{my topography}

It’s been twenty days since I launched A Field Guide To Now, and in those twenty days I have been more intensely creative than I’ve been in over a year.

I’ve been forced way outside my comfort zone. My word for the year was action, and this project has forced me to take action on behalf of my career as a writer and artist in ways I couldn’t have conceived of when I first took the plunge. I’ve had to learn how to query and research and push the limits of my ability to create at night after small boys go to sleep. I’m working on this book project, my novel, paintings, and a few other big projects that are under wraps with fingers crossed.

(I am also working part time, at a job that is pushing me to learn In Design and Photoshop, always under deadline. The child-free hours of my day are spent thusly: designing ads and view books and writing press releases. The rest of my day is spent juggling, with a single-minded focus pounding in my head like jungle drums.)

I am compelled, determined, wired, moody, thrilled, exhausted, inspired. When I sleep my mind is active in a way that is almost new to me. It’s frenetic and repetitive: gnawing away at the creative tasks I’ve left off from before bed. This past week I’ve begun dreaming of whales—and they’ve inspired some of the newest art for A Field Guide To Now. Here is a glimpse (in progress.)

Incidentally, when I looked up what it means to dream about whales, this is what I found: Whale reintroduces us to our creative and intuitive energies to show us a talent we’ve forgotten about or haven’t been aware existed. How spot-on is that?

I’ve had more coffee and less sleep; more wine, more sex, more dreams and less rhythm. I’m spending less time on laundry and dishes (and the house is in probable shambles because of it) and more time perched on the stool in my studio painting, with gauche on my fingers. Less time taking leisurely walks with my boys; more time trying to multi-task while they’re under foot.

It’s made me think about my identity, about who I am and how I define that. For a while, after Sprout was born, I slipped wholly into the identity of mother, and felt my world narrow to the small, domestic orbit of that life. It was restful, to be there. For a while. Sprout was such an easy baby that I enjoyed his babyhood in a way that I never fully did with Bean—who cried more and was more needy, just as I was newer and more anxious at the whole mommy thing.

But now, Sprout is walking. Bean is 5. The house is littered with legos (Sprout holds lego helmets in his mouth like a chipmunk. I’ve checked his diaper but he’s never actually swallowed one. Go ahead call me neglectful. YOU just try to keep legos off the floor with two boys in the house, four years apart.) There is a constant stampede of activity and peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of milk that get spilled. The vacuum is out all day long. Money is tight. Bean has outgrown all his pajamas. Sprout is starting to say words.

And.

And in the midst of all this messy, simple, regular domesticity, I’ve begun to long fiercely for myself. For myself not as a mother, but as someone entirely separate from my children.

Truthfully, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the definition of motherhood, and now, more than ever, I am enjoying my boys and wanting to be distinct from them, in my own right. A writer. An artist. Right now my mind is preoccupied with the craft of writing, with images, and also about self-doubt, and longing…

How do you define yourself? Where does your definition of motherhood (if you are, or want to be a mother) shape you? What are the words you use to tell yourself the story about your life as it is at this current moment?

I have the day off and I’m gleefully miring my way through an inconceivably long to-do list. I have yet to figure out how to accomplish my every day life and everything else that needs to get done.

The biggest thing I’ve accomplished: completely reorganizing and painting my studio. Last year sometime, in the middle of the winter, under a blanket of depression, I painted my studio a pale blue, which felt like a bad idea almost seconds after the last coat was applied. Without meaning to, I began to use my studio space less and less, until I would go for a week or two without ever entering it.

This affected me on a subconscious level. I felt creatively terrified. Performance anxiety corroded any attempt to splash color across the page or really sink back into a routine of writing. Without a space I felt comfortable in, I resorted to writing at the kitchen table, in the midst of the hubbub of daily life, and routinely sabotaged my own efforts even there, buy skimming through my favorite blogs, or trying to keep up with the voracious demands of my gig over at Parent Dish.

Somehow the entire month of September (and nearly all of October) was swallowed by the murky creature of un-ambition. All summer I was entrenched in the rich sensory beauty of the outdoors; of leisure; good food; good novels. Then fall arrived with the first nip in the air and the hillsides turning orange, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. My syncopation was jagged and blurry; like a scarecrow trying to dance. Somehow with the shift in seasons I stopped doing all the things that I love: running, writing, art, and instead became (maybe necessarily) submerged in the fabric of work.

Headlong there, in the classroom, participating in the daily alchemy of turning eighteen individuals into a working group of learners; time spent watching spiders eat grasshoppers in the terrarium; and writing stories about magical shrinking potions. Time spent tying shoes and counting shells and navigating small sorrows. Time spent feeling nearly exhausted every afternoon; always empty, hungry, anxious.

And then I came home a few days ago to an empty house (Bean and DH were out running errands) and despite feeling hungry and grumpy, I decided to pull on my running shoes and head out in the perfect autumn sunlight for a run.

On the way