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.

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.

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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

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.

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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

Featured in Artful Blogging*

I'm so happy to have my piece, "Ordinary Remarkable Moments" and my art + photographs featured in the Autumn 2013 Artful Blogging! (And to have my birds...and heart in my hand on the cover!)
Go take a peak + pick up your own copy... there is so much beauty + inspiration in this issue!
xo, Christina

A birds-eye view of this right now {Just One Paragraph 4/30}

This morning I realized that July is almost over, which startled me, because really, didn't summer just start? I've been experiencing this incredulity at an ever-increasing rate: at time's passing, at the long-legged bodies of my sons, at the way my eyes have accumulated crows feet and the furrow between my brows is there for good. When did all of this happen? Time is a trickster. A torrent one minute, then a slow as honey crawl the next. Some weeks pass with laborious slowness, but days are never long enough. Other weeks pass in a blur, but hours stretch out for an eternity. The constant, it seems, is that years go in an instant. Each one short. Shorter. And here I am at the apex of another summer, feeling the way the last days of this particular month make up a strange equation of endings and beginning's for me. Summer is waning, yes, that. But also: my father died this month eleven years ago, on the same day as my half birthday which is two days from today. And if I were calculating my rate of success based on averages, I'd say I was behind, at least on my birthday list. Half the year gone, and only 10 crossed off. (Of those, I'd never thought I'd have ridden a carousel, but that happened, quite by chance two weekends ago at the Shelburne Museum; and I can almost cross off paragliding, because I've found the perfect place for lessons and am now just waiting for the right convergence of wind conditions and babysitting to high-tail it there with T for a day jumping off into blue sky.) But the thing is, success isn't about averages at all. It's not about steady progress rates or past performance. It's about the process, and seeing the way things map out wide and large. About setting goals and gravitating towards them, even as new projects take shape, and new goals emerge. A book. A company. Another book of personal essays in it's inkling phase. A kindergartener. A third-grader. A rekindled sense of utter in-loveness with my guy. And I can't help but wonder, if my father were alive today, what he might say with his birds-eye view, grinning at the life I've made.

    I'm curious, when do you take stock of your progress from a bird's eye view? Do you have any times throughout the year that you make it a ritual (like a half birthday) to stop looking at the small stuff, and take in the big picture instead?

The Things I've Grown Used To Around Here {Just one Paragraph: 2/30}

The moon is round and bright, climbing up through the in the branches of the quivering Norway birch outside my studio window. I've grown used to that tree; to watching it bend in storms, and flutter in the slightest breeze. To the way, when the autumn comes, it turns pure gold before coyly letting the season's leaves fall to the ground, laying bare her silver branches to the gathering cold and shortening days that winter always brings. I've grown used to the way my studio sill, from which I watch that tree, is always cluttered with jars filled paint brushes. With shells. With small canvases to paint (and often the cat finds here way there too.) I've grown used to the wild roses that bloom beside the front door. And also to the dirt road that carries us to and from our house. To the ritual of walking down it with the boys. To finding wild berries: raspberries, grapes, blackberries, Eastern prickly gooseberries and also elderberries that are still blooming in clouds of lacy white. Today, Clover went running out ahead of us, then veered off when she smelled something in the hedgerow, and for the sake of all of us would not return until she'd flushed out every living thing: startled red-wing blackbirds, small brown rabbits, a flock of gold finches that lifted like yellow sparks. I've grown used to the sloping grassy hill at the back of the house where the boys sat today facing each other on beach towels warming in the sun after playing until their lips were blue in the pool (the blue plastic kind that stands improbably 36 inches above ground, and is by far the best investment we've made this summer because Sprout is learning how to swim of his own accord, begging to be in the pool more than he is out of it.) It is the hill where my book began. The hill that, when everything feels like it may just be falling apart, I've gone to lie upon countless times, face upterned to the sky with my heart beating uncertainly in the boat of my ribs, until the steady pull of the earth rightens me. I've felt the earth spinning from that place. I've watched shooting stars fall from the heavens there, and played with both my boys when they were babies. Today I'm grateful for this last month here among familiar things, and also for this small ritual of a paragraph of noticing daily.

