{my topography}

In the fields, ice glitters like fish scales snared in the stubble of corn. The river flooded its banks last week. A January thaw, and now the outlying fields are a morass of ice and sloughed off hunks of snow, stained black with silt and mud. The ground heaves. The ice breaks, and pitches up vertically among the mowed stalks. The winter light plays across it; unexpected iridescence.

In the summer corn grew tall here, and driving slowly with the windows down you could smell it: sweet and starchy; each ear growing fat in the secret shade of leaves and silky tassels. The river was brown and slow. The sun high; the heat supple.

Now the wind bites at my cheeks, and I bring steaming buckets of fresh water to the coop where the hens peck about listlessly among the litter. Spilled water on my jeans hardens to ice. Snow is in the forecast again. A sundog dogs the sun.

In the house, the air is floral and fragrant with scent of cooking fruit: pear-apple sauce. The stove is fat with embers. The cat is lazy. The to-do list is a hundred miles long.

I wanted to launch my project over at Kickstarter on my birthday—but a storm the night before brought down a huge tree on our road (a pine with a glorious crown of roots almost two yards across–up-ended unceremoniously, smashing smack into our phone and internet line) reminding me how small we always are in the scope of things. And also: my inlaws drove off our ice-slick driveway and then managed to get our truck stuck too (trying to get their car out!) wheel-well deep in mud and melting snow… so the morning of my birthday DH and I spent a fun (really, it was!) hour winching vehicles out of mud. I love that we work so well as a team.

So here it is Thursday and on the windowsill are a dozen scarlet tulips from my guy, each one the fierce color of my heart. When the sun breaks through the clouds, they almost make me catch my breath. Each petal illumined, gorgeous, risqué, and utterly out of place against the backdrop of naked poplars and maples: a tableau of gray on gray against the cloud strewn winter sky.

First: a birthday list.

Second: I’m going to launch my project this weekend hopefully.

It’s going to be fantastic. With your help, that is. Truly: the only reason I would have ever dreamed this up is because of YOU.

Third: a birthday wish. I’m declaring my own personal Delurking Day. Say hi. Share: who you are, how long you’ve been reading, and one of your favorite moments in your day.

xoxoxo!

An Invitation

A box of postcards. A handful of moments. A Field Guide For Now.

Part prose. Part mixed media collage. Part survival guide. Part adventure guide. Altogether: an exploration of the moments in life when everything happens and nothing does. Right now. Because these small, mundane, repetitive moments of laundry and dishes and leaving and arriving can also become the bread that that feeds our dreams and make us whole.

Launching on Kickstarter tomorrow.

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Thoughts?
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(I am so giddy and nervous and excited about this–can’t you tell? Also, you’re support means everything to me on this one. So many of you have nudged me about making some kind of book, and while the novel is in progress, THIS is something that you will be able to hold in your hands.)

From The Sound of Paper by Julia Cameron

… “Most of us live with a continual sense of emergency. We have a fear that we are too late and not enough to wrestle a happy destiny from the hands of the gods. What if there is no emergency? What if there is no need to wrestle? What if our only need is receptivity and a gentle openness to guidance? What if, like the Arabian horses grazing outside my window, we are simply able to trust.

When we trust ourselves, we become both more humble and more daring. When we trust ourselves, we move surely. There is no unnecessary strain in our grasp as we reach out to meet life. There is no snatching at people and events, trying to force them to give us what we think we want. We become what we are meant to be. It is that simple. We become what we are, and we do it by being who we are, not who we strive to be.

We are right-sized. We are who and what we are meant to be. All that we need, all that we require, is coming toward us. We need only meet life, not combat it. We need only encounter each day’s questions, not raise a fist at the heavens over the question of tomorrow.” …

(Thank you Cheryl for sending this to me.)

Also: I have a project I cannot wait to tell you about. I’m not quite ready to yet, but it is the most exciting, most daring, most bold thing I can imagine and it makes me giddy. It’s all about reaching out and taking hold of this moment. This one right now. It’s going to be awesome.

Where have I been? To be honest, I’ve been busy taking myself too seriously, with an enormous cold sore on my lip, that’s where I’ve been. I’ve discovered that I’m quite prone to becoming rather preoccupied with the outcome of my life and days. It’s foolishly easy to sit in the dark in a rocking chair with my baby attached to my breast, wondering, is this the sum of now? Is this what I intended when I was twenty-one, more sleek, more plump, more inflamed with ideals?

