What my heart wants to say, even though my own words fall short:
KEEPING QUIET
Now we will count to twelve
and we will keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
ets stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engins;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
∗
~ Pablo Neruda
So, so devastated by the days events. Words fail, yet my heart is full.
Through the lens on a walk today
T and I went on a walk this morning with the pup, looking for signs of spring here in Northern Vermont where the winter still has been particularly reluctant to leave. We saw an owl take off above the pond with the widest wing span either of us have ever seen, and flickers with their gorgeous, almost-neon red heads and spotted plumage pecking in the newly greening grass.
What does the world look like where you are?
5 things to fuel your creative soul this weekend:
1. Review all the notes you've jotted down throughout the week. I often take notes on my phone, but if I don't make it a ritual on the weekend, I forget the thing's I've noted there.
2. Start a Spark File. Steven Johnson first coined this phrase, but it's something I've been using for years. Pam Houston calls it her "Glimmers" file. I keep mine as a single document in Evernote, so that I can access it from everywhere, and I put all my ideas there for for everything I want to write or dream into reality.
3. Eavesdrop. On everyone. Your kids. The people standing next to you in line. The couple at the restaurant, leaning in. The two old ladies with cool hats walking to church. Listen to the cadence of their dialogue. To what they're saying and how they're saying it. Take notes. Good dialogue in stories is born of eavesdropped moments.
4. Get moving. We're made to move, not to be still. Even though it's raw and muddy in Vermont in April, with my favorite turquoise Hunter boots on, and camera in hand, the meadows beg to be explored. What's around you? Get out and see.
5. Underline in magazines. There's something about the temporariness of magazines that makes us read them more quickly. We tend to skim, reading subtitles and captions and pull quotes. But I've found that when I read with a pen in hand, underlining as I go, it gives me a reason to read more deeply, and to begin to parse together new thoughts stirred in my mind by the underlined fragments.
What are some ways you love to fuel your creative soul on the weekend, when there's a little more time to sink into the moments, sip coffee, and soak up the world? I'd love to hear!
On developing a writing practice:
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It doesn’t matter what you write, it matters that you write.
It doesn’t matter if there are many good sentences. It just matters that in showing up you’ve cleared the way for a single good sentence.
There is also simply the fact of habit. That in creating it, in something done everyday at the same time no matter what, you develop some reflexive muscle for doing your work. It becomes automatic in a way, though not necessarily easier.
There will always be the in-bed bargaining. The first minutes of sleepy awakeness. But there will also be a goal streak to maintain. A promise with yourself to keep, and simpler than that: a habit that pulls you softly upright in the dark. That carries you to your chair with tea and stumbling fingers to begin.
5 things to feed your creative soul this weekend:
1. Claim an hour for white space. For doing nothing. For thinking. For Writing or doodling or daydreaming.
2. When you first roll over and wake up, write down the first five things that come to mind. No judgement, no editing.
3. Pick something to look for: a word, a color, an object. Record every instance, and notice how many ways simply paying attention attracts what you are looking for.
4. Have a second cup of coffee + linger, reading. (Feedly is my new favorite app for subscribing to RSS feeds. REWORK is the book I'm in the middle of that I most want to finish.)
5. Take a self portrait, shamelessly, gleefully, shyly. It doesn't matters. What matters is looking yourself in the face regularly. It's an act of translation sort of. A bridging of the gap between inner self and outer self. Do you look like you feel?
Do it today. Then do it again tomorrow. Compare notes. If you feel inclined, blog about it, please share a link to your post here. I'd love to see what you discover!
Our trip to New York City: an era of adventuring has begun
We went down to NYC with our boys for the first time and came back in the span of two days. Here’s what happened:
It takes us most of a day to get there, and when we finally do arrive the traffic around Canal street is so snarled we spend an hour traversing no more than eleven blocks. Still, there is no way to quash my glee or theirs. It’s the boy’s first time seeing the city, and for me it always feels like going home. My heart begins to beat to a different tempo in Harlem, and as we move down 135th street, we roll the windows down enough to let everything hit us in the face: smoked corn, roasted nuts, music thumping, exhaust, laughter, yelling.
The kids eyes wider than I’ve ever seen them, everything magic, and when we cut onto the Henry Hudson and the majestic buildings along the highway on the Upper West Side come into view, Sprout calls them castles. Later, when we’re downtown he has no more adjectives left. “Really, really tall” and “e-nor-mous!” no longer suffice.
