A loss for words
On the way to work, after dropping the boys off at school, a piliated woodpecker lifts out of a tree and flies across the road above me. Its flightpath is a zig-zag. It swoops softly through the cold morning air to alight on a tree on the opposite side of the road. The light is fiery and gold with early morning. It makes the bird's crimson head flame.
In the night it snowed a little and ice crystals decorate the fence wires and broken grasses poking up from the dusting of white across the fields. The lake is frozen at its lip, and birds gather at the jagged line between open water and frozen water.
Such things still amaze me: that water can be solid, liquid, vapor. That birds can fly with inimitable grace. That the light is golden with a new day.
Like the birds, I'm treading the line between. Between stasis and flux, between now and what will come next, between here, and wherever there is. There: the future. Tomorrow. The next day.
The boys are counting down the days until Christmas. I am counting the days. But I can't say for what. For knowing. For certainty. The past few months have felt a lot like this. For the first time in a long while, I feel at a loss for words.
Inward Glimpses
The day we raked leaves, the air smelled like snow. We lit a small fire in the circular pit and gathered round it, warming our hands. Sprout couldn't stay away from the leaf pile, but Bean, suddenly older and just recovering from being sick, moped about the yard, wanting the reckless play of burrowing into leaf tunnels, yet scorning it too. Above us, the sky was that bluest blue of high altitude and cold weather. Later the snow came at dinner time. T had picked up fresh Bluepoints, and we shucked them by the sink together listening to tunes we'd picked up while in Louisiana this time last year.
It was a weekend of ups and downs. Enough time to read through the VOGUE that's been sitting on my coffee table for a month. Good coffee. A look at Dominique Levy's new gallery online. A trip to the new, big library we belong to now that we live close to town. A trip to the book store for another Molskine, and often, the collision of wanting time together voraciously and wanting time alone with equal hunger.
How was your weekend?
Just showing up
It's been a long time, hasn't it? Too long really to go back pick up the lost stitches of whatever came before right now. Too long to catch you upon all the where and what that was October.
Now, it is November. The light is ample while it lasts. Most days golden with a long slant to the light towards afternoon.The first hard frosts have come, shaking down the last of the gingko's golden leaves. On the mountains: snow. White on blue.
November is the season of sticks. God's architecture laid bare in the trees. Suddenly the back yard revels neighbor's yards and the topography of the adjacent hill covered with the fallen finery of golden leaves. The world feels naked and fragile now, before the snow. Everywhere the reminder: we are mere mortals.
A beautiful boy died in Sprout's kindergarten a few weeks ago, unexpectedly. Then the mother of a girl in the high school died too, trapped in a house fire. A friend tells me his marriage is falling apart.
We are all here briefly, this I know. And my prayers become profound in their simplicity: Hold us. Hold us with grace.
Sprout, with his big dark eyes keeps asking me to tell him about death. Bean asked the same kinds of questions at his age: tender, utterly unguarded, matter of fact.
"Will you die, when we're big, Mama?" Sprout asks from the back seat on the way to school.
Yes, then, or yes whenever. We're only held by a fragile thread.. The world calls us, we arrive, stay for a while, and if we're lucky, do good work.
And I've been pondering what doing good work means to me, with my heart on my sleeve and my holistic mind. I love to be consumed by my work. I love the single-minded focus of having something big and incredible to work on and work towards. And I love being a part of things that are greater than myself.
What about you? What does doing good work mean?
I keep circling around these questions as the the days grow brief.
In the stores shelves are cable knits and icelandic sweaters. Gift catalogs come in the mail.. The boys come in from out-of-doors with rosy cheeks. We light fires and gather close, celebrating St. Martin with our lanterns.
The year feels worn.
It was a year, wasn't it? For me at least, and for many of the ones I love this year brought radical change. Unexpected turbulence. The loss of things held dear.
I've been inward lately. Guarded. Quiet. Working on connecting the dots of next moves, and also on the work of self care. And yet I miss showing up here for the connection and solace and inspiration that I find from all of you.
I think for the rest of November I'd like to show up here each day with just a few photos and a handful of words.
I always want to do that, but then feel compelled to share the stories that go with them, and so I don't. But I'm wondering: Is it enough for now to just share that? Do you want just the glimpses? The haphazard sentence or two; the snapshots of work in progress in my studio; the messy lantern-lit post-dinner table; the boots in a heap by the door; the boys with their legos in a sunny patch on the floor?
Introversion, extroversion, and creative cycles
My sister and I send texts back that look like a secret code. Four letter combinations that might reveal all the evidence we know is true. Outside my studio window the remaining golden leaves stir. The light is milk, the sky overcast. I don’t need the Myers Briggs to confirm I’m an introvert. This much I’ve always known.
Still the thing that’s been fascinating me lately, is the way that I can look back and see patterns of introversion and extroversion, in the same way you might look back over recorded periods of seismic activity, or weather patterns over decades, the heat maps charting summer highs and winter lows, hot vermillion and icy blue.
I’m not always an introverted introvert, but now more than ever I am. After a season of extroversion, all I want is to abide. To be quiet with my own thoughts, my laptop and notebook close at hand.
Inhale, exhale. Expand, contract.
It’s an curiously inverse equation in two parts: When I felt most extroverted and social last spring and summer, with always a friend to meet, or a gathering to attend, I was also most drained creatively. I was resistant to working on anything new, and felt heavy-handed and clumsy scribbling notes or sketches. I avoided reading. I let distractions claim me. I flitted. I wrote only at the surface of things, and let daily client work consume me as it may.
What I know is that I was exhausted at a cellular level still, after the intensely creative cycle that had just ended with publishing A Field Guide To Now, graduating with an MFA, and then moving into a year of working at a design studio here that was intense, if nothing else. During that productive time I was less social. I had coffee only with close friends, devoted my slim free time to family, and worked.
Naturally, when the studio began to downsize and I was let go, I was ready to also let go--and spent the next 2/3rds of the year exhaling. I extroverted. I made new friends and connected old ones to each other, and watched as the studio I’d left behind downsized and fragmented, proving that no one is exempt from these cycles--no brand or enterprise or individual.
