My nearly three year old Sprout settles into my arms in a familiar way that I can’t even describe. It is a language we share, between our bodies. Another way of saying LOVE, this thing that we do, folding into each other, his small arms and legs wrapped around my torso, the heft of him against my hip.

We haven’t seen each other all day, and now he reaches up and brushes my bangs out of my eyes and says, “I want to rub noses.” And so we rub noses like seals.

Across the room Bean is drawing on an index card. In another minute he brings it to me. On one side: a red heart with an arrow through it surrounded in blue. On the other, a cheetah with brown spots and a yellow sun.

“You are the cheetah, Mommy,” he explains.

He’s right. I am. I am going thisfast.

T is at the stove stirring tortilla soup. It smells heavenly, and when he looks up to greet me and his smile turns my heart into helium.

Bean shows me the picture he’s draw for T. On the front, a heart that matches mine. On the back, a tall tree with the sun above it.

“Daddy is a tree with big strong roots and he reaches up to the sky and he’s surrounded by the sun. I’m the sun, and Sprout is a lion who plays with you.” He explains happily.

Sun, Tree, Cheetah, Lion. I love how he’s captured some small truth about each of us exactly.

So. I started a job this week that combines my love of story and creative work, with my superpowers in strategy and social media. I am now the Emerging Media Strategist at a super cool design firm here in Vermont. I’ll be almost full time until I graduate, and then definitely full time after that. It’s a new position, with a lot of culture changing momentum behind it, and I’m surrounded by some of the best and the brightest people imaginable. I’m thrilled.

It is also, of course, a shift for our little family. I had every intention of working once I graduated, but none of us expected the right opportunity would arrive right now. We’re making a new roadmap. Finding a part time nanny. Exploring ways to make everything that needs to happen effortlessly and well.

And the truth is, I’ve always been one of those people who loves to work; who wants to be full time, full on, engaged, motivated, connecting, moving and shaking things up. And when n I think about what they’re getting, my two boys, by having a mama who sparkles when she talks about the creative, awesome work she does… I know it’s the just right opportunity to do this now.

And of course, I’ll be blogging about the process pretty regularly here: about the choreography of equipoise—of making time for the things that count, and doing them. And I’m curious about your stories…

I want to year more about your experiences navigating work and parenthood in whatever context you navigate that. What do you love? What makes your heart ache? What are your truest insights?

Also… PART 2 of the CREATIVE PROCESS post is coming up on Friday. And a post very soon about my 33 before 33 list progress. Also expect some news and sparkle and possibly even a love letter on my birthday. GRIN.

It will begin like this: with the sudden irreverent bark of a dog on a cold snowy night; or with the lilting flight of a hundred starlings among the naked poplar branches, or in line somewhere, waiting for a cappuccino, when you pause to take note of what you’re actually thinking, and there it will be. An inkling. An image maybe, a string of notes, or perhaps a phrase.

I have a phrase in my head now, for example, that I’ve for a couple of months, rattling around like a magnet in a bucket, attracting fragments of things: filaments, filings, scraps.

That inkling will persist if you listen; until it becomes unavoidable and you have to stop wherever you are and take and admit: I have an idea! Then you will begin to wonder and ponder, record, and reflect as bits of the idea drift about in your subconscious like gorgeous saffron and vermillion coy fish moving slowly under the ice on a winter pond; moving just enough so that you know they still have a pulse, a vibration of life all of their own volition down there.

The days will gather upon themselves, until you feel the idea stirring with certainty, with urgency : a private equinox right there in the midst of your soul. And if you’re brave and passionate you’ll listen, and you’ll begin in earnest whatever work you must do.

You’ll ask for help. You’ll ask for answers. You’ll ask for time, and more time, and extra cups of coffee. You’ll clear your calendar as much as possible without the normal reluctance that you feel when pushing aside the “shoulds” and “musts” you are accustomed to always putting first.

And then there will be days, or months even, when all you want to do is dive into your work with passion and zeal and focus. This is the apex of the creative cycle.

This is when you are inclined to burn the candle at both ends; working one day of work, and another on your project; when you have perpetual paint on your fingers maybe, or a pencil behind your ear, or you feel naked without your laptop keyboard under your palms, and you don’t remember the last time you washed your sheets, and all you eat is whatever leftovers are in the fridge.

This is when the work that you’re doing becomes a force of it’s own. When even though the specter of failure rears its ugly head, and procrastination stalks you, you can shake it off with a certain courage and urgency, and get to the heart of what you intend. This is the time when all you want to do is the work you are in the midst of.

