Just one paragraph
We haven't seen each other in months, even though for the past six month's my friend M. has lived here. Time passes like that. A blur. And then she texts, "let's make sure to meet up before we leave. We're leaving on Friday." And so I put aside other pressing work, and walk out into the warm air to find her.
Soon we're sitting on a bench on Church Street sipping cold drinks. Condensation forms on our glasses, our fingertips wet as we gesture and laugh. The air is humid, heavy, bright with sun. The thermometer climbs past 90.
She tells me she's planning on traveling for a while: camping wherever she and her husband land for the night across the West, and so I say, "blog about it! Keep a record."
I can see the way she flinches just a little, and also smiles--like I've dared her to do something, even though mostly I said it because I want to go along, vicariously, across the West, campsite to campsite. But I get her reaction. It's so hard to start after you haven't for a while. Hard to get past the inner critic that says, "It should be better, more clever, more crafted, more intriguing." Hard to just show up and write, keeping a record as the moments unfold. But that, truly, is the wonder of what a blog can be at its best. Unvarnished, real-time evidence of a life as it's being lived.
So many of of my clients have the same challenge in one way or another: they imagine the bigness of starting, instead of the smallness of it and so taking the first step becomes tremendous, daunting, bigger than life. They imagine the end result: a thriving blog, a booming business, product flying out the door, and the path from here to there is inconceivable. But the truth is, nothing begins with grandness. Instead, it begins with small act of showing up. With something small. With a single step. And so I say, "Just write one paragraph a day."
She grins like sunshine, because that's how she is. She gets out her phone and writes herself a note. Just one paragraph.
Starting is the hardest part. Even with the small micro-goal of a single paragraph. But the challenge is all in your head. The minute you start, things happen. Your fingers moving there on the keyboard will lead the way. Your mind will slip into a groove, or find a pattern or answer or riff.
But to begin, just a paragraph. Just that.
Driving home in the evening I think of our conversation again, and feel the weight of the dare: Just one paragraph blogged every day.
I know I haven't been showing up here regularly either to record the moments, my process, the glimpses into my life as it happens, and it's something that I want very much to do this summer. Yet like everyone, I have excuses. Many of them very apropos: I'm writing elsewhere online; I'm working on a fiction piece; I'm drafting the outline of a book; the heatwave makes it hard to concentrate for very long; the kids are under foot; my work days are filled to saturation. Non really hold water.
So I'm putting myself up to the challenge (and you too!) to blog a paragraph every day for 30 days. For me, it will be the last 30 days in this house. Next month on the 20th we move. Then school will start soon after, and new routines will emerge. But until then, 30 days. 30 posts. 1 paragraph.
Are you in?
I've had a few people ask for badges for this little project, and so here you are. I'm thrilled that so many of you want to join me! It will be worth it. Promise. (Also I can't wait to see what you share every day!)
Camping in Maine
Still, once we got in the car, there we were. Driving, singing at the top of our lungs, mediating arguments, and stopping for things to eat. We drove late. Spent the night in one of those grungy little motorist motels that are every seven miles it seems along the highways in Maine, and the next day made our way out to the coast.
The sky turned from foggy to blue, the water cerulean, the salt air immediately causing my hair to curl. Our campsite was under pines and birches at the edge of an old granite quarry just outside Stonington. In the distance, a fog horn, and nearer, the smell of camp fires and the soft spring of pine-needle covered ground under our feet.
We swam in a fresh water quarry on an island, rock hopped on the beach, ate lobster, shucked oysters, learned what lobstermen do, marveled at the many colored buoys, wondered at the life of lighthouse keepers, pointed to seals (like fat sausages on the small granite islands out toward the edge of the bay) and cormorants and gulls, explored the town, drew exquisite corpses while cooking dinner, roasted marshmallows, and threw rocks off the edge of the quarry before sitting together at sundown watching the heavens flame and the water turn to liquid gold. Of course there were moments when we snapped at each other. Everyone got bug bitten. There was sap on the bottom of our feet. We cooked too much food one meal, and didn't bring enough when we went kayaking for half a day. We spent a small fortune on firewood. We brought too many shorts and not enough sweatshirts. We forgot reading material (except iPads that died shortly after arrival.) We had a long drive home. And it was perfectly imperfect.
It took three days really, to just be there. To stop thinking beyond the moment. To settle completely into the simplicity that camping affords: making coffee and frying up eggs and pancakes over a griddle in the morning; walking to the water to play for some part of the day; then venturing into the town, or out onto the water in a kayak or a boat to watch the grander "vessels" as the boys called them.
Sprout was worried about the huge, beautiful old sail boat that passed with a black flag flying. "Pirates, Mama!" he proclaimed from the front of my kayak. Then he proceeded to lie low so that they wouldn't come after him (and nearly fell asleep) as I rowed steadily to shore.
