Slowly, softly, the new year arrived here:
I’ve been wanting so very much to show up here and tell you things, but with the new year came a fever—the kind I remember having as a little girl, and all I was able to do was curl under thick down covers and sleep.
It’s not something I make time for readily: resting deeply, and I think my body knows this. I think it staged a mutiny just as soon as my very last project for the semester was finished and I crashed hard: first a chest cold, then a brief respite right over Christmas at to ring in the new year, followed by a fever that when it broke, left me feeling like a knobby kneed colt, my limbs somehow new and unfamiliar as I woke from a day of sleeping. I felt unbearably grateful to find my hands again, my arms, my kneecaps, scapula, ribs. What a glorious blessing to arrive with these fragile lungs still intact to suck in the cold air; with eyes to watch the birds lift and dive from branch to feeder; with fingers to type these words!
And so I woke, sipped tea, and wrote in my notebook 12 things to manifest in 2012 and a word to true towards, my own inner north.
I’d been thinking of EASE, and VITALITY, and AFFLUENCE, and about the way those words called to mind a certain blooming of soul and career and creative work that I want to dream real this year, and then flourish found me, somewhere between dreaming and awake, while the puppy was on the bed, and the boys too, and it felt so right and true that I laughed.
Flourish (v.) 1. to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way; thrive 2. to develop rapidly and successfully; to achieve success; prosper 3. to be in a state of activity or production 4. to reach a height of development or influence.
For 2010 I chose action; for 2011, fruition, and each word speaks more truth about its year than I could have ever imagined.
Big things came to fruition in 2011. I wrote my first book, completed my fourth semester of graduate school, got a dog, made incredible + soulful creative connections, watched my six year old become a first grader and my two year old become a talking, singing, dancing boy.
And now to flourish in this new life I’ve dreamed possible: doing work that I love as a writer, an artist, and as a social media strategist.
I haven’t shared as much here as I intended about my journey through graduate school, or about my growing love for social media strategy, and the way this field combines storytelling and conversation. It’s been so intense and full velocity and transformative in ways I’m only now able to put my finger on. It has reshaped my view, reframed my capacities, and honed my passions. It’s been pretty cool, really, and I’d like to share more here about that process this winter and spring as I finish up my thesis, and about the process of being a mother while also doing these things.
This is something I’m becoming increasingly aware of, how this truth, more than any other thing, is my trumpeters call, my purpose, my passion. To tell you this: you can do what you want.
Choosing is a myth. Being only one thing or only another isn’t a requirement. And manifesting what you long for has everything to do with finding your true velocity: your right tempo at the borderline between self and world; between mamahood and career; between soul and body.
I don’t always get the tempo right; and there are many days when I’m reminded once again that I’ll always be a novice at my life: new to the curveballs, the passions, the possibilities that come my way. But I’m joyfully committed to the process nonetheless. And that, my friends, is my way of way of telling you: I have big plans for 2012. New offerings, new directions and new adventures. And I can't wait to share them!
xo, Christina Rosalie
MERRY + BRIGHT
Wishing you a joyful holiday!
I have so many things I'm looking forward to share with you in the New Year...
xoxo! Christina
On holiday expectations, collisions, and delight:
There is something about first days of the holiday vacation when we're all together as a family, converging on the kitchen with our apron pocket hearts stuffed full with expectations. We show up aproned and get flour everywhere, and then burst into tears, each of us in turn, when there is too much crowding and impatience, too many elbows around the mixer or fingers in the icing. "Mine!" the boys chorus back and forth like harpies.
It's this bittersweet thing, the way we all show up needing. Wanting. Wishing. We put carols on the stereo, and dance to Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, and then we end up arguing about something insignificant, a phrase said slantwise or some careless remark, and each of us far more crushed than necessary by the other's harsh tone.
