What Rilke knows about being a beginner:
We spent the weekend reading Rilke by the river, and also riding our bikes, and talking in the fragrant, humid evening air until after midnight drinking wine. We spent the weekend in a place in between: sky and river, self and other, navigating whatever it means to become, to begin, to be in this life together and separately, wholly, and with abandon.
* * *
These words made all the difference:
I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Resolve to be always beginning—to be a beginner!
From Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters on Love"
There is no blueprint for being everything
I don’t realize how fast I’ve been twirling until I settle down with Sprout in his blue room for a nap. I don’t realize how far away I’ve been, until I am here, next to him, with his hand on my clavicle, and his damp hair pressed against my cheek.
I’m home so rarely now, it might be the truth to say that I hardly remember how it feels.
Like this.
Like the sound of his heartbeat and the oscillating fan moving air around his room. Like my body folding into the softness of his small twin bed. Like his hand tracing the lines of my jaw bone, eyebrows, nose.
I watch as the fan stirs the mobile of moon and stars I made when I was expecting him, and feel the way who I am becoming, and who I was then are poles apart. Now, I am made of twirling parts. A dervish, with a prayer of days. A hundred lists, the velocity of now hitting me with full force.
* * *
I keep looking for a blueprint for how to do this well: Being both. Being everything. Mama, writer, artist, strategist, creative, partner, lover.
The moments overlap, unfold, tilt. I write a list of of women I admire on a scrap of paper:
Georgia O’Keefe, Anais Nin, Adrienne Rich, Patti Smith, Isabelle Illende, Elizabeth Gilbert, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Alice Munro, Joan Didion, Barbara Kingsolver, Twyla Tharp, Meryl Streep, Rebecca Makkai, Pam Houston, Anne Lamott, Danielle Laporte, Sabrina Ward Harrison, Brene Brown.
Then I realize less than half have children. The half that do rarely talk of it; of how their lives navigate worlds, and how they must feel a certain push-pull and heartache that comes the tug-of-war between self and children, self and world, self and lover/partner/spouse.
* * *
Is there a blueprint for this life?
Is it possible to be great, to be a Creative in the broadest sense, to live deeply into the world, and still create the measured tempo of home, the rhythm of domesticity, the moments of daily bread and wonder? Some days I think so. Other’s not. I fluctuate, and now is the season when I feel most restless, like the raccoons who wend their way through the summer heat and shoulder-high corn, looking for fat kernels of sweetness.
It’s fluctuation then,that remains my constant.
And this much is all I know: Everything, even this restlessness, and also the quiet stirring air in my son’s blue room, and his childhood too, is temporary.
* * *
Still, I want very much to know: who are women you admire who navigate the tenuous line between motherhood and creativity with grace and verve?
There is magic in the city
Taking Inventory At The Half-Way Mark:
It was my half birthday on Thursday--and also the 10 year anniversary of my father's death. I like how those two things collide, combine, overlap. I like that each year it marks a midway point for my own year passing. It reminds me to lean into the hours, the days, the weeks that are yet mine. This year, perhaps more than ever I've made it my purpose to say yes. To approach every encounter, chance meeting, and circumstance as an opportunity: to grow, to become, to expand. The universe isn’t binary. Yes and no aren’t mutually exclusive. Our feet know--arrival and departure our temporary states, and we're always in between. Sole to soil, soul to air.
Right now I’m at the ACE in NYC. I’ve slipped off the cusp of my life and arrived at the center of myself. Maybe that sentence doesn’t make sense at all, but it’s the truth. I needed to slip away, to feel the city’s pulse in order to feel my own again.
Sometimes, when you are in the thick of your life, doing the day, one thing to the next, the map of your own meaning becomes obscured. Then it’s time let things fall out of kilter; tip the balance; rock the boat. Then it’s time to find new map, or to make one boldly, even if it means that no one else has arrived yet, on that same course.
Being somewhere new helps me to disentangle from the constructs of my life: mother, strategist, writer, lover, spouse. Showing up for oneself without any of those words is daunting, but gowth is only equal to our willingness to risk, to show up, to be split wide open by our lives again and again.
I think Didion has it right:
“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
― Joan Didion, in a 1975 commencement address at the University of California, Riverside.
The unexpected arrival of right now
I'm trying... to find my sense of place again. To locate myself here, now, where I am. But life has been a series of lift offs and landings lately, and my heart like a boomerang some days, like a kite others.
A friend said this week: "Next step: feeling the roof dissolve away from that new room in your head."
And that's exactly it. That's exactly what's happening. Life is full of a kind of poignancy I'm unaccustomed to. I'm working on so many things I love; trying to balance the shoulds with the woulds; the longing with the here and now. Little boys, with big cities; paint on my jeans, with running hard; book promo projects, with all the canvases I want to paint.
I want to hear your stories.
Have you've every had a time where you felt you were growing so fast you could hardly keep up? What was that like?
The truth is this right now:
This is the truth: I’m not sure how to start here, on this new site. Not sure, except to show up and hope you’ll show up too.
The truth is that I wake up and do the day. I wake up and write, help the boys get dressed, make fried eggs on toast, and drive to work. And then everything is different than it once was. Remember? I used to be a teacher. Then I was a full-time mama for a while, and eventually things shifted again.
Now I'm a full-time emerging media strategist at one of the coolest design studios on the planet, and every day I arrive and leave, my head brimming with ideas, plans, words, research, data sets, metrics, wonderment, proof, ROI, questions, answers, possibilities, and a perpetual to-do list.
At the end of the day I always walk down three flights of stairs to the ground, and find myself startled by the warm summer air. It hits my face palpably, my skin prickling as it adjusts to the humidity and heat. To the west is the lake, and there are often crows circling as the sky turns from blue to apricot.
I look up, paying homage to the clouds, and take a breath.
Then I drive home, the music turned up high, drums filling me as my consciousness slips out of one life, and into another: my heart tugging at the kite strings of my mind, up in the stratosphere where my head’s been all day. And before I know it, I’m on the dirt road driving towards the house I’ve lived in longer than any other house, between green pastures.
The truth is that lately, I've been feeling inexplicably restlessness--a sensation in my ribcage that is more like a deep hunger, than a reason to run. I can’t make sense of this, except to say that I feel like an entirely new room has opened up inside my head. A whole new room, to which I never knew there was a door, let alone keys and modes of entry; windows, possibilities, stairways. It’s like I’m bigger than myself, like I’ve suddenly grown to be more than whatever I was.
The truth is I feel ready for the changes that this site signify. For my name up there at the top, and for telling more pieces of my story--what it is, and what it is becoming.
Are you in?
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.