It took three days and then the fourth was dreamy and even keeled and I didn't want it to end. I didn't have time for writing really, but what I had instead was time for thinking; for listening; for sifting through the tumbling of the thoughts and ideas that have accumulated over the past few months. And also time for not thinking. For just being there, in my most animal state: sun browned and mostly naked on the beach, watching the gulls twirl and the boys laugh and the salt air stir the tall, tall pines.
Adventuring + resilience
To heck with the rain, with mood swings, with overwhelm, with too much (to do) and also with too little (time), we're going on an adventure.
I'm not nearly as good at doing that as I'd like. In my head I'm a spontaneous rebel, but in my habits, I'm a calculating planner. I like to be prepared: for bug bites, bee stings, and general worst case scenarios and missed connections.
I wasn't always this way. Before kids, way before kids, I went to Europe for a year with my boyfriend, with only $800 hard earned dollars, no credit cards, and no firm plans. Things worked out, though there were many scrapes and close calls.
But now, with kids, I feel terribly vulnerable in a way I can't put my finger on. I feel responsible for everyone else's happiness, and for the possible disappointment. Trying to shake that and relocate the easygoing, resilient vibe I used to have about leaving and uprooting and adventuring.
I'm very curious what a few days on the coast in a tent will do for my psyche and my family.
I'd love to hear from my most adventurous readers: how do you maintain a sense of spontaneity and ease adventuring with kids?
The truth about having kids, making a creative life and finding true velocity
Here's the truth:
I don't really know how to slow down. In fact, I don't even really know what those two words mean, in the context of my life. And even more truthfully: I'm afraid what slowing down would mean.
I'm 35, and already nearing the apex of this brief, beautiful life. My half-birthday comes at the end of this month, and time dissolves with every breath. Every week there is a new magazine cover featuring 30 under 30 who have done radical, amazing, remarkable things. People who own companies, who are recognized by millions, who are worth millions. Kids, nearly, with smooth skin and glossy lips and the ease of only caring about one single thing: their careers.
Instead, I had my first baby at 27. The next at 31.
Having them forced the pace of certain trajectories to slow. Life became multifaceted. Complex. Abundant. Nonlinear.
With kids there is never simply, A to B. There is never exclusive focus. Never uninterrupted solitary effort for days on end. Every power sprint at work must be equaled by another power sprint at home. Every expenditure of effort is met by a simultaneous demand for effort to be spent.
My boys wake up fresh faced, beaming, urgent with their small demands. Cheerios and snuggles, trips to the library and the pool. Bike rides, french toast, bandaids applied to scraped knees. Mediation, moderation, patience. Endless demands for those.
It's not that I would change a thing. In my heart of hearts, I wouldn't have done one thing differently when it comes to having kids. I adore kids categorically, and I love mine most of all. They invite the universe in close. They invent different realities. They push me to discover the secrets of my heart, and to feel the urgency of what I'm capable of in a fierce raw way that matters tremendously when everything's all reconciled and accounted for.
And if I'm lucky, when I'm old they'll call me, and visit, and we'll travel Paris together and eat croissants; and hopefully even before I'm old we'll sail together and they'll show me how to see the world from a perspective that is wholly and completely different than the way I do.
But just the same, it is simply a fact that parenthood is at odds with art. Parenting and creativity are fueled by the same energy reserves and time invariably runs short for both on any given day. It will, for me at least, be a forever tenuous balance. A push and pull. Some days a graceful dance, other days an all out war.
I had my first son than nearly all my friends, at an age when I still felt a certain boundless optimism and ease, before I could really imagine the trajectory of my creative career. For that I'm grateful.
I could have only ever had kids then, before I'd begun to feel the velocity of my creative life propelling me forwards with sheer urgent force, as I do now daily. And I'd be lying if I told you that I am anything but gleeful when I watch a pregnant mama walk down the street now, and feel my relative freedom in comparison. My boys dash out ahead of me now, capable as they are of attending to all of their physical needs themselves: pouring milk, buttoning pants, wiping butts, brushing hair, pulling on shoes. Still, their lives are within the immediate orbit of my own. Their days defined by and defining mine. And it's because of their perpetual needs, and mine, that I am terrified to go any slower than flat-out, full velocity.
The hunger I have-to sink into my creative work, and the joy I take from not working at all, and making donuts from scratch or ride bikes through the rain with my boys, their shrieks of joy startling the crows in the wet hedges--is sated by the same thing: Time. Enough of it. Fleeting. Then gone.
So there it is.
The truth is a messy equation.
It's why I'm not sure about slowing down. About what it means, or how to do it, or even if I should. It's why I'm hardwired, almost, to push and keep pushing. Why I'm uneasy doing just one single thing thing at a time, lingering without purpose in the languid, ripe days of summer, simply being instead of doing all the time.Why above all else, taking it easy feels counter intuitive,especially now that I have time, relative to what I had. Because I also have crows feet and sun spots and my birthdays keep happening, each one faster than the next, and what do I have to show?
It's this that scares me: the thought of missing my chance somehow to make blazing mark that is singly my own on the world; of not leaving a body of work that lasts; of not altering in some meaningful way the trajectory of culture.
Yes, that's how big I dream. That's the truth, and the urgency and anxiousness that propels me forward.
