{my topography}

She walks out the door ahead of him; long white hair blowing into her face as a truck barrels past. I watch as she turns back toward the door, and at first her face is carelessly content; then she sees him and her features soften almost imperceptibly. She looks up to where he’s paused there on the landing, readying himself to tackle descending the stairs. Does she know that he is dying? Does he?

He has the same sparrow like grasp and yellow skin my father had when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The same hunched shoulders in a flannel shirt. The same slow deliberate effort to carry on with the minutia of the day. Coffee in a paper cup; the laces of his leather boots tied in double knots.

He holds the metal rail and takes each step at a time. Then he puts his palm on her shoulder, and they turn, go.

Unbidden, there are tears.

Across the street I watch a man in a wool jacket gather small bouquet of chrysanthemums and yellow leaves. At the edge of the park he pauses for a moment, then tucks them into the slats of a metal bench and walks on.

I feel like a part of me is suspended above myself somewhere, caught among the helium balloon strings of my heart. Can’t quite seem to find solid ground, yet, again. It’s become a pattern for me lately.

Everything is gold and rust here: the light, the leaves, the barns bathed in late afternoon sun. Trying to catch my breath and find a rhythm today.

In my molskine quickly scribbled quotes. Together, they’re where I’m at right now:

“I believe in everything that has not yet been said.” ~ Rilke

“I write to discover what I know.” ~ Flannery O’Connor

“The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as a part of the process. Ask different questions.” ~ Bruce Mau

“It is as if mothers have two hearts and two bodies–one heart loves the babies, the other heart attends to the world; one body feeds the babies, the other body moves through ttime and space.” ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Zoom!
That was just the entire month of August flying by. I cannot believe how quickly it has gone. One week until September. Already there are fallen leaves on the lawn.

I wanted to share a few things I have been crushing on today:

This darling little clock project.

This glorious sketchbook series and this lovely inspiration wall.

And this list of stories. Good to listen to while doing the dishes.

The past week has been a blur of copy-edit days. Every scrap of time spent close to the thesaurus and the delete key. I miss my book. I miss talking to my characters in my head in the shower. I hope they’re waiting. It terrifies me that maybe they have slipped away. A page of events and scenes languishes in the top drawer of my desk. It cracks me up that I professed big plans for this story by the end of the month and here I am at end of the month. And I am not even close.

But there is something to this that I’ve been learning and learning again this summer. Things come and go—and really, you can’t hold on to anything too tightly.

I’m starting to get that it’s okay to just ride the waves. To be greedy with sleep and joy and creativity when they find you—and to sink into work and fast-paced days and tiredness on the days that those things hit hard. Each will return, and leave, and return again. There is something in this of faith, I think.

Whatever today is, tomorrow will be different. Yet there is a thread that loops through the fabric of both with its promise. Continuity somewhere. Balance, eventually.

It’s scary though to feel a surge of creativity, only to have it plundered by more practical things. There are moments where it feels like having a blindfold yanked down over my eyes, and I’m just bumping into things, fingering the shape of each moment with hands as unknowing as the blind eyes of potatoes.

Are you doing the life you want daily?

Hmm.

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.

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

You are there in the field of tall grass,
your shoulders hunched

and I am inside at the table by the bowl of daffodils,
trying to do other things

while in a tall dead maple
the woodpecker knocks

and we are both hearing this,
even though you say ‘I want to be alone’

and leave through the screen door banging
and walking away from me

I know where you are
I’ve been there too, a fierce dry sorrow making my throat swell,

still I climb the stairs and find you across the field
wearing orange like a small flame

everything could tip right now, we both know this
but I keep feeling like there isn’t anything we can do

except kneel and give thanks,
except pray as we listen to the woodpecker’s

morse code of the heart.

Tonight my orbit is the cat’s purr; my finger’s contact with the ENTER key, the space bar, alphabet twirling.

Tonight my orbit is my sick son, now asleep, before in tears simply because the day was too much.

Tonight my orbit is the roundness of my belly where kicks disrupt my thoughts, where space is at a premium now, and over which I pull new woolly sweaters.

Tonight my orbit is the circling of my thoughts, dogging each other, nose to tail; feeling like gradually I’ve lost touch with my creative self, allowed myself to sink deep into a dreamy no-mans land of day to day.

Tonight my orbit is the scattered disks thoughts about tomorrows plans; a thirst for fresh water, an eagerness for bed and a longing to feel right now, the warmth of my husband’s skin.

