The wildness of crows and the wonder of taking note
For a few weeks just at the end of winter before we set the clocks ahead and the evenings were filled with yellow light, I'd leave work just after the sun had set; the sky still stained blue and tangerine with the remnants of the sun's grandur, and I'd look up, reacquainting myself with the wideness of the heavens and the moon and the geometry of rooflines and I'd see them:
Crows.
Sometimes just a few, other times so ten or twelve, or even dozens flying all in the same direction, their harsh calls filling the darkening air; and one day looking out the window of my car I saw their silhouettes gathering in the tree tops in an empty patch of land between the electricity co-op and a renovated factory building.
Not ten or twelve, but hundreds, thousands of crows.
The first day I kept driving, smiling to myself at the strange figment of wonder I'd witnessed. The next day leaving work the sky was full of crows again, and when I drove past, I drove more slowly, starring. On the sidewalk people were walking to and fro as if it were a normal occurrence; as if the thousands of crows covering every tree top above them were something utterly ordinary.
The third day I left work a few minutes early on purpose. The moon above me was completely round and white, pinned on the azure blanket of twilight like a cameo brooch, and when I got to the maples, they were already black silhouettes against the sky.
I parked behind the factory and walked out to the edge of the trees, and oh, I've never heard anything like it.
Pure wildness, the sound of thousands of crows. All calling, all cawing at once, their wings simultaneously beating the air and the settling.
I watched until my fingers grew cold, and my cheeks flushed and then I turned reluctantly to go.
The next day there were only a few--maybe a dozen in the trees, and today there weren't any there at all.
//
This life. Take note.
Make time for the reckless detour, the irrational urge to pause and be transformed by wonder.
the truth
Remembering my father:
None of this makes any sense as I rock back and forth in the mostly dark with Sprout on my chest. Bean, up in his bunk bed is humming along with me as I pick up a tune and begin to sing and then I realize: I'm singing the song I sang to him over and over as he lay dying. I'd sit there for hours beside his bed, watching the shadows cast by the dancing leaves of the cherry tree on the pale yellow wall.
The song is an old Gaelic blessing. I learned it in school as a child, at the end of my fourth grade year before all of us were released for the summer to climb trees and run wild. By then I lived in a tract home in the Northridge hills. There was an olive tree that spread over the front driveway, and the driveway would get stained by the dark purple fruit that would also stain our feet when we ran on it barefoot. In the backyard we had a redwood hottub that my parents could never afford to heat, but in the summer we filled it anyway and lolled about ducking to the bottom and popping back up, the water running in rivulets off our cheeks and eyelashes.
What I remember about my father from that time was his office that was separated from the house by a workshop. It had sliding glass doors that opened on to the back patio, and you could reach it by either going through the workshop, picking your way through pipe clamps and table saws, or from that sliding door. I remember watching him at work through that door, his back to me as I'd swing on the swing he'd hung from the patio veranda. It was something I did a lot, growing up: Watch his back as he worked on his computer.
My boys will likely have a similar memory of me.
"Shush, Mommy's working."
I try to sit at the dining room table and let their busy world spin around me, but like my father, I crave the silence of uninterruption; the solitude of that comes with focus.
Now I'm rocking in the tender dark of my son's bedroom. Sprout's limbs are already lanky in my lap. He's three; the years are galloping.
After I tuck him in and rub noses with both boys and kiss their cheeks, I search for a box at the back of a closet: With photo albums in it from a decade before I was born. I sift through the pictures of my father then; wondering what he must have been like in that alternate lifetime before I was even an inkling in it.
This is just it, this life: An inkling, a hundred inklings, and then blink.
A Spirit Session With Thea Coughlin: the gift of being seen
I've been meaning to tell you since the leaves were falling and the grass was still waving waist high in the fields about Thea Coughlin, and the magic that happened when she took my picture.
To start at the beginning--I needed an author photo.
I thought a long time about how I wanted those photos to be. And I was nervous about hiring a photographer.
In the past whenever I’ve had a photographer take my picture, I’ve always felt like that set of circumstances manages to bring out my most introverted awkward self . I start acting dorky. Inevitably I slouch, or make wry, ridiculous expressions.