Yet lately, I've felt the way living at full velocity is not the same as living at true velocity, and I'm trying to put my finger on the pulse of what that means.
What does it mean to you?
Just this:
“The Summer Day”
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
— Mary Oliver
Germination + Creative Process
Moisture hangs in the air. Storm clouds gather, then rain comes. It comes in torrents. Thunder rolls across the sky. Lightning illuminates the torn edges of clouds. The roads wash out. Again, and again. The hedges and blackberry bramble ditches are swollen. The woods are drenched. Everyone’s lawns are muddy beyond saturation. Each day the temperature climbs, then rain falls. Rinse. Repeat. It’s not the summer any of us were imagining really. Not the summer I imagined anyway as the last in this house: the garden beds flat squares of mud; the ground never dry enough to even plant tomatoes.
But there it is: expectations will always do you wrong.
We let our hair curl. We let the rain water fill the blue plastic pool, and then, when it’s warmed by the sun, we jump in, overcast or not, jumping until the water splashes our bare knees and shorts and arms. Wet, wetter. And when the sun does come, it’s like euphoria. Everything feels like neon. Brighter than bright. Truer than true, and when the clouds gather again, we keep our eyes trained on the places where the clouds snag; for torn corners of blue beyond the gray.
The car-load of moving boxes I picked up at a friend’s house are pliant and damp. Laundry comes out of the dryer, and waits to be folded on the couch, a snarl of cotton absorbing moisture from the air. And we try to go on about our lives, planning for what will happen next: for when the sun will come out again, and we live closer to town and pools and fresh bagels and friends.
I can’t help but feeling at loose ends. Out of habit, out of practice. I’ve spent the past week cutting back, narrowing in, refocusing on self care. Nearly perpetual headaches and digestive distress finally caught up with me, as has all the radical change that is eminent, here, happening, about to happen.
My friend Willow said: “So many things have happened in the past six months, and think how little you’ve written. You have to write to catch up with yourself.”
She knows me well.
And I’ve spent enough time watching my creative cycles--to know that I’m in a vital germination phase right now. There are big, awesome things that I’m working towards, but it’s the kind of slow work that happens below the surface where you can’t see it or really describe what’s going on, and yet it takes a tremendous amount of effort. There were other points in my life where I’m quite sure that this was happening too--and I can look back and see the outcome, and see how obvious that unseen growing time was--and I can remember feeling devastated by the apparent lack of clarity. The blurry edges. The slow motion effort, with no outward evidence of anything at all to show for all the struggle.
But I know this now: everything big starts unseen, and with great effort. All I must do now is write, and write, and write.
Tell me: how do you begin things? What’s your process like at the very beginning of something new?
Elsewhere in the universe today:
I'm so honored to be interviewed by Beth over at Do What You Love. She asked lots of great questions about change. And, there's so much of that in my life right now! She's also doing a book giveaway... just saying ;)
And...you can also find me over on Stephanie Levy's blog today, for her "Artist's Who Blog" series. Stephanie a kindred creative spirit halfway across the globe in Germany, whose art I just adore.
Home is wherever I'm with you
I don't know where to begin because things have already begun. Summer. The fire flies blinking. We're always in the beginning, the middle, the ending of something; our lives made up of this simultaneous stuff. Life, happening.
It happened fast and slow this time, and perhaps this, too, is the way things always happen. We'd been thinking for a while. Talking together, circling the idea. Talking with friends. Imagining ourselves somewhere other than this house, this place that has become home to us, that has made us the family that we are.
Because the thing is, when we moved here eight years ago I worked down the street at the local elementary school, and T worked from home. Bean was a rambunctious, curious, wee 18 month old. Life was radically different than it is now--with an 8 year old and a 4 year old and work that brings us both into Burlington almost every day.
Really, it's because of the driving. The fact that we are always driving. That we spend more time in the car than anything else. Including here at home, among the wild fields of tall grass. And it's that truth that finally, gradually hit us.
But also, we've gradually become a part of a community of creative, fun, incredible people who all live and work near Burlington, and we never ever see them on the weekends. There are no dinner parties. No after work drinks. No meeting friends after the kids are in bed. No casual play dates. It's never worth the hour spent in transit.
The truth is we've outgrown this long dirt road, in a way neither of us imagined we might. We're on the cusp of new things now. New directions, projects, adventures, discoveries.
The boys are all legs their hair long with summer; their elbows scraped. They walk down Church street ahead of us. They ride bikes without training wheels. They want to learn to skate board. They want access to a pool, to the lake, to friends, to the library, and all the things that come with living in a neighborhood instead of on a homestead.
And T and I? We want things. Some are clear: less driving. More time. And some still unnamed. Still undecided. We'll rent for a year, if not more. Let our compass needle spin for a bit, until we find the right place.
Less driving. More time. It's a simple equation really. With proximity to downtown every day will yield 180 minutes a day of untapped time. Imagine what could be done in that time!