The hotel is in TriBeCa, and by the time wecheck in all of us our starving. We connect with T’s parents and then, each of us holding the hand of a wonder-struck boy, we move up crowded Canal street through hawkers and buskers selling everything from wind-up toys to pricy knock-offs that require ducking into empty hallways and back rooms to purchase, making our way to Little Italy for food. We find a place without plastic menus, where the gnocchi Neapolitan is handmade. The boys eat two bowls.
Hunger sated we wander slowly back, stopping for torrone at a cart where the man cuts it with one swift whack of the cleaver, and then the boys eat it, somehow covering themselves, head to torso in stickiness. It’s a rookie mistake on my part, and the only time on the trip I’ll be caught without wipes.
Back at the hotel, Sprout falls asleep in a blink. Bean takes longer to unwind. We leave them with T’s mother, and stop for a glass of wine at T’s brother’s room, where their kids are awake finally, still on Japan time. We say our hellos, but after a glass, we’re itching to be off, and outside I can’t stop grinning as the night air hits my cheeks.
I know exactly where I want to be, and when we get there, there is a line until the next seating at 11, and so we find a table in a tiny café, share an affogatto, and sip glasses of white. Tired hits, but the feeling doesn’t last when the music starts.
In Smalls the walls are brick and covered with everything: evidence of literary lives, of musical greats, of love, of thwarted love, of things the way they were and things the way they are. A torn cover off a Salinger paperback. A dried rose tucked between bottles. Egg crate foam stapled to the eaves above the drum set. I sip something with grenadine and Markus Strickland carries in his horn, and people are moving, some leaving, but mostly dozens upon dozens arriving, and by some kind of perfect luck we get two stools at the bar where you can see everything: the alchemy of breath becoming song.
When they start to play I feel tears at the corners of my eyes, a grin so wide it makes my cheeks ache. Tonight, this is the way I pray, embodying song, swaying to the rhythm, complex, conversational, perpetual. There is a mirror tilted above the piano player, and also above the drummer, and their moving hands make poetry. Fingers flying, they are in some kind of hurtling conversation until the bdass slides in, whispering a solo, and everyone bows their head slightly, the notes tender, pleading, urgent, begging us to take heed of the only thing that will save us, and then the room swells up again, the sax carrying us all.
The night passes, and morning arrives, and we’re still there. I’m kissing his neck, his hand running up my back. Grinning, we leave reluctantly at 2:30, tumbling into other’s arms as we fall into bed; knowing only the fierce, uncomplicated language of desire, then sleep.
Somehow, miraculous I remember the Easter Bunny, and when they wake up, the boys find brimming baskets and tuck themselves under the desk by the floor to ceiling window and look out at the taxis already moving in fits and starts through the intersection below us, to count their chocolate eggs. T and I lie in bed, warm still, arm wrapped around each other, and when the boys climb onto our bed, Easter bucket’s titling, their fingers are sticky, and eyes wide.
Our kids are kids now, and that has changed everything about what parenting and adventuring means.
There are new horizons now, of What’s possible, and what we can imagine possible. I love the heft and sweetness of wee ones, but there is something about the way they steak a claim on you—the way you belong to them, body and soul. The way your space is never your own, nor your nights, nor any hour of the day. Having boys though, is another experience entirely, and we’re starting to explore what it means to move about, the four of us, in new places, on new adventures.
We talk about Paris. Guatemala. Portugal. We talk about taking a cross-country trip. And mostly, we talk about living in other places that aren’t at the end of this dirt road.
We spend the day the way any day might be spent: eating pastries, looking into shop windows, sipping smoothies, peaking into churches, riding the subway. We eat lunch with T’s brother and family, the cousins all squirming as we sit on the wooden floor in a Korean place, then take a zillion pictures. The air grows cold. We pick the wrong subway train. Pass the Natural History Museum. Stand forever at 125th street, then catch another train that takes us back too far in the other direction. We don’t give up. Unflagged, we finally get the local, getting off at 81st street. The museum is a zoo. So many people that after an hour we’re inundated. Tempers flare for the very first time. I need warmer clothes. T needs to eat. The kids fight over the penny flattening machine.