Behind the lens I feel confident and easy; and over the years I’ve taken many self portraits that are straight from the heart and true to who I am in the moment. But in front of someone else’s lens I feel gangly and uncertain. With the exception of a handful of the off-handed candid shots by those closest to my heart, whenever someone takes my picture I end up smiling a little rigidly; or looking far too serious, and the outcome when I look at it on the screen or printed always feels a little foreign.
Also, I had no idea what to wear.
So I emailed Thea a shy, hopeful request: Would she maybe take a few photos of me that I could use for my book, and for other future workshops and sundry places where I might need a photo that reveals a little glimmer of my soul?
I'd seen the portraits Thea had taken at Squam of Elizabeth, and, having spent time with Elizabeth I understood just exactly the extent of the magic she'd achieved. Thea had captured something essential and ephemeral about Elizabeth that comes through in person but often gets lost in translation of film or pixels.
I hoped for that.
Still, when she showed up on an overcast fall morning, I was nervous. For about eleven seconds.
Because then she hugged me, and her beauty and light simply filled the space where any hesitation would have lived; and we sat my kitchen island and drank tea and got to know one another in the most easy, lovely way.
And then I brought her up to my bedroom and she poked through my dresser of barely folded clothes and my overstuffed closet with things falling of hangers, and she asked me to find my favorite pieces: Stuff that I love to wear; stuff that feels like me.
And because she was so perceptive and intuitive and grounded, something that I’d been dreading became fun. Instead of struggling with finding something to wear, I found many. She convinced me to try combinations I never would have, paring my love fore ruffles and beauty with my tomboy self that lives in ripped jeans and sorrels. Instead of feeling nervous, I started feeling giddy and beautiful.
And then we wandered up into my woods and fields where I always take walks and feel deeply at home, and she shot picture after picture until I began to feel the way I do inside: brave and beautiful, feminine and strong, confident and a complete goofball.
And that’s just exactly what she captured.
I want to tell you this because doing a Spirit Session with Thea was one of the biggest gifts I’ve ever given myself. It isn’t just about the photos she takes—-its about the way she takes them. The way that she is attune to the energy dancing between the her subject and the lens; the way she makes you feel in the photo just exactly the way you feel in your soul.
If you ever find yourself needing a photo like this. One that makes your heart sing because it feels authentic, and gorgeous and true to you and the creative work that you do, seek Thea out. She's pure magic.
{All photos by Thea Coughlin}
On a walk after sunset
It's cold out tonight.The kind of cold that makes me fold my arms around myself, feeling my pulse in my glove clad finger tips, as my breath floats up in the air around my head like a halo or a thought caption.
My footsteps make loud sounds across the frozen ground as I follow the dog, clipped on a length of rope I've wrapped around my palm. She dashes off ahead following the wild scent of deer or squirrel or rabbit across the pale snow. I follow after. Lurching, stopping, feeling the way my heartbeat makes thunder in my ears.
It's cold the way it hasn't been all winter and my unaccustomed cheeks burn bright, while overhead the almost full moon, that bowl of milk, spills its light all over.
There are moon shadows at my feet, squat and dark, following now before, now after as I turn towards home.
The weather has been a yo-yo, indecisive, shaky in its course. One day the road's all mud; the next the puddles hard again while in the woods, the trees know their certain secrets.
On the mild nights, owls fill the woods at dusk; on the quiet days, silence. It is the same with my heart: lifting off and landing a thousand times right here. Startled, steady, mild, wild.
Wekend Notes: The violet hour
The light a few days ago was just so lovely. It was the violet hour; just at dusk when the shadows are long and the hills purple. You can feel the way the earth is tilting now, closer toward the sun. The days are lengthening, even as snow falls from pale skies. Most days the roads are mud, not frost. And when we take walks we can see the slender maple buds are growing fat. It's time for cutting forsythia and carrying it indoors by the armload, to plunge into warm water and then arrange in jars on sunny window sills, to find in a few days time the promise of the season to come, bursting yellow and delicate from every stalk.
Plans for the weekend: Riding the lifts and maybe making pumpernickel bread. Also thesis reading, and making a mobile for my dearest friend's new baby boy. Did you see I updated my current crushes & inspiration? I'd love to hear... What are your plans for the weekend? And also: what music are you listening to lately?
10 things that are awesome:
Hello! Hello!