Still, when we decided, it didn't feel like we'd really decided. It felt like fiction. Like something we'd agreed to in a story. It seemed like the decision would take forever to be real. We expected a long summer of house showings. We expected having to met out the very thin reserves of patience we barely have. We expected haggling. We expected waiting things out. Instead it happened in a weekend. The right buyers. The people who will love this place harder and more and better than we have, if that's possible. We're so happy the found us.
In a weekend.
What happened next: I was euphoric. Then I wasn't.
I panicked. I cried. I felt a thousand things. Uncertain, grateful, scared, self-doubting, anxious, exhausted, giddy, obsessive. Every rental we looked at was confusing. Yes and no. Pros and cons. Nothing felt like us. The us, of who we've become here. And even though I know that that is not the point. To continue being the same, following the same habits, fumbling for the same light switches, walking down the same hallways, the familiar has a hold I didn't expect on me. And all I wanted was everything to be settled and certain.
I was unprepared for familiarity. For the longing of it. The animal tug of comfort. For the hungry way that habit pulls you back again and again. And feeling myself pulled this way, I felt betrayed. This wasn't what I was supposed to feel. This was not what I've always said I feel, wanderlust running deep and blue in my veins, the one who always has an escape route planned, the one who wanders down unmarked roads for the sake of it, who is called by faraway cities.
It's an unreconciled thing really. Familiarity and wildness. Wanderlust and roots. And it's clear I've not made my peace with either.
Also, kids complicate things. Apartments without yards for these country boys would be the death knell. A place in the Old North End that I would love, tucked between an African market and a honeysuckle hedge, is fraught with obstacles when it comes to their innocent big eyes. Across the street the Labor Ready place where people stand about listlessly for hours, tossing cigarette butts to the curb; radios playing non-stop; an the endless stream of traffic stop and go at the light. To me, it's all material; all story. But to them?
Sprout will hardly remember this place as home. 4 is only the beginning of memory. The beginning of time transferred from short term to long term for safe keeping. For him it's not leaving that will matter, it's where we go that will count. But Bean will remember, sensitive and big-eyed. He's torn about moving. Excited, eager, and then suddenly sad.
Really, home is us, but more than that it is here.
It's the 4 of us, and who we are becoming. Our dreams, caught like fishes in the nets of our imaginations and reeled into the nearness of the present tense. Our lives, like a series of stop-motion films. One day happening and then the next together marked by the countless meals and walks and loads of laundry that make up the weft of our lives.
It took mea going alone to the top of a mountain to reconcile everything: the glee, the possibility, the devastation, the exhaustion, the responsibility, the opportunity, the hurdles. It too letting the birds eye view from up there fill my soul. It took lying and listening to the wind. It took list writing, and remembering. And then hiking back down.
Then the next day we found a perfect little place to rent. For now. For this year. Suburban. With a creek. And sidewalks. Kid-friendly biking distance to the farmers market, the library, the park, the lake. A place to transition in. To acclimate. To find ourselves becoming something else. Something new.
So, it's likely things will get a whole lot more adventurous around here, and saying that makes me see how habitual I've become in the way I see and record the moments. How for-granted everything is. The road with it's wild raspberries. The mail boxes. The neighbor's pond. And the house, with our steep stairs and red wood stove and our kitchen island around which life pivots: pancakes, coffee, sandwiches, noodles, toast, markers, legos, experiments, to-go lunches, magazines, love.
This will be a summer drenched in nostalgia and lasts. I'm planning on recording and sharing them here, so we can remember when we've moved on. So we can live each moment twice. Boxes packed and the door flung wide to the wild blue. It's bitter sweet and thrilling, all at once.
14 Summer Weeks
Even with the rain, even with the endless, endless rain, summer is here in our green part of the world. The fields are full of wildflowers. The kids are finished with school. The light lingers until late, even under the milky cloud cover.
Summer, especially here, is just 14 short weeks from Memorial Day to Labor Day,and when we blink the leaves will be turning and we'll be buying new pencils and backpacks and pants that are two inches longer than the ones they have now.
And in between, there is this golden time. Busy as it always, yet also filled with moments of delight: marshmallows over the fire and fireflies blinking; hunting for wild strawberries among the wild flowers; popsicles on afternoons and watermelon seed spitting contests; mornings spent camped out in the tree fort with a heap of new library books reading.
Still, if you're not present, it passes in a whir. So make time. Take note. Record the moments. And then share them.
14 Summer Weeks
You know you want to play along. Here are a few ways you can:
1) Write a post on your blog about your ideas or plans for intentional adventure (big or small) with your kids. Share a link back to 14summerweeks.com and they'll feature your post on our blog.
2) Tweet an idea, photo, or other kid summer moment and include the hashtag #14summerweeks
3) Or submit your idea
It will make me so happy to get a glimpse of your summer moments, and I really love this idea--started by my friend Jackson who is the co-founder of Notabli, and the husband of the ever-gorgeous Laura, author of Pregnant Not Fat.