Finally T and I look at each other and laugh, realizing that we don’t have to stay. So we don’t. We go instead to the nearest pretzel stand and buy two big fat pretzels, salty and soft and then catch the subway back to the hotel.
We eat in our old Upper East Side neighborhood before leaving, and the rain arrives as we go. By 10pm, we’re nearing Albany and though we planned to make it all in one drive, we stop instead, admitting tiredness and tucking ourselves in at the nearest hole-in-the-wall hotel, and in the morning we head home as dawn spills like milk over the Adirondacks. It was a good trip. And when we got home T and I turned to each and said nearly simultaneously, “We are insane if we don’t do this every six months.”
Do you travel and adventure with your kids? If so, what tips and tricks have you learned?
For us, the best thing about this trip was doing very little while we were there. We mostly acted like locals. Wandered through SoHo, and took our sweet time. The Natural History Museum was something I’d put on my 36/36 list, so we had to go. But I’m glad we didn’t make any other plans. Spontaneous exploration always suits me best anyway. There’s ample time that way to take photographs and experience the delight of ordinary remarkable details.
Off for some weekend adventures in NYC!
Happy Saturday, friends!
We're off on some weekend adventures, seeing family in NYC for a very brief slice of time--just today and tomorrow in fact. And even though my friend Dan asked, "Why are you driving 6 hours just to turn around and do it again?" there's no explaining what spring fever does to a girl living at the end of a long dirt road with wanderlust in her bones this time of year. I miss the city with it's non-stopness and hum of creative making, and I'm so excited to share a little glimpse of it with the boys. They've never been.
Bean wrote the Easter Bunny the dearest note yesterday-- he was worried that he wouldn't find them at the hotel in the city. The Easter Bunny confirmed he knows his way around the city, and is fond of elevators though, so I think we'll be fine. Bean read the note carefully and asked me to read it to confirm, and then took the Easter Bunny for his word and started packing for the trip: an eclectic assortment of things including a Go Fish game, a magnetic locking spy kit, and a set of colored pencils.
The combination of practicality and pure magic that coexists in their minds right now is what I love most about their ages. They're transportable, easily delighted, curious, sensitive, and more or less self sufficient. They are also always up for an adventure. All week long Sprout would ask, "Is it tomorrow yet?" Meaning, is it time to leave on our adventure yet?
So we're off. I'll likely take heaps of pictures over on Instagram, and probably post a few of my favorites here come Monday. If there are any places in the city that we absolutely shouldn't pass up with kids--ours, and our twin almost 4 year old nephews, do leave a note.
xo,
Christina
Resistance to change, creative habits, and Sprout is growing up
It’s taken us too long, really, to be firm. To take a stand. To say enough’s enough. But to be honest, we were resistant to making the change because we were both a little afraid of what taking it away might mean for the balance in our lives. We pictured bedtimes of wailing, naptimes gone, perpetual whining in between for a week. He’s that kind of kid: stubborn when he wants to be. Also, he has unbelievable eyelashes and the biggest,
widest eyes.
Unlike his big brother, Sprout totally loved his pacifier as a baby. It was a great self soothing mechanism, which, while he was small made all the difference in lulling him easily to sleep. But somehow he’s not small anymore. He’s lanky-legged and solid, and when we’re driving somewhere, just the two of us he’ll tell me silly stories about bears and foxes and coyotes that almost inevitably end with all of them putting spaghetti on their heads and tails, and then he devolves into laughter.
And still, the paci has stuck around. It became a habit long past when instincts linger, and lately? The more he’d use it, the more bratty he seemed to become. Whining at everything. Yelling. Throwing fits when he didn’t get his way.
Still we hesitated, and the truth is I don’t think either of us made the connection entirely between his behavior and our reticence to help him give up that final habit of babyhood. We had a lot of conversations around his fourth birthday. There was mention of a “Paci Fairy,” whom he seemed to marginally believe might really come to collect all his pacis and send them off to a baby who needed them. And there was the suggestion that his baby cousin might need it instead and we should ship them to him instead.
I admit the logic was warped in all cases. But I know you've done this. Made some halfhearted attempt to see just how gullible your kid is, in hopes of being able to make a point or change the course with the least amount of resistance? Wool over eyes. An impossible suggestion to make a point. Knowing the entire while that it won’t really work unless you get behind it too.