1. I have an interview up over at the gorgeous 52 Photo Projects site today. If you don't know Bella and all the photographic inspiration she brings to the world, you should. It was such a fun interview to do---particularly the last question.
2. Nothing quite compares with missing my guy while he was gone for the weekend, and then having him back: sweeter, better looking, and funnier than ever. I really have such a crush on him.
3. This blog is awesome. And hilarious. This post shamed me into cleaning out my car. I am so not an adult when it comes to doing so on a regular basis. The contents, just for fun: 3 ceramic cups, 2 to-go cups, 1 pair of shoes (mine), 1 pair of jeans (Sprout's), 1 pair of underwear (yeah, that'd be a good story. But they're Sprout's too), 5 picture books, 2 jackets, countless wrappers and dirty paper towels and napkins.
4. Twitter. It's really awesome. I know some of you have said that you don't have time. But here's a secret: It's better than Facebook. It's news and insights and inspiration and delight all wrapped up and moving at the speed of light. I've been having the best conversations there lately. Join in!
5. I've finally made my peace with the fact that I will not have any Kickstarter rewards for my dear backers until I graduate. It's killing me to admit this, but it feels peaceful and wonderful too, to picture sending out rewards when I start ramping up for my book this spring as I celebrate the end of graduate school. I'm planning some other big super fun things for this space then too... *grin*
6. Modcloth. I had no idea it even existed until I followed a Pinterest meander. And oh, I could buy nearly every dress there. Really. Truly.
7. My dearest friend had her first son on Bean's birthday! It's the coolest thing in the world to have known her since we were ten, and to know her now as a mom. Talking to her about those first weeks of staggering exhaustion and wonder has me reeling: that my baby is a three year old.
8. Speaking of: He is finally, completely potty trained. It was kind of epic, and I didn't really write a lot about it here because I never wanted to jinx anything and it took for effing ever. But now I think we're there. I think somehow without intending, I bought the very last package of diapers I'll ever buy. He's in underwear. We've graduated into a whole new era of big-kidness.
9. A project we just finished was to paint a wall in our house between the living room and the kitchen with chalkboard paint. It seems like a perfect way to celebrate the fact that we've moved into the era of big kids around here. They draw robots and play with magnetic numbers and make people with long legs and big smiles on the wall, and it's a totally rad ever changing work of art to come home to at the end of the day.
10. Instagram. I really, really love the glimpses, the bits of bright beauty, the inspiration, the community, the ridiculous talent of the people I follow. Yes, Instagram makes the ordinary gorgeous, but the people who really rock it, are the ones who can compose a shot just so; who have an eye for light and color, and who surprise you every time with the unexpected way the elements in the image are arranged.
I am particularly enjoying followingL: @carrisajg, @hilaryhess, @petamazey, and timrobisonjr. You can also find me on Instagram here: @christinarosalie.
Ready, set, go!
On writing: The song of my music box heart
I have until April. Until the twentieth, to be exact, to pull off something bright, provocative and well-researched for my thesis, and I have dozens of articles in a printed stack beside me; sheaves of evidence; proof of where my focus should be in every spare minute; in every fragment of time left at the end of the day.
And yet the only thing I want to do at the end of the day is write.
Like this.
I can feel myself, in the weeks when writing is scarce, become like a Bread and Puppet specter; a disjointed creature with long limbs and dark circles under her eyes.
Then, everything in me resists the pre-determined course I've vowed to take at 8pm: research, interviews, and organizing paragraphs to defend a logical conclusion. I become like a vintage music box too tightly wound: impatient, stuck, off key. It is the practice of writing; the meter of showing up; the tempo of reflection here, at the page, after twilight has been tucked into the soft dark pocket of the night, that unwinds the thin filament of my soul, and aligns the brass pins of my music box heart so that it can play again its winding calliope of song.
Being brothers
A jar of apple butter. A jar of peanut butter. Two spoons. A completely unsanctioned snack that was Bean's solution to the ravenous feeling they both have at about 4pm.
I decided to instead of saying no, to just hang out and watch them from behind the lens. I like doing this. Sitting back, seeing without interrupting or intervening. Just letting them be their silly selves. I love their unintentionally matched shirts; their nose rubs; their eyelashes; the way their body language is synchronized.