At the apex of extroversion, I co-founded Superconductor, which, true to it’s name has been an opportunity to supercharge creative connections and facilitate other people’s potential: accelerating their brands and projects with a fertile mix of art and science, strategy and intuition that my partner and I bring to our approach.
But with summer’s waning, our move, and all the ailments and near-misses we’ve had health-wise, I can feel the way things are almost literally inverting. A smaller house, a shorter commute, a closer range of focus. What was external is now being internalized.
The wind bites cold in the morning. Daylight savings is this weekend. In a different time and place I would have said I was skirting around the edges of depression now, and maybe that is so. But I’ve also lived with myself long enough now to know: these are the tell-tale signs at the outset of a highly creative period. I have a book in my head. Above our house in the evenings crows flock in murders to the lake’s edge against a saffron sky.
I’m so curious: Has anyone else has felt these inverted equations of introversion paired with high creativity/productivity; and extroversion coupled with lower creativity/productivity?
What are the tell-tale signs that let you know where you are at in your own creative cycle?
Family stories: The ones we claim, and the ones that claim us
I chose the isle seat on every flight, and never regretted it in spite of wishing I could see the Rockies spread out from above like some remarkable crumpled map, each mountain crested with white, the plains wide and even like some celestial quilt, roads stitched in between wide expanse, each farm a lonely marker of existence, trucks no bigger than fleas on the back of a dog.
Across the isle there is a man with eyelashes that remind me of my husband’s. In spite of my copious hand talking, and my double rings: engagement, and wedding, he seems enchanted, curious, gregarious and then subdued when he finally asks, “Are you married?” Apparently the reflexive ring-check all my single girlfriend’s do before even looking twice isn't instinctual for men.
"Yes," I laugh.
He looks temporarily disheartened, but then we forge ahead, and in the way I always do, I ask bold, impertinent questions that require vulnerability and heart.
Conversations on the plane afford this: hello, goodbye. Fleeting snapshots. Anything goes.
“What would you do if money weren’t a concern,” I ask.
He isn’t sure how to answer, and when he says the generic things like travel more and see his family more often I prod a bit. Finally he says, “I’d become a vet. It’s what I should have done when I started, but now I’m too old. I’d be fifty by the time I was ready to practice, if I started now.”
He shows me pictures of his dogs: a black mutt and a golden that’s just died. He misses her. Shows me a half dozen photos.
In pictures, all dogs end up looking the same. They run and stand and loll and saunter, and to their owner each one is emblematic of their unique dog-ness, but to a bystander all that personality gets rinsed away and save for puppies with their too-big paws and big ears, dog’s all look pretty much the same. Still I look at every one, and then we talk about how growing up with money to burn makes you a different kind of person than growing up without it. We’re both of the latter type, and across the isle for a handful of moments above the Rockies it’s us against them.
Before we hit the runway he asks for my name, and I tell him, but only my first and so he tells me his name is Mark, and I leave ahead of him and never look back.
This whole interaction has me wondering about the meaning of everyone we meet. My mother likes to say that we’re all connected, all part of an interconnected web of karma that unfurls over lifetimes, each person entering our lives meaningful to us in some way.
It’s my mother I’m going to see, and my sisters, the lot of us together for the first time in a decade; for the first time since my father died.
Family, that inexplicable thing that it is. The people that make us, fiber and bone, but also the ones from whom we learn the map of our own reactions and earliest perceptions of ourselves. They hold the fun-house mirrors and the truth. Our lives, witnessed in blurry fragments. “See that white horse?” my older sister asked me once. We were standing by a coral on the new land my dad had bought in Northern California that would become the home I lived in for the longest as a kid. “Yes,” I said, already climbing the fence. “I wonder if you can ride it?” she might have asked. A mere intimation, a suggestion was all it took and I was over the fence and onto it’s back, riding willy-nilly, break neck to the other side of the paddock and back with nothing more to hold onto than the white rope of it's mane. That’s how we were: my older sister always suggesting or protecting, one extreme or the other. Either sending me hurtling down hill in a little red wagon with no way to stop, or guarding my secrets fiercely. First crushes, and covert outfits. Now she’s as tightly wound as the vintage clock that no longer ticks on the mantle of the place we’ve rented in Denver’s Cap Hill neighborhood, and all I can do is rub her shoulders, even though she doesn't ask. The neighborhood is full of big old limestone houses, every other one set out with skulls and pumpkins, nearly the entire city turning out for Saturday’s Zombie Crawl. We try to find our stride, conversations happening between the indecision and decision of what to make for dinner; between the meltdowns of one sweet and sensitive boy, and the nap times of the other; between waking up and going to sleep in an unfamiliar place, all of us talking at once. Both sisters have their boys with them. I've left mine at home: sparkling, spinning, gap-toothed and bright-eyed. I miss them, even as I'm glad for the ease of my unencumbered self. Just me and my luggage at the airport, and at dinner I'm the one who can offer extra hands. My younger sister’s husband bravely joins us at the table. Later, as it’s just the two of us flipping through channels on TV while my younger sister puts her darling babe down, and my mom and older sister have gone back to the place we’re staying he says, “you all certainly don’t lack in conversation.” The kindest midwestern way of saying: we’re an intense bunch of talkers. And we are. We walk through the botanical gardens and my younger sister unfolds a perfect picnic blanket under the falling yellow leaves of a quaking aspen, and then spreads containers of olives and pickled beats, curried chicken salad and bagels. She’s gracefully thought of everything without us ever asking, and we gratefully eat. What I learn from the trip is to just be there, side by side. To hold my arms open wide. To apologize without the friction of ego. To wash the dishes, and then to wash more when they get added to the sink. To offer my hand to one nephew and my bouncing lap to the other and to try as much as I can to move like water between the moments. I stay up late, talking with my mother. She tells me stories, like lost stitches in the tapestry of my lineage. About my great grandfather who owned gold mines and gambled; about my grandmother’s unrequited love; about the cruelty of seventh grade for my mother; about the first boy she loved who died at 19 in a machinery accident. The whole time I'm with them, I'm feeling the shape of the stories that we're living. One afternoon while I’m holding my younger sister’s sleeping baby in my lap I start reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids , aloud to her as she lies on the floor with her huge white cat. It’s one of the most beautiful beginnings to a book I’ve ever read, nearly a prose poem, each line perfect, spare, visually stunning. On the way home I nearly finish it, reading hungrily about her hunger. I can feel the way I'm craving the evidence she shares. The proof that artists live some part of their lives circling the secret of their calling before their way. It's solace to me, even as I measure the decades between her first success and mine, and come up late by a long shot. Still, I underline as I read, and fill my notebook with snapshots from the time with family I’ve just spent. The stories that claim me. The stories that I claim. More than ever I can feel the way certain embers in my ribcage have begun flare up with the unavoidable heat of this again: to write is everything to me. Over and over again I find my way to this truth, even as I'm circling around what it means for my life in every day terms. Always there are stories making me, and in the making every day.
