I need your help!

Posted on | September 1, 2010 | 6 Comments

First of all, a little bit of giddiness: I must just have pause here to say how THRILLED I am to be in an MFA program…. To have weekly artistic assignments in multiple mediums I have never explored. To be engaged in daily discussions about how ideas and words and images shape who we are. YES. Indeed. It’s been such a long time coming and it feels incredibly incredible to be here finally. So awesome.

Now that that is out of the way, because you are all reflective and brilliant and generous and truly amazing, I have a favor to ask. I need your help. 5 minutes of your time and a little bit of your brain to be exact….

One of my first assignments is to explore some ideas around design–and to create some type of presentation based on that exploration. I’ve decided that because my art and writing has come to life here on this blog through my interaction with you–that I’d like to ask you a few questions and then turn your answers int a super cool mind map representing how you collectively think about the answers to these questions.

I need your info by Friday at the latest…All that is need is a one or two sentence response to each of the following questions. (You can leave a question blank too, if you want..)

What do you get by being a contributor? My undying gratitude–and a a glimpse at the final product (if you’d like.)

an impossibly possible project

Posted on | August 30, 2010 | 7 Comments

I’m driving with the windows down and my hair down and the late August light makes everything gold, gold, gold: the asphalt, the windshields of oncoming cars, the dozen college boys who run across the road in front of me, shirtless, their skin on fire in the setting sun, to run down the green median between the traffic. The air is sweet and the traffic slow and I drive away from myself and towards myself simultaneously. I’m going to class. The first of the semester. Already my mind is like a hive of bees, bristling with ideas, with longing, with possibility.

I feel like I am in the looking glass, slipping towards an alternate view of everything that I know, everything I can imagine, be, do.

I’m wearing a blue dress and it’s just me and the quiet and then, eventually, NPR as I wait at the stoplights and I want everything to feel the way it does tonight: full with opportunity, yet not saturated with the stress that will inevitably come as deadlines press and the hours cannot hold enough. Right now, anything feels possible. This is always the way things are before you begin them. You can be anything, right up until the moment when you try.

Then it’s all about sweat and grit and talent. I’m not leaving any room for doubt.

I have the feeling that I will be coming here often with words; with the little scraps of thoughts I invariably carry around in my head; with the wonder of all of it, and the terror too. I’m the only one in the program with two small kids. The only one living at the end of a long dirt road thirty minutes away. The only one nearly bursting with words for a book. It will all be possible, right?

If there was ever a time this blog had anything to do with balancing motherhood and a creative life, it will be now, for these next two years. I’m thinking it should be my new byline: My Topography: An Impossibly Possible Project.

{grin.}

I want to remember this: just before parking for class tonight I watched a middle aged couple, both blind, navigating the sidewalk together, their bodies a dialogue of halts and movements, their dark glasses reflecting the setting sun. They held each others arms, each tapping out a path for future steps with a long white stick. They encountered the park bench, a tree, and navigated around these obstacles with a kind of faltering grace. Without sight, they were wholly devoted to the task of being present in the moment of walking.

The only place I can be is right here, encountering the unexpected with joy.

I also wanted to tell you that I’ll be posting links and inspiration and essays about emergent media and design here. (But I’ll also be taking full advantage of all your awesomeness here. Stay tuned. I have a project already in the works that I need your input on.)

August 25:: Working Together

Posted on | August 25, 2010 | 6 Comments

WORKING TOGETHER

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air

passed at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self
by forming it well

to the great
intangibles about us.

~ David Whyte ~

August 24:: Treehouse

Posted on | August 24, 2010 | 8 Comments

“I want a fort really, really bad Mommy. Can we make one?”

Today I said yes.

Yes, and a pile of wood destined for the dump became a flying boat fort. He built it nearly half himself. Singing, hammering, adding knobs and buttons and tubing and the appropriate tree fort signs. And then he came in for lunch and over rice with tamari and avocado slices he drew this absolutely awesome self portrait.

“Why is it white just around your head?” I wanted to know.

