On Finishing, Persistance, & the reason for everything

I had no idea what my capacity for self discipline was when I began. No idea that two years and a book later, I'd sink to the grass on the Friday after turning in my thesis and cry tears of gratitude that it was all over. But that is what I did.

I lay with my arms akimbo; the grass pressing up into my palms and the clouds moving above me, a symphony of cirrus, and hungrily felt the weight of my body being tugged by gravity close to the barely wakening surface of the earth. How I've been longing for that: to feel my body next to the earth. To feel like I am of it, not just tangential to it. To feel my pulse thrumming steady and slow, keeping time with the pulse of the nearly blooming crab-apples and service berry.

In the weeks when I was finishing, the world was turning to spring: first the coltsfoot like a hundred thousand scattered suns along the muddy edges of the road; then the wood trillium, green and pale with purple freckles, poking up among the pine needles in the shade at the back of the yard along the stone wall. I knew these things because they happen every year, familiar and certain. But this year, I only saw the coltsfoot from the car windows and the trillium in passing. This year, the robins came one day while I was researching. It was the weekend. I remember. The boys were outside playing in the sandbox, and their voices would come lilting up to me through the cracked-open window, the smell of spring coming wild and cold through the screen. I remember glancing up to notice the way the sun was slipping westward, and then heard it. Warbling, golden, liquid: the setting sun in song.

I grew used to watching the day pass from the windows.

And really, it was one of the hardest things to full-out sprint for so long. To try and to keep trying, even when I was exhausted. To work, to go to class, to come home and play with my kids, and have dinner, and do all the bedtime choreography and then sit down to begin several hours of work. To miss the entire blooming of a day: to not have felt rain falling on my cheeks, or hail on my tongue. To have spent week after week circling myself, in front of the computer, making something happen.

And still, though it’s not a pace I could have kept forever, the thing that I feel now, already, after a few days with a little more rest--is that we give up on ourselves too easily too often.

We get the message all around us that things should be easy, and when they aren’t—especially for any prolonged length of time, we tend to panic—it’s hard not too.

But there is something to persisting, to showing up, and showing up, and finishing; to discovering that you are capable of more. It’s the only way, really, to find that out: to do the hard stuff, the impossible stuff, the stuff that makes you want to weep and yell and sing hallelujah all at once.

And now look! The world is full of wind. The treetops are fat with new sweet leaves. The goldfinches have arrived and the sky is full of cumulus and turbulence and new tomorrow will dawn new and bright—and this, this is the reason, again and again for everything.

This is possibly the hardest thing I have ever done.

Finishing this work. A year without weekends. I am so tired. So. Very. Tired.

(And I'm not finished yet.)

The slender threads of right now {9 days}

I am trying to slip back into work mode tonight. I've found that it is helpful, after the boys go to sleep to let myself unwind a little, doing some small act of creativity.

I bring tea and chocolate and maybe a handful of raw almonds up to my studio with me and then I mull about a bit, until I find some small thing among the scraps. A raveling, a glimmer, a tenuous thread bit of paper. It might be the smallest act of wetting a brush, uncorking ink, or letting color spread in water to the edge of a line. It is this act of making something from nothing that tugs me right back into this moment, tucking the tiredness falling in front of my eyes back like stray locks.

And even if it is a very small thing, a single purposeful gesture, it is often enough.

What can you make, if you pause right now? If you look around you, what do you see?

Tell me the inventory of where your creativity begins.

.

Bits & pieces {10 Days}

I woke up determined to complain less today. Even though Facebook bought Instagram, and I went to bed at almost 2am, and morning hit me hard. I decided to take note of the things I like: Unexpected constellations of snippets and chads; filing papers after they've been dealt with; cayenne and maple syrup in cappuccinos, blue birds, blue jeans, and telling Bean stories in the car about when I was seven.

I liked the the red tailed hawk on the tree at the edge of the highway; and the magnolias, pink and white and lush, even in the rain; and also the rain, falling on the roof of the studio at work.