Finding balance at boundaries of work life + love
Late spring has brought rain and more rain. Occasional thunder. Purple skies. Torrents. The air hangs heavy. Hair curls. Inevitably we leave umbrellas in inconvenient places: in the car, or at the office, wherever we are not when the rain hits, and it does. At home, on our quiet hilltop the storm clouds move off towards the mountains, leaving the green greener and the evening exhaling. The gloaming air air is soft and fragrant, filled with the vibrations of crickets and mosquitos, tree frogs, peepers.
On a walk after the boys are in bed the moon shows its waning face above the newly fluttering maple canopy. The dog smells rabbits in the hedgerows, her ears on alert, her wiry body quivering with expectation. The moon plays hide and seek with the clouds around it, and they turn radiant, iridescent, blushing each time she shows her face again. The gravel glints. And though we leave smiling, our conversation unintentionally slips. We bump up against each other. Words crossways, emotion at the surface.
It’s not on purpose. Not because there is anything awry. But simply because we’re both in the thick of things, both doing things we love, and our boundaries weak and permeable. Work has been carrying over lately, nearly every night.
Balance isn’t something you feel until you loose it. This is what strikes me, standing in the moonlight kicking at the gravel and feeling misunderstood. What we’re arguing about, and even the fact that we are, is purely product the way our work days haven’t ended with a clear edge, and everything from the day slides up against this moment like the small bits of riff raff and gem stones in a kaleidoscope.
Everything tumbling to create a bright, discordant geometry in the present moment while the frogs trill and the first fireflies lift and flit among the meadow grass.
We're both in the midst of big things that inevitably throw the balance, absorbing all available bandwidth. And then we turn to each other wondering at our own short fuses and quick tempers.
The truth is, we’re alike in the way we are both energized by action. Risk is something that has always connected us. Over and over we've leaped together toward the unknown, and for both of us, although in different ways, creative work is something that makes us feel alive.
Still, things feel off. And though at the end of the day neither of us are interested in the stasis of perpetual balance, so much as in with movement that comes finding it again and again anew. What's necessary is to acknowledge the tilting, and then make adjustments.
Things can kilter. Things can be taken to the extreme. The nature of doing work you love is that it consumes in this way. There is a voracity and hunger to it that belies balance. It's no accident we say we “fall" when we are in love.
But what makes both work and love sustainable is to knowing when things have slipped too far in one direction. It's about leaning in, and then leaning out again. Tilt, and then return. Sprint, then rest.
And to be honest, the hardest thing for both of us. The doing nothing part of intentional rest.
Both of us are inclined to throw ourselves into our work, without pausing long enough for gravity pull our bodies tumbling to the couch, legs and lips entwined. The velocity of forward motion becomes a force of it's own, and at the end of a work day, we're unskilled at letting the day come to a full stop, finding the white space between notes; pausing where newness germinates; lettting rest reclaim us.
Right now in the thick of making and doing and shifting our lives, the hardest thing is just going for a walk in the moonlight, and not talking about work, or plans, or anything at all.
I reach out and hold his hand.
We hold hands.
We breathe.
Portland, Maine in so many, many pictures
So we went to Portland East for the weekend, and oh, what a beautiful city. I dare say I fell in love. And have heaps of pictures to prove it (sorry about the overload. I just had to share all of my favorites.)
Right before we left I broke my phone, and so for the weekend I only carried my DSLR, instead of defaulting to my iPhone and it was a welcome change. Every time I walk about with my "real" in hand I find that I bring a different level of intention to my observation.
I look for the small details that make things real: the skull and cross bones sticker on the door; the fish tails on the floor; the wedge of lemon in my drink; the silhouette of gulls as the sky turns to twilight; tattered prayer flags flying overhead; the pattern of sunlight and dappled shade; the way things decay at the edges of things.
Eventually you will make a decision (or reminders to myself)
Eventually you will make a decision to stay indoors or to venture out, not letting the rain stop you. Pull on a rain. Rain pants for the kids. Boots. And go out into the smudged world, with its falling sky and imperfect roads torn loose with too much rain.
Eventually you will make a decision to give in to the sudden way the PMS creeps up and everything comes toward you like a thinly veiled jab, and the entire world seems to be making it personal; or you shake it off, pull on running clothes reluctantly, make a new running mix, and hit the treadmill hard. It will takes a while for the tempo to change you, but eventually it will. Your grateful pulse will remind you what it means to be alive, lungs raw with breath, feet pounding.
Eventually you will make a decision keep pushing yourself past your limits, or take care of yourself by asking for help. By drawing boundaries. By saying no even after you said yes, because in the moment that was easier and now you're faced with letting yourself down or letting someone else down. Because the truth is other people's disappointment isn't your problem, even though you've programmed yourself very insidiously to think that it is.
Eventually you will make a decision to forget your craft, or to zero in what you love most about it, truing to it fiercely above the urgent, the insistent, the loud demands that are yelling like a bully in your ear. Eventually it will be up to you to decide to turn a blind eye on the other things, and just pick this one thing. This one thing that feels important to you. That feels like the work you love, and just do it for an hour. Imperfectly. Even if it means you'll be up a creek later. Even if it means there will be hell to pay. Even if it means the sky will fall.