All this to say: We were afraid of his resistance and because of this we were halfhearted. Our lives have had all kinds of curveballs lately, and every time we ran the scenarios through in our heads, and we’d end up shrugging and giving up saying, “Well, he’ll grow out of it eventually” or, “He won’t go to high school with it.”
But then this past weekend he was a whiny monster all of Sunday, and at one point when I removed him from some utterly nonsensical embittered argument with Bean over legos or blocks or whatever it was that had devolved into yelling, and while I was carrying him downstairs he wacked a block towards one of the newly painted hallway walls. And somehow that was it. My resistance to change was shaken. I was really in.
I plunked him in a chair for a time-out. He wailed. I resisted, and when repentance crept into his voice, he started asking for his pacifier, out of the blue I said simply, “No, you’re too old for pacis. You’re done. Your behavior has been showing me that it’s making you think like a baby when you need to be thinking like a kid. All done.”
It wasn’t a threat. It was completely the truth. That is the phenomena that I’d been noticing. And when T heard me say it, he nodded and said, “You know, you’re totally right. That’s exactly what’s been going on.”
And just like that, we were both in, and he cried for a while and asked for it about seven hundred times and then he finally climbed down from the chair and ran off to do something else and that was that. That night I heard him muttering “Oh, right, no paci.” And it took him all week to figure out exactly what to do with himself at bedtime—but he did, and we did, and it was almost entirely a nonissue.
His resistance in our heads was so much worse than the actual event.
Which got me thinking about how this isn’t just true with parenting. Watching Sprout ajust to new habits made me realize how often the narratives we tell ourselves resisting change are more difficult to overcome than making the change itself. This is certainly true with my own life too. The starting of a creative habit—the waking up daily, the building of an unbroken goal streak*—it’s actually harder in my head in the moments before I commit to it, than when I do.
So I'm wondering: How many times have you resisted making a change because there’s some story you’re telling yourself in your head? How many times has your own inertia that kept you from swerving off the course you’re on, even if the swerve would inevitably lead to growth? How often do you resist, simply because the story of your resistance is stronger in your than your commitment to change?
What if I told you that all that resistance is far worse than the actual event of change? What would you let go of? Stop doing? Start?
*More on goal streaks & creative habits in my next newsletter coming out on April 1st! SIGN UP.
Let the choices you make today be the ones that make you glad
It’s before the dawn and I’m up. The choice is mine. Hello writing practice. Hello day. I lie in bed for a minute or maybe five, feeling the way my mind slips like a gymnast between one state and another: one second I’m here, the next I’m somewhere else entirely, with people I’ve never met whose faces are as vivid as the day is new.
“Are you getting up?” T asks. He’s rubbing my feet, a ritual he started sometime this summer when he realized, maybe for the first time, how I settle into myself in the morning. Head first, then body slowly.
I’m always surprised that I can talk at all then, with my eyes closed, and my body still enmeshed in the silken cobwebs of drowse and dream.
“Maybe,” I say. The choice like a soft purring animal in bed with me.
But the truth is, I’ve already committed.
Yesterday I spent some time with my priorities for this year, looking at how each breaks down into hours and minute spent daily toward achieving them. And writing, as always, was at the top. It’s the most important thing to me, above all the urgent things, to show up and put to the page as the world turns to blue. Before there is rush, and fragment. Before the trees take on the pale color of day, and then are painted gold and blue as the sun climbs up through the tangled ladder of their branches. Before other things chime in, to make arguments of urgency that cannot be avoided.
And so even as I’m lying in the soft warm dark with this purring animal kneading the rumpled edges of my dreams, I know I’ll get up, press a hot wash cloth to my puffy eyes, pull on sweatpants and pour tea (never coffee first thing) and wait with the cursor at the page.
It takes another minute of struggle to do it. To get up, really. But then I’m here.
Last week my sister sent me a link to the Huffington Post essay, “Leaning In: Similarly Yet Differently” by Carissa K, about two friends whose lives had since high school, run on parallel tracks, careers, companies, promotions, each of them making one choice and then another; each of them progressing, or sometimes outpacing or catching up until the author went and had a baby, and the other friend did not.
Then, inevitably like tracks in a switching yard, their courses changed.
Isn’t that the way it goes?