“Because I’m sticking my head through the hole in my treehouse, and there is space between my head and the hole. Don’t you get it, Mommy?”

And then I did get it.

I love the way he thinks.

August 23::uncertain ordinary (and a list)

Posted on | August 23, 2010 | 10 Comments

Hello there.

I hardly know where to begin tonight. I’ve been playing tag with the delete key. Typing words, then flitting over with my pinky finger to delete them all, and again. It’s a peculiar choreography of indecision and exhaustion: the day was full of talking. Some days are like that, full with friends and family in such a way that the quiet becomes slender mortar in the chinks between the noise, and I want to creep away and scribble little quiet notes onto bits of imaginary paper and slide them into the slight hesitations between hubbub and bustle, between making bread and taking phone calls, meeting a final deadline for work (that job is through now, on to the wild blue yonder of freelance + being a full time student) and sharing lunch with a friend and her wee ones, all the while circling about wiping counters and trying to pinpoint exactly where I am in space.

I am not sure where I am. That is the truth. With this sprained ankle, I haven’t been running and I’ve lost that sense of forward motion that I have when my feet move down the dirt road, the sweet scent of grass drying thick in the air and the crickets singing, every night louder. But it’s not just because I cannot run. Things have been out of the ordinary for so long I no longer really have any memory of what ordinary is.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, I know something of that. This year has pummeled me so often with last minute curveballs and second chances and unexpected offerings that I’ve started to develop a new set of reflexes. I’ve learned to duck and bend, to bow in prayer, to hold my breath and then release it, and then to wake up and carry on with the day without knowing where it will end despite the fact that every ounce of me craves control and certainty and sure outcomes. I’m beginning to understand that we never really have any these things, though sometimes with more resources (time, money, etc.) we successfully concoct elaborate facades that allow us think we do.

But for now it is about this. About facing the uncertainty and saying yes, and saying yes again. It’s about counting up the little things each day and finding the utmost joy in them: the white cat crossing the bridge with a black mouse in her mouth; the red cows chest deep in clover; the corn, taller than my head now tassels waving against the blue, blue sky; the fat four-leaf clover I found when I looked down today at the edge of the field; the apples turning golden and pink and red.

It’s about just going, slowing, being right here with this life. Being.

I’m terrible at it, but I’m learning. I’m learning that it’s okay to never be finished. I am learning that the real blessing is about not being finished.

It’s about having more to do.

Does this make sense at all?

As I gear up for school this week, which feels just as foreign as it would feel to be saying that I am heading for heading to Antarctica or the moon, I have no expectations, only happiness tucked into my pockets, and wonder, and a little trepidation too….and I would like very much to hear what new music you are listening to (so I can make some new mixes for driving) and also what is inspiring you right now.

Mine:

This blog. And this one.
This poem.
This artist.
Some music
A piece of clothing (or a few)

Your turn. : )

August 22: decided

Posted on | August 22, 2010 | 9 Comments

+++

So I am going.

It’s for certain. Even though things will be tight, tight, tight financially. And also time, it will be a figment, and invention of imagination, a delirium, a dream. Who cares? I’m going. A full time student, this year, this week. I’m giddy. Happy. Content. Terrified.

I didn’t even imagine this last year, now.

It’s been such a year.

A year of big huge changes. Of beginnings. Of this: every day I face uncertainty on the page and keep going. I put my words here, and here, and here again, around the moments that I am trying to say. It isn’t arrow straight or clear, but it’s got a pulse, and it keeps unfolding, like something new and wet, or something very old and furled and fragile, and I keep waiting, and showing up, fingers crossed, with more determination in my rib cage than I’ve ever had for anything. This book is happening. There is no other way.

And now school too. Complete reinvention. The beginning of so many things.

Have any of you done this: full time school + full time parenting + full time writing?

Full, full, full.

{big smiles}

A love letter::1.5 Years

Posted on | August 20, 2010 | 10 Comments

I have been wanting to write you a love letter for a long time now. 18 months more or less. Since the day I met you to be exact.