Because eventually it will. It will pour, and eventually roads will wash away. Eventually moods and hormones will catch up with you, or sleep deprivation will bring you to your knees. People will invariably be needy needy and self serving and impatient, and eventually to-do lists and deadlines and must-dos and should-dos will pile up like a angry, thumping, insistent mob inside your head.
Eventually you will make the decision: to let circumstance define you, or to define your circumstance.
And the thing is?
It's up to you to give in, or head out.
What will you decide?
The things we cannot know
"What’s your book about?" he asks, standing awkwardly at my side at a party full of writers. I’ve never met him before. It’s always the hardest thing for me to say what it’s about. How can a handful of sentences ever really convey the way everything I care about is there on the page. How to summarize something, when everything in my life went into its making?
Later I am standing with my back against the farm sink in the kitchen with a glass of rose in my hand, and I am listening to a friend talk about about her fear of dying. It occurs to me then that somewhere along the way I’ve stopped talking about dying; about what it means to me and how it's shaped me, although I don’t remember when I stopped. Now, suddenly, I know that the time is finally right to begin writing story of my dad the real way, in a book. Not only him, but everything. The way all of my life began with the convergence of theirs, and even what came before them. The way faith and timing, love and wanderlust all can be traced with a fingertip along the blue, slightly raised veins in my wrists, like rivers moving from the source. An inheritance of story. A torn roadmap of loving and believing.
I’m talking with a friend who has the most perfect bangs in the world. Straight across her forehead like Amelie, and I watch as she almost winces when she says, “How can it just be it? How can our whole life be a timeline, and then just nothing?” Then she says, "I'm terrified of dying because of that. Because of not knowing."
I nod.
The bigness of what happens after this is something we all must face. We become something or nothing. We feel the truth, or the absence of it. We know, or cannot know.
Our mortality hangs in the air.
We’re fleeting. We're scraps, star dust, uncertain particles. That’s one way of seeing. Another is how my father saw it from his deathbed, hunched among the covers, pale, morphine patches on his belly as he said, “I’ll keep doing my work from the other side.” S glimmer of a smile, like sudden flight of birds moving across his face.
“I know,” I said without hesitation.
A lifetime of conversations with that man left me feeling held in the weft of spirit worlds. Still, I was too heartbroken to write more than the raw edges of story down. Too lost in the spinning of my own world without a North to know really where to begin, or that I would begin at all, some day, after a rainstorm as I am now.
Things are uncertain always in a world where physics apply. But what of spirit?
I’d love to hear what you think.
It rained all day in fits and starts; the clouds gathering in a rush, the sky suddenly dark. At the party people read brilliant prose that was raw and hilarious and heartbreaking all at once, and someone sang “Imagine” and someone else played the piano and I sat against the wall with my dying cell phone skimming through texts from T and wishing I be only right there without distraction. Then it became clear: our road was flooded out.
My cell battery was dead leaving the party, and the night was black without stars. Every dirt road’s neck seemed to be broken at the lowest point. Sudden flash floods had swallowed every stream bed; every culvert washed away.
You never really can imagine the future until you’re there. Until you’re standing at the torn edge of macadam where the road used to continue and now it doesn’t and instead there is a ten foot drop and a raging river in its path. I bite my lip. I’m freezing, still wearing flip flops from when I left the house in the morning under humid skies and temperatures in the seventies. Now the mercury is falling fast.
Two old men join me, shoulders hunched under slickers. They are neighbors familiar enough that we know each other’s silhouettes though we’ve never said hello; living as they do, a good two miles down the dirt road from where our house sits perched high and dry among dandelion fields and maple woods. Now they shine big flashlights at the raging river, share their iPhones, offer their houses to me for shelter, shake their heads.
I can’t get ahold of T. He’s already trying to meet me, likely at the place in the road where the service dips. I leave a message. There’s no way to cross. Nothing to do but retrace my path. Back to Burlington, the clocks closing in on a new day. Nearly every road I take becomes a back track; every low point is overwhelmed. The water rages like something hungry and wild. It devours the bedrock, tears away at the pavement, tosses logs and branches and old farm machinery in its wake.
Eventually I make my way back. Call a friend, show up at her doorstep after midnight. She puts clean sheets on the air mattress, hugs me, goes back to bed, and I spend the night fitfully, rain still falling.
The next day, I leave town in the afternoon. I buy groceries, and hope for lucky breaks. Bacon for the weekend, fruit, eggs, milk. At the place where the road was a river, the water is low now, and there are two huge excavators pushing gravel bigger than my fists into the wound. Truck after truck comes, backs in with precision, dumps another load, leaves. The men smoke cigarettes and wear steel toed boots and cotton sweatshirts. They use a sign langue specific to their trade: back her up, lower her down, all set, stop, go. Watching them work with little words and absolute efficiency I am beyond grateful. I want to cry. I want hug them and offer hot coffees and donuts. Instead, T meets me on a mountain bike, carrying the backpacks we used for hiking in college. He crosses in between the excavators, wraps his arm around my shoulder.