I liked finding this piece by Susan Sontag, And then asking the people I work with to also tell me things that make them happy; and getting their replies, my inbox filling with coincidence and artichokes, palindrome and back scratches, that made me smile particularly.

And when I came home there was my dog with her lolling tongue and Yoda ears, and T had made chicken salad and crusty bread and fresh avocados, and there my boys with their tousled mops of too long hair, and now there is chai tea and chocolate, even though I'll be up again till 2am.

What do you like?

I can't wait to hear.

.

Almost: 11 days left

Today it rained all day. I have 60 rough pages; double spaced. I have the vaguest ideas of what I want the visuals to be. I'm far from where I need to be. And yet, I am so close.

The amount that I have to finish terrifies me. It feels impossible, insurmountable, enormous.

My body is growing restless from sitting in a desk chair so many hours out of the day.

My mind like a bucking bronco, takes so much will power to harness to this task: finish. Simply that.

It's been such a long time without a break, I hardly remember what that feels like.

Still, I'm trying to slip in a few moments here and there of delight, and whimsy to get me through.

////

Tell me things:

What music are you listening to right now?

What blogs or magazines have you found that are simply too gorgeous not to share?

What is a meal you can't get enough of this spring?

WHat small thing do you do that brings you joy?

They make my heart feel like helium:

They do, even after the longest, most impossible days. I come home to early evening light, Clover loping across the yard with her silly Yoda ears, and these two, playing in the sandbox. And when they see me they yell and cheer, and give me grins that make everything that I've held in tension in my ribcage loosen and lift off, like glycerin bubbles on a warm spring wind.

I'm really so lucky. I have the best kids.

A parenthesis in time:

All week I've been wanting to tell you About how I slipped away last Friday night with T and my beautiful friend Hilary. We went North on a road marked with farm houses and fields, the land as flat as a tucked sheet. We saw snow geese, hundreds of them, and remarked about the solitary trees that stand like sentinels in the middle of wide fields; their branches some small haven for wild birds and wild winds.

We crossed the river at the blue hour Across the wide metal bridge into a city Where the syllables are soft, and the consonants luxurious.

And found our way to our hotel, among cobble-stoned streets Where the cathedral towers were making love to the fat crescent moon.

We had dinner at Holder: mussels with cream and white wine, duck confit with arugula and garlic, white wine and red, chocolate ganache, and espresso.

And then found our way to the Corona theater, which is truly lovely and just the right size place to hear Gotye play, up close and intimate his music still new and experimental and sweet in the way that it wasn't utterly rehearsed. Kimbra played first. So much soul in that small slender body in a crumpled champaign dress; and then the drums of Gotye, making our hearts thrum.

It was good, so good to get away. To slip out of my mind for a night; to be with two people who I adore; the easiest of combinations.

The next morning we had breakfast at Olive & Gormando which quite possibly has the most lovely pastries in Montreal... And then we wandered around taking photographs.

I can't help myself: I must share them all. They make me happy. Even now, as I'm in the thick of one of the hardest weeks; with too little time. Far too little, to finish all the work that I must for my thesis to be done in two short weeks.

Here's to parenthesis! To moments stolen. And to trying to let the be enough.

xo!

Make today your work of art.

This phrase slipped into my head today while I was running at lunch time. It was cold, and the sky was as gray as it ever gets and the waves on the lake were choppy and sharp, and still it felt AMAZING to be out running, feeling my body do this thing that it knows how to do.

And this is the truth:

It doesn't matter how much time or how little you have.

It doesn't matter if everyone is counting on you, or no one is counting on you.

It doesn't matter if whatever you're doing is something you've done a hundred times, or have never done before.

What matters, simply, is doing whatever you are doing with everything you've got.

Small rituals :: Holding steady

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Toast with honey + almonds, and a cappuccino for the road.

Kissing my boys before we part ways for the day (all three of them.)

Stopping in a parking lot by the lake on the way to work to watch the gulls, just for five minutes, and to breathe.

Having lunch with good friends often.

Calling the people I love on my commute home from work.

Counting the days until I finish (22).