I want to hear the stories of your family. Not the one you’ve made, but the one that made you.
What have you learned about yourself from knowing them?
What stories do you claim, and what stories claim you?
You are not in control
Any time could be the last time. The last hello-goodbye. The last drink. The last caress. The last giggle, macaroni and cheese dinner, yelling match, email, orgasm, inspiration, idea, breath. Anytime could be your time. To leave. To arrive. To become. To cease becoming. Whatever way you think of it, whatever you believe.
Any instant could be your last.
We’ve been talking about this often, since our lives brushed against the raw edges of this truth, and its tremendous, unavoidable evidence has given rise to both panic attacks and wonder.
“How can I have spent five months running through it, and not known I was that close?” He asks, wondering about the doctor’s matter of fact sentence:
“You had a week or two at most.”
We are all that close.
The world is cruel and beautiful; the gods are splendid and irreverent; the odds and science are what they are; and the truth, a secret dervish twirling just beyond.
“It’s in my control now, to do more,” he says, committing with renewed vigor to diet and exercise and all the other proactive things that indicate clear arteries and a long life.
And there it is, the sly and foolish word control, which has come to mean some kind of power over outcomes. Assurance, even, that the outcome we intend is ours.
But watching the gulls on the lake, I am privy to a different truth.
They have gathered at the edges of the rocks. Some have hunkered down, their white feathered breasts against the rocks. Some stand on a single yellow leg, the other tucked beneath feathers for warmth. Others tilt and pitch gently in the steel blue waves.
When I arrive they turn their lidless eyes in my direction, watching for the unknown of what my intrusion might mean. When I move slowly, they turn back. They have no illusions of control. No ornate or predetermined accounting for the way their life unfolds. What they know innately is attuned attention and response. The waves come and they rise. The wind tosses their hollow bones aloft, and they soar in flight.
We too, have only this, as puny as it seems. As much as our desires and egos and legends paint a different, grander backdrop for the stage upon which our life unfolds. Of course we think we do. It is our myth, spiraling back to the epics at the beginnings of time, and to the sagas of god and man grappling over the outcome of fate on Mount Olympus. It is our human striving to tell a bolder narrative, with us at the helm. We wage wars, with ourselves with each other over control. Over achieving some unswerving, undeniable guarantee that we are the makers of our destiny. That control is ours.
We think, “If I just...”
Just whatever it is we bargain for in our heads. Whatever illusive thing we believe that if we do we’ll have control: exercise every day, lose weight, say I love you, get the job, live closer to town, live away from it all, be discovered, become rich, eat a paleo diet, get elected for office, eat local, buy organic, pass that law, get eight hours of sleep. Whatever.
But even if you did each thing, even if you did everything, your life is still a gift; slight and rare in a tremendous universe. In an instant, it could slip. A blockage, a tumor, a fluke accident, a brutality. There are a thousand ways your life could end this instant, in spite of our best efforts. You are not in control.
So what can you do then, with this truth?
You can show up with intention for this life. You can attune your attention. You can choose your response. Still, no outcome is assured. The raft of your life is buoyed up by some grater force.
For the gulls, every intruder, possible threat, devastation, predator, or darkening night is simply an offering of life. Just as the sparkling tides, the pale crabs, the twirling yellow leaves that scud across the skies, are also only life. What is theirs, are wings, and wind and days.
What is yours is the way you meet the turbulence as it arrives: with grace or terror, with gratitude or anger, with openness or clenched fists, with focus or distraction. Your life will find you, no matter what you plan. Be here then. Be of this wild, brilliant new day. Respond as truly as you can, and know this life is made both of your breath, and of the wind you breathe.
Of an instant the gulls take to the air in unison, and their harsh calls are carried upwards with the sudden wind.
Falling in love: to Jamaica and back
We leave before dawn, and watch the world grow light from above. A thin red line between the black of earth and the blue of heavens: dawn happens like this. And the moon, a waning crescent, a celestial hangnail bright and silvery against the softening sky.
By New York, the sun is a ball of the brightest red, and then the world turns gold and then finally blue with day and we lift off again to cross the continent southwards, and then across the ocean, the world from above taking my breath away.
When we land the air is thick with humidity and fragrance. Our pants stick to our legs and my hair blows into my face as we wait for our driver to show up to take us the hour drive to where we are staying in Ocho Rios.
"I've just had a nice Red Stripe, mon" our taxi driver says, after we've loaded our luggage in and are off on the highway. "They're refresh'n, mon. Have you had one yet?" He glances back in the rearview where we're fiddling with seat belts that have no place to buckle.
"Not yet," we laugh.
"That's how I start my day, mon. I smoke a splif and have a Red Stripe. That holds me through the day, ya know?"
So here we are, under the equatorial sun, driving on the left side of the road with a laid back cabbie who might be both high and buzzed. Somehow he drives as straight as everyone else is driving. Everyone swerves. They "overtake" drivers up ahead by encroaching until they're near enough to kiss bumpers and then just sort of sidle to the right, oncoming cars be dammed. At least though, they honk a warning. In fact, they honk for everything.
After a while our driver begins telling us about the way he's using his hand to signal if there are cops where he's just been, or if it's an all clear to other drivers. His hand floats out the open window into the warm, sweet air making upward and downward waving gestures. There is a code. There are lots of codes. Their patois is a code. A pidgin of English evolved by slaves to evade plantation owners. H get's dropped from words recklessly and added to others with precipitousness. Ocean becomes "hocean" and hotel, "otel."
The island is teaming with code, with secrets, with myths, with ways of being that emphasize things that are entirely different from whatever it is we're hell bent on here, in northern New England (with our rational predilections and our perpetual industriousness and productivity.)