Making Saturday Slow on Purpose {Just one Paragraph: 1/30}

It was about a month ago, maybe, when T and I were having a spate of drawn-out, late-night conversations about the direction of our lives, that I decided to try to slow down a little and get more sleep. Slowing down isn't my nature, and sleep is definitely no the first thing I think of when night folds the house in darkness and lamplight spills across my desk. Instead, late night hours are the ones I long for; time spent working without interruption; the windows open and a soft rain falling on stirring leaves until well after midnight. But as we talked and talked, it dawned on me that maybe even though I'm terrified of slowing down, I'd reached the point of overdrawn. And though admitting this felt like admitting weakness, it also felt like a necessity, like some kind of survival mechanism kicking in. And so I agreed that maybe, possibly, a little more sleep and a slight slowing of the pace might be a good thing to experiment with, and so unofficially I began. Fewer late nights. Sleeping just a bit longer. Aiming for just one thing at a time. And above all else, making the weekends, and Saturday in particular, slow on purpose. Gluten free muffins made from scratch in the morning with plenty of coffee and bacon, and then all of us sitting around reading at the table: Richard Scary, and Spider Magazine and the New York Times, and then moving toward the day without rushing or an agenda, and coming back together frequently for snacks and snuggles and couch time in the evening when we could all hear first of the season's crickets making their debut. That's what today brought: the ease of slowness, and also the reminder that summer will be ending soon. Just another month of ripe golden days, and then school and autumn. Reason enough to slow down for a day, and let the time slide by like the skin off a sun ripened peach, the juice making our fingers sweet.

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PS: I just love, love, love how many of you are joining me. It's an excuse to pop over to your blogs regularly and to see what the small corners of your world look like day to day!

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.

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

14 Summer Weeks is all about intentionally making the most of this short summer with our kids. Rather than ideas of how to entertain your kids or just make it through this time of year, 14 Summer Weeks is about going all in for big summer adventures, while also appreciating the small moments that only happen during this time of year with you and your kids.
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.

Portland, Maine in so many, many pictures

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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.

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What will you decide?

Today, like any other day

Today, like any other day, We wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundres of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

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--Rumi

5 things to feed your creative soul this weekend:

1. Claim an hour for white space. For doing nothing. For thinking. For Writing or doodling or daydreaming.
2. When you first roll over and wake up, write down the first five things that come to mind. No judgement, no editing.
3. Pick something to look for: a word, a color, an object. Record every instance, and notice how many ways simply paying attention attracts what you are looking for.
4. Have a second cup of coffee + linger, reading. (Feedly is my new favorite app for subscribing to RSS feeds. REWORK is the book I'm in the middle of that I most want to finish.)
5. Take a self portrait, shamelessly, gleefully, shyly. It doesn't matters. What matters is looking yourself in the face regularly. It's an act of translation sort of. A bridging of the gap between inner self and outer self. Do you look like you feel?

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Do it today. Then do it again tomorrow. Compare notes. If you feel inclined, blog about it, please share a link to your post here. I'd love to see what you discover!