What are the things you do, in the eye of the storm, in the midst of momentum, when urgency dictates only the slightest room in your day to linger or pause?

Making your mark

The days are numbered until I'm finished with graduate school, and in the woods the days are numbered too before everything bursts forth wildly with green.

I haven't shared much about my thesis-writing process here, mostly because my hours are too full, and the days not long enough.

My thesis is called: Making Your Mark: Art, Influence and Identity in an Era of Personal Brands. It's a subject near and dear to my heart as a writer and artist. I'm curious about the tenuous line between commerce and creativity; and about how the work that we do, and the work that we make is shaped by the digital landscape we inhabit.

It's an adventure, a labor of love, and a heap of scholarly research. I've had the pleasure of speaking with (or am slated to speak with) several brilliant folks from around the web for this projectt: Kal Bartestki, Dan Blank, Chris Gullibeau, Bernadette Jiwa, Mark Schaefer, Samantha Reynolds, and Susannah Conway. It has been an amazing process to gather and synthesize my research and their collective wisdom.

I am thinking about creating something alongside the scholarly paper I must turn in at the end of April. Something that I can share with you here; a distillation of all the depth and insight in the form of a PDF download perhaps. Would you be interested?

Kinfolk Vol. 3

Good morning! After a tender, quiet weekend full of work and small moments: toast and bacon and good cappuccinos, cleaning out my closets and building blanket forts with Sprout on the bed, and many hours spent in my studio writing (my thesis), it is a new week has begun. And I'm excited to share that a little piece of mine called "Morning Rituals" is in Kinfolk Volume 3.

It's the kind of magazine you want to hold in your hands: the texture of the pages, the heft of it, the dreamy grain of the photos, and words that inspire you to be right here.

Get yours. You'll be happy you did. Perfect for reading over breakfast with toast & bacon and small boys.

At whatever cost

I have no way of knowing, that reading this piece would make the soft pulsing organ in the hull of my ribs ache with indescribable sadness.

A mother. A runner.

“I thought of you when I read this, you’ll see why,” was my friend's explanation for the link to this story in my inbox, referring, no doubt, to the fact that the school mentioned is my high school alma matter. It takes me until page four to understand that this is probably what he means.

And maybe it is because of this--that I know the geography of her life--that this piece has the effect that it does.

She was pushing Julian up just to keep him above the water. She would raise him, sink under the water herself and then reappear.

I read through to the end and feel broken open sitting in my studio among sheaves of research for my thesis, the window open just a little to let some cold spring air into the stillness of the room.

Outside I hear my boys driving a remote control car across the newly greening lawn; the car’s small motor makes a whirring sound, like a hive of angry bees. The dog barks at it every so often; high pitched, uncertain, her head tilting to the side. Then she settles down with her bone under the crabapple and watches uneasily as they run pell-mell, laughing.

The sky has been gray since dawn. All morning I’ve caught myself wishing it were different. I want the sun to come back the way it was all last week: mellow and golden and so warm the lilac started to send out furling tender leaflets.

Maybe it’s this that makes me fold in against myself when I finish reading; like one of those Leatherman tools, where everything is rendered useless in its compact state; knives and saw blades and pliers all folded against each other.

I sob.

They were less than 10 feet away from her, but in the time it took Caleb to turn back around, Rhiannon had breathed her last breath and vanished into the sea.

When the finish line is moved, runners struggle to continue beyond the expected terminus.

It isn’t just the facts of the story. Because later I go back and read other reports in local newspapers, and each reporter describes incident in the typical anonymous tone such papers tend to take on purpose so that no one becomes too alarmed: “Healdsburg woman washed out to sea.

I think it is the way piece in weaves the grief into container of tenderness; the way the author gathers the facts and turns them over and over, like pebbles on the shore, looking for understanding, that moves me to tears.

It’s damn good writing.

There was a time when I might have managed to read this piece and move on. But then I had one son, and then another, and with their births I become utterly permeable. The world slips in now through my breath; my eyes; the very pores in my skin.

Now, I cannot move on. The grief lingers in my chest all afternoon like a carrier pigeon in its wicker create. I don’t know how to release it, or where to tell it to fly.