And then, as you near completion and the deadline looms, it’s possible that you’ll feel like the whole thing was a mistake. A terrible misjudgment of your abilities; a laughable mess of smithereens. It’s possible that you’ll wonder Who the hell do I think I am, anyway? And you’ll consider escape routes and worst case scenarios, and it will feel utterly impossible to finish. But you can, and you will…

//

This is part 1 in a series of posts I’ve been wanting to write for a while about creative cycles and how they affect me. My feeling is that these are very universal experiences, hence the second person voice which I fall back on naturally when I feel like it applies to you too!

I’d really love to hear your experiences about starting in on a cycle of creativity, and what happens throughout that process.

Next up in the cycle: Reaching the completion, celebration, loss and regeneration.

I’ve been wanting so very much to show up here and tell you things, but with the new year came a fever—the kind I remember having as a little girl, and all I was able to do was curl under thick down covers and sleep.

It’s not something I make time for readily: resting deeply, and I think my body knows this. I think it staged a mutiny just as soon as my very last project for the semester was finished and I crashed hard: first a chest cold, then a brief respite right over Christmas at to ring in the new year, followed by a fever that when it broke, left me feeling like a knobby kneed colt, my limbs somehow new and unfamiliar as I woke from a day of sleeping. I felt unbearably grateful to find my hands again, my arms, my kneecaps, scapula, ribs. What a glorious blessing to arrive with these fragile lungs still intact to suck in the cold air; with eyes to watch the birds lift and dive from branch to feeder; with fingers to type these words!

And so I woke, sipped tea, and wrote in my notebook 12 things to manifest in 2012 and a word to true towards, my own inner north.

I’d been thinking of EASE, and VITALITY, and AFFLUENCE, and about the way those words called to mind a certain blooming of soul and career and creative work that I want to dream real this year, and then flourish found me, somewhere between dreaming and awake, while the puppy was on the bed, and the boys too, and it felt so right and true that I laughed.

Flourish (v.) 1. to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way; thrive 2. to develop rapidly and successfully; to achieve success; prosper 3. to be in a state of activity or production 4. to reach a height of development or influence.

For 2010 I chose action; for 2011, fruition, and each word speaks more truth about its year than I could have ever imagined.

Big things came to fruition in 2011. I wrote my first book, completed my fourth semester of graduate school, got a dog, made incredible + soulful creative connections, watched my six year old become a first grader and my two year old become a talking, singing, dancing boy.

And now to flourish in this new life I’ve dreamed possible: doing work that I love as a writer, an artist, and as a social media strategist.

I haven’t shared as much here as I intended about my journey through graduate school, or about my growing love for social media strategy, and the way this field combines storytelling and conversation. It’s been so intense and full velocity and transformative in ways I’m only now able to put my finger on. It has reshaped my view, reframed my capacities, and honed my passions. It’s been pretty cool, really, and I’d like to share more here about that process this winter and spring as I finish up my thesis, and about the process of being a mother while also doing these things.

This is something I’m becoming increasingly aware of, how this truth, more than any other thing, is my trumpeters call, my purpose, my passion. To tell you this: you can do what you want.

Choosing is a myth. Being only one thing or only another isn’t a requirement. And manifesting what you long for has everything to do with finding your true velocity: your right tempo at the borderline between self and world; between mamahood and career; between soul and body.

I don’t always get the tempo right; and there are many days when I’m reminded once again that I’ll always be a novice at my life: new to the curveballs, the passions, the possibilities that come my way. But I’m joyfully committed to the process nonetheless. And that, my friends, is my way of way of telling you: I have big plans for 2012. New offerings, new directions and new adventures. And I can’t wait to share them!

xo,
Christina Rosalie

My dreams are the kind that make no sense upon telling: dancing porcupines, crazy riots, precocious children, and a pervasive feeling that I was never entirely in control. It’s a little how I feel when I wake too, the wind blowing until it rocks the bird feeders off kilter, the air so warm it could be a Chinook save for the fact that it’s now, a week before Christmas. Where is the snow?

I slept in (7a.m.) and missed breakfast with the kids and T, and now the house is in that helter-skelter tummult of everyone rushing to get out the door. I move through the motions of making Bean’s lunch like a heavy-handed robot. My fingers are made of clay. Sprout refuses to put on pants. I put cream cheese and jelly on an English muffin. Bean keeps walking from one end of the house to the other trying to locate his hat and gloves and jacket, each separately although he’s left them all in nearly the same place. The floor is mud stained.

In the small ravine where a winter stream runs beyond the meadow where our kitchen garden gets planted, the wind sounds like a freight train. Chickadees fly sideways; smoke comes back down the chimney. Where did all this wind come from anyway?

I have today to finish preparing presentation, to tie up the loose ends on several other signficant projects all due tomorrow. I’m making coffee. Pulling on rain boots for a walk with Clover. Ducking my head into the wind.

Ready, set, go!

And I tossed in a little creative challenge just for the fun of it. I’d love to hear what you discover.