Resistance to change, creative habits, and Sprout is growing up

It’s taken us too long, really, to be firm. To take a stand. To say enough’s enough. But to be honest, we were resistant to making the change because we were both a little afraid of what taking it away might mean for the balance in our lives. We pictured bedtimes of wailing, naptimes gone, perpetual whining in between for a week. He’s that kind of kid: stubborn when he wants to be. Also, he has unbelievable eyelashes and the biggest, widest eyes.
Unlike his big brother, Sprout totally loved his pacifier as a baby. It was a great self soothing mechanism, which, while he was small made all the difference in lulling him easily to sleep. But somehow he’s not small anymore. He’s lanky-legged and solid, and when we’re driving somewhere, just the two of us he’ll tell me silly stories about bears and foxes and coyotes that almost inevitably end with all of them putting spaghetti on their heads and tails, and then he devolves into laughter.
And still, the paci has stuck around. It became a habit long past when instincts linger, and lately? The more he’d use it, the more bratty he seemed to become. Whining at everything. Yelling. Throwing fits when he didn’t get his way.
Still we hesitated, and the truth is I don’t think either of us made the connection entirely between his behavior and our reticence to help him give up that final habit of babyhood. We had a lot of conversations around his fourth birthday. There was mention of a “Paci Fairy,” whom he seemed to marginally believe might really come to collect all his pacis and send them off to a baby who needed them. And there was the suggestion that his baby cousin might need it instead and we should ship them to him instead.
I admit the logic was warped in all cases. But I know you've done this. Made some halfhearted attempt to see just how gullible your kid is, in hopes of being able to make a point or change the course with the least amount of resistance? Wool over eyes. An impossible suggestion to make a point. Knowing the entire while that it won’t really work unless you get behind it too.
All this to say: We were afraid of his resistance and because of this we were halfhearted. Our lives have had all kinds of curveballs lately, and every time we ran the scenarios through in our heads, and we’d end up shrugging and giving up saying, “Well, he’ll grow out of it eventually” or, “He won’t go to high school with it.”
But then this past weekend he was a whiny monster all of Sunday, and at one point when I removed him from some utterly nonsensical embittered argument with Bean over legos or blocks or whatever it was that had devolved into yelling, and while I was carrying him downstairs he wacked a block towards one of the newly painted hallway walls. And somehow that was it. My resistance to change was shaken. I was really in.
I plunked him in a chair for a time-out. He wailed. I resisted, and when repentance crept into his voice, he started asking for his pacifier, out of the blue I said simply, “No, you’re too old for pacis. You’re done. Your behavior has been showing me that it’s making you think like a baby when you need to be thinking like a kid. All done.”
It wasn’t a threat. It was completely the truth. That is the phenomena that I’d been noticing. And when T heard me say it, he nodded and said, “You know, you’re totally right. That’s exactly what’s been going on.”
And just like that, we were both in, and he cried for a while and asked for it about seven hundred times and then he finally climbed down from the chair and ran off to do something else and that was that. That night I heard him muttering “Oh, right, no paci.” And it took him all week to figure out exactly what to do with himself at bedtime—but he did, and we did, and it was almost entirely a nonissue.
His resistance in our heads was so much worse than the actual event.
Which got me thinking about how this isn’t just true with parenting. Watching Sprout ajust to new habits made me realize how often the narratives we tell ourselves resisting change are more difficult to overcome than making the change itself. This is certainly true with my own life too. The starting of a creative habit—the waking up daily, the building of an unbroken goal streak*—it’s actually harder in my head in the moments before I commit to it, than when I do.

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So I'm wondering: How many times have you resisted making a change because there’s some story you’re telling yourself in your head? How many times has your own inertia that kept you from swerving off the course you’re on, even if the swerve would inevitably lead to growth? How often do you resist, simply because the story of your resistance is stronger in your than your commitment to change?
What if I told you that all that resistance is far worse than the actual event of change? What would you let go of? Stop doing? Start?

    *More on goal streaks & creative habits in my next newsletter coming out on April 1st! SIGN UP.