The stories he tells are about about the owners of various huge houses who are cursed, about the delicacy of Conch "that is a man food, and too strong for the lady," and about the ganga and where the best of it grows. What matters is "living a good life, mon, ya know?" Happiness derives from simple pleasures: fresh-picked sweetsaps, papayas, breadfruit roasted over the fire, saltfish, jerk pork, ganga, music.
At the edges, hunger shows itself. There are shacks everywhere, belonging to squatters who "capture the land" and sell fruit, or fish or conch or carwashes from roadside stands rigged out of whatever they can find. There is both an ease and a desperation here, on the North side of the island where the economy depends on the tourist hustle of cruise ships coming to port, and people like us arrive at the small wind-blown airport amongst a thousand bougainvilleas.
When we arrive at our hotel, we slip into another world entirely. A gem from the 1950s, a throwback to the jet-set life. It's a gorgeous, sprawling blue-walled affair that was once a coconut plantation on the sea. Marylyn Monroe came here; T.S. Eliot; Ian Flemming; Winston Churchill. Our room overlooks the beach, with an open verandah that we slip over sidesaddle onto the sugar sand, and, upon returning, step into a steel bowl of water to rinse sand from our feet.
It feels like a dream. I've never been on a vacation like this. Nothing close. We never took a honeymoon trip, and this, we decided would be ours. Except when the day came for our flight, which was also our anniversary, T and I were pacing cafes in NYC, waiting for referrals to go through so his insurance would cover his surgery. and feeling very much like the HMO was playing a game of roulette with his life. Trip insurance is worth it sometimes, and this time it's why we're here. Standing a little awe-struck on the verandah, watching gentle blue waves break beyond the palms that make gorgeous feathery silhouettes on the sand.
We spend the week relearning things. What it means to go slowly. What it means to go even slower than that. What it is like to make love whenever we want to, without children underfoot. What it feels like to watch a sunset from beginning to end, while lying on a raft in the warm ocean. What reading feels like: the slow kind, in books with paper pages and pens to mark the good lines. To dog-ear pages and sip mojitos made with the best Jamaican rum and the sweetest Jamaican sugar. And above all else, relearning what we feel like, just the two of us, together.
It felt like falling in love for the first time: that crazy high of giddiness, that perpetual desire to be close. Yet better, with the easy laughter and easy quiet of knowing each other for 14 years. We went some places: up the Blue Mountains to see coffee farmers; into the farmers and crafts markets to hagle over prices; and into a shanty town/cafe that served the best fish, where everyone was high and hawking wears and dancing even though it was only mid afternoon. But mostly we swam and read and swam and made love and lay in hammocks and watched the stars.
It's strange, the way the past two weeks happened, back to back: the former, one of the worst I can remember and the latter, one of the best. Returning feels headlong. Reality arrives and we're still moving at a different velocity entirely. Let-down isn't quite the word, but it has stunned us both nearly to tears to realize that the mundaneness of life still makes us act like idiots and assholes, even after all that bliss. We still argue over stupid things like dinner, and how to encourage/enforce Bean's cello practice, or how to get out of the house as a family on time.
Still, the wonder from that trip is indelibly bright.
Grateful feels like this
The doctor, after the surgery said, "Well, he had about a week." He said it casually, the way you might tell someone the weather forecast in passion: relaying obvious facts that are, of themselves, barely noteworthy. He had gentle eyes and an experienced hand. One of the best doctors in the country. This news, is the news he shares every day. Ninety-percent blocked.
And now, just a handful of days later, you wouldn't know looking at him. The microscopic incision in his wrist where they sent the catheter in is healing beautifully. He's back to his usual shenanigans, kissing me awake before I'm really awake; making breakfast for the boys; building our commuter bikes from vintage frames up.
The past couple of days we've spent just being normal, and that feels tremendous. Going to work, bringing the boys to school, eating dinner by candle light, and taking walks after dinner. The weather has been unbelievable: day after day of the bluest blue contrasting the warmest vermillion, the firriest red, the sunniest gold of the maples and sassafras, hickories and gingkoes. It's so beautiful, just being alive, that I catch myself, tears wet on my face.
Also, reading your comments in my last post I was moved to tears often, not just by your kindness, but by the stories you shared revealing your courage and wonderment and devastations. I am so honored you come here and read. Thank you.
We are heading off on a long, long-awaited trip to Jamaica. Just T and I. We were supposed to go last week, but he ended up in surgery instead. Now, I can think of no better way to recuperate than to sit on the beach with my love in the sun. I'm bringing books (yes, I still believe in lugging the real things around in my luggage) and a fresh new notebook. I can't wait. I'm sure I'll be posting regularly on Instagram while we're there. If you're inclined, follow along.
xoxo, Christina
Life is this close
The whole time I kept thinking, "If there were just were words, I could begin." But there weren't words and so instead I noticed seams.
Those thin lines between open and closed, between one thing and another, between now and later, between life, and whatever comes after.
There are seams running up the backs of the black plastic crows outside the kitchen hardware shop beside the bakery. They face each other, beaks forming a bridge, an early harbinger of the haunted holiday to come. Inside, there are old women gathered around a table with coffees and wrinkled hands and brightly colored socks. I think about their husbands now. If they have them still, if they ever did, if they are good. The women nod, lean in, sip from their cups.
The same day we get the news about T’s heart, we also get the news about a woman who many of us knew or were acquainted with, who was beaten brutally by hear husband, nearly to death. Now I'm thinking of her, as I am searching for answers for the news we newly have: a heart blockage. I can't stop thinking of her.
The prognosis is touch and go. Really, it's always that. A brush with grace, a brush with brutality. Life is always touch and go; just oftentimes we become enmeshed within the ordinariness of our beating hearts, our daily altercations and infractions and forget. We grow impatient at stoplights; we throw our hands in the air when someone claims our parking spot; maybe we yell fuck you, or whisper it beneath our breath. When our kids dawdle we say, hurry up, won’t you? When we want to be close, we say can you just leave me alone? instead. We are all fragile and failing and fallible in ugly colored socks.