I found myself nodding as I read, aware of my own narratives about how, and who, and why, things have turned out the way they have for me. The stories I’ve told myself about the life I’ve chosen. Now, at 35, I have enough of a past to look back on roads not taken, and the outcome of those choices not made will always be fiction, played out by the actors and actions of other peoples lives.
What I’m trying to say, I think, is that we all have our own version of Kate. An alter ego. A parallel universe. A real-life or imagined embodiment of what if, or if only. The way we didn’t go.
And truth is: at every turn, we choose, and with our choosing, the inevitable slice; the bifurcation; the way thing sheer off from our lives: opportunities, outcomes, options. The inevitable nature of choice is that there is always another. The what if? The passed-up chance. There will always be something we leave behind in order to make the choice we do.
This is another way of saying: the choices we make matter immensely.The ways we wake up or stay asleep to our lives. The ways we choose urgent over important, or the times we decide instead to do the most important thing, even when other things and other stories thunder in our ears with their urgency.
This is also a way of saying: those things you didn’t choose? Don’t let them define you. The lives you passed up in order to live this bold, glorious life? It’s all fiction. It’s all a story you’re telling yourself in your head. I'm reminding myself of this today, and also, hopefully reminding you:
The parallel path is not your path. Put your time into here, into this now, into this bright new day. Let the choices you make today be the ones that define who you are.
Creative habits: glimpses from around here lately
I don’t think I understood really, how flat-out I’d been. How the pace of my life had become my life. How, in spite of writing a book about this very thing, somewhere along the way I slipped back into the groove of doing the day to do it, rather than to be in it. And now, after having come to a full stop, I’m beginning again, with tender intention to form new habits that feed my soul.
Habits are interesting things. When we create them with care, they can be our secret weapon, jet fuel for living at our truest velocity. But when we simply react to our lives, habits form too. The past few weeks for me has been all about peeling back the layers of self, and finding the fulcrum of habits that have formed out of self-doubt and self-preservation and angst and worry, and letting them go. The next part, which has been surprisingly hard for me, is defining the shape of new habits that support my greatest intentions, and align work with joy, so that instead of becoming a job, the work I do becomes my livelihood.
I’ve been writing lots of lists. Sorting. Sifting. Prioritizing. Downsizing. All of it feels, as I’ve said before, really right-timed right now, with spring creeping across the fields as the snow melts and each day new birds arrive. The air in the morning now is filled with calls, even as now flurries still fall.
Here are a few glimpses from what our weekend looked like. One of the creative habits I want to grow this month is blogging regularly--even when I all I have are a handful of snapshots, moments un-curated and in progress, the little glimpses of life as it's happening around here. It's something I struggle with--because I always feel like words should be there too, crafted and thoughtful, but lately I've been wondering if that's just another story that I've been telling myself. Maybe less is more here too?
Happy Monday, dear friends!
In the comments will you tell me: what does the word livelihood mean to you? And also: what creative habits are you trying to cultivate in your life right now?
How to find your true velocity: do less to achieve more
I meant to write here all week, but then I did other things. Namely, slowing down until I was just doing one thing at a time. I've been exploring this since I began to muse about productivity last week, and part of my work right now is about finding my true velocity, between rest and motion, between production and inspiration, between input and output.
I'm taking the time to notice the impulse behind my actions, and am finding that though there is a tremendous difference between action and reaction, I think the lines become blurred. Isn't this true for for most of us? We’re so caught up in the doing of every day, that stress, exhaustion, and the standards of productivity we hold ourselves become the incessant refrain in our heads, do more! Do more! All we can do then, is react.
Yet we also know somewhere in our heart of hearts, that doing more isn’t the answer. Doing less is. Animals know this. They only exert energy when necessary. They run hard, climb wildly, mate with gusto, devour voraciously, chase, sprint, dart. And in between they come to a full stop. They rest unambiguously. The secret to our power is leverage. What lights us ablaze is a wholehearted alignment of soul with action. It's the right conditions and then the striking of a single match.
Animals have no trouble at all with doing one thing at a time. But we perpetually trying to do more. We say maybe when we mean no. We take on more because we’re afraid that whatever we’re doing isn’t enough. We scatter our attention because the heat of single-minded purpose threatens to consume us. And also, we’re terribly undisciplined. We're hedonists at heart, the lot of us, perpetually falling in love with whatever’s yet to be done.