Why productivity is not enough

The roads are muddy now; one day ice, the next day thaw. The sun can’t make up it’s mind. It shows up in the morning all glowy and bright, and then the day turns fierce and raw, with flurries in our faces. The beginning of March is the time when things appear to be standing still at the surface, but underneath the mud is thawing and sap running, and it seems right on time, this shift.
I’m reeling still, coming off of what has more or less been a four year sprint: a baby, a book, graduate school, a job, and now this, whatever this is.
I’ve been thinking a lot about standing still. About really giving pause.
I’m not sure when the last time was that I really did that. Stopped entirely for long enough to feel only the rhythm of my own pulse stirring. Can you put your finger on a time like that? When you weren’t actively producing anything. When was the last time that you came to a full stop?
The houses along the back roads here show a rawness and wear this time of year. The optimistic red paint from brighter time is worn thin. Barns that were once full with the sweet breath of dairy cows stand empty or are repurposed, housing tools or tractors or other less important things. Houses gird against the thinning and seemingly endless cold of New England's forever-long winters.
I think that what we’re afraid of, our Industrial Complex in over drive, is that like the barns, we’ll become obsolete the minute we stop producing. Pause one second, and the next we’ll be a wash-up, cardboard over the windows for extra insulation.
I think that’s what has surprised me most about being adult: that it never stops. That if you let it, the world keeps right on demanding. That if you buy it, everything is about production, about resources, about consumption. As if we are made of infinite stuff; time unlimited, our hearts as geared to function like some precise and whirring machine. The days fill up. The years too. Do you feel the way that happens? The way output gets weighted over input; matter over spirit, job over calling.
When was the last time exactly that you came a full stop, or let the hours or days fill with emptiness?
I am feeling my way along the edges of this truth, and finding myths at every turn. Productivity is our inheritance, borne of our our Western Industrial Complex. We produce, to produce more in kind. Our productivity simply yields more. More hours spent producing. More minutes, multi-tasked.
But the fields know a different secret under snow. They lie there, unafraid, bearing the sudden weight of snow, the prolonged rest of white on white, where only voles and field mice and foxes hunger in the gathering dusk, leave a smudge of vermillion at the periphery of what we know; tracks crossing here and there to unknown places that lead back underground. The fields, fallow, gather promise. Metabolize potential. Prepare for the wild frenzied greening of May and June when suddenly the grass is waist high, and we blink and there are red winged black birds making nests and milkweed growing tall and purpling with blooms.
When was the last time you let the field of your heart lie fallow? Not in ruin, like the barns in disrepair, signifiers of industry no longer relevant. Not by accident, or by neglect, or because of giving up. But on purpose and with intention. To rest, to recuperate.
Full stop.
And then to gather energy anew.
I have no idea what that looks like really. I’m just feeling my way around the edges of it, wondering, and also knowing that my body, animal first, is begging me to listen, attuned first to it's wild truth, more than to the endless precise production of machines. How to listen. How to slow in these moments now entirely?
Tell me things. Tell me about full stops, and fallow times, and hibernation. What comes then?

{2}

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Start with whatever you can do right now.

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#justshowup

Things to enjoy + take note of this week:

        

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The tomboy-chic look of A Well Traveled Woman
Ah-ha moments of realness and couragethat happen with new motherhood.
The rooms in Michael Graydon's world.
My friend Steve will be on This American Life soon. That's pretty cool.I love going through the TAL archives.
A project with my friend Willow I are doing: 35 Words + an image every day for the year.
A way to take notes in the shower. Really, what more is there to say about the genius of this?
The talented artisans from a favorite cafe of mine here in Vermont are featured on The Selby this week. So love that.
I have an artist crush on Oliver Jeffers. Also, his studio is pretty rad.
The Wilco NPR Tiny Desk Concert. They are poets in their own right.
A new mix on 8Tracks that I made. Love songs. Wanderlust. All of it.

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Tell me what are you listening to? Watching? And finding inspiration from this week?

{ STUDIO SALE }

Hello Friends!  In celebration of my 35th birthday, I'd like to invite you to my pay-what-you-can, first-come, first-served studio sale! I'm so excited to put this work out into the world, and to know it will find homes in your studios and living rooms and kitchens. I so hope you'll find something you love and enjoy. xoxo! ~ Christina

HERE'S HOW IT WORKS:   1. Click on a thumbnail to see details for each piece of art. 2. If you find a piece you love, leave a comment with the word SOLD below that piece of art. 3. I'll follow up with you by email as promptly as possible. 4. You tell me what you'd like to pay for the piece and process your payment through Pay Pal. 5. I'll ship the piece out to you as soon as is humanly possible.

{ One True Thing }

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

—Ernest Hemmingway

A little hibernation

Hello friends,

I've been missing you! And I've been enjoying some quiet time offline. If you follow me on Instagram, you've had a peak at my adventures in Hawaii. I'll share more about that here in the coming days perhaps, but for now I wanted to say that I'll be back soon. I'm taking this month--the first month of the new year, which also happens to be my birthday month, to dwell and reflect and hibernate a bit.

xo / Christina