{my topography}

I did it. Days of mapping out details and collecting information and editing video clips (whoa, no small thing!) and finally, here it is. A Field Guide To Now.

It kind of feels like giving birth. A lot like it in fact: the risk, the unknown, the realization that it’s all beyond my control even though I’m going to give it every single thing I’ve got.

It’s the first time I’ve ever taken a leap like this. Plunged with a fluttering heart towards a dream.

Please support this.*

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And also: I have two birthday boys this week! Bean’s birthday is the 16th and Sprouts four days after. This is the week that has changed my life, twice, momentously. It felt so utterly right to launch this project today. (Still. I’m nervous.)

xoxo!

*Things are tenuous financially, and this would make a huge difference. Please Share this project with everyone you know.

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 don’t have words. I don’t know where they’ve gone, except maybe with the dark speckled starlings, lifting off all at once from the snow flocked trees, their calls filling the silent air with abrupt, heady sound before they are gone and the fat fluffy flakes fill the impressions in the snow where their feathered bodies fluttered, fighting for crumbs.

In a moment, nothing is left of them: no memory of their stark, dark wings except my own. The bird feeder swings empty. The snow falls. This might be how a year passes, or an afternoon. This is how moments add up now, recently, without words.

So I have begun to paint again.

In the absence of words, color looms large. A particular hue of blue finds its way into almost everything: like an undertow, or the drone of a bagpipe, like something I cannot name. I paint it everywhere, almost accidentally. I’m even thinking of painting it on my dining room chairs, this color that is my soul now, at the edge of a new year, after a year of limbo, of growing, of patience, of wondrous birth of my smallest boy.

Natalie Goldberg says to go, right now and write. She says to go and write as practice, and maybe it is time that I return to this, here. Maybe there is nothing more than this in the spaces between productivity as my novel consumes me, then falls silent like the snow, like the starlings, like the quiet surprise of winter making everything the most delicate hues of white imaginable, until I want to curl aroundthe almost-ache of my own wonder at it’s whiteness.

How can there be anything but this moment? This snow, this quiet throbbing of my own embering heart at the start of winter?

This is where I am now, looking to and fro and trying to remember. What has this year been? I have everything and nothing to show for it: the accomplishments that are mine are small and enormous, both. A baby boy, a 7 minute mile, the shambles of a novel, the wonderment that we’re still here, barely, after a doozy of a year financially.

Who are we, who are not great or famous? What is the sum of lives that go by unimaginably small, like the mark left by the starlings in the snow? Except for this: inside my mind now, the world expands like bellows by a smithy’s hearth. I hold wonder. I hold fire. I hold prayer, and promise.

Who are we, who are not great, but are blessed with snow and small boys and warm bread and starlings? Across the world, and also seven miles away, someone is hungry. There are boys who stay awake at night shooting phantom villains on video games they do not understand, then come to school tight-fisted, angry, saying: “I’ll shoot you,” and meaning it in the stark, hungry way that only they can. And there are people heading up the corporation that is stealing the seeds of a biodiverse world and making them limited, presice, ingenious, terminating, so that entire populations become destitute and indebted.

Who are we, who are not great, who touch softly the cheeks of our sleeping children, feed chickens corn, paint when words don’t come? Who are we if not everything at once?

It seems like it was just a couple of weeks ago that I was clipping Bean into his ski boot bindings for the first time and sending him down the driveway. Now the first leaves are already golden and orange. Where has the summer gone?

The crickets know that snow is on its way. In the garden, fat pumpkins with girths rounder than Bean’s hugs. My Bean, who has started a mixed-aged (Waldorf) kindergarten program, and comes home singing. My Bean who tells us about the enormous imaginary kangaroo that lives upstairs. My Bean, suddenly a big-little kid. Four and a half. Mischief around every turn. He is my favorite forever.

And then my baby boy, my little Sprout, coming up on 7 months old, impossibly. He is a chunk. Pure love. Grins always. He’s been surfing the floor the past week or so, trying to crawl. In between attempts he’s pleased as peas to sit in the center of a circle of pots and spoons, banging things and grinning. He’s always cracking himself up. There are so many times throughout the day where I’ll look over at him and feel my heart catch and then expand. He’ll be smiling at me, watching me from across the room as I do things in the kitchen or fold laundry or type. He is my little Buddha. My reminder to be right here, now, in this precious, precious moment. He is my favorite always.