This isn’t a new conundrum, though certainly it's more of a Western predicament. And it's certainly become more complicated since the world has gone digital and we have at our fingertips a perpetual black hole of distraction and possibility. In cleaning my studio I found a page I’d printed out with Henry Miller’s Commandments for writing. The first one? Work on one thing at a time until finished.
One thing. One thing. One thing.
But really, what I'm learning is that if I don't react, if I'm not always at the ready to respond, if I'm less accessible, it doesn't mean they end up getting less of me. Instead, the opposite is true. I'm able to show up with greater concentration and energy, bearing pineapples and little boys to make a messy meal, or to sit over sandwiches and catch up face to face instead of exchanging a flurry of partialities by text.
What about you? When do you spread yourself too thin? And conversely, when do you make time to focus wholly on just one thing?
Why productivity is not enough
The roads are muddy now; one day ice, the next day thaw. The sun can’t make up it’s mind. It shows up in the morning all glowy and bright, and then the day turns fierce and raw, with flurries in our faces. The beginning of March is the time when things appear to be standing still at the surface, but underneath the mud is thawing and sap running, and it seems right on time, this shift.
I’m reeling still, coming off of what has more or less been a four year sprint: a baby, a book, graduate school, a job, and now this, whatever this is.
I’ve been thinking a lot about standing still. About really giving pause.
I’m not sure when the last time was that I really did that. Stopped entirely for long enough to feel only the rhythm of my own pulse stirring. Can you put your finger on a time like that? When you weren’t actively producing anything. When was the last time that you came to a full stop?
The houses along the back roads here show a rawness and wear this time of year. The optimistic red paint from brighter time is worn thin. Barns that were once full with the sweet breath of dairy cows stand empty or are repurposed, housing tools or tractors or other less important things. Houses gird against the thinning and seemingly endless cold of New England's forever-long winters.
I think that what we’re afraid of, our Industrial Complex in over drive, is that like the barns, we’ll become obsolete the minute we stop producing. Pause one second, and the next we’ll be a wash-up, cardboard over the windows for extra insulation.
I think that’s what has surprised me most about being adult: that it never stops. That if you let it, the world keeps right on demanding. That if you buy it, everything is about production, about resources, about consumption. As if we are made of infinite stuff; time unlimited, our hearts as geared to function like some precise and whirring machine. The days fill up. The years too. Do you feel the way that happens? The way output gets weighted over input; matter over spirit, job over calling.
When was the last time exactly that you came a full stop, or let the hours or days fill with emptiness?
I am feeling my way along the edges of this truth, and finding myths at every turn. Productivity is our inheritance, borne of our our Western Industrial Complex. We produce, to produce more in kind. Our productivity simply yields more. More hours spent producing. More minutes, multi-tasked.
But the fields know a different secret under snow. They lie there, unafraid, bearing the sudden weight of snow, the prolonged rest of white on white, where only voles and field mice and foxes hunger in the gathering dusk, leave a smudge of vermillion at the periphery of what we know; tracks crossing here and there to unknown places that lead back underground. The fields, fallow, gather promise. Metabolize potential. Prepare for the wild frenzied greening of May and June when suddenly the grass is waist high, and we blink and there are red winged black birds making nests and milkweed growing tall and purpling with blooms.
When was the last time you let the field of your heart lie fallow? Not in ruin, like the barns in disrepair, signifiers of industry no longer relevant. Not by accident, or by neglect, or because of giving up. But on purpose and with intention. To rest, to recuperate.
Full stop.
And then to gather energy anew.
I have no idea what that looks like really. I’m just feeling my way around the edges of it, wondering, and also knowing that my body, animal first, is begging me to listen, attuned first to it's wild truth, more than to the endless precise production of machines. How to listen. How to slow in these moments now entirely?
Tell me things. Tell me about full stops, and fallow times, and hibernation. What comes then?
When the universe has been listening all along
So, dear friends, I have been silent here the past two weeks because everything in my world has been shifting and kiltering and truing towards a new more rightly aligned north.
Two Mondays ago, the same Monday we moved to my in-laws house for the week while our new floors were being put in, I found out that my small department of two at the design studio where I worked, was cut. My role and the department represented new capabilities for the studio, and for various reasons, some better reasoned than others, including a tightening of budgets and pressure to reduce overhead costs, there I was at 10:30 am, suddenly cut loose from everything I’d spent the last year working on.