I’ve been curled up under the eaves in my studio on the couch, listening to the rain fall and perusing all the delightful blog links you left in the comments of my last post. Such delight & inspiration. Thank you, thank you for dosing me with your good taste and fabulous finds.

Everyone here is sick with one thing or another. Bean with a double ear infection, DH with a cold, me with a possible sinus infection. We keep passing these germs around like sandwiches, apparently, so we’re all lying low, staying put, and generally eating soup and bread and keeping to ourselves.

Today DH bought a new truck out of necessity and in celebration of a new month. Okay so we’re officially half way through already. Still. October sucked. Long story made short: the day after our friend died, the our plow truck gas tank fell out on the road, followed the next day by our septic backing up. Followed shortly thereafter by 2 of our 3 geese getting eaten by coyotes. Yes. It was a month. Anyway, the truck had irreparable rust damage–it was used to begin with–and so we sold it and bought a new one.

We spent most of the day driving about in the rain through some neighboring towns, stopping for sandwiches at a general store; lattes at a bakery; poking into little toy shops; stopping at a train station; and listening to music low on the stereo. Just the three of us, content to be half sick and with each other in the small circumference of the cab.

What did you spend Saturday doing?

…To doing art. Another thing I’ve taken a long hiatus from. I have a list, scribbled on a piece of scrap paper, of things I need to pick up at the art store. In my absense, my gel medium has dried up. Brushes are in disrepair (having been well loved by Bean) and and my India Ink has grown hard in the bottom of it’s square glass jar.

I can’t say why or when I stopped. Just did, and then the weeks became months, and my soul was elsewhere. Maybe with words on the page? In any case, it felt good to slip back into paint and glue and ink and graphite, making something without editing; the inexact phrase of the image.

What have you left off or forgotten or taken a break from?

I’ve been shy here, lately. Perhaps dodging myself a bit. Not really sure how to pick up where I’ve left off—I’ve been so sporadic with posting lately—yet I really am missing the regularity of sharing moments and comments. I’ve been fragile this winter.

For the first time since November I felt like I could breathe in again this past week without anxiety fraying the weft of my heart. Miraculously (maybe) or intentionally (with great effort) I’ve stopped feeling like if the world will clatter to a halt around me: a mess of splintered parts if I stop doing everything I do for a split second.

Depression, however fleeting, put me right up against the edges of things: the tattered cuff, the broken branch, mud-spattered snowmelt at the edge of the road. It stained my heart ashy, the color a clouded sky turns after dark.

Not something I was used to, wide awake at night, each day starting out with tight breath and tears close.

I think it had something to do with the fierce longing that I have so often voiced, that eats away at me like a smoldering fire if I’m not careful. A longing to be both here and somewhere else: making a homestead, doing the exact opposite of that (whatever that may be.)

It also had to do with the fact that I was feeling imbalanced at work: I was giving too much, yet not willing to give it. Lately I’ve been feeling less depleted there: allowing myself to focus thinking critically about learning, and children; somehow honing this as a craft.

Perhaps this was what was hardest for me: reconciling the fact that I am still a teacher even as I long with my whole being to be able to write full time. I let myself start hating my work simply because it was the thing that was stopping me from doing the work I was yearning to do. It almost felt like a betrayal to dedicate myself to my work at school, not that that rationally makes any sense.

I realize now that really I was making myself bitterly unhappy because everything in my life was skewed. I resented my work, and myself for doing the work, and this resentment had a corrosive quality like salt and lemon juice. Everything felt scoured and sour. I felt inadequate as a writer, without enough hours in a day, and that inadequacy burned a hole in the very center of my creativity.

Recently, gradually, I’ve been letting myself sink back into the small fragments of my life, not yet whole the way I wish it could be, but certainly a mosaic as it is. I started doing some running again, down our mud slicked road with grooves down the center six inches deep. I started painting. And I got word that I’ll be teaching second graders next year which excites me. I like teaching older kids. I love watching them become thinkers, with writer’s notebooks and organized work spaces, and I like them more than I like the younger ones who need so much reminding about things like nose blowing.

In the end I keep saying it was the winter, and I keep feeling like since the arrival of the first mellow (if not warm) days, my mood has evened out and I’ve become more peaceful. But I cannot say for sure. What is it really that ever makes us sad? I don’t think it can ever be defined entirely by the narrow perimeter of the weather, or for that matter a job or another human being. Somehow, achingly, each arrow of sadness is drawn from the sheaf of our own unquiet soul.