The first thing I did was count your toes and fingers. Then I kissed you, still new, still wet, still scrunched and red and purple. Oh how I loved you in that instant. Irrevocably. Utterly. The very first thing you ever felt in this world was me; my skin, my beating heart beneath it. We looked at each other for forever. You were content in that moment, and in this world still you are content; filled with laughter and delight.

Now you arrive in my room in the morning with your hair invariably tousled and softer than corn silk, your face radiant with smiles. I lift you into bed, and while your big brother is dressing himself in some outfit involving numerous Hawaiian prints or plaids, you lie with your head resting on my chest, and hum a little song. We begin nearly every morning like this, and you smell like heaven.

Next you climb up the mountain of pillows to look out the window at the world below us; at the dawn becoming day; the purple mountains; at the sky spreading with early morning light. Often when your brother comes to snuggle in, you join him, pressing your cheek against his cheek, grinning, cooing. How lucky he is to have you, spilling with affection, as the one who adores him above all else in the world.

I’ve been wanting to tell you a hundred things, wanting to snatch a moment to write them down, and here are some: you play with balls with sheer delight: tossing and catching as though sport is a thing you came into this world knowing. You lift up your shirt and point to your tummy to be tickled. When someone hands you a doll or stuffed animal you hug it instinctively, and carry it around tenderly, rocking it in your arms.

You play peek-a-boo, hide and seek, and a hundred other games of your invention with your brother or by yourself, contentment surrounding you like a halo of bees around the sweetest honey. You stack blocks, and jump from precariously high places with more ease than I ever imagine is possible for someone your size. You are coordinated and physically adept. You climb both up and down our steep staircase; you sit at the stools by the kitchen counter without assistance; you drink your milk or water only from a glass (refusing sippy cups entirely.)

You eat independently and willingly: tomatoes, chicken, corn on the cob, tuna, PBJs, Indian curry, peaches, anything. You love cookies, fig bars, milk, berries. When you are eating something and you discover something you’d like to be eating more—you simply remove whatever is currently in your mouth and hand it off to me. Thanks little dude.

You cannot help but smile. You smile at everything, always. You have begun to say words: mama, daddy, mooah (more), ba (ball), wa wa (water), no, oh nooo!, uh oh, uh-uh (what we say to you when you are doing something you should not be), papa (your grandfather), nona (grandmother), though words have come slower to you than they did to your brother, just as drawing isn’t something you are naturally drawn to: you want to eat the crayons or paint your hands with markers instead.

You have the best giggle in the world. You sleep, easily, effortlessly.. This was something I never wanted to write about because I feared jinxing it; feared that it would change; but no, it’s just who you are. We put you in your crib for a nap or at bedtime and you simply go to sleep, humming to yourself softly. You sleep for two or three hours back to back. You are easy going in every way: even teething only results in a fuss here or there, and you only cry if you are hurt or if your brother takes a toy away from you. Really. You hardly ever cry. Mostly you laugh. You smile. You climb onto your red radio flyer wagon and stand—not holding on—and surf back and forth and grin with glee.

I guess the truth is I expected you to be like your brother, who was all intensity from the minute he was born. (This morning when he came in to snuggle with us after dressing he was already talking, telling me about how to tie different kinds of knots. He’d pause every so often to visualize, then gesture with his slender hands and he described the images in his head. And this is what he was always like. Intense, articulate thought. He squirmed, wiggled, fought sleep. He cried often, and still to this day gets upset more easily than you. My sweet firstborn: so thin skinned and aware of the world.) I guess I couldn’t fathom that you could be so entirely different, so entirely your own little self from the get-go. But you are, oh you are.

And you blessing. I love you so. I love you, I love you, I love you.

August 15::The only way

Posted on | August 16, 2010 | 5 Comments

This is what I will keep saying, even when things seem impossible, or impossibly hard, or just straight terrifying, or daunting, or uncertain. Over and over, yes.

Two phrases in my head today (the second one makes me giggle):

“There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.” ~ Wayne Dyer

And also:
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” ~ Winston Churchill