We fill the backpacks the groceries and my work bag. Cross back over, and in another handful of minutes I’m there, the fire bright, the kids hugging me, the dog licking my hands, and everything feels certain with the familiarity of home. I am exhausted beyond reason, as though the tenuousness of everything---us, and this, and life, and the gashed and then repaird roadway---is heavy with a weight I can’t perceive.
“Mama, what’s something no one can picture?” Bean asked me on the way to school earlier in the day when the sky was still soft, and the air was warm and damp and smelled of lilacs.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said, seriously, softly. “Nothing. You can’t picture that. It’s the opposite of anything. And every time we try to picture something--we’re picturing something. But nothing... we just can’t picture that.”
Today, like any other day
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundres of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
--Rumi
Glimpses from the weekend:
Just a few images from our weekend, as we head back into the week. Rain in the forecast + there are many big projects to really dive into for me.
I'd love to hear what you are up to. Where are you putting your attention this week?
The asynchronous art of motherhood and craft
The door opens and closes. One boy and then the other come in, perch on my lap, and accept my ample kisses on their warm necks. I wrap them in my arms, hold them close, and then gently nudge one and then the other out of my studio. This is my hour. The one I’ve sacrificed sleep for, waking before dawn to come reluctantly to page while the birds lift up the corners of the sky in song.
When they were small, it wasn’t like this. I couldn’t just shoo them out and shut the door. Their needs came before mine for years; milk and comfort, laundry and the full-body demands of little ones, arms always reaching up. Hours felt spliced into impossible fractions. Half-hour nap times were never long enough. Everything took three times as long to finish. Leaving and arriving were forever activities requiring sheer force of will and extra bags: wipes, snacks for the road, diapers, extra socks. And it all felt so terribly permanent: the way the edges of my self had blurred; my identity smudged with motherhood. The way time always seemed to come up short, as though there was an accounting: a reconciling of unequal equations. Motherhood vs. livelihood. Guilt and craft and love and art.
Now though, at 8 and 4, my boys have their own perimeters. And though their lives are still in orbit with mine, we have our own trajectories. They're becoming their own selves. They dress in the morning of their accord; pour cereal, ride bikes, and running wild in the yard. And when they come to my studio in the morning now, they go without question when I ask---understanding that part of what I do is a magic that happens only when I sit alone in a circle of lamplight, fingers moving across the keys.
They scoot off my lap, and pull the door closed. Their voices carry down the hall with the thump of their bare feet.
Somehow I had babies ahead of nearly everyone in my life, and so I’m again on the flip side, watching as many of my dear friends (and sisters) navigate the terrain new parenthood. They are sleep deprived, anxious, broken open, falling hard in love, inevitably remade by the small new person in their lives.
And even though I now have these two lanky-legged kids who spend hours doing their own thing without intervention (Bean reads street signs and technical manuals and builds complex circuits, and Sprout has suddenly started draw sky scrapers, and doing basic addition) I remember exactly how it felt then, when both of them were small.
I remember feeling like the equation would never reconcile. And like my art, and time, and leisure, and my barest truest sense of self had been exchanged for some other murky self defined by milk and moments of sweet heat and sobbing, blooming smiles, and the raw edge of desperation.
How I wish someone had taken me by the shoulders then and stared into my eyes and promised: It will all even out. Things kilter back to center gradually. And then you'll be on the other side, looking back.
There is no way to talk of this without verging on cliché. They grow up so fast.
Of course I could have never really heard it then, and likely all I would have wanted was to punch anyone in the face who might have dared to say a thing like that out loud. I was in the weeds. The days an eternity of overwhelming hours. Milestones were marked in weeks. Years seemed like a forever of time when counted in diapers. Everything felt rarified: alone time especially. And time fo art most of all.
Jamie and I talked about this a few weeks ago, when she interviewed me for her Creative Living podcast. She asked me: What's the greatest challenge that you face as a creative? The long and the short of my answer was about time. Finding it. Having enough of it. Balancing it. And how this looks like closing the door--and putting my work above them sometimes.
The thing about new parenthood in particular is that it's a trick of time. It's a fiction all of it's own weaving. It makes you feel like all is lost and gained. Like you can never have it all, and like you have it all. Like you have given everything, and are everything with this other little person in your world. Like sacrifice is inevitable. Like who you were and who you are will never align with who you once thought you might become.
But, to all the new mamas reading, this is I want to tell you: There's time enough.
It isn't a race. There is no finish line, other than the one that we cross when we leave our bodies behind. Sink into the moment and trust that the right time will find you again to do the work you love. To run the miles you crave. To make the art that makes your soul light up. To _______fill in the blank.
And I also want to tell you this: That in the instances or hour or days when you choose your work over your kids they'll be just fine. You're children do not need to be at the center of your world, to know that they are at the center of your heart. And when they see you do the magic of the work you love and come back with your own well filled, they will feel filled too. That's a promise.