Mine, on the night the doctor confirms that T has heart blockage, are olive green ones, cotton, of an undetermined origin. I’ve had them forever and have always hated them, yet they persist in my drawers, inexplicably paired and waiting for use.
Getting news like this means that we must begin, inevitably and unwillingly to see ourselves as the small mortals that we are; impossibly minute and dependent wholly on the ones we love make us real with their witnessing and participation in our lives. It’s this that strikes me now. Slams into my chest, taking my breath with it's sudden force. I’ve known T since I was 20, my whole adult life, and here we are.
Whatever I’ve become, I’ve become partly because of him, and also with him.
Now I imagine my future. What fifty might look like, or sixty, through the kaleidoscope of chance. With him, or without him. Touch and go. I think about the way, if I am alive, no matter what other circumstances, there will be the light that comes with morning, and days will come, one after the next, and wrinkles too.
And also this: the majestic breath of spirit.
In the dark, past midnight, past making love, past the news, past the promise of tomorrow and the impossible promise of the day after tomorrow, we hear geese calling in the dark, navigating with certainty. They are star following, and southward bound. They know their place like all wild things do. The crows and the monarchs; the cat with her tail curled over her nose in the sun; my kangaroo dog with her too-big ears, certain only of waking and sleeping and the darting of squirrels.
In the morning the leaves have begun to turn. The sky is painted white with thickening clouds. My heart is a gyroscope. Circling, circling back to what I know. To the inevitable cadence of words and to the secrets between them that surface: in the gaps, the pauses, the rare spaces when paragraphs break.
All day as we drive down to the city, and then the next day (our 9th wedding anniversary) as we wait for insurance to give the green light, and then wait the next day in the waiting room, first together, and then just me alone, there will only be fragments and run-ons.
I will not allow myself the finality of the period. I will be terrified to write that mark at the end, to mark that inevitable edge. A hard stop. An abrupt break. The pause that keeps pausing. I will write only with ellipses...
In the waiting room, he will be by far the youngest, and when he goes in, I will sit alone with the sweet apple I’ve brought with me from Vermont and a book of essays that are sort of funny, but lack the transformative quality that would truly make them shimmer. The author is my age, but without kids and, at least in the essays, without deep love. She lives solo in a Manhattan studio, and writes wryly about the death of childhood hamsters. About a trip to Lisbon in winter. About feeling lost in Paris. About expensive furniture, and dishonest boyfriends. I want tell her how much more she’ll have to write when her story isn’t solely hers, and there is everything to lose. When her heart isn’t beating just there, in her chest, but in her kids flushed cheeks, or in her lover's tenuous arteries, or in her own, fleetingly faced with fate.
Still, the essays make me laugh and I’m grateful for their distraction, and also for the friends who, texting with the help of Siri, also make me laugh out loud into the stillness of the waiting room.
The light will grow steady with morning. More than an hour will pass, and I will want it to be over.
“It should be about an hour, maybe a bit more,” the attendant in blue will have told me beforehand, and now when it runs over the hour-mark, all I will think of is that in fact, there is something instead of nothing. That the end might arrive now. Or the beginning. I will catch myself holding my breath.
They will call my name eventually, and I will stand abruptly, embarrassingly scattering my belongings onto the floor. Then the physicians assistant will tell me about the stents, three of them running the length of his heart, and about the entire surgery done with hairline wires up through an artery in his arm. He will tell me, it’s okay, he’s doing well, and I will stand there listening and not listening, my mind whirling.
Outside the big floor-to-ceiling windows crows will fly past. They will land in the shrubbery below me, far below, and after he's left but before I can go to T, I will go to the window and watch them. They will call, they will circle, they will whirl through the sky. Proof, certain and steadfast of the simple wild truth of this life: we begin, we begin, we begin. Only that.
When I go to him he will be sitting up and smiling.
“Hi,” he’ll say “I love you. They said I can have coffee and food.”
This is my man. Coffee always a near second. And so I will make my way around the busy blocks by the hospital to a Starbucks and return with a venti Americano and with this offering, our lives will begin again.
We are this close. Always this close. Touch and go, in an instant.
Afterwards I will crash. After I drive him the 7 hours home. After he panicked on the highway, thinking his heart was failing but really his blood sugar (and maybe blood pressure was low.) After we took wrong turns because of the panic. After the sun set the fields on fire as it fell from the sky. After the heavens turned to indigo. After we came home to boys in striped pajamas and in-laws who held us close and proffered soup. After all of this, I will fall part. I will cry hard the way I haven’t been able to cry the entire time. Cry till I have a nose bleed, my soft-eared dog pressing her face close to me, her fur stained from the blood.
I’m sick with a head cold. I’m still reeling, recovering.
So much, to have your life spit out at you this way.
So much to feel the sum-total of everything I am as a part of a constellation of boys suddenly halted for an instant. To imagine the what-ifs, the other divergent paths. To imagine what love would look like without love. To imagine fatherless boys. To imagine, this close. Our pulse, our lives, our breath. This close, we are. This close.
And then to begin again.
Go love the ones you love.
You answered, I listened
I love how clearly the poll's little grey lines spell a message. How straightforward your ask, your wondering. The process of zeroing in. Of mapping the constellation that makes your one thing? Of going from macro to micro, from everything to just your thing. This is something I understand deeply in my gut. It is the process of ideastorming and pattern detection, synthesizing details and honing in; listening hard and hungrily for the clues. This is the art of creating your own compass. It's one part alchemy and one part science. It's analysis meets curiosity meets making things real. It's untangling narratives and discovering where your story catches you up (and also where it sets you free.) It's something I do with clients when we build a Brand Compass, and it's something that I'd love to do with you, in service of the singular thing that calls you (even if you don't yet know how to hear it's song.)
I'm making an e-course. It will be playful and fun and adventurous, and you'll arrive at the end with a tangible map for doing; an action plan for arriving; a lens through which to focus. It will likely be ready just in time for the New Year, and I'll be keeping it small, so that I can bring a true-to-my-heart hands-on approach (with some one-on-one coaching), and so you can also feel like you really belong to a community of kindreds.
If you're interested (and I so hope you are!) sign up for my vary occasional newsletter to snag a first-dibs spot.
(Also, I feel a studio pay-what-you can sale coming on. That will happen in late November, likely, just in time for holiday gifting. Just saying.)
