Starting the day:
My dreams are the kind that make no sense upon telling: dancing porcupines, crazy riots, precocious children, and a pervasive feeling that I was never entirely in control. It’s a little how I feel when I wake too, the wind blowing until it rocks the bird feeders off kilter, the air so warm it could be a Chinook save for the fact that it’s now, a week before Christmas. Where is the snow?
I slept in (7a.m.) and missed breakfast with the kids and T, and now the house is in that helter-skelter tummult of everyone rushing to get out the door. I move through the motions of making Bean's lunch like a heavy-handed robot. My fingers are made of clay. Sprout refuses to put on pants. I put cream cheese and jelly on an English muffin. Bean keeps walking from one end of the house to the other trying to locate his hat and gloves and jacket, each separately although he’s left them all in nearly the same place. The floor is mud stained.
In the small ravine where a winter stream runs beyond the meadow where our kitchen garden gets planted, the wind sounds like a freight train. Chickadees fly sideways; smoke comes back down the chimney. Where did all this wind come from anyway?
I have today to finish preparing presentation, to tie up the loose ends on several other signficant projects all due tomorrow. I’m making coffee. Pulling on rain boots for a walk with Clover. Ducking my head into the wind.
Ready, set, go!
How to fall in love with your life: the wisdom of little boys
Bean is watching my every subtle move. We are in the middle of a game of “alligator” and Sprout, perched on the couch cushions above us launches himself suddenly through the air, chubby thighs bare, and lands between his brother and me, straddling my chest, laughter erupting.
Alligator is a game that Bean invented. It requires certain might and restraint and all the physicality that little boys crave. The rules are simple: I catch him and wrap in my arms and legs, my fierce alligator jaws devouring his lithe little body, and then I hold him tight regardless of any plea, or request, or peel of giggles as he tries to wriggle free.
Sometimes I follow the rules. I am a fierce and steadfast gator, remaining unswayed until just exactly the right moment when the wiry-mulled little boy I’ve trapped is clever enough to outwit me, or strong enough to slip between clenched biceps. Other times I add a twist: I pretend to be asleep and snore, and he slips out easily, much to his delight and my pretend chagrin. And then there are the times, when it takes everything I have not do not to devour him whole: soft cheeks and sandy hair that smells like honey and milk.
Today he’s already made his first escape, and has immediately clambered on top of my ribcage for more. His weight familiar. I’ve always carried him; always held the heft of him close; always been the cradle for his small knees and elbows and belly. And thisI think, is part of what I do that makes it possible to sustain this full velocity life. Of doing the work of my heart in all the ways that I must: writer and mama, strategist and artist, graduate student and runner, all in unequal measures as the day demands. No matter what the day holds, it will always finds us like this, limbs colliding in this certain and unequivocal choreography of love.
I watch him watch me, imagining what he must think of me. My own childhood was far less physical. There was no puppy piling, no running through the house, no yelling. I remember often being told to be quite, to find the boundaries of my ebullient self and rein them in. I praised for my intellect, never for my ability to make people laugh; and other than sitting on my father’s lap to listen to a book read aloud, or hugging my parent’s goodnight, or holding hands when walking along a busy street, love was never spelled limb against limb, twirling in giddiness, kissing like blowfish, or howling like the pack of wild hyaenas always on the loose and restless in my soul.
Which is why his answer delights me deeply when I ask:
“If you were to describe me to someone who has never met me, what would you tell them?”
He tilts his head to the side and looks at my face.
And then he says, “That you’re strong…. that you’re funny*….and that you stay up late.”
Then he adds, “And that you wrestle with me.” As if this is the most important thing of all.
It’s such a gift to catch the tiniest of glimpses into how he sees me. It’s a gift, always, when you can get a glimpse of how anyone sees you. It broadens your view of yourself; increases your imagination of what you think is possible, and makes you lean into your potential differently. Give yourself this gift today: go ask someone how they would describe you to a stranger. Bask in their reply.
xoxo! Me.
*FUNNY made the list! Funny. You have no idea how over the moon that makes me.
The beauty of the light
The light's been catching my eye lately. I can't help photographing it.
To look up from work and see how the world has changed; how the light has moved across the room, or walk the woods and find the shadows falling differently there.
To see with my painter's eye, the way there is more yellow now, more cobalt in the shadows.
The dog keeps helping me to remember the rhythm of the day. The morning sun, the late twilight gold, the long shadows.
