Words to live by: From Chris Gullibeau
I filled a little Field Guide notebook while there, and then rapidly filled the second half of the Molskine I started in the spring. I label my Moleskine's down the side of the spine with a Sharpie: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and the year, so that when I keep them in a stack, I can find older volumes easily, and it usually takes about a season lately to fill one up. But this spring, with my thesis and graduation, and starting work I was a little slow to fill each smooth page, until I went to Portland, and found myself scribbling voraciously in a room full of some of the most creative souls on the planet.
Now, it's full to bursting.
I honestly feel like there has never been more possibility than there is in the world right now."
--From Chris Gullibeau, who just wrote 100$ Start Up, and is the incredible mastermind force of nature who made WDS a reality.
I came away feeling more intensely than ever: Now is your moment. What are you doing with it?
Living A Remarkable Life In A Conventional World
I’ve started at least a dozen times—trying to put words around my experience at World Domination Summit 2012. I’ve written a sentence after sentence with quick fingers, as the sounds of the osccilating fans and the ciadas fill up the ink of the evening, but then I've deleted them. Again and again.
It’s unlike me to not have the words.
But that’s maybe exactly why the experience was so significant for me: It was about shifting out of my head and into my heart-- letting go of “shoulds” and words, and preconceived notions, and just showing up.
“You’re experience cannot exceed your willingness to be vulnerable.” --Brene Brown
This became my measure for everything.
How willing was I to be vulnerable? How open was I to encountering inspiration, humility, gratitude, unfamiliarity, and possibility with all-out, wholehearted abandon?
The truth is, I’m serious to a fault (and a total nerd) and my default is to over-intellectualize and over-analyze everything. But it's also true that I’ve got a heart that’s thisclose under my skin; and it’s always on the verge of busting right out of my chest with glee or wonder. And this weekend was an exercise in living into my heart.
Wholly, enthusiastically, and without expectation. I learned so much. So, so much. (More to come.)
The beginning of wonderful things:
Hello friends!
Do you see what that is? My book! In the real. My wonderful editor shipped me a half-dozen advanced copies because I'm heading out today to the amazing World Domination Summit in a few hours and am excited to be able to share them with some creative souls there.
I'm also giddy to share with you my almost finished new digs here under my new name. It feels grand to have finally arrived. Welcome. I hope you'll stay a while. So many good things are in the works...
I'd tell you more, but I'm leaving on a jet plane for the west coast in a couple of hours and can't stop grinning about what a wonderful time #WDS is going to be. I'll be tweeting up a storm, I imagine, and posting like crazy to Instagram... so peak over there too!
xoxo,
Christina
On the summer solstice: how the morning arrives
For some reason the boys have woken up early, and they are all wiggles and wiggly teeth as they join me, two to a chair. We’re in the front yard, watching the morning arrive. The day is going to be hot, and above us each of us there is a halo of tiny insects twirling in the humid air.
Everything: our arms, and legs, our notebook paper, and the dewy grass, is damp. The mountains are all but obscured pale clouds that keep the edges of the morning close, surrounding us with the gauzy softness of dawn.
The sun has yet to make the climb its ladder of tree branches in the east.
So we sit, side by side, and I string sentences together while they string gestures. Theirs is a story of action, mine of words. And I think about how we grow still as adults, our bones and muscles full of gravity, while our children run about us, tumbling, twirling, tripping over their own lightness of being.
Sleep still plays across the edges of my mind this morning, and my attention soft. Still, I’ve showed up to watch the sun, and now it does the miraculous one more time: sending gold-fingered rays up the east edge of the morning.
So. This is what I’ve been doing to greet the day: waking earlier and writing. It isn’t enough, and what I must do and what I do get done are still a chasm apart each evening, but it’s a start. It’s showing up. It’s the beginning of a practice that I am always at the beginning of.
It’s the way I pray, the way I pay attention, the way I arrive most wholly here.
Hello day. Happy solstice everyone.
A love letter to you:
Dear you (yes, you). It’s been a long time coming, this change.
I want to start by telling you how much I adore you. How much your comments and support and emails and questions have changed my life for the better in inexplicable, remarkable, profound ways.
I want to tell you how much I love that some of you have stayed with me since the very beginning, when the word blog wasn’t one people said out loud; and that I appreciate how others of you have found me just recently and have said the kindest most thoughtful things my words here, on twitter, and here in the comments.