Also, some weekly blog crushes to share:

2 or 3 Things, Bliss, Le Love (can’t help going here and smiling), listing quirks over at Cupcakes & Cashmere…(a quirk DH pointed out tonight while we rocked it in the basement gym—3 miles in 24:15 minutes—is that I love to watch bull riding. Really.)

Also, these houses (still brooding over treehouse plans, as you can tell.) This gorgeous little party. This amazing installation. It’s how my heart feels, sometimes, lately. Overflowing, made of feathers, of air, of fragile things.

What are some of your crushes right now? Share please.
Also~ what are you looking forward to this week?

I’ve been finding fragments of my heart lately, tossed among the hair pins and pennies by the washer; lint too, purple from the red shirts and blue towels that seem to endlessly make their way through the wash. So this is a life.

Certain things are never done. The wash for one; the spoons in the sink are always there again, and the bowls; the small hands that need scrubbing; the ripe things waiting for harvest in the garden, some silent and round under the dirt, or fat and humming with wasps, sides split open in the late summer sun.

These are days when the light is amber and still. The grasshoppers are huge, springing into the hedgerows as we run by. Their legs are always bent, poised again and again for the small prayer of almost-flight; temporary, dizzying, before they land again among brambles and gravel.

This. This life. It feels so small, so incredibly small and so enormous all at once.

Walking about the house gathering toys in the quiet that comes after small boys finally sleep and the dishwasher runs, I wonder if this can be enough for anyone? If anything is ever enough, if any heart beats regularly with contentment; or if to be alive always means to crave, to lunge, and long and push. We have our hearts after all, full of muscles that never sleep, and chambers secret even to us.

I put a wide mouthed jar of zinnias on the windowsill; follow the hawk with my eyes as I run. Its body is gold and white in the sun, circling against the blue. It is only there, present in the sky. Eyes like arrows, bones hollow, feathers tilting and lifting its small handful of life into the wind.

Day after day the rain comes in the evening, the windowsills wet. I eat an extra cookie, the chocolate melting bitter and sweet and sticky on my tongue, crumbs on the couch for sure, and put Sprout to sleep in his bouncy seat in the laundry room.

Yes. There with the fans, and the rhythmic satisfaction of clothes being turned and turned again in sudsy water (a task my great grandmother maybe did by hand with a washboard in a basin, and before her women at the creek bed, knees pressed into the silty mud, pounding with stones) there is a snugness that lulls him. The fan drones and the wash whirls back and forth, and beautifully, without a fight, he’s asleep.

So. I’ve been moody with this rain, the humidity making my hair curl and my skin stick. I have 10 tabs open in my internet browser and I’m on the verge of tears, right on the cusp of everything as usual. It’s so terrifying to contemplate doing more than whatever it is I’m doing right now. As in: sending more work out, figuring more things out, putting my heart out there in thin lines of Times New Roman double spaced and waiting for whatever.

It’s terrifying to sit here on our stained couch with sore boobs (Sprout nursed less than usual today, but he was just as chummy and darling as ever,) contemplating what else could be a reality soon, or never, or maybe. What if I make it?

Sometimes that question is almost as confounding and daunting as What if I don’t?

Here are the things I suck at: organizing, networking, time lines, deadlines, and synthesis. Here are the things I am good at: sentences, earnestness, heart, metaphors, and dreaming.

Between those to columns are the three words that Nike made so very famous: just do it. Sometimes that feels impossibly hard.

Sometimes I don’t even know what that looks like, doing it, going for it: where to begin?

Breath. I come back to that. And then I go back to my browser with it’s ten open tabs and try to make sense of my life.

You? What are you good at? What are you utterly miserable less good at?

And: Which is more terrifying: attempting success and failing, or failing to attempt success? Ha!

Wednesday. Watching the rain from the porch with Sprout. Newly mowed grass, in heaps. Tired. So tired, after a night awake with a restless babe. Fresh jam. Scattered thoughts. Trying to make sense with words with some people, including with my mother, and while my heart is there, and hers is, it doesn’t always come out right. You know? The words crisscross like a subway map, and you find you can’t always get off where you intend to.

A headache. Raw almonds on honey toast. The first zinnias blooming in the garden. And already the day is over and it’s time for bed. But before sleep, some things to share:

First: some small art. Little tiny pieces that I am putting in a little gallery for sale. I know. It’s been years, literally, since I sold art here, with the time away from teaching my creative well has been filling and I’m excited to start sharing little pieces with you. Please go look. It’s just a start. An inkling. We’ll see where it goes.