So few days. Full velocity. From one frame of mind to the next we go: from work to full-on family, rolling out sugar cookie dough while tying up loose ends: the last of deadlines, proposals, promises, details. We check our iPhones, catch each other doing so, and sigh, while dreamy snowflakes fall outside. Just enough snow to make the world magic. White on blue, and in the distance cirrus devour mountain tops. The dog licks our bare toes, the fire makes the house toasty, and still we collide. We kiss, we rub noses, we snap, we argue, we laugh. It is all inevitable: this mess, this frantic loving, this silliness of converging in the time allotted before the holiday. Everyone excited, hopeful: imagining perfect days that unfold like the lyrics of the nostalgic carols we play. And though days never do, still we find delight the minute we let go; the minute we remember to just lean into the chaos.
This is just a little reminder to you today: be gentle with yourselves as you converge with family and try to find the rhythm of your mutual expectations. Rest into the mess of it, into the moments just as they unfold. Know that there is no perfect, save for exactly the way the day unfolds with you in it. Be content in the way things will inevitably unravel. Find ways to shake off the expectations and hold instead to the moments of delight that emerge unexpectedly. The easy sparks of joy that come from the simplest things: warm sun, touch, coffee, quiet.
Wishing you each peace + light + delight this holiday. xo! Christina
Five minutes seen + heard, and a prayer:
I am in Rite Aid buying C batteries and a 3-pack of scotch tape, and I pause in the isle of match box cars, considering a pair of matching red and yellow ones to stick in the boy’s advent calendar for tomorrow, and there he is. Towheaded, not quite waist high, in a blue action hero polyester jacket and jeans with holes in the knees. His mother is rushing past, yelling in a hoarse distracted voice for him not to stop. But he does, and she doesn’t, and soon she’s out of sight around the corner at the pharmacy. “Hello,” I say, as the boy looks up at me. “Do you like matchbox cars too?” He nods. “Yeah,” he says, fingers running lightly over a blue and white race car.
I sort of hesitate there until I hear his mother. She’s walking backwards, still talking with the pharmacy clerk, but at least she’s moving towards her son like a reluctant magnet, and so I go on my way in search of the batteries I’ve come for.
I can’t help but hear her say,
“But Gage always fills four, and lets the prescription roll over to the next month.” “Well I’m not Gage,” says the pharmacy clerk.
The woman is wearing dirty pink sweatpants. Her hair is pulled back into a disheveled ponytail that matches my own on many too-busy days. Her face is ashy. She has a bronchial cough. She’s holding cigarettes in one hand, her cell phone in the other.
I walk on, ask a boy with barley enough facial hair to warrant his attempt at a beard where the batteries are, and then make my way to the register.
And then I see her.
“Noah Jeffery!” She is yelling in a tone that sounds more angry than anxious though I know what she must feel.
She moves down the isle quickly, and then reappears soon after, biting her nails, quiet now, looking. She walks up and down the front of the isles past the displays of stocking sized bottles of wine, and Russell Stover chocolates, and fake poinsettia plants. Then she goes out of the store and I hear her calling into the night. “Noah! Noah!”
I wait. A new register opens up. It’s the boy with the barely beard. I say, “There is a woman who has just lost her child in your store, is there anything you can do to help?”
He looks at me and says “Oh.” And then, “Debit or credit?”
As I run my card I say, “I’m a mom, I get it. Can you make sure no little boy walks out of your store. I just saw him in the toy isle.”
He gives me the vaguest of smiles, the slightest of nods as though I might be asking him to feed his cat bonbons. Like nothing I am saying computes even remotely with the gravity of the situation. The woman dashes back in even more frantically, still empty handed.
I linger as long as I can.
I do a sweep of the store. But with my paid-for merchandize in a sack it feels like contraband walking back through the isles. I do not see him. I do not see her.
Maybe they’ve found each other, I tell myself hopefully.
Still I plead: “Really, there is a little boy who got lost in your store. Please watch the door.”
And then reluctantly I go, looking up and down the street, and into the parking lot, where what must be her car stands with all it’s doors wide open, left abruptly when she didn’t find him there. It’s an old Chevy, the dents in the hood glint in the lamplight.