It means so much to have your eyes reading; to know that my words and images are, if only in the smallest of ways, igniting in you a desire to embrace your life right now, to the very best of your capacity.
That is what I love to do, more than anything else: to dwell in the mess and sweetness of life as it is, to share it a way that gives of sparks that you can light your own tinder of curiosity with: driving straight to center of your own courage, and claiming whatever story it is that you need to be telling.
And this is what I hope to do more of in the days and the weeks ahead, at a new url.
Mytopography has held for a long time. It has described, accurate, the way my showing up in this space has been my narration of the shape of daily life. Still, as I’ve gradually found my tempo and voice and focus, I’ve found the confines of that title too small. I’m ready to claim my own name, and with it, open the door to some bigger and bolder and more vibrant insights, offerings, narratives and possibilities.
All this to say, sometime this week I’ll be moving my blog over to christinarosalie.com. That way, I’ll be able to keep all the archives here, the accumulated narrative of voice, and magic, and timing. That way I’ll be able to keep the nearly 14 thousand comments you’ve shared with me here. That way there will be a connective thread from the beginning, to what is beginning to emerge.
In the new space I’ll still tell you stories about Bean and Sprout and T and long dirt roads, and the way the seasons arrive, unpacking their many colored quilts of promise: the new tendrils and fragile foliage of spring; the ardent green of summer when the orioles turn the air above the apple trees to streaks of vermillion and gold; and the soon-coming fall when the light slants and tart apples sweeten, and my heart aligns inward with the gravitational tug of the Earth as the night sky spreads with the ink of darkness sooner, and again the longest season starts. Winter, with nights of stars and frost and days of falling snow and introspection.
But I’ll also be sharing more about taking action and creative process. And about mindfulness and motivation, and the alignment of those. I'm also looking forward to making some changes to the overall look and functionality of the site so I can respond to your comments better, so that together we can share thoughts and words and ideas that speak to the bigness of becoming.
Some things to look forward to in the new space:
Another pay-what-you-can studio tag sale! A whole bunch of interviews with some of the artists and writers that inspire me. Book launch festivities! And the launch of an special, bold, beautiful e-course I’ve been working on for a while now.
Stay tuned.
I’m so excited for this shift. I hope you are too!
I'd love to know: what would you like me to write or share more about.
xoxo, Christina
Photos by Thea Coughlin
A work in progress:
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, “Simba!”’
(Annie Dillard, The Writing Life)
Writing Process: wildness and resistance
I make excuses. That my desk is a mess; that I’m tired; that I don’t know where to begin. And at leas that last part it’s true: I don’t know where to begin.
I can feel the grave way that I’ve fallen out of practice. The way the sentences don’t line up readily, evenly. The way things feel off kilter and I am impatient with sitting down to begin. But more than impatience, or off kilter, I can feel the way I’m right at the edge of something that’s been building, and if I start, the words will tumble out, saturating everything, reclaiming my present tense with the sudden brute force of a flood.
It's like this: If I don't write with consistency, it's almost like I stop knowing who I am.
My soul becomes a flume of driftwood and turbulence.
I'm telling you this because I have so many other things I want to tell you: about my trip to NYC, about my book, about this space and big things that I have planned for it, but whenever I sit down't to start, I can't stop writing, and the words I put on the page are these: wild and willful. That escape me, a sluice of sentences, and I am forced to remember that this is what, above all else, I am made to do.
What about you? What craft calls you? What claims you, marks you, and makes you whole?
Glimpses from around here lately:
This week I'll be in the NYC for a few days at Blog World (for work) and the Book Expo (I finally get to meet my wonderful editor, Mary Norris in person!) That should be an adventure. I'll be tweeting quite a bit, if you're into such things and would like to follow along. And I'm sure I'll be posting photos left and right to Instagram (@christinarosalie). I'm always so inspired by the pace and colors and rhythms of the city after spending time meandering down dirt roads that are lush with green meadows on either side, and the frothy constellations of blackberry bramble blossoms, sweet now, and blooming more than I remember from any other year.
What are you up to this week?
The questions he asks
This boy is... sunshine and rain, fragility and wonder, wisdom and ferocity. He is as intense as he was when he was a baby, but that intensity is tempered by learning: he's starting to read, to write, to discover that the world can be recorded thusly, with vowels and consonants dancing together to make words magically arise from the alphabet he's known so long.
+++
In the car driving to school he says, "Mama, what's at the end of the universe?"