The truth is also that the cold sore on my lip caused quite a rash of vanity. I didn’t want to go out of the house, stupid as it is. I could feel it prickling up on my face last Friday night, the irritation starting at the thin pale line between pink and cheek. It bristled, as cold sores are wont to do, into an enormous festering thing and quickly I felt felled by my lot. Seriously. All week I’ve had this thing on my face and I had to go about my life driving Bean to and from school, attending meetings, meeting deadlines. A friend said, unthinking, “Oh my god what happened to you?” and I wanted at once to weep with self pity and also to laugh hysterically because dear lord, it’s just a fucking cold sore and I should get over myself. I almost have.

And also: how seriously we take ourselves in our small lives. And still there is a wild striped stampede in my heart rocketing towards whatever is still out there to be mine.

Even in the dark I feel it as I am rocking my second baby, my last one, who is nursing with gusto, his little hands moving about, clutching at my skin, my shirt, my hair, my lips. There is something utterly elemental and mammalian about these moments that we share. He’s drinking me in, his hands memorizing my soul, my teeth, the slack skin at the backs of my elbows, my hair which has grown long now, down below shoulders. I need to remember to sink into this, to let go, to let things be more. The imperfect has never been something I sought after; now it is always mine. Each day bridled with the bittersweet of knowing all that my heart knows.

Life is the wild startling flight of chickadees, the softness of my boy’s cheeks, the salty smell of my husband’s skin against my lips, the dishes in the sink, bread dough soft and punchy in a bowl rising by the wood stove, icicles, each one sharp and glittering, dripping as the temperature warms. And life is also knowing that I have this while someone else is hungry; and also that I long for things I do not have; and also that each day is short, too short, and sleep still consist of fragments torn from the blurry cloth of night.

Someone said in the comments awhile back that I don’t seem to be happy, and when I read this I was struck by how narrow the perimeter of that word is. Happy. It feels neither big enough, or small enough to contain all that is in my heart.

Still, its true that it’s been one of those weeks, and in fact it’s been one of those years—and by that I mean that I’ve been preoccupied a great deal here with the day to day, and also with a pervasive feeling of not getting as far as I need to with my life; not doing as much as I should or whatever. The thing I kind of keep forgetting and then bumping into again and again is the fact that I had a baby this year, and really, that is a big fucking deal even though its something that happens all the time to nearly every woman, and most of them are not nearly as lucky as I am with their lot, if you think of all the women in Iraq or in the Indian slums or in China or Sudan. Having a baby is derailing in the best and worst ways. It splinters your heart and your objectives. It makes you become, and also destroys small (and possibly shallow) parts of who you once were. (Who was I at twenty-one anyway? What did I want?)

How we measure our lives is so strangely, imperfectly, foolishly, relative. My life this year has seemed particularly small to me some days, and sometimes I want to sob because of its smallness. On these days my dreams become thunderous and sharp against my ribs inside my heart. But who am I, really, to feel anything beyond the gift of this life? So I have a fucking cold sore and spent a year raising young boys under significant financial stress. So. Fucking. What. It all seems small when you think of Haiti. Or Afghanistan. Or what life must look like behind the crazy political and literal barbed wire curtain of North Korea.

So that’s where I’ve been: feeling kind of sorry for myself because I’m turning thirty-two in another week and I’m not sure about the whole success bit—what it means, or if I’ve achieved it, or if it even matters.

I know I get caught up in this a lot—even with just simply posting here. I trick myself into this mindset that I always have to write something relevant, and this year has been one of many quiet moments and a lot of angst about making ends meet, and so without meaning to I’ve stopped noticing the small things, stopped writing about how the world makes me feel full to the brim with it’s beauty, always, nearly every day.

This makes me sad: I’ve recorded less about Sprout by a long shot than I did about Bean, and I wish that it weren’t the case since I’ve loved his babyhood so entirely—even more, in a way than I did Bean’s because it wasn’t fraught with the same angst about each phase of babyhood. I want to get back to writing down the simple things because for one, my short-term memory is shot, and also, because it locates me in my life in a simple and wholesome way that I love. Writing down the day is like finding myself on a You Are Here map, even if the map is small and crumpled and only consists of a few shaky lines delineating the floor plan of my kitchen.

When the decade started I was twenty-one and eager and I didn’t actually put much thought towards concrete goals. What did I expect? If I were really honest, I’d have to say that I didn’t have a fucking clue what I to expect from my twenties. And in the end, maybe it doesn’t matter much at all, because as Kurt Vonnegut says, “Be patient. Your future will soon come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.”

