud speckled and windblown as I try to pull lines of prose together in the thick of things. That's what this life is about, after all. This book too.

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.