"I don't know," I answer, still bumble-headed, with not enough coffee in my veins. "What do you think?"
"Is it just blackness with no air and no dust?" He asks after a little while.
Immediately I imagine such a thing: a vast blackness. "That sounds pretty close," I nod.
And he nods too--I see it in my rear view mirror, but then he says, "But Mommy, what I just don't understand is nothing. I mean, what is nothing?"
Are there words to answer this? If there are, I do not know them and so I shrug. We're passing the blue corner of the lake that we drive by every day. Egrets, a pair of them, gray like metal, swoop like javelins towards the marsh at the edge. The sky is cloudless, the morning already hazy with heat.
We're quite now, our minds both filled with the remarkable density of nothing; its scope and weight, its emptiness and distance.
Then he says, "I have another question Mommy."
I brace for it, smiling a little. On days like this when he stares long out the window on the way to school, his thoughts are a different universe I hardly ever get to visit, and when he lets me in I'm always surprised to find myself a foreigner there, without maps or charts or directions to navigate. "Go on, what is it?" I ask.
"What is the purpose of humans?" his voice pitches up. "I mean, why are we here on this earth at all anyway? What are we for?"
This, before 8a.m. I almost laugh. "That's a question people ask their whole lives, I think," I say tenderly, looking back for his expression in the mirror. And then I add, "What do you think?"
He's quiet for a while, and then he says, "Well maybe we're here to teach the earth how to love."
There are no words, really, for the gratitude I feel, that I am his mama. That this particular teacher has found me, clad in the lanky limbed body of my 7.5 year old son.
"I think you're right," I tell him, and when we pull up to school I kiss him hard and then watch him climb out, his backback nearly dragging, and then run up to the doors of the school, sunshine trailing him. And at the very last minute he turns to me, a huge grin on his face, and then he waves.
Showing up for summer (#4)
The fourth thing I want to show up for this summer is: Friendship. Sharing food and drinking wine by the open fire, after dark, all of us sitting around in Adirondack chairs; or gathering in town at Bluebird or Farmhouse, or Maglianero for coffee. Time together, where ideas collide makes me happier than almost anything. (#1 , #2 , and #3).
// What do you want to show up for today?
The third thing I want to show up for this summer is: Reading poems, hungrily, whenever I can. Mary Oliver, and William Stafford, e.e. cummings, Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell. Their words become the circumference that is home. (Showing up for Summer (#2)
The second thing I want to show up for this summer is: Eating dinner outdoors with my family outside every night if the weather holds. We carry a white metal tray stacked with plates and aged balsamic, salt + pepper, cloth napkins, flatware. Then we light citronella candles, say a grace of gratitude. Eat, and worry not at all of things fall to the grass. (#1 here.)
// How about you?
Showing Up For Summer (#1)
I was thinking how easy it is to fill time with the things that don't matter; how easily we become preoccupied with being productive, achieving, doing just one more thing, all the while forgetting focus on the things we really love. And, because I believe there is great power in listing things, I decided I'm going to do a few posts about the things I intend to show up for this summer.
The first thing I want to show up for this summer is: Running first thing in the morning with the dog. Rabbits cross the road then, and the birds are loud as the mist rises off the grass. My muscles gradually reclaim their grace. This is a way I like to begin the day. One foot, then the next, heart pounding, blood thrumming. Grateful.
// Join in! What do you want to show up for this summer?
From babyhood to boyhood
I like to do this every so often: pause, and capture the expressions of my boys as they happen in real time. It's something that a photograph doesn't capture well: the way their looks are fleeting; the way their moods are like a New England spring: sunny, then storm-tossed, then serene and clear. I used to tell stories about Bean and Sprout here often, until the days blurred together and their growing happened faster than the record I could keep. Like lightening, they are taller, sillier, wiser, more affectionate, and every evening when I come home I look forward to the moment when one or the other of them folds into my arms, their hands dirty, their cheeks smudged, their hair wild.
Lately, I've been taking a little more time to pause and take note. Here is Sprout, at almost 3.5 years old:
Sprout is still the peach he's always been at nearly 3.5. He is boy of smiles and ready kisses. He is abundant in his warmth and contentment, his laughter, his tenderness, and in his loud, boisterous ways. He yells and waves his arms when he talks, as Italian as he can possibly be; and lately he's been known to clock his brother upside the head with a truck if Bean gets bossy on him and tries to mastermind the game they're playing. Yet he is shy and empathetic in equal measure: slow to warm to those he doesn't know, and always ready with a kiss and a heartfelt apology when things go amiss and he's to blame.