And this is what I pray will happen, despite the seemingly obvious odds: That when she finds him she will wrap him in her arms, that there will be soft voices and tender kisses and hands held and cheeks pressed close to cheeks.
some glimpses from the week
Here are a couple Instagram snapshots from the week. Since my semester ended on Fiday, I've been soaking up time with my boys. Doing silly, delightful things like making marshmallows from scratch + lovely salt dough ornaments + playing with catch with the dog + reading stories to the boys.
Tonight night we are having a solstice gathering at our house. Potluck + lots of good friends + a big bonfire. I'm hoping to take a few pictures to share. I'm so looking forward to it, in spite that currently my house looks entirely less than presentable and I have yet to make anything other than said marshmallows (which are entirely questionable) to offer my guests. Sigh. Somehow it will all likely come together.
What are you doing for solstice? {PS: thanks to everyone who supported Bethany! She is a light + an inspiration.}
A call to action + a call to wonder: A Guest Post
Hello friends!I have a guest post to share with you by a true kindred spirit who believes, as I do, that instead of ending the life of adventure you may have once had, children can actually enhance it. Anyone who has ever dreamed of traveling Europe...but then had kids and gave up the dream (at least temporarily) needs the book that Bethany Basset is writing. And she needs you're help over on Kickstarter, where the deadline is closing in and some big-time dreams are on the line. Go back her project! Re-tweet this story. Share the love. Spread the word. I'm saying this selfishly. I want her book, so that in another two years from now T, Bean, Sprout and I can descend on Europe like I've always dreamed we will... and not only survive, but have an amazing time.
Following is a guest post written by Bethany. Enjoy!
We are in Venice, a land of fairy-tale opulence—gondoliers and palaces, masks and museums—but we stop for the honeysuckle. My barefoot Texas days come flooding back in muscle memory as I show the girls how to ease out the stamen and catch the tiniest drop of nectar on our tongues. It tastes like July. Natalie and Sophie are enthralled; drinking from flowers is a purer magic to them than St. Mark’s Basilica would be, so we linger off the tourist path to pick summer, and this is it: motherhood, nostalgia, travel, joy, LIFE.
My mind delights in the details, so if I were to organize our yearly road trips around Europe, I would map out an agenda for every minute. I’d research the top recommended things to do in every city and the best routes to get there, and we would be such efficient travelers that we’d never even see the honeysuckle. We would never tumble out of the car beside an unnamed waterfall in Wales or splash the heat away at a neighborhood creek in Munich or collect wildflowers on a sleepy mountainside in Austria. We would end up with pristine vacation photos and impressive souvenirs, but we would miss out on so many of the spontaneous moments we now treasure as family memories.
And so I step back to make room for wonder. Perfectionism has always chipped away at my capacity for marvel, but my girls have more than enough to go around. They don’t need a brochure to show them how to appreciate a new city, the curve of an unfamiliar leaf, the way each mile of landscape shapes the sky. They simply greet life as it comes with their full array of senses and a penchant for adventure, and I—the perfectionist, the planner, the mother-student—gain far more than souvenirs in return.
I am currently raising funds through Kickstarter to spend the next five months writing a book based on our unconventional trips to help families reconcile the dream of European travel with the challenges of parenthood. Life is too short, too deep with possibility to keep deferring adventure until the children are older or the 401K is filled, and I’m thrilled to work on a project I believe so sincerely in. However, I can’t do it on my own, and with only eight days left to raise the funds, I’m asking for your help.
First, would you back my project? Even if you don’t have young children or have never dreamed of Paris, would you help make it possible for me to write a book I believe in with all my heart? A simple $10 pledge will help in meeting the goal while pre-ordering a copy of the book, so I’m asking—earnestly and gratefully—for you to give what you can.
Second, would you spread the word? Every new person who hears about this book increases the likelihood that my project will succeed, so would you share this post or the link to my Kickstarter site with everyone in your social networking circles?
Whether traveling or writing a book, the most convenient option is to do it alone. However, the richness of shared adventure trumps convenience. Always. Thank you in advance and from the bottom of my hopeful heart for being a part of this one with us.
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?