Navigating motherhood and a life of creative work has been like learning to swing: there’s a balance of movement that propel you away and then back towards the center of gravity that holds you here on this earth.
Ephemeral alchemy + right now
The trout lilies with their yellow faces are blooming in the woods. I love the name of these first spring woodland blooms: ephemerals. They are here for an instant, then gone as secretly as they arrived once the canopy fills in over head and the leaves begin to rustle thickly. The world is tilting towards the sun. Things are greening. The sun is staying longer in the sky. And everything is happening at once, it seems; in my life, and in the newly springtime world.
I’ve been a bit quiet here even though I’m bursting with some rather big projects. Sometimes things just need to grow in quiet first; like yeast dough rising, the alchemy of effort and attention towards these things is becoming new source of nourishment and opportunity in my life. I’ll share more soon for certain.
Right now though, I’m packing to head down to NYC to 99U ! I'm quite excited.
If you’d like, you can follow along on Twitter for a glimpse at the making ideas happen magic that will undoubtably transpire.
Faces that I love:
I've been using my DSLR again lately, and I have to admit, I almost forgot the depth and texture that it captures. I use my iPhone so much--simply because it's always on hand. But I so love slowing down, and really looking through the lens. I think these shots totally capture the boys right now. Who they are, and what they're like--mud streaked, pen marked, dirt under their finger nails. They've been on vacation this week, and finally the weather has started to turn warm--inviting long hours of outdoor play in little aluvial streams, climbing apple trees, and building forts, Clover always nearby chasing sticks.
To seek balance, and find ourselves instead in motion
We're running. He's ahead of my by a half a stride, and I can feel the way this makes me run harder, then harder still, trying to catch up, to syncopate, to be in step. Finally I ask him, "Where do you see me now? Next to you or behind?"
"Next to me," he says, zero hesitation.
I sprint a step ahead so we're in line, his feet moving in time with mine now, our knees and feet matching in gate. "How about now?" I ask.
"Ahead."
I put my arm out like the wing of an airplane, perpendicular to my side, it brushes lightly against his chest. We're exactly in line.
"I'm beside you now," I say, "But I wasn't before."
"No way!" he's incredulous. A dozen small finches lift up from alongside the road where the yellow coltsfoot is finally blooming like hundreds of small suns.
We've been running together for years, side by side, more or less in synch, our strides matching save for this irregularity of peripheral vision. Him, just a little bit ahead. Because of the way I'm strung together like a lanky marionett, my legs are nearly as long as his (though his torso is a good 6 inches longer than mine.) I'm made of legs, then ribcage, not much in between. And because of this we've always run together more or less side by side, even at a sprint.
Still, this is the first time I've bothered to ask if that half a stride distance ahead of is something he's been doing on purpose.
Most of the time it doesn't bother me. I like the challenge. I like to run hard, feel my lungs burn and my quads heat with the sure fire of muscle motion. But there are some days, like this one, when all I want is for the effortlessness of togetherness. Neither behind nor ahead, neither pushing, nor being pushed.
He laughs now, his voice ringing out into the cold spring air. The sky is overcast but bright. The pebbles on the road gleam white and copper and ocher in between the soft places where our soles sink in the mud. The fields are greening. The shadows growing long in the gloaming.
For the rest of the run we try it. Side by side. It's such a subtle shift, if I weren't paying attention I might not have noticed it at all. They way my body stops pushing. The way things feel suddenly at ease, in balance.
It's so easy, to let habit become fact. To let inertia shape the channel through which your energy flows. To settle into the way things have always been, even if it no longer feels in balance.
It's easy for this to happen especially when you've been at something for a long time (13 years for us). When the days stack up full of things that need doing and work comes home for the weekend; when dishes wait on the kitchen counter and alone-time and time together are both in short supply.
Harder to bring attention to breath and pulse and heart. To take notice of the way things make you feel; to dial in and really listen. And then to ask, to reach, to wonder, aloud and together until there is a stirring of energy. Activation. Attention. Motivation.
What if instead of seeking balance, we found ourselves anew in motion over and over again?
Glimpses from the weekend & an app I love
Last week was so turbulent and devastating, by the weekend all I needed was to disconnect and sink deeply into the simple routines of family. Homemade donuts from the tiny local bake shop that only sells on Sundays--come early, or they're gone. Haircuts for the boys and swimming at the YMCA. Making paper airplanes at the table before dinner, and watching them read together in the sunlight after.
I've been trying to take more head shots of Bean and Sprout lately, just to capture the radical growing that's been happening around here. Both of them seem huge to me, especially Bean who is suddenly coy in front of the camera, and maybe a little self conscious.
I've recently started using the beautiful and really thoughtfully designed app Notabli to curate my favorite photos, videos and quotes by my boys. Notabli has incredible privacy settings and terms for use, and its designed for parents--to take note of, and share the lives of their kids with loved ones and close friends. The best part? When the boys are big, they can inherit their Notabli feed, all backed up and ready for download. It's not often I get really excited about an app, but this one is a keeper.