What are you up to this week? Say hello!
Field notes: A small collection of beautiful things
In the woods, the leaves are decomposing, the moss still verdant green, and punky wood good for kicking, or digging at with eager puppy paws. We walk the boundaries now, daily taking inventory of every bit of quartz, each trampled path, each wild raspberry bramble, and listen as the piliated woodpecker makes waves in the air with its drumming.
With their saws buzzing like angry bees, the men arrive from the power company, to fell trees for wires to pass through unhindered when the storms come, and though I’m sad about the spruce they take, leaving only the shorn trunk marked with scars of sticky sap, I’m grateful too, for the light that I turn on.
After dinner, the night is still soft and new and we go out, all five of us now; the dog at my side on a slack lead, picking up scents among the wet leaves while the big colored lights twinkle around the tallest pine and we start singing every carol we know, one after the next our voices lifting into the gathering night.
The best & Worst: Notes from the weekend
The high notes:
Rambling in the woods + fields with Clover.
Watching her run off leash through the high grass in our meadow.
Putting up colored lights around the big pine tree + house. (I am completely crushing on the big fat colored ones this year.)
Finally, finally building a fenced enclosure for the chickens: no more poop on our front steps!
Holding hands with T on a walk.
Being reminded by a beautiful friend that I need to share my silly side with the world more.
Singing Christmas carols at the top of our lungs in the car everywhere we went.
Nutella.
The way that new possibilities keep flooding into my life right now.
Running every day again.
And the low notes:
Staying up until 2:30 last night to finish (and then not finishing) an assignment for a class I don’t dig at all.
Clover rolling in poop and getting it all over her ear.
Not having enough hours to hit all the deadlines.
The way that I catch myself hunching all the time. Stupid sitting at a desk posture.
Feeling my breath catch in my ribs when I think of my to-do list for the next two weeks until my semester ends.
+++
How about you?
Inspiration for the end of your week:
Hello!
Oy. The week hit.
That's all I can say about that really. I've been paddling along just about as fast as I can to keep my head above, and taking little mini-breaks as often as possible to rest + recalibrate outdoors and in.
Clover sees to the outdoors bit. I've rambled through woods and fields and watched the moon come up more times in the past week than I have in the past six months. I love that. The weather has been unseasonably mild here, and it's been so nice to go outdoors in the dark after the boys are in bed and listen to the wind move through sticks and twigs and grasses at the edge of the woods. I like the way my hair gets windswept into small tangles; how the moon, a fat waxing crescent, smudges the night sky with a ring of white gold; and there are unexpected things: the shining eyes of a stray cat along the rock wall; paths that give way to soft spots full of moss and mud; shooting stars when I look; and the quiet. Oh the quiet of early an early winter night.
Indoors inspiration looks like this:
Anthology Magazine's special digital winter edition. Two words: eye candy.
Pam Houston reading at Writers Block. Listening to Pam read is one of my favorite things. Her stories out loud are possibly even better than the very same stories on the page.
Jason's newest mix. (So, so good.) Also his photos. Always.
This collection of poems. Laisha's book The Sudden Weight of Snow is one of the only novels I slipped in to my reading list last year. Those Canadians... they get under my skin in the very best of ways.
And getting lost in Idaho wilderness, words, and beauty of the Noisy Plume. (Jillian is also Canadian. Seeing an unintended pattern here...)
delight this week?
The secret to perfect timing, and the sweetest Clover
Call me irrational.
And maybe I am. But when I get an idea into my head, sometimes I can't shake it.
This time the idea I had was a dog. A partner in crime. A studio buddy. A reason to be out doors infinitely more than I am right now. An excuse to take rambling walks. A reminder to be in touch with my animal self, hair blowing in the wind among the dry November grasses.
The idea came from a feeling: that the balance has been off in my life for a while. I've spent too much time at my desk, indoors, consuming stress and carbohydrates while the world changes seasons beyond the glass. And also, the boys are at the just-right age for a pup to grow up with. To remember as their first dog, as the one who accompanied them on wild rambles, napped with them, rode in cars with them, shared ice cream and afternoon swims.
Life slips right by.