The light is golden now, and the shadows lengthen. Sprout and I look for colored leaves. In the woodlands behind our house we rock-hop and discover trees that fill our arms. We look up, and up and the canopy is a lacework of leaves. When we get back to the yard, I climb the ginkgo until I am above the roof tops, until I can feel the trunk swaying gently with my weight, the fan-shaped leaves brushing my face. Below me the boys watch, grinning, a little awe-struck. When I come down Bean goes up, holding close to the trunk as I've taught him, his feet curling round the branches, prehensile, agile. We have a whole new hour now, ripe with promise when they come home from school, and we've been using it to just go slowly. We rig up a swing with rope and a round log. We play badminton. We linger till the sun slants low.
How are you spending your time at the end of these early autumn days?
Just one thing
I walk out along a rocky promontory at the lake and sit in the early morning sun for just long enough to hear what's in my heart. I watch a tern dive, then lift, then dive low again, struggling with the quick flick of a silver bellied fish while the day becomes warm. The light is bright and golden and the dew is still fresh and the water smooth and green. I gather my arms around my knees, and listen. To the lake, to my breath, to my heart.
This is what it says:
Do just one single thing. Focus obsessively. Give myself time. Cultivate discipline for a single discipline. Acquire the muscle of repeated effort. Nurture sustained focus. Return, return, return to the thing that claims you first, foremost, irrationally. What causes the spark to flame up brightly? What makes you so alive you can't stop grinning? Go back to that. Trace back to that last moment like a tracking a wild animal. Trace moments like a heat-map until you find the pulse, the last instant when you felt exactly like you should be. Do that. Claim the words, the titles, the courage, the pseudonyms, the fiction, the probable pitfalls, the hours that seem decadent, the days that seem to short. Start simply. Fake whatever you haven't it until it begins to be real: confidence, boldness, daring, commitment, certainty.
Does this speak to you?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
What is it for you? What would you do if you could, if you knew how, if you had the discipline, the money, the confidence, the time?
What's stopping you? Really?
What would help you? I'm humming with ideas and I want your thoughts.
[yop_poll id="2"]
Upon Arrival: A Slow Arrival
It takes me longer than I anticipate to arrive. For the first two weeks, I have move-related amnesia. I can't find anything, even my body in space. One night, I believe I've broken my elbow after a coffee table falls on it. I fold in against myself like origami and cry. I have no idea about anything. If it's broken, or if it isn't, and so I spend hours in ER with T at my side while a dear friend sits on my couch in my unpacked house. Outside it pours. We get the verdict that it's just badly bruised, and I come home dejected, exhausted, embarrassed. My friend acts like it's completely no problem. He's good like that, even though the cat threw up in our absence. I owe him for certain.
A week later I slit my wrist trying to catch a falling glass picture frame. The cut makes a perfect red line. Gapes just enough to make me quaver. It happens ten minutes before we need to leave to bring Sprout to his first day of school, and so I apply pressure and wrap my wrist in a dozen bandaids and just go, carrying it vertically, like a fragile totem. I kiss his rosy cheeks, watch his hesitation and the decision to follow after his teacher to feed the chickens, and then I go. I call my doctor, then head to urgent care. Hours later I have three stitches. After the first day I wear the zebra bandaids Sprout offers me. I try to slow down.
Still, I walk into door frames. Trip over shoes in the entryway. Everything is a perpetual, “Where did you put the...?” conversation. Everything displaced, misplaced. There are socks along with mail. A hammer in the silverware drawer. We take two trips to Ikea, the first to get bunkbeds that aren't in stock, the second too, to get the beds. We come back with other things, naturally. Lights we want to return the minute we've brought them in the door. A cabinet to house the audio equipment that in the last house had been wired into in-wall speakers. We drive up and back passing miles of genetically modified corn that rustles with perfect stalks in flat fields as the sun arcs across the sky. We become impatient experts at assembling flat pack furniture.
And then we're here. Here in the best little neighborhood that is so close to everything. One night we go to the lake after dinner for ice cream cones, and are back in time for bed. Other nights we walk Clover, the boys riding out ahead on their bikes, making a game of stopping (and sometimes not stopping) where I tell them to. The sun slants long and golden and low across the pavement, and makes our cheeks light up.
Somehow we make it through T's birthday (my love, my hero, my co pilot) and the first week of school, and finally the house feels functional. Every room has it's utility and gradual grace. Many still need paint or pictures or hooks or nooks to be created. But it's close now, and we all feel like we're here now instead of in limbo with our minds tracking back to the familiar habit of the floor plan we left behind.
Also, out of nowhere, amidst all the turbulence of moving, the title for my next book arrives like a gift. Like a thin silver lasso cast out among a stampede of thoughts that occur as I do other mindless tasks (turns out building flat pack furniture is good for something). And it makes me giddy to have it now, this whisper, this inkling of what the book will be, tucked into the pocket of my heart even as I celebrate the 1-year anniversary of my first book. Whoosh. There went the year.
Now we eat on the back picnic table in the last light of evening. We light candles after dark. Apples are sweetening in the orchards and the air is crisp. And slowly, slowly I am arriving. Here. In this new life.
Now, upon arrival, as I begin new rituals, blocking time into my calendar for new projects, and mapping new runs,I find myself circling back to the things that ground me: poetry, morning pages, baking bread, making soup.
I'm curious:
What grounds you as you move towards this new season? What makes home home to you?
Glimpses: The making a new *home*
There are many words that will come, but for now, here are a few glimpses as we unpack boxes and think about the way our habits and lives will shift here.
The tree fogs sing loudly here at night, and it is quiet, save for the occasional cars. In the morning the sounds of traffic rise with the sun. During the day there are parrots somewhere in the neighborhood. They remind me of my childhood: where my neighbors had parrots of all kinds up on the hill above our house. I love their exotic calling during the day.
There are trees here, wider than my arms can hold, and a creek where Bean already caught a crawfish longer than my palm. He's fearless and slight of hand, that boy of mine. Both of them, such natives in nature. Sure footed and confident in the woods where they go now to explore.
They've also got a shed attached to the house off the back deck that they call their 'clubhouse.' It's the perfect home for their workbench--stocked with hammers and nails and small saws and bits of wood, and for all of Bean's "inventions" and collections: snake skins, pebbles, circuit boards, locks.