The pieces I’ll be putting up first are in a songbird series. I have this gorgeous old vintage book about songbirds and I’m giving its pages new life with little paintings of the birds that have been making me so happy this summer.

Also, I’ve been loving…this gorgeous little journal of random things.

These photos.

This little story.

And these fascinating little films.

What’s inspiring you?

In the pale crook of a birch a robin threading its song through the fluttering green of newly furled leaves makes my heart tremble.

Things are up in the air, and I’m holding my breath waiting for unrecognized brilliance. It’s like I’m occupying the thin space between air and water in a drinking glass, where the whole world is reflected in a line.

I spend whole days skimming, flitting, careening. In my molskine I’ve started writing again, finger bones gripping in quiet concert, the lead becoming a rush of loopy js and ys, answering the same questions each morning: what do I feel? What do I want?

Today I don’t know how to get myself started with the rest of my life. Today I am trying to catch up with myself. Trying to be something.

Across the sky clouds the color of cinnamon remember the fiery circle of the sun,
then draw together close like stitches over a wound; gathering indigo, gathering twilight, gathering the night.

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What do you feel? What do you want? Right now. Today. Right this moment.

37 weeks. Gradually I am feeling like more than a silhouette of myself.

That is what I’ve become, over the past months, the past year really. A cardboard cut-out stand in for the girl with the smoldering wildfire heart, the one who tucks brushes behind her ears and dreams big dreams; the one who runs with mud splattering her shins, kisses like she means it, writes until after midnight. I’ve become parched, devoured by the lackluster day to day of my job.

This blog is like a time capsule, a magical thinking jar, a strange little cyberspace place full of remnants of me. I go back to look at the person I was last year, two years ago, three. It feels like stepping into an unexpectedly cold shower, a shock to the system to get these glimpses; to remember what I was like happier and less stressed. The mother to a younger son; a woman on the verge of writing more, not less; the one with art hanging in cafes; putting down floorboards, on the brink of making a home.

I didn’t notice it leaving, but I feel it coming back. Seeping back daily, blessedly, like sap running in branches cut and thrust into a jelly jar of tepid water. Hello joy.

I’ve hated being pregnant because it placed me outside of myself unable to run or hike or eat a damn meal without feeling nauseous and ill at ease. But more than that I’ve hated the emptiness that has swallowed me up at the end of every long day after giving everything away.

I look at the past months, the hours that compose each day, and discover a heap of pebbles. I’ve been bashing about, too tired to polish the stones or thread them onto a necklace. Nothing has mattered. It’s all been so blurry and subdued in my head that I have barely noticed that it’s winter. The snow outside is this incidental inconvenience. I have neither hated nor loved it. I read other people’s posts about spring, and feel like we must be participating in alternate realities. Spring?

My life has narrowed this past year, in part inevitably: as my belly has grown, I’ve become a container for this baby boy who is rapidly outgrowing my womb. Now when he moves, I feel his little limbs, his rump and tiny feet. I am impatient, eager, and restless with waiting. But it has also narrowed because I’ve been overwhelmed and empty at work, like a concubine with tiny feet, bound by obligation to put on hold the things I love. I’ve allowed myself to go dormant.

Of course, only I can be blamed. Someone else in the same situation would have looked at it differently, made different tools, fashioned different moments in the construction of the everyday now of things. But for me, consumed with the empty tasks of the moment, attempting to meet too many other people’s needs, I ignored the beast gnawing at my creative taproots. Can’t put a finger on when I let things slip exactly. But they did, and I feel it now as I’m stumbling about a little like a mole (I’ve always been rather fond of moles, by the way, with their long anemone-like noses and silly little useless eyes) in broad daylight.

So, here I am, 37 weeks and suddenly waking up. Shaking off the cobwebs of a dormant time, gathering brushes, laughing, dreaming about painting dogwood flowers and zebras; and catching glimmers of stories in my notebooks just before I drift to sleep.

And oddly, I don’t feel like this new state will be altered by the birth of my second son, though I have no illusions about the sleep deprivation and the crazy-making that it brings. There is a difference between bone tired and sucked dry.

Anyway, here is the mobile I made yesterday, paint everywhere, the floor of my studio amok with gel medium and paper shreds and glee.