Gallops full tilt even, under the twirling heavens. The days gather with twilight, spill into starry nights, turn blue before dawn, then spread the world with milky early morning sunlight. Crows fly over head. They fly in a murder of many, their dark wings beating as the sky turns pink and gold at sundown. Geese keep arriving to overwinter along the waterways where beavers made their summer homes. Life passes this way: one season slipping into the next. The fields are brown now; the road muddy; the leaves frail and wind tossed in heaps at the back of the house.
If not now, when?
We've already waited a year for the timing to be right. And what I've learned from every bold action I've ever taken; from every leap of faith is this: There is no right timing.
The timing is always what you make of it.
Always right, if you choose it to be, if you let the universe align.
And so last weekend I started looking. Rather obsessively, actually.
And then I found her.
What we are sure of is that she's stolen all of our hearts. And also that she's better behaved than either of the boys. *grin.*
And right now as I write she's asleep under my feet, her tail whippity-whapping every so often with dreams.
7 things I'm doing to rest + recalibrate this weekend:
1. Slipping offline for the weekend
2. Layering pretty dresses + winter cords, painting my finger nails, and putting henna in my hair
3. Taking walks alone to stalk the Piliated woodpecker in the far meadow, and follow coyote tracks
4. Emptying my inbox entirely
5. Clearing the number of feeds in my RSS reader
6. Reading Mary Oliver's Evidence. Again.
7. Getting a dog.
Sometimes things just fall apart
I don’t intend to fall apart. I don’t intend to be standing by the sink, putting dirty plates into the dish washer one minute, and then falling to shambles the next, but this is what I do.
We’ve just watched the King’s Speech. Movies in general have a way of getting under my skin; I soak them up in the same way I soak up the emotions of strangers in a car on the subway; or at a bar, or a party where I know only a half dozen acquaintances by name. And so I’m scraping sauce off a plate and within seconds I’ve dug myself into a hole with T. I’ve made some flippant chiding comment I can’t defend or match with reason, and he’s putting silver into the drawer with unnecessary vigor, his voice raised.
I try to say stop, let’s not go here; hormones are making unsteady tonight, but it’s no use. He doesn’t hear me, not yet, not in the way I need him to. Things escalate. Whatever the words are that pass between us make me suddenly crumble. I run to the door. Drive away, sock footed.
The road is quiet. The air smells like snow.
I am the only one leaving, the only one with headlights making circles in the night. At the edge of the road there are deer. With the cold they come closer now to human dwellings; finding the last sweet fallen apples; the scraggly lawns still nearly green; the last frail petals of climbing roses, petals faded like pink paper tickets from the county fair.
I leave knowing that if I stayed whatever I’d say would wild and unsteady. I leave because I know that what I need is just to lean into the feeling: of sobbing, of yelling things out loud into to the dark, until the things I yell are the things that maybe feel true. I leave so that I don’t actually have to leave, though I can imagine every detail of the way I might: just a small bag, my laptop, wallet, jacket, passport, boots. I’d go somewhere cold and far away, with wheat fields and Tim Hortons and I’d get a room in a roadside motel and sob until I couldn’t, and then I’d sleep and wake and try to be in the realness of what it feels like to be anonymous.
I leave because hormones are making a short circuit between heart and mind now; I leave because this is what my body does without thought: fight or flight.
There are potholes in the road and I hit them harder than I should, and above is barely any moon, the shyest of slivers.
I drive down to the end of our dirt road and then I back into someone’s drive, do a K turn and retrace my way until the bridge, where I park at the waterfall, and listen to it thunder, under a sky full of gathering snow clouds. I turn the engine off and feel the cold start in at my extremities.
And then I cry I know that the only thing I want is to return, though even then, even when I do, I say the opposite of what I mean:
“I just want to be alone.”
Why do I say that?
I walk to the boy’s rooms and find each of them uncovered, arms flung about like rag dolls. I rest my head on Bean’s mattress and feel the way the thought of him fills me up with sunlight. I inhale Sprout’s sweet sleeping breath. I tiptoe out. And then I pace back and forth in my studio until T comes to my door, sits with me, lets me sob, says only enough, finds the tense muscles between my shoulder blades and begins to work on them with a steady, warm hand.
The whole thing catches me by storm: The way I fall apart, as though my bones and heart and ambition and love and determination were all bricks and mortar in a dam so fragile that the dislodging of a single stone might cause the whole thing to slip and tumble under a sudden hormonal torrent.
It’s humbling and devastating and incredibly powerful to find the outer limit of my capacity.