Best decision ever: to have both of them. Brothers rock. They have this bond that makes me feel like they're gonna be okay no matter what. I wonder if they'll feel that way about each other when they grow up? (Is that something that a parent can actually influence at all?)
Tell me about your family. Do you have siblings? Are you close with them? How did that relationship evolve?
My second son: three times around the sun
Do you remember him then?
I do. I remember the way I loved each day of his infancy; the way his smiles exploded my heart; the way I felt always a little high with helium wonder watching him watch the world. I've said this many times, but it's true: if Bean taught me to be a mother; Sprout taught me to love the process of it.
The year Sprout was born was the hardest year. 2009; the year everything upended in our lives. The year the stock market lurched, and pitched T's old job as a day-trader into a no-man's land of guessing. The year I refused to go back to work in a classroom where test scores came meaningful learning and bureaucracy held creativity in check. The year our marriage felt like a painful off-kilter dance between two sleep deprived drunks. The year that forced me to begin to imagine a new paradigm; a new way of thinking; a new way of being in the world.
It was the year A Field Guide To Now began in my head as inklings, as drafts, as snippets here on the blog.
And it was the first year with my sweet second son.
And now:
He's 3.
He is hilarious. He is empathetic. He is shy and boisterous in turns. He is all about yelling things and gesturing expansively, true to the core to his Italian heritage one minute; and then hiding behind my leg when he meets someone for the first time, the next. There are times when he loves to lie on the rug with his matchbox cars, driving them along the imaginary roads that the patterns make; or building block castles all by himself; and other times when all he wants to do is wrestle and hurtle around the house on his tiny two-wheel bike with training wheels, singing at the top of his lungs.
He loves to sing. He loves to rub noses. He loves to laugh.
And every morning he finds me while he is still half asleep, and I am still half asleep, and together we doze for fifteen or twenty minutes, curled into each other, our cheeks and noses touching, while T showers. I adore this time. I adore this boy of mine.
He has taught me contentment. He embodies verve. He is the pure poetry of love in motion.
In the midst of everything, this: I have a 7 year old.
There are things, a thousand in my mind like the small sparrows in the singing bush at the roadside that I pass, walking down from class to work. There are things converging, turning, passing at odd angles, like fish swimming in an aquarium on different lateral planes. There are things unresolved and just starting out; things igniting from the flint of good work and quick words. An there are moments, one in particular that matters wildly: My son is 7. My first born. Bean. This here boy: long legged, lithe, whip-smart, spoiled, tender-hearted, intuitive, dreamy, mystical, introverted, agile, goofy, kind.
With his birth-day, I became a mother, and since then, everything has been enormously, vastly different. I am more permeable, more affected by the world; braver, truer to myself, more confident, more daring. He is one of my greatest teachers, this boy of mine. Knowing him is one of the coolest things ever.
//
If you have children, how have you been altered by them? I never tire of hearing those stories.
I don't know how she does it, guilt, and telling another kind of story entirely
I don’t know where I am going yet, but I know that this is the beginning. The beginning of finding true velocity: a unity of moments, a lithe tempo, a right algorithm of speed and grace.
I am still rather far from it now, in the final semester of school, with my new job already nearly full time. And I’ll be the first to admit: The days don't always offer the time I need for pondering, for the daily practice of writing, for rest. Until I’m done with graduate school, I know the hours will ignite, one after the next at a certain pre-determined heat, each one double booked, precious, full to saturation. And I'm humbled by the process. By being here again, at the outset again, new to the particular set of challenges and opportunities my life offers and asks. I spend my day tripping, sprinting, catching my balance, careening, laughing with sheer delight.
There are wins and losses: I drive Bean to school every morning; we have a part-time nanny who helps with the laundry; Sprout is finally making headway with potty training; T cooks weekday meals with the grace and kindness of saint. And I'm still trying to find an hour that offers itself for writing; time for running is inconsistent; I have a birthday party for Bean to plan, and no time to make it to the store for favors; I see my husband less than I'd like. And in the midst of it all I've realized I've somehow reached the life velocity that causes people say, “I don’t know how you do it” to me now.
I find myself shrugging at that remark. I don't know how anyone does it. We've all got our own particular mess of moments and necessities; priorities and stumbling blocks. Each life is remarkable.