It was a shock, but not necessarily unexpected. Even though I loved the work, many things about the position were lacking in--terms of resources and internal support, and there were many days that I spent quelling a feeling of panic in my ribcage because of the way things felt perpetually out of alignment. Days when I felt like a singular salmon swimming up through turbines too numerous to count., trying to convert a studio saturated in the language of print, into one with a fluency in online engagement. And so in so many ways it was a best worst-case scenario, for now, after three years of sprinting and preparation, I have the time and capabilities to begin doing work that has my heart.
The work I’ve been hankering to do, and have been doing in the margins, in any extra hour I’ve had. First and foremost: writing again, for real, for earnest. Fiction, essays, the mapping of two future books. And next, work I’m called to do as to do as a creative catalyst: providing creative’s and entrepreneurs with soulful brand strategy and business opportunity coaching.
Already, this work is aligning in ways I could never have imagined, with some super exciting collaborations that have emerged with sudden energy and creative force as if they were lying dormant, waiting for just this chance.
It’s as though the universe has been listening all along.
But oh, the disorientation I felt, having neither the habits of home nor work to hold me for two weeks. I’d end up driving places only to realize I’d forgotten to make a turn. My studio in boxes. Our house a sudden construction zone, with insulation guys and flooring guys and a painter, their coffee cups and machines and dirty footprints tracking from room to room.
Now, finally the house is put back together. New floors, and some new paint for furniture well loved. Vermillion, turquoise, and clean, bright white. It’s been so good to move back in, and to catch up slowly with myself. It feels right-timed in ways I can’t explain.
Snow is still falling, fat and wet. But the days feel warmer, and the sun stronger. There’s mud now in the sunny places on the drive, and the taps are in on all the maple trees. Even though it looks like winter, there is a stirring, a calling from the deep. To rise up, to unfurl, to begin anew.
Thank you so much for not deserting this space entirely, even with my long silence. One of the things I’m most excited by with these changes is that I’ll finally be able to really show up here again.
xo,
Christina
Things to enjoy + take note of this week:
The tomboy-chic look of A Well Traveled Woman
Ah-ha moments of realness and couragethat happen with new motherhood.
The rooms in Michael Graydon's world.
My friend Steve will be on This American Life soon. That's pretty cool.I love going through the TAL archives.
A project with my friend Willow I are doing: 35 Words + an image every day for the year.
A way to take notes in the shower. Really, what more is there to say about the genius of this?
The talented artisans from a favorite cafe of mine here in Vermont are featured on The Selby this week. So love that.
I have an artist crush on Oliver Jeffers. Also, his studio is pretty rad.
The Wilco NPR Tiny Desk Concert. They are poets in their own right.
A new mix on 8Tracks that I made. Love songs. Wanderlust. All of it.
Tell me what are you listening to? Watching? And finding inspiration from this week?
Watching a boy grow up:
We're nearly late, and I still don't have my things together when he asks me to to put the finger lining right-side-in, inside his glove. "Fine," I say, putting the bag I'm carrying down, and I crouch beside him, my too-big hands awkwardly cramming into his still-small gloves.
Inevitably, I am wearing wool and overheat immediately with the effort. It doesn't help that I'm already feeling the panic of a day too filled with things: lists I'll never make it to the bottom of, tasks unfinished from the day before. And as I am struggling beside him, asking him to try to push his hand inside his glove, his arm goes limp.
I look up and see that he's caught sight of Sprout playing with a little red flashlight. The one I found deposited carelessly on the driveway, buried under snow. I'd told Sprout he could have it. But now Bean wants it in his customary way: "That's mine!" he says, grabbing. Even though it isn't.
No amount of nudging or barking at him would get him to refocus on the situation at hand: namely his hand inside his glove that still would not fit. And suddenly I am caught up in my own hormonal, over tired, overheating tide of frustration and stress and I yell at him with a ferocity I don't expect.
Then I walk away, furious. Unable to stop, I keep yelling, caught in the sadness and shame of my own anger, and not one a bit demonstrating the the grace the self-discipline that I wish for my boy.