And also, even if I did have expectations, they wouldn’t have included heartbreak or shock (expectations never do account for such things.)

I couldn’t have imagined how aching and pell-mell and urgent my twenties would be. How life would hit hard and fast, with loss and surprise, each event following closely upon the heels of the last. I became a teacher. My father died (as I sat with him.) I had a baby boy (unplanned.) I got married. I helped to gut and rebuild a house in a unfamiliar city in an unfamiliar state. I was in a school related shooting. I began working with an author I admire immensely. I was nominated for a pushcart prize. I was accepted to graduate school twice and derailed both times because of topsy-turvy life events. I had another baby boy (unplanned.) I quit teaching. I couldn’t have put my finger on any of it, really, which leaves me reeling. Bracing. Shit. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and be forty-two and what will I be saying then?

Now I feel wide-eyed and tenuous. This is my life. These moments, fragrant and tender with my baby’s soft head against my breast. He slips into sleep, and I look into the dark towards the pale outline of the window where snow falls outside.

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PS: I’m having fun painting the zebras. (This painting is for sale, by the way…)

PPS: What did you expect? How has your life measured up?

I want to remember him exactly like this forever.

Doing: Whoa, it’s been one heck of a couple of weeks with both kiddos underfoot. Lots of sledding and cookie baking and general revelry. Not enough writing though. Or painting. Or time without the ruckus, giddy, non-stop noise making of two small boys.

Speaking of: Sprout is standing and almost walking. He’s thisclose. He’s hilarious. He plays hide and seek. He initiates chase games around the house and crawls pell-mell at top speed, then bursts into adorable peels of laughter. I tried to teach him to paint a few days ago–because I did with Bean at around this age, and it was an utter disaster. He ATE the brushes and got so frustrated when I’d take them out of his hand and try to turn them around so the bristles went on the paper. So not his thing.

Bean on the other hand is totally into drawing. He makes airplanes and houses with doorbells wired in to the walls. Tonight he drew a picture of our cat stalking mice. Each mouse had a lovely, loopy, curly tail. I can’t really believe that he is almost five and suddenly all cool and adorable: a big+little mashup. Yesterday he said, “When I’m big I’m gonna build robots. I’m going to design one to be a remote control that I control–and then another robot that the first robot controls.” He’s like that. Totally coming up with the coolest things ever. An engineer in the making.

Reading: it’s been haphazard at best this week. Mostly about the end of the world as we know it. Which really is rather unsettling . Though not entirely hopeless. I’m already thinking of what my garden will look like this spring.

Wishing for: a few solid hunks of time I can call MY OWN to get things crossed off the to-do list and sink back into writing and creating and feeling like myself again.

Eating: I’ve perfected pizza dough and a really great bread recipe. I’ll share both, but not tonight. Somehow it’s bedtime already. Where did the day go?

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Wondering tonight: what do you worry about? What are your greatest fears–the big, worst-case-scenario ones…and the little ones that nag and gnaw?

I’ll be back soon. I have so many stories to share…. Just trying to get back in the routine of things… (First day back to school for Bean was yesterday.)

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What are you doing, reading, wishing for, and eating this week?

I like the way the world looks now: tender, undercover, monochrome. I like the way this month starts off in sleep: the longest nights, the shortest days. I like the way we hurtle down hillsides on sleds; the way driving home from a New Year’s Day party with friends we saw five trees illuminated by the light of a car dealership, each branch crowded with the black silhouettes of sleeping crows.

I like how anything can happen before it does, now, at the beginning of a new year; and also looking back, considering the pulse and tremolo of the year gone by.

I like how it’s always possible to feel at the cusp of something grand at the start of a new year. Like there’s a chance for anything to happen, and everywhere all over the world people are throwing themselves towards their lives with renewed gusto.

People are picking words, and I like that. Looking back, I’d like to say that last year’s word was cocoon, because it was a dreamy, blurry, nestled year of slow motion, present tense stumbling; of new baby love and making ends meet. It was a domestic year. A quiet year. A year of sustaining; of inward growing. Now I’m ready for real action.

I want accomplishment and tangible returns. I want the satisfaction of crossing things off my list. Some years I’ve had heady, dreamy goals. This year it’s all about the down-to-earth and practical. It’s about getting things done. Enough of next year and sometime and when the time is right.

It’s the beginning of a decade. Time to get things started off on the right foot.

Non-negotiable: Financial stability, daily joy, and finishing my novel manuscript. The rest I’ll put up on this year’s list at the end of the month.

What is non-negotiable for you this year?