And I’m sharing this here because sometimes people email me and say, “How do you do it?” Meaning the ALL of it part. And the answer is that I don’t always; the answer is that I’m still getting the hang of it. The answer is that there is a vital choreography here that I will always be learning: a dance between generative and productive; between producing and reflecting; between doing and taking enough damn space to remember how to just be silly and pretty and playful.
I tend toward overachieving; toward flat-out sprinting; towards burning the candle at both ends. I tend towards this because I love to be consumed, engaged, invested, at work. I love to work. I love to create. That’s the simple truth. But I am not nearly so graceful in the learning to reel myself in bit. The taking things easy part.
The part where I just take the day off to paint my nails aubergine and tickle my boys and trawl petfinder.com for the dog that my heart keeps whispering for.
That’s the real of it. The ALL of it. I’m good at going full tilt. Less good at coming to a full stop.
Productivity and self reflection: a vital ratio for happiness
It occurred to me last night that I have no fewer than NINE very significant projects that I'm working on right now (not including my boys, or laundry, or a strangely irrational obsession with finding a family dog.) It also occurred to me last night that I've been feeling a little like a windmill, diving into things in an unfocused blur of reaction. To-do lists are converging, deadlines are colliding, and incredible connections and potential projects are practically bursting out of me... and I haven't created the space to reflect. I could say I'm overwhelmed, but the truth is, I havent been making enough space for synthesis and consideration.
It's a ratio that is vital to being successfully creative and fulfilled for me. Action and self reflection need to happen in tandem in order to be able to slip into the grove between intuition and purpose; between effort and ease.
And if that ratio is off I can feel the way my intentions become blurred and and my actions reactive.
So this morning I began the ritual that always reclaims me: Writing first thing for a half hour. My handwriting is a mess then, as I sit up among pillows in the lavender dark of my bedroom at dawn. My sentences unreasonably long, my focus fickle. But what I get from writing then, is the ability to slip in at the back door of my mind and listen for what I'm feeling, for the way my heart responds to certain ideas, questions, fears, projects.
That half hour with the cat at my hip purring, while the mountains become blue and dense with daylight, is is a way of closing the loop on worry; tying up the loose ends of fears; and finding the pulse of my intention.
The morning begins like this:
The morning begins when I am less awake than dreaming, and with shut eyes I shift my body, truing towards the warmth of my husband beside me; pressing my nose against the warmth of his bare shoulder. I pat the edge of the bed when I hear my littlest come in, carrying his bear, a pacifier in his mouth. He climbs up and burrows in next to me like a puppy, finding the curve between my neck and shoulder where little head fits just exactly so. Then we all doze, until his brother starts to call from their room down the hall; ever the bright eyed one in the morning, Bean wakes up curious, eager, effervescent, loud. Sprout props himself up on an arm, then sits off, shoving the warm covers back. “I’m coming,” he calls, then trundles off.
The morning begins like this: I am between sleep and waking, sitting at the edge of a mossy dock. Below me the water is warm, and when I slip into it I discover amethysts sparkling below the surface. Then I am here, with the cat purring at my hip, and I roll over so that I can run my hand along her apricot fur, her purr vibrating up through my finger tips, into my palm, my pulse. In the kitchen below me, the boys sound like herd animals. They make the wood floor thunder. They shriek and laugh and yell. The house smells like woodsmoke and bacon (two of my favorite things) and soon I push back the covers and stumble toward the shower, my vision blurring suddenly to stars. Head rush. I hold the door frame and pause.
The morning begins with all four of us around the butcher block island in the kitchen on stools. There are white bowls of oatmeal with butter and maple syrup, seedy toasted baguettes with butter and raspberry preserves, fried eggs, bacon, flat whites. There are greasy little boy fingers. There is a scuffle over the last slice of bacon. Both boys ask for milk, then water. T and I look at each other over the table and smile.
The morning begins with this: I am sitting beside the wood stove, this mix is playing and the sun is out. It makes shadows fall in bright contrast across the un-vacuumed floor. I sit with my new notebook (I’ve filled the last one up) and a pencil with soft lead, and find my pulse. I watch wild turkeys run across the far meadow, and settle into the steadiness of my hand moving across the page, scrawling careless, messy script. “What chu doin mama?” Sprout asks within minutes, his face right at table height, his cheeks rosy, his bangs in his eyes.
The morning begins like this.
