Wednesday + Thursday { only this }
Last night gail force winds + ground lightening took our power out right at dinnertime. We went to my in-laws, made pizza and put the boys to bed there, then came home late to a still-dark house. Above us, stars, and in the woods so many owls. We followed a single flashlight up the stairs, and then we found our way to each other in the dark.
Tuesday {in pictures}
Hello friends.
I'm finding this so restful: to notice the small things of daily life and to share them here with you.
We've been keeping a jar of markers and fresh paper at hand for quiet times, and today had many moments where the boys just sat and colored. I love the way Sprout is learning to draw: circles first.
I made some fresh peach preserves yesterday with some not-so-great peaches. Just a little sugar + water + a hint of vanilla and they cooked down into something lovely to have on biscuits this morning.
Today was all dappled with sun and shade. I love the way the field grasses blow in the wind.
While I was writing Bean and T made a sign for our nightly visitors. Bean has since observed that perhaps he needs to add a checklist to clarify exactly what makes a skunk a bad one. We have several this year. We always do. T has twice encountered them in the coop, though they've yet to spray anyone. Still. Bad skunks take note.
Manuscript progress today for sure. It is wild to be working on something this big. It terrifies and thrills me in turns. I've decided to focus on just finishing the manuscript. Once it's in, all my backers will be rewarded (with a little extra surprise in addition to what they signed up for) for their patience. Until then, I imagine I'll be pretty quiet on that front: creating beautiful chapters.
What are you up to this week?
Documenting the week in pictures
Starting tomorrow I have a week off from classes. I have high hopes for these seven days: uninterrupted writing time to get somewhere significant with the book manuscript; writing in the mornings; then making illustrations in the afternoons, the fan on low, interspersed with strawberry picking and swimming lessons and celebrating the Fourth.
I'll be taking a break from writing here, but I'll be posting some photos every day instead. I'm looking forward to the challenge of bringing my camera with me more and documenting our daily life. Care to join me?
Surviving Summer: An In-Progress List Of Little-Boy Awesomeness
In the process of perfecting the art of moon walking, I'm also becoming increasingly adept at wrangling and loving and wrestling little boys. I'm starting to understand that this is a part of my art. This almost-balance, this in-motion gesture of my life towards and away from them in the very same instant. This push-pull, this glorious mess and abundance of giggles, this makes my creative work what it is.
Here it is, friends, an in-progress list of little boy awesomeness:
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* Mud is meant to be played in. Let them. Let the laundry pile up. No one will remember clean laundry; mud monsters on the other hand: totally epic.
* Sink play: faucet on low; funnels, teapots, turkey basters, measuring cups. Science happens here: sink and float, cause and effect. Also, dinner can get pulled together around them. Just remember put towels down first.
* Extra bubbles in the bathtub. So what if their hair doesn’t ever get perfectly clean? There’s always next time.
* Make soup. Give them sharp implements and let them help chop. A 2 yr. old can do a number on zucchini with a butter knife. Also: they’re more careful than you’d think, and growing boys who turn into men who can cook = awesome.
* New couches are overrated. Keep the one you have. Buy throw pillows. Let them build forts. Cardboard boxes are also amazing.
* Chocolate ice cream cones. Yes, let it melt everywhere. If you think ahead, bring wipes. If not, extra napkins + a little water works wonders.
* Let them climb trees. The rules: don’t climb up where you can’t get down yourself; only hold onto branches bigger than your wrist; use both hands.
* Keep cardboard boxes, toilet paper tubes, etc. Supply scissors, duct tape, markers. Instant rocket ship, submarine, motor boat, race car.
* Take a walk with big sticks. Poke things. Draw in the dirt. They wont poke their eyes out. Sword fighting may occur. The only rule: no running.
* Say yes. Keep a marble jar. Point out the positives. Move on.
+++ Now I want to hear your favorite life with kids discoveries. What are your standbys for keeping small people happy while achieving a busy life. Ready, set, go!
I AM IN LOVE WITH THESE BOYS
I am so utterly in love with these boys of mine who tussle over the banana bread muffin batter, giggling, shoving, offering sticky cheeks to be kissed. And I am in love with this man of mine who makes me flatbread with caramelized onions + creme freche + flat iron steak, and a salad of micro greens when I come back from a forever long day.
Yes, yes I am.
His smile is a raft that buoys me up. His love is bedrock.
Some days we spend the whole day gone, sending texts back and forth, missing bedtimes, missing dinner. We encounter each other in the dark among the sheets. I wrap my arms around his back, and listen to the wooden shades clattering in the summer wind.
On the weekends we play french music and sing along. We fry bacon like it's going out of style. We have two double shots of espresso each, mine over milk. We make pancakes made with cornmeal and buttermilk in a cast iron skillet, and Sprout helps pour the batter while Bean sets the butcher block kitchen island with plates and carelessly folded napkins. Forks get strewn like pick-up-sticks. Syrup is amply doled out.
We're all about relishing the sweetness of these mornings, and after we're full we almost always go for a walk.
It always takes longer than we expect. Sometimes we get impatient. Usually I bring my camera. More likely than not there are either puddles or sticks, or some combination of both. The blackberries are hard green buttons on the brambles along the road, and the peonies along the edge of our neighbor's yard fill the air with the most lovely scent in the world. Sheep bleat. The boys chase each other and climb fences. We hold hands.
These moments happen in spite of the pace of things, or perhaps because of it. We make time. We always make the time for us.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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.
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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.