But beyond that, I shrug because I'm particularly resentful of cultural paradigm from which that statement springs.
I’m sure most of you are familiar with the book that spawned that phrase. Both it, and its movie counterpart have been suggested to me by no less than six women friends as a seminal narrative that “tells the story like it is.” I’ve been given two copies of it in fact, one from my mother. And I ended up watching the movie on the way back from California in the plane, but regretted my choice upon landing, as manufactured guilt clung like burrs to the back of my mind as I greeted my boys; drove home with my husband; and then helped my kids put on their pajamas and brush their teeth and go to bed.
Guilt.
I don’t think it is a terrible book by any means. It gets many of the details right, of a full-velocity life. The pace, the tumult, the jam-packed days. What I resent is the paradigm it perpetuates. It’s that Kate's primary emotion and modus operandi is guilt: About her work, about her husband, and her kids.
It gives fule to myth: That you should feel guilty as a woman if you work away from home; and that the smug comments of stay at home mothers are both assumed and justified. I call bullshit.
Women who work at home, and who work away from their home, and who stay at home each have the choice to frame their lives in terms of guilt or fulfillment.
Whatever you slice it, you see a different slice. There are challenges and advantages to each way of being in the world, and to tell the story of a woman who works and has children as a guilt riddled narrative does a huge disservice to all women, regardless of their childrearing status.
So as I’m writing now, about the early phases of doing this full velocity thing called life that includes work and kids and a thesis and whatever other bits fall into the mix, my hope is that I can begin telling the story in a slightly different way.
Less guilt, more fulfillment. Less culturally perceived “shoulds,” more personally perceived moments of sheer awesome.
I am at the beginning of a new phase; an epic; an adventure. It feels off kilter some days. There are days that I don’t have enough time for anything more than the barest essentials. Still, unless I read about it somewhere, guilt doesn’t factor in to the equation.
My life is asking for new definitions and capabilities. It demands that I cultivate the ability to adapt to the speed of things moving in multiple dimensions and directions simultaneously. It pushes me to imagine bigger constructs; and to see time, and speed, and distance, and success as new non-linear relatives.
My life is being altered by the nature of the work I am doing; by my expectations for myself; by the sunlight gradually softening towards spring; by my sons turning three and seven; by a dozen years with the man I love; by my thesis; and by all that is unfinished at present. And instead of guilt, what I am striving for is to acquire a certain degree of nonattachment. To do my very best, to pour my soul into the work I do, to love my boys when I am with them, to trust that when I’m not that they are flourishing, and to let go and know: Our right lives are happening now, in dynamic unison, every morning, every afternoon, every night.
So many things
I've decided that to just roll with the fact that this post is going to be disjointed and full of juicy tidbits and no real rhyme or reason because it is the only way to get everything down on the digital page, so that I can start fresh again before my brain explodes. Because so many things. Are happening. Right now. Oh my.
I keep thinking/hoping/wishing that I'll wake up one morning with more time, but instead, I woke up one morningcame back from my trip to California to find that T had taken out a wall in our living room. Yeah. So. That goal of painting a corner of our house aquamarine that I made for my 35/35 list? Check. Flexibility as a personality trait? Check.
I'll totally post pictures just as soon as there is some semblance of semblance. My entire house has a new wide-open floor plan. Removing the wall caused all sorts of re-painting to take place. The dining room is a different color. So is the living room. The kitchen remains, for now, the same. That it will persist that way is doubtful.
I love my new job. It excites me. It uses all the parts of my brain: strategic, creative, emotional, practical. It challenges me in all the right ways. And the days pass in a blink. I watch the light move across the sky from my office window; head out for a run at lunch, and then drive home, eat dinner, put the kids to bed, and hit my thesis. Or at least, intend to.
And oh, hey! I have two birthday boys next week. When did that happen?
Exhibit A & B:
They are pretty much the coolest. They're funny and full-tilt and totally, completely different. I intend to write each of them a love letter, or at the very least, share snippets of their Birthday Interviews that I always conduct. Of note: Bean is almost as good as me at snowboarding now. I can still beat him down the mountain, but I have a sneaky suspicion it's just because I'm heavier. The kid was born to ride. He has a sort of effortless grace that I can't help but be a little bit jealous of.