A creative loophole:
That perfect letter. The wishbone, fork in the road, empty wineglass. The question we ask over and over. Why? Me with my arms outstretched, feet in first position. The chromosome half of us don’t have. Second to last in the alphabet: almost there. Coupled with an L, let’s make an adverb. A modest X, legs closed. Y or N? Yes, of course. Peas sign reversed. Mercedes Benz without the O.
Y, a Greek letter, joined the Latin alphabet after the Romans conquered Greece in the first century—a double agent: consonant and vowel. No one used adverbs before then, and no one was happy.
~ From Y, by Marjorie Celona, originally from the Indiana Review, republished in Best American Non-Required Reading 2008.
How can you not be inspired, like I was, reading this, to pose and consider everything remarkable about a letter? Maybe your first initial, or your last. I'm on the lookout every day for opportunities like this: to slip through an open doorway, an imaginative loophole, a slight tear in the fabric of all that right now insists. Because everything is happening at once, as it always is. Everything converging. Projects, deadlines, discoveries, presentations. It’s easy for me to just put my head down and run hard without stopping, without looking, without pausing for a handful of moments to practice doing what I love the most. And I found this to be the perfect thing to do today, mid week, now, on the seventeenth of November, with the world blue and brown and quiet with the promise of snow, amid everything else.
At the back door there are leaves that the wind’s tossed up in heaps, brown and crackling under our feet as we make a bonfire with friends, roast marshmallows and press them between crumbly graham crackers with chocolate; drink cappuccinos, and watch the children play. They take rakes with bamboo tines and heap the leaves until one or all of them are buried, laughter rising up with the sparks toward the night sky that is full of ink and diamonds; such a mess of grandeur, are the heavens above us.
The children turn on the porch lights; four boys in hats, leaves eddying up in the dark. Their shadows are eerie and huge across the grass, and then up in the sky, the waning gibbous moon, a pregnant C up there with the spilled milk of the universe, the faintest shadow of its darker side also there, barely illuminated: a C in reverse.
C: The letter that is at once the contents and the container, the balance of negative and positive space, the curve of palms, cupped, holding a bowl, and also the shape of the bowl. It is curiosity, and the top bit of a question mark in reverse. The final slight line in a pair of parenthesis, the pause of a comma, the arc of a story, a a smile turned on it’s side. It is the consonant that invokes creativity, the third letter of the alphabet, the symbol for chemical concentration, the speed of light in a vacuum, the abbreviation for carat, century, constant, cubic. It is the first note in C major, and the way my name begins.
***
Take 5 minutes. See what you can write about a letter. Or share a link an image or post and I’ll be sure to take a peak.
An inventory of things found on my studio floor:
Things found on the floor of my studio: A blue letter O; two puzzle pieces; a small rocket ship; a cardboard tile with the word COMETS on it; a very small sticker stuck to the floorboards that says "Road Closed" in black against orange; another sticker, artfully pressed into a knot in the floorboards that says "YES" in all caps; a small black wheel; a spool of turquoise thread; a solitary striped sock; a red matchbox car; 1 pacifiers; 7 hair ties; countless snippets.
I can only trace the origins of the final two from that inventory. This is what happens when I work in my studio with children underfoot.
It's such good practice though, to slow down enough to take an inventory of the details around you. Try it: Can you notice five unusual things within an arms reach? What are they?
This is true:
Possibility.
Opportunity.
Joy.
What you hold are hold the fragile wings of something that arrives in the night and then slips away, leaving only its slight carbon footprint on your sill; or the small body of a sparrow that’s just hit the window. Or maybe you hold the runaway tug of your dog’s leash; or the runaway tug of your heart.
You might hold the hand of the one you love; or your face in your hands; the heft of your child’s body, his head thrown back with laughter; or the weight of emptiness in your palms pressed together in prayer.
What you need to know is that what you hold can be a anything. What counts is intention. What counts is reaching out. Taking hold. Accepting. Offering.
Spend today taking note of your hands: of the artful way they pick up a pencil, wipe tears from a cheek, flip eggs, type, caress, create. Of how they translate the world for you; the way they’re the bridge between what’s inside your heart, and what you make of it. Of the way they feel held in another’s hand, or pressed into dough, or submerged in water. Imagine the joy you can hold; the possibility you can ask for and accept, like a boomerang tossed and received.