The house is small. Humbly small. It's good for us, and it requires an adjustment (we have a lot of stuff it seems!) We'll likely be storing some things, to keep the space open and easy. There is good light in the living room though, with windows perfect for basking beside, especially come winter when the sun is scarce.
We brought the boys back to the old house to say goodbye, but all they really wanted was to be here, playing with their bikes on the sidewalk and then running to the ice cream truck when it came by--such a novelty still, for these country boys of mine.
More glimpses to come. We're still knee-deep in boxes... and I've got some health issues going on that are slowing me down (a positive Lyme test being one of them. Ugh.)
Toward the closeness of friends { Just One Paragraph 24/30 }
We pack all day, and then a few dear friends come, bearing dessert to sit around the bonfire with wine while the kids run wild in the woods. The moon climbs up over the peak of the roof against a violet sky. Then the crickets come, and the katydids, thrumming. Woodsmoke, laughter. A good final fire to mark the end of hundreds, all of us gathered on the uneven ground on dinner table chairs, dodging the wood spoke. After a while the kids light sparklers and twirl across the lawn, and when everyone there is only contentment. To be here, and to be moving toward the closeness of friends.
Nearly beginning {More than Just One Paragraph 24/30}
There is mist when we wake up. We lie in bed, close, breathing, watching the soft world through the wooden slats of the blinds. Three days left.
I think about the ways we cannot know. The ways before and after are utterly discrete, the barrier between them absolute. It was the same, waiting for the arrival of my sons. Or waking up the day after college. Or the moment after I said "Yes." It is always this way.
We move with measured intention or whirling chaos towards the unknown, and then we are there at the brink. We can't know, and yet we leap. Wings made of faith, of certainty, of calculable odds, of foolishness, of hope, of daring.
I walk out into the meadow with bare feet, just to feel the dew. To pay homage to the way the grass has always been there, lush, tangled, season after season to harbor field mice and Queen Anne's lace and milkweed and monarchs. I go, because for so long this field has claimed me, and claims me still. Not just this field really, but all fields. The wild, my home.
We'll see where new begins; what shape beginning makes.
Beginning
The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.
BY JAMES WRIGHT
The day as it was {More than Just One Paragraph 23/30}
I didn't write last night because I came home and completely crashed: chills, swollen glands, headache. T wondered, "What about Lyme?" and so today I went and got blood drawn. I have nearly all the symptoms. But who knows? It could be anything, everything, my body on a collision course with the reality of moving, which we are in just four short days.
Bean came into bed this morning, his hair a shock of alarming curls, his grin sleepy and sweet. "How are you feeling, Mama?" he asked, spooning perfectly into my arms. And then he lay with me and we dozed and talked about things and imagined what the future will hold. He seemed to get it, my little aquarian kindred. That this is big, what we're about to do. "It's our last weekend here," he said softly, nestling in.
Then came Sprout who has the heartiest of laughs. His dimples cause an uproar of delight in my heart. He bounces instead of snuggles. His sturdy little body burrowing for a second before he springs back up, and kisses my cheeks and nose and forehead and then dives off the bed to go play with matchbox cars.
T leaves for work. It's my day with the boys. Bean and I linger in bed, imagining where we'll explore downtown, what colors we'll paint their room, how we'll have friends nearby. Then, slowly we get up and while I'm untangling my hair and finding jeans he goes downstairs in underpants and a sweatshirt and starts making french toast. He's got the first round frying by the time I head downstairs, and is perched on the stool by the espresso machine, teaching Sprout the steps. He pulls a perfect shot. "Iced or hot, Mama?" he asks.
We eat mounds of french toast and it's perfect: eggy, with just a hint of vanilla and cream. Then, after unloading and loading the dishwasher and packing all the cookbooks that seem to have mounded themselves on the kitchen table, we head to the car with a lab slip for blood work.
Sprout watches the practitioner closely as she cinches my arm and draws blood. Unlike Bean who wants to know how everything works, Sprout wants to know if I'm okay. If it hurts. If I flinch. (I don't, just for him.)
They took such good care of me all day.
A record of unfinished things {Just One Paragraph 23/30}
Tonight my heart rides unsteadily in the hull of my ribs across the waves of all the unfinished pieces and fragments and questions that remain from the day. The arrival of new friends and the disappearance of old ones. The half-packed boxes strewn in every room. The half-written emails sitting in my inbox. The audio notes I take on my phone that show up as emails, skeletons of ideas, lurching back into focus. Pattern recognition. Inklings. Story fragments.
Here are a few recent note titles:
Take down the lights.
It's about repetition.
UK Art Everywhere Project
It's so late the next day has already begun.
Bear humphing around looking for Fox.
She wants her way a lot. She keeps secrets.
There is a woman who smiles with gaps between her teeth and her minivan in the morning...
Heritage movie theater ads.
Meyer lemons, eggplant, almonds, dill.
Surfaces and the first day of seeing in a new city.
How do you keep track of unfinished things?
And how can you tell when things are finished? Friendships, stories, ideas, dreams?
On learning, right timing & finding directions when we need them: {More than Just One Paragraph 21/30}
On our way to his friend's house this morning Bean asked if I knew the way.
"Not really," I said. (I have this thing called an iPhone. It makes me navigationally lazy.)
"Don't worry, mama. You don't need to know the way. You can count on me. I'll show you," he said confidently.
It's true of course. For more than driving directions. This boy is my teacher. This in-two-weeks-third-grader. This coltish legged boy with a missing-tooth grin. I've fallen in love with him all over again this summer. He's just so tender and thoughtful lately. So full of a new awareness that everyone around him has emotions and thoughts and secret goals and dreams.
I often notice him watching me subtly: for a furrowed brow, or a lightness in my voice. He wants to know, "Are you happy mama?" It matters now, differently than it ever did before.
I can feel the importance of how I am in each moment with him now. The way it's making something indelible. A blueprint of the emotional topography of woman.
It's no small thing, this. Raising boys.
Sprout gets to be the only child at dinner tonight. We sit around the butcher block counter together eating soup with grilled bread and talk about numbers. We consider "How many, and then one more?" Then we make a game of writing the numbers out, each one with their own special characteristic--5 with it's baseball cap, 3 with it's two bouncy balls.