This past weekend we also put Sprout on a board for the first time, and wouldn't you know, he didn't fall at all. He had crazy balance. Rode perpendicular to the slope, laughing his head off. The only problem: He had no clue how to stop.
"When you tell him how to stop Mommy," Bean told me while riding the lift, "He doesn't believe you because it just looks like magic."
"Is that how you felt when you started?" I asked him.
"Yeah, but then my body learned the magic."
Exactly.
Somehow, the days fly by. I do as much as the hours allow, and am learning to let the rest go. I've started running again and it is definitely a key sanity and wellbeing. Today I hit my 3mi/25minute goal. Another thing on my 35/35 list. I think I may need to revise that one.
Did you see how I tossed that link to twitter in there? Yeah, I'm on twitter a lot, and it's one of my very favorite places to share, and find insight and be inspired. It's also a place where I've been sharing little in the moment updates, at the speed of life as it's happening right now. Won't you join me?
Work-Life balance: Daily routines and the quality of light
Then we talk.
He asks me to tell him about summer when I was small, and when he asks, I smile, my mind slipping to the far off drawers of memory I keep inside my head.
I tell him about going to Bryce canyon and riding horseback with an old guide named Pinky up and down the steep canyon cliffs. I tell him about packing just enough clothes to fit in a sigle drawer in the camper; about the sketch book I always kept; and about about the way my older sister would yell at me every night when it was time to set up the tend and I’d just stand there holding the stakes, staring off at a neighbor’s campsite or into the sagebrush, stalking stories with my eyes.
I tell him about the jackrabbits with their enormous ears and big hind feet, and about the full moon above the canyon and the silvery pink rocks; and then I picture what it will be like in another summer from now when Sprout is a little older and we can travel together, all four of us, across this wide, wide country through the dessert to end up at the wild Pacific where we’ll collect sand dollars and blow on bull kelp bugles.
And abruptly we’re there, in the snow covered parking lot of his little school, and I pull up in the drop-off circle and he unbuckles his seatbelt and leans forward to kiss me and then grabs his backpack and goes in.
It seems improbable, all of this.
That I am leaving and arriving in the nearly light of early morning and the twilight of a spent day; that I have a job like this, full on, full time, full of possibility; that I am the mother to an almost seven year old who does the things I remember doing. Kisses me on the cheek, grabs his backpack, goes to school.
I remember that same routine with the indelible clarity of long term memory. The feeling of my backpack, the way my sneakers looked against the walkway cement leading up to my classroom door. I had a favorite cobalt blue sweater and my bottom teeth were missing, just like his—though his are growing in crooked like T’s were.
Bean's little boy smile is almost unrecognizable to me some days. He's a certifiable kid, now. Half way to fourteen already.
And so I kiss him quickly and then he slams the car door and goes into his blue school building where he spends the day discovering the world, while I drive off into the city and park, and then climb three flights of stairs and settle into my little brick and windowed office where I watch the light shift across the walls above my head.
I drink more coffee in a white mug, and at lunch I go running outdoors along the bike path that I used to run on every day when I first moved to this city and started running years ago. It feels strangely familiar: each turn and slope somehow written into the kinetic memory that the soles of my feet recall.
Snow cakes under my shoes, and I have to kick them hard against the ground every so often to loosen it, and above the lake the light is almost entirely flat gray, save for a place where the clouds are ripped and a rosy apricot spills through.
When I return, I am red faced, sweating, and focused and the rest of the day slips by in an ellipsis of concentration; the dark gathering unexpectedly, without my watching. When I return home, the house is full of lamplight and yelling. The boys are hungry. Dinner is on the table. The dog is whirling under foot.
This is the new tempo of things. The new state of leaving and arriving; the way the quality of light reveals much about this new process of becoming.
// How does daylight mark your daily routines? What do you spend your day doing?
Taking inventory on my birthday:
A year of self portraits on the go, in the middle of the action that is my life.
My list for this year turned out better than I imagined. I crossed off more things than from any of my previous ones. I even made croissants over the holidays! A lovely lingering process spread over two days and involving three sticks of butter. I also went ice skating on Frog Pond with T while in Boston, and miraculously managed both a visit to the ocean and making face to face visits with faraway friends happen in the past week.