Eventually enough time has passed in the car on our long drive, and when we talk, his voice mostly so quiet, I can hardly hear as he replies "Yes mama" and the "No mama" and then "Yes mama," again.
I'm not sure if any of what I am saying will make a difference to him. If he'll remember my apology, or my outburst down the road. And I can feel the way we're navigating something new now. An unfamiliar terrain where feelings matter more than words, and logic is sidelined by reckless hearts. "I love you," I say to him as he climbs out of the car.
He looks at me, his face ethereal and serious and pale. "I love you too mama," he nods. "Bye!" And then he turns and walks away.
Today I idle and watch him go. His backpack so heavy, it's nearly as big as him. It's his choice. He doesn't have any books to bring. Instead, he brings extra clothes for worst case scenarios and because he likes to be the one to share with friends when they forget, and also because he's like a bit like crow, always gathering a rookery of things.
Little scraps of fabric, pencils, tape dispensers, invisible in pens, and mailing inserts. Used-up gift cards, marbles, yarn, and costume jewelry. Pen knives and hole punchers, batteries, postcards and locks and keys. These he stows in a vintage lock box that he bought from a flea market with his own money; the kind hotels used once, to keep the room keys safe with little rows of hooks on the inside.
"They might come in handy," he says. And often they do. More often though, I'm finding them in his pockets.
When he gets out of the car his backpack tilts sideways. And he has to lean awkwardly and throw his weight around to right it before he sticks one arm threw a strap and then the other.
I wave goodbye but he's not watching. Instead, he's turned to grin at another boy, walking with a blue puffy hood pulled tightly around his chubby face. He looks older than Bean, and they're not in the same class, but they seem to know each other in that casual schoolyard way of boys. He shows Bean a pencil stub he's got in his and as if it bears some importance. Both grin with big front teeth. Bean leans in with curiosity.
In their world, pencil stubs are still important.
I watch them walk into the school building together; a walk I no longer make with Bean, instead dropping him off at the circle, as he slips off into the secret world of school where he navigates everything on his own, becoming whomever he is becoming without me.
This is the crazy part of being a parent. The part when you realize that all along they weren't really yours. Not even as a tiny baby when all you did was teach them how to sleep and how to smile and how to eat and how to dream, they weren't yours. Not even then. But it's easier to fool yourself then, smelling the top of their head and believing they'll always fit just there, their small head tucked under your chin.
Now this colt-boy of mine will be 8 in a week. This wild, tender thing I've raised; long limbed with unruly hair that refuses to lie straight, even slicked under the tines of a wet comb. This boy. Becoming his own self.
He is skinny, he is lanky, he is a live wire full if electric energy and ideas. He is sentimental and nostalgic and terribly, remarkably bright. And he's so stubborn sometimes my heart breaks.
This is my lesson today: I can't really control him. Only he can truly control him. I can give him guidance and good habits, and do my best to hold my own tempestuous heart at bay, but he has to show up in his own way, finding the tenor of his own conscience, and the discipline of his own will.
And oh, how I hope we get this balance right before he's 16 and muscled and full of testosterone causing wild tides to rush in to the uncharted caves of a young boys soul. Would that we get it right before I resent him and he resents me.
Later, after dark, when I come home from work he's there at to greet me and when I put my things down he flies up into my arms. He is so light still, and lithe, his legs wrapping around my waist like some small koala bear. "Mommy!" He shouts. "I missed you! I'm so glad you're home."
An evening spent:
There is Peterson’s Guide To Fishes and Barry Lopez’ book, About This Life that I have not read, and also the heater ticking on beside me. A small oil-filled upright space heater. The temperature still keeps flirting with negative numbers.
The walls are cut open, drying. The floor is buckling more. Little uneven peaks and valleys; so many hours of sweat and effort to lay it all in place. It makes me bite my lip to thinks of what's ahead; ten days living somewhere else. Some other floor put down.
Now T brings up up chai with frothed milk and sugar, and on the windowsill there is a candle, shining its light from a mason jar, and fame burns steadily and low. Ben Webster plays "That’s All” on the sax so perfectly I want to dance and laugh and cry, all at once, those tremulous notes saying more I can ever do with just these words.
The dog shows up, her yellow tail wagging temporarily at my knee, before she goes to find the softness of her bed (I am always ending up with pets like her: too outspoken, too independent, too much like me.)