Today I hold the last of autumn’s leaves; papery now, and wind tossed; my coffee frothy and warm; scissors for cutting Sprout’s long bangs; the excitement of new possibilities; a brush dripping with aqua ink; the soft cotton of shirts, ready for folding.
What do your hands hold today?
*
Inspiration for daily art: lines + marks
Hello! I wanted to share a few pieces that have been inspiring me as I continue with Daily Art, trying to make pieces that are simple; that play with positive and negative space; with online lines + marks or color. I am exploring what it means to make something quickly. To just do make something--following following through with the act of putting something on the page because this is what I committed to do. I am trying to slip into a grove of doing this as a creative habit, without worrying about meaning or intent or composition, as a way to exhale a little.
“Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this? By the time I give the taxi driver directions, it’s too late to wonder why I’m going to the gym and not snoozing under the warm covers of my bed….
It’s a simple act but doing it the same way each morning habitualizes it–makes it repeatable, easy to do. It reduces the chance that I would skip it or do it differently. it is one more item in my arsenal of routines, and one less thing to think about…” ~ Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit
If you're feeling brave, join us! Just a few simple marks on a page; a photo; a squiggled line; a bit of fabric sewn. This is a way to pay homage to your creative heart.
xoxo, Christina
No one prepared me for this: The end of my baby's babyhood
“MAMA!” he yells, eyes close, face upturned. “MAMA!”
I run out in bare feet across the cold November grass, to cup his soft warm cheeks in my hand and brush the sand from his eyes.
“Thank you Mama.” He says, this small exclamation of gratitude something secondary to his nature. He grins as I kiss face, and returns happily to playing. I stand there for a minute, then go back indoors where the maple floors are warm and golden with slanting sun, and my work awaits.
This is the boy/baby who as of Sunday no longer sleeps in a crib. He’s been climbing out for months, agile and sure footed. He’s been swinging with the ease of a gymnast over the railing, in and out, the crib growing less and less sturdy with every vault, and finally I made the decision to put it away.
I didn't expect that he would be terribly sad.
“I’m still da baby!” he wailed that night, sitting on the potty, his face in his hands.
The next night he said, “My new bed is so cozy. The crib went bye bye. I'm big. ” (Yes, he said cozy.)
And just like that, I can feel the way things are ending. His babyhood. And with it an entire span of time where motherhood was straightforward and consuming. Where my physical presence could solve nearly anything; and a kiss could most likely solve the rest.
Now there is separation. There is the complex terrain of emotion. There is getting to know this person he is becoming, beaming-faced, hilarious, stubborn.
Neither of us are quite ready for the way things are inevitably shifting. At the dinner table he's taken to crawling into my lap, wanting to be close to me, wrecking havoc with my dinner plate. Some nights I'm all patience and games: "Here comes a bite for the hyena, the lion, the hippo." Other nights, like tonight, I'm worn thin by the way he squirms, his strong little body knocking me off kilter. But when I set him firmly back in his chair he begins to pout and then cry.
And I know the years to come will pass just like he counts now: “One, two, three, four, five, eleven, eighteen.”
It’s not something I expected or even considered: That it would feel this way to be here, at the other side of babyhood: Bittersweet and uncertain. He’s just shy of being done with diapers, and with that, he’ll be all kid, hair in his eyes, doing tricks on his bike, swinging ling a monkey from his bunk bed frame.
The world narrows so much when you’re in the thick of mothering in the first years—-when your kids are small, and then suddenly the aperture shifts, and they're chest high and learning to read.
How to do this gracefully? This part where I try to stop calling my baby “my baby?”
Life In The Present Tense: A Field Guide To Now ~ Thanking my backers
I'd want to start this week off with sharing (finally) many of the incredible Kickstarter Backers who made this book dream of mine real. These are only the folks who have an online space to share with the world. Together with many others, they believed in this idea when it was just a glimmer in my eye--before I had any kind of real plan, any proposal on paper, any chapters written; when the whole thing consisted of a handful of drafts and a heart full of longing.**
I can't even describe how powerful it is to have people back you. How it makes things real, how it makes you be accountable and your very best self. How generosity is at the root of so much: abundance, success, inspiration, joy.
Thank you.
There is so much talent and creativity and passion and goodness in this list of bloggers and creative entrepreneurs, and they fill me right up with inspiration + gratitude + joy. Have fun perusing. You'll be so delighted.