What I love about making these lists is the record they create: of attempting, of longing, of wonder, of achievement. And even though I missed the mark on a couple of line items, in all, 33 was an amazing year. An exhausting, thrilling 365 days of determination and perseverance and pushing boundaries and joy. A book. A new job that I adore. Friends that make my heart smile. Boys that make my days bright. And a partner that makes it all possible. I'm a lucky girl.
I've posted a new list in my sidebar. And I'm curious: what are a few things on your list for the year? There is such power and possibility in claiming the big and the small with a few purpose-filled words.
xo! Christina
A kind of christening
I know I promised you all kinds of things: Part 2, a list, posts full of details and whimsy, but here I am, in the middle of things and all I want to tell you about is the hour that I spent on the California coastline this weekend. All I want to do is hit pause. All I want to do is linger.
So that I can remember the way the ocean sounded. The way it felt like coming home, and how that feeling hit me so hard it almost took my breath away.
I haven’t seen the Pacific since my father was alive. I haven’t been back there, to that familiar geography of rolling hills and gnarled cypress since he died. And oh, how that feeling pummeld me. The bittersweet of grief and longing, of memory and utter joy.
Standing there on the sandy beach with the cuffs of my jeans rolled up, ankle deep in the cold tide, I found myself inhabiting the memory of my twenty-one year old self.
I didn’t know my father was dying.
I’d just barely met the man I would marry.
I couldn’t imagine the children I’d conceive. These boys that I have now.
I hadn’t even claimed the word writer as my own.
Let alone heard the phrase brand strategy. Blogs didn’t exist. Social media wasn’t even a term. Google had just barely made the scene. People used Hotmail and still picked up the phone.
I was a girl with salt tangled hair, who felt like her heart would just bust open from the sheer wild joy of the waves.
And here I was now: 33, turning 34 in a matter of days. Inhabiting that feeling. Those memories. That ache, that loss, that progress.
It was cleansing, and devastating and wildly, utterly gorgeous. The light. The waves. The sand. The sky.
I picked up a small handful of treasures: a tiny wing-shaped shell, a bit of driftwood, a gull feather. And then I looked and shut my eyes and listened, until who I was and who I am became the same. Christened there, in the sea foam, before I turned to go.
When opportunity arrives
My nearly three year old Sprout settles into my arms in a familiar way that I can’t even describe. It is a language we share, between our bodies. Another way of saying LOVE, this thing that we do, folding into each other, his small arms and legs wrapped around my torso, the heft of him against my hip.
We haven’t seen each other all day, and now he reaches up and brushes my bangs out of my eyes and says, “I want to rub noses.” And so we rub noses like seals.
Across the room Bean is drawing on an index card. In another minute he brings it to me. On one side: a red heart with an arrow through it surrounded in blue. On the other, a cheetah with brown spots and a yellow sun.
“You are the cheetah, Mommy,” he explains.
He’s right. I am. I am going thisfast.
T is at the stove stirring tortilla soup. It smells heavenly, and when he looks up to greet me and his smile turns my heart into helium.
Bean shows me the picture he’s draw for T. On the front, a heart that matches mine. On the back, a tall tree with the sun above it.
“Daddy is a tree with big strong roots and he reaches up to the sky and he’s surrounded by the sun. I’m the sun, and Sprout is a lion who plays with you.” He explains happily.
Sun, Tree, Cheetah, Lion. I love how he's captured some small truth about each of us exactly.
So. I started a job this week that combines my love of story and creative work, with my superpowers in strategy and social media. I am now the Emerging Media Strategist at a super cool design firm here in Vermont. I’ll be almost full time until I graduate, and then definitely full time after that. It’s a new position, with a lot of culture changing momentum behind it, and I’m surrounded by some of the best and the brightest people imaginable. I'm thrilled.
It is also, of course, a shift for our little family. I had every intention of working once I graduated, but none of us expected the right opportunity would arrive right now. We're making a new roadmap. Finding a part time nanny. Exploring ways to make everything that needs to happen effortlessly and well.
And the truth is, I've always been one of those people who loves to work; who wants to be full time, full on, engaged, motivated, connecting, moving and shaking things up. And when n I think about what they’re getting, my two boys, by having a mama who sparkles when she talks about the creative, awesome work she does… I know it’s the just right opportunity to do this now.