This is Sprout: an embodiment of contradictions. Shy + loud. Brave + hesitant. He is determined to fill his own water glass, or climb stone walls or tall trees; yet when it comes to putting on his shoes, or his pajama shirt, he always wants the help.
He is at the delightful age of matchbox car love right now. The patterns on our persian rug under the coffee table in the living room becoming roads; and he's content to play by himself for long stretches of time, driving his cars about on their imaginary journeys. He also loves building snug forts out of couch cushions and quilts to hide in, and boxes of any size suitable to tuck himself into. The world is small and big for him at once; and he's at it's center still: sturdy, delighted, charming, stubborn.
He is my love, my heartbeat, my wild, sweet, tender, second son.
Creative ritual: a walk at the blue hour
This has become a nightly ritual, after the boys are in bed. To go with the dog, and some good chocolate in my pocket and also a ball point pen, my Molskein notebook, to the pond as the blue hour draws close. Once there, I find the same smooth, flat rock to sit upon, and she settles beside me, her head on my thigh. We watch the water, spread out blue, on blue, ripple folding over ripple as the sky becomes indigo and the bats come out. And I write fast and furiously in the fading light: filling page after page in a loose, easy scrawl.
I care hardly at all about the content. What matters isn't what I write. It matters simply that I do. (I can feel it, how this is already the beginning of something new.)
This, right now:
After the boys are asleep, I go back outdoors into the soft night with my notebook, and sit by the fire pit to watch the evening gather.
I'm here. Just here, at the edge of the sloping field where the grass is growing tall. Here, at the edge of the woods at the top of the valley. Here, where the sounds of a hundred different bird calls fill the gloamy twilight: finches, robins, grosbeaks, vireos, warblers, thrushes.
And then I hear a pair of geese, circling and calling as they do, and soon others find them, and they land, one after the next with a heavy-bodied splash in pond at the edge of the field below us. Their alto honking punctuates the dwindling sentence of day, and theirs is a message that I understand: to be right here. To let the air be everything, the softness be everything. The final calling of the robin and the first flight of the bat:everything.
Now there are crows with sooty backs and beaks and breasts, perching on the quince tree, and in the distance, the sound of traffic. Nearer, through the open windows of the house, the dryer clatters, tossing a load of delicates round and round, and above me the sky has been rinsed of blue.
It turns to lavender, then paler still, until it is the exact color of the blossoms on the lilac tree where the wind chimes hang and the birds go to rest after gathering seed from the feeder.
The air is sweet with woodsmoke and it smells like summer.
It smells like childhood, like family, and all the things I ever want to remember about traveling in a camper with my parents and sister: the Grand Canyon, Half Moon Bay, Point Reyes, Death Valley, Bodega, Four Corners, Pikes Peak, The Great Divide. We'd light campfires in the evenings, and do the very thing my boys did after roasting marshmallows tonight: burn the ends of long sticks in the licking flames, and then hold them aloft, smoke spiraling upwards into the gathering night.
The songbirds slowly settle among twigs and newly furling leaves in the woods, and the sky blushes with a final rose. Above me there are contrails, golden still, then fading to white, marking the path of silver-bellied planes, carrying people wherever it is they want to go above me.
And while they cross time zones and topographies, I am here.The peepers in the vernal pools beginning there tremolo chorus as night draws close, and this is all of my life, again and again.
We are no more and no less than the sum of the moments that make up our present tense. And this now, and the now after this will be marked by a gathering of clouds, and the last surprising flight of a dozen red-winged blackbirds overhead.
//
I've started writing again.
Mostly in my Molskine, with scrawling haphazard script. But I'm finding the moments, and feeding them slowly.
To show up, to show up, to show up.
//
How do you show up?
From Instagram, with love.
There's more to that last story for another day. So much more.
But for tonight there are a handful of photos from what I've been up to since graduating. (Thank you for all your awesome comments and appreciation for the big work of my thesis. I so adore you all.)
Making your mark
I graduated! Epic. Grateful. Done.
The show afterwards at SEABA was really fun. It was so good to finally just be able to laugh, and celebrate, and drink wine, and eat cheese, and talk with some of my dear friends and favorite professors who made such an impact on my life over the past two years; and also to hear good stuff from people getting a glimpse at my work: 40 odd pages of research and interviews about the meaning and value of creativity and technology in this current era of personal brands.