It might seem odd that I haven't taught him numbers before: he's 4.5, headed for preschool, and I'm a certified elementary teacher.
But the thing is: the meaning of the word "readiness" is debatable in my book. In the school system, readiness is knowing your numbers and letters so that you can be ready to learn mathematical operations, write sentences, and read about Spot and Jane. Then of course, those skills are learned, because they are readiness indicators for later academic skills, and so on, each skill set building to the next level until ... what? We reach the end of school, and have a bunch of skills that prepared us for more school. Hmmm. Is that really the goal?
If, instead you think about readiness from the standpoint of developmental capabilities, then things like learning numbers and letters and reading and writing are naturally, and almost inevitably a part of the process of learning to function meaningfully in the world. Academic skills are acquired when they're needed and appropriate to problem solve and recognize patterns; to make connections and navigate complex social situations; to make order from chaos, and chaos from order. Learning is about understanding the process of innovation and excavation; leading and following, taking note and being of note.
And at the end of the day, if children are submerged in a culture of learning, with real, tangible opportunities to make meaning of their world, then things like numbers--both knowing them, and writing them--are easily acquired when they're most appropriate.
Like now. Sprout's just ready. He's known how to count to 10 and farther for a year or so (although he gets creative in the teens.) And he knows how to do simple calculations: 7 and one more is 8; if there are two cookies and four of us, we'll have to break each in half to make fair shares. He even knows how to write the number 4--which is the most important number to him, of course, since that's his age. But tonight when I teach him how to write the other digits, I wish you could his chortles of delight!
With each new number, he lets out the most triumphant laugh when he masters it. Pure gusto! Complete ease. And in ten minutes he knows and is using all the digits easily. Right timing. They're useful to him now.
Of course, it's way more just this, and has everything to do with a household where learning happens all the time. A house that is literary rich, and scientifically minded. A house where T and I both engage our kids in problem solving while doing real-world tasks rewiring an outlet, making quiche, filling the gas tank, calculating change for the parking meter, programming a website, or mapping directions. (And we're blessed with kids who are typically functioning and healthy, which makes everything simpler without a doubt.)
But I've been thinking lately about the rush that we have as a culture--to get ahead. To prepare. To be productive above all else; at the front of the pack, and ahead of schedule--and how that affects me as a creative (often leaving me exhausted). And then I've been wondering if it's not something we're tacitly teaching our children, instead of showing hem that real learning means exploration and going at your own pace, prototyping and practicing and narratively mapping meaning. For that's how children are hardwired--to learn: iteratively, intuitively, and instinctively from real-world experience.
But if we dialed it back just a we bit and rested into the truth of this:
"Don't worry, mama. You don't need to know the way. You can count on me. I'll show you." I think they'd turn out just fine.
More than fine, actually.
Change is always this: A thin, perforated line between known and unknown{More than Just One Paragraph 20/30}
When I wake up still feeling out of sorts: achey headed, light sensitive, and all-round fragile, I feel betrayed. Who gets sick, I think, with just a week and a half left before moving for the first time in eight years? But of course, that's why I'm feeling off, as Elizabeth gently pointed out to me in an email today. My ultra-sensitive constitution is humming with the vibrations of change that all of us are trying to wrap our heads around. Processing.
At the kitchen counter drawing together before dinner Bean says, "I'll miss watching the snow falling from those windows on my birthday." He sits looking out the windows in the dining room where now the foliage is green and lush, but come winter, are the best ones for watching the snow fall. Each flake fat and white, while inside just there, you're always warm by the wood stove, the table golden in the pale winter sun.
After dinner the huge, pink cumulus over the mountain top gather, bigger than imagination, wider than a dream. "Oh T, look," I say, and he comes over, and the boys follow after and we all stand staring. The boys are in various states of undress getting ready for bed. T rests his hand on my lower back; presses his lips into my hair. The blue hunched shoulders of the mountain settle in the twilight. The clouds nestle in, the sun's setting turning their bellies to flame. This view, oh this view. Every day changing, yet every day the same. How I'll miss it.
Sitting in my studio later, the coyotes call, as if just for me. First one, then several, their wild, giddy yelps rising up among the night sounds of whirring katydids and crickets, tree frogs and owls. It's these things I'll miss the most. The way the natural world edges up close here; close and hungry, finding us at the door every morning: the small garden snake on the path; the moths by the lamp; the cedar waxwings in the lilac.
The move is what we need and want. I'm hungry for cultivation. For culture. For community. For the connectivity and ease of living just 2 miles from the heart of the city. But still, the actual process of moving: of heading face first into the unknown of it, feels daunting.
Isn't this always the way? The hardest part of change is the anticipation that comes before; the huge fractured maze of what we can't imagine. The particles of possibility are infinite. Any way might turn out, or no way. That's what our minds say, at the doorway of the unknown, and in turn, what's known becomes beloved. Familiar becomes nostalgia overnight. Not because it is right or true, but because the course is already set. Because the heart knows its way through, each turn familiar and made by habit.
Change is always this: A thin, perforated line between known and unknown; it's like one of those one-way metal grids in parking lots that prevent backing up. We've already changed. Crossed the line. Made the move to move. Now we're just catching up.
Feeling fragile + Reading fiction {Just One Paragraph 19/30}
I felt sick all day today, out of the blue. Fragile. Shaken. Even though the weekend was wonderful with perfect weather and an evening with friends. Today I woke for no reason with a headache and stomachache, and packing boxes all I wanted to do is curl up. Eventually I did, finishing Elisabeth Strout's new book, The Burgess Boys tonight. (I'm in awe of the way Strout can write a story, telling it from many points of view, each one real and simple and poignant.) It was the first fiction book I've finished in months. It feels so crazy to admit such a thing, but it's true. Most days I feel like every minute ought to be filled to reading "useful" things, that will make me smarter or more strategic. Fast Co articles, and the New York Times. (Do you ever feel like that?) But tonight it was all about slipping into a different point of view, and this much I know is true: I'm hungry for more.
I'd love to know what your favorite fiction reads have been this summer? Please share!
Also, I can't quite believe it. Next Tuesday we move.