I run and errand and when I return, Sprout, who has been napping, has just woken up and he runs to greet me, his arms held open. I press him to me and his smell his scent like it is a thing that can sustain me.

It is.

T looks up from rewiring the brake cables on his bike. “What’s the matter?” he asks, seeing my face.

I tell him, in as few words as possible, trying to be obscure so that Bean, who is puttering about at the opposite corner of the room wont hear, but he stops to listen. I tell the part about the way she held her son above water until he could be rescued and then slipped under, and Bean takes one look at me and says, “That makes me sad” and in an instant he is beside me, folding his small wiry body against my birdcage chest.

I hold him there and cry silently, with gratitude and for my tender boys; for the fact that I am their mother, at whatever cost.

Where ideas happen: a documentary of small moments

In the slight slender seconds of pause when the tea is hot and the quiet is steady, or at the stoplight, waiting to cross the street beside a billboard, and then the galaxy of staples are all invitation I need to linger, to take a picture, to look and then look again.

It happens in the washroom at the little vegetarian cafe, where the picture of Bukowski, likely piss drunk, is a lurching reminder as I dry my hands to be irreverent and bold with what I know; in the same way that the ink-spattered sink promises that being in the midst of the mess is the best if not only way to find the truth.

And it happens always, in the cafe, a frothy cappuccino its own evidence of creative collisions and circumstances that invite recollection or collection; And also always staring out my office window at the sky, where the moon, white and round, offers endless chances to describe its pale face anew, and so I do.

// An invitation: Tell me your way of talking about the moon without talking about the moon at all. (I love the way you think.)

On loving someone for a while:

There is a slow magic to knowing someone for a while; to loving them for longer than a decade; to waking up beside them morning after morning. It isn't an effortless thing, or something you just stumble into. Rather, it's a thing of shared dreaming: Of taking each other's hands, of walking side by side, of saying yes, and imaging what our future holds together.

I don't take a single day for granted. Each day I wake up committed and eager to try again, to grow, to live this life side by side, and so does he. I think this makes us among the lucky ones.

Yes.

The truth is, after a dozen years, he's still my favorite.

I love him more than I ever did when we first were dating, that's for certain. He has better biceps now; more smile lines; less hair; more scars; deeper laughter; wider love.

Have I ever told you about how we met? He asked me to go downhill mountain biking the day after we'd met, and I said yes, even though I'd never done such a ridiculous thing before. We road the chair lift up the mountain together, and somehow while taking pictures with a disposable camera we dropped it, and even though we rode down and looked for it, we never found the camera that had the first evidence of us together on it, his arm around my shoulder.

He let me ride his bike because mine was not really cut out for hurtling down such steep terrain, but somehow he broke my front wheel in the process, which was a great guarantee, really, that we'd have to see each other again.

And when we did, I remember thinking: How could anyone be this good, this solid, this open hearted? And then he kissed me.

We were in college still.

Now we're at a stoplight driving into town with the boys in the back seat and the dog in the trunk and we both stare in wonderment at the group tour of the UVM campus that's crossing the road in front of us. The kids are so young; so fresh faced and slouchy and hesitant in their posture. Their parents stand upright, arms folded, or hands clutching catalogs and brochures or handbags; and they look anxious and skeptical and worried and old.

How is it possible we'll be them in ten years? Instead of the younger ones, looking careless, their arms and legs like question marks, their clothes too baggy or too tight. How is it possible that Bean will be one of those boys, his sandy hair all shaggy, stubble on his cheeks?

We shake our heads. He reaches out and rests his warm palm against my thigh. Then the light turns green.

A reminder:

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

Some days there is a part of me that wants it to be easy already; some sleepy-head part of me that keeps wishing I’ll wake up one morning to someone handing a blueprint for how to live these final days of graduate school + work + boys + writing, so that they become a symphony, rather than a collision of hours.

Remembering my father:

I have to use the calculator to remember: he would have been 78 today, which means the inconceivable. He died ten years ago.

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.