And of course, I’ll be blogging about the process pretty regularly here: about the choreography of equipoise—of making time for the things that count, and doing them. And I'm curious about your stories...
I want to year more about your experiences navigating work and parenthood in whatever context you navigate that. What do you love? What makes your heart ache? What are your truest insights?
Also… PART 2 of the CREATIVE PROCESS post is coming up on Friday. And a post very soon about my 33 before 33 list progress. Also expect some news and sparkle and possibly even a love letter on my birthday. GRIN.
Hello January! {A post of updates}
I loved reading your responses to my PART 1 post on CREATIVE PROCESS. It's such a wild ride, to be in the thick of creating, and it made me so satisfied to read about how the process is the same across all mediums.
This week I'm resolved to write here daily. To just show up with a few photographs and some notes. I've been recording glimmers in my notebook lately: snippets of conversations overheard, or details observed, and I think I'll share a few of those here too.
Coming up this week I'll share PART 2 of the CREATIVE PROCESS, a post about that job that I so casually mentioned (though inside I'm still doing a giddy happy dance about it) and some news about this here blog. Cool news. Exciting news. Stay tuned.
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What is in store for your week?
I'd love to know the following: 1. An album you're loving listening to... 2. A magazine that strikes your fancy... 3. A cold-weather beauty secret you rely on... 4. And a fav food that is getting you through these mid January days.
xoxo! Christina
Inspiration, starting in, achievement, and resistance {Creative Cycles Part 1}
It will begin like this: with the sudden irreverent bark of a dog on a cold snowy night; or with the lilting flight of a hundred starlings among the naked poplar branches, or in line somewhere, waiting for a cappuccino, when you pause to take note of what you’re actually thinking, and there it will be. An inkling. An image maybe, a string of notes, or perhaps a phrase.
I have a phrase in my head now, for example, that I’ve for a couple of months, rattling around like a magnet in a bucket, attracting fragments of things: filaments, filings, scraps.
That inkling will persist if you listen; until it becomes unavoidable and you have to stop wherever you are and take and admit: I have an idea! Then you will begin to wonder and ponder, record, and reflect as bits of the idea drift about in your subconscious like gorgeous saffron and vermillion coy fish moving slowly under the ice on a winter pond; moving just enough so that you know they still have a pulse, a vibration of life all of their own volition down there.
The days will gather upon themselves, until you feel the idea stirring with certainty, with urgency : a private equinox right there in the midst of your soul. And if you’re brave and passionate you’ll listen, and you’ll begin in earnest whatever work you must do.
You’ll ask for help. You’ll ask for answers. You’ll ask for time, and more time, and extra cups of coffee. You’ll clear your calendar as much as possible without the normal reluctance that you feel when pushing aside the “shoulds” and “musts” you are accustomed to always putting first.
And then there will be days, or months even, when all you want to do is dive into your work with passion and zeal and focus. This is the apex of the creative cycle.
This is when you are inclined to burn the candle at both ends; working one day of work, and another on your project; when you have perpetual paint on your fingers maybe, or a pencil behind your ear, or you feel naked without your laptop keyboard under your palms, and you don’t remember the last time you washed your sheets, and all you eat is whatever leftovers are in the fridge.
This is when the work that you’re doing becomes a force of it’s own. When even though the specter of failure rears its ugly head, and procrastination stalks you, you can shake it off with a certain courage and urgency, and get to the heart of what you intend. This is the time when all you want to do is the work you are in the midst of.
And then, as you near completion and the deadline looms, it’s possible that you’ll feel like the whole thing was a mistake. A terrible misjudgment of your abilities; a laughable mess of smithereens. It’s possible that you’ll wonder Who the hell do I think I am, anyway? And you’ll consider escape routes and worst case scenarios, and it will feel utterly impossible to finish. But you can, and you will...
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This is part 1 in a series of posts I’ve been wanting to write for a while about creative cycles and how they affect me. My feeling is that these are very universal experiences, hence the second person voice which I fall back on naturally when I feel like it applies to you too!
I’d really love to hear your experiences about starting in on a cycle of creativity, and what happens throughout that process.
Next up in the cycle: Reaching the completion, celebration, loss and regeneration.