I know many of you have asked what I was working on for my thesis... And I was always in the thick of it and could never muster more than a line or two. But now I have a spiffy little abstract to share, if you're still curious:
The disruptive force of technology has radically and rapidly altered our cultural and economic landscape, and the emerging era is characterized by individualism, virtual networks, and the rising phenomenon of the personal brand. This thesis examines the role of the Creative individual as a personal brand in this context, with a focus on the dynamic and causal relationship between technology and human creativity. It develops a framework for conceptualizing the personal brand platform of the Creative as an interface between technology and Self; and discusses some of the practical and ethical issues as well as the potential opportunities that have emerged as a result of personal branding in this context.
And a little bit more context for that:
As a writer, artist, and blogger, I have become increasingly interested in the ways that technology and creativity collide, inform, and influence each other in the emergent media landscape. This work is inspired by an appreciation for the voice of the medium, a sense of wonder, and a deep feeling of gratitude for all the opportunities, connections, and possibilities that have emerged in my life as a result of cultivating a presence online. The intent of this work is to start a new conversation around the value and purpose of personal branding in the emergent media context, and to offer both a theoretical framework for this reinterpretation, and a distillation of these ideas into a guide of sorts for the emergent media Creative to use as a jumping off point for pursuing the work of personal branding with intention.
...And, if you click on the image above, you can download the series of images and distilled observations that emerged from that work if you'd like. I'm definitely planning on taking it farther at some point. It's good stuff; heady and meaningful and timely.
And did I mention? I done. Wooohooo!
I'm making a sweet list of all the things I can't wait to do now that I have time. Like reading fiction. And watching movies. And listening to new music. Your recommendations for favorite novels, short story collections, movies and tunes will be taken with utter seriousness and glee. What should I make sure to include/devour?
Target practice: A reminder
It's like throwing darts. The best part is letting the dart fly: a quick flick of the wrist, and then that satisfying thud of it finding its target. The part that is less thrilling is pulling the darts back out of the board and wait to throw them again.
Yet this is the truth: every significant thing that we do involves this process of taking aim, and gathering intention; of drawing ack an arm, and then releasing with a quick flick of the wrist. And our lives mostly a tapestry of these moments stitched together: the practice of this action again and again.
It isn’t about hitting the target at all. For there is always a next time, a farther, a closer, a more perfect line up, something else to aim for again and again.
The way it feels in the end
I’ve fallen out of practice: noticing the little things, the blue pebbles amongst the brown ones, seeing the sunshine when it happens.
I’ve forgotten what it feels like to run hard: every day, with some conviction and speed, or do pull-ups, five in a row. This year my biceps and belly have grown soft.
Since turning my thesis in and finishing the last class, I've been wavering a bit. My heart feels like a giant squid, startling at the smallest hitch, at the slightest trepidation, to fill my thoughts with an unexpected blur of ink.
I’ve lost the tempo of doing things with my hands: raking wet leaves, or turning bread out onto the butcher block to knead it; and when the people I love ask, how are you? I am never sure what to say. Like the turbulent spring weather, it changes.
I can’t get this song out of my head.
I’ve been in self-preservation mode so long, I don't remember how to ease up and just be curious. I've forgotten how to laugh at the small stuff. I've been so damn seriousness for so long, because I was simply too tired to let any other emotion in traipse its way around my mind like a soft-footed cat. But now that I've finished, that cat has snuck in through the window, ferrel and reckless, spilling everything.
I had a cat walk across a painting once, wet with new India ink. It made tracks everywhere, across the floor. And that's what it feels like now. My emotions are messy. Unreasonable. Hilarious. Devastated. Delighted.
This is what coming down feels like. The hard pull of gravity and the softness of bones. A sudden hard stop, like the wind just got knocked from my lungs.
Maybe none of this makes sense.
The truth is: I'm ecstatic: it feels amazing to be finished, and where I am in my life now is . Yet it also feels so final that it's a little devastating in the way I've heard it is for runners after training for a marathon: 26.6 miles down, and then they wake up on the morning after and have no reason to train, no place to run to, no purpose to push. That feels good until it doesn’t, until the softness of cumulative exhaustion catches up, and what to aim for next is smudged and out of focus.
So this where I am right now: at the end of something, without being consciously at the beginning of something else.
// What do you do in situations like this? How do you ease into rest, refocus, move forwards?