1017
100 Proof Stories
Airstream Dreaming
Andie Edwards
Annie Denison
Barb's Evolving Project
Bead Tree
Becoming Megsieth
Beverly Reverlry
Blissful Thinking
Brickhouse Studios
Bring Yourself
Catching Days
Cayden J
Coco & Lafe
Coffee Stained Clarity
Daily Fieldnotes
Dawn Smith Designs
Dream Dust
Do What You Love
Dust Of Europe Film Project
Elayna Alexandra
Elisa Elliot
Everyday Glimpses
Flyover People
Hashi Works
Hysterical Mommy Network
Imaginations Everything
In The Violet Hour
Inosculation
Jorun Boklöv
Johanna Hoerrmann
Julies Little Joys
Just My Digital Stuff
Last Crumb
Laura Two Tina
Learning To Walk In Heels
Leonie Wise
Lesley Dahl
Life On The Green Line
Like A Radio
Listening & Speaking
Little Elm
Little Potatoes
Liz Lamoreux
Lizardek
Lylium
Magpie Days
Magpie Girl
Meadow Lark Days
Meat Revolution
Melissa Brott Photography
Michael Kershner
Mindy Schroder
Molly Sutton Kiefer
My Creative Space
Oink Tails
Paul Frank
Perils Of Caffeine In The Evening
Phriday Filosofy
Pixie Campbell
Positively Organic
Rosa Murillo
Scatterbeams
Seeking Equipoise
Shameless Self Promoters
Slightly Scrappy
Shona Cole
Solomon Shiv
Soulful Owl
Some The Wiser
Stefanie Renee
Story Lamps
Sunday School Rebel
Superbeck
Susan Kruse
Susanna Crossman
Tara Bradford Photography
Terri Rambo
The Learning Curve
The Life and Times of a Kiwi-Mumbaiiker
This Joy Ride
Timothy C. Flood
Trying To Stay Focused
Wet Fresco Photography
Wood Smoke & Lingon Berries
Also heart-filled gratitude for the following inspiring + generous bloggers who shared my project with their readers:
Ali Edwards: Giveaway
Boho Girl: Giveaway
Do What You Love: Interview
Liz Lamoreux: Nine {An Interview}
Magpie Girl: 1Q Interview
Susannah Conway: My Creative Life {Interview}
Wishstudio: A Book You Can Help Bring To Life
** (If you are a backer and I didn't include you on this list, it wasn't on purpose! I had a few broken links and a few outdated URLS that I couldn't trace. Please please send me your URL if you backed this project and would like me to add you.)
The things I carry:
Today I carry the feeling that I’ve slipped right back to the cusp of more things not being known than things that are for certain. I am carrying the way the light looks over the pacific ocean in the morning at Bodega Head, and a homesick feeling for my fathers hands; for the way they were always warm and skilled with tools, knobby knuckled like mine, mottled with vitiligo.
I carry a secret awful wonder at what my DNA might hold for me, and a list of appointments including one at the dermatologist’s to investigate a small hard lump on my thigh that arrived without my notice sometime in the summer, and then persisted. My regular doctor shrugged. More than likely benign. Still, a referral was made, and then one appointment after another, cancelled to make room for other more urgent things.
I carry my wedding band of soft hammered gold; a hair band around my wrist, snarled with a few tangled strands of hair yanked free from a ponytail with impatience; and the memory of my tenth birthday.
I carry my father’s SANFORD LOGO II mechanical pencil; my soft-covered Moleskine reporter’s notebook; and an ache for what I know I will forget of the way Sprout is right now, small like this, speaking with a little lisp, repeating everything, begging for a convertible blue vintage VW like the one our neighbor drives. His hair is sandy gold in the sun. Potty training is a comedy of errors and stubbornness. He gives the sweetest kisses, one arm circling my neck. How will I hold all of this in the permeable container of time?
Today I carry the sight of geese cutting across the pale morning sky, one after the next; the first inklings of a second book; ideas for classes I’m planning. I carry the way comparisons always make me feel terribly small; the fact that my jeans are tighter than they were when the summer; and the muscle memory of running hard (today, 3 miles.)
Today I carry the memory of quiet; my cup of coffee; the rooster crowing; my laptop; kindling; honey crisp apples; and questions, always questions.
What do you carry?
A reminder:
{Also, a quick introductory DAILY ART prompt (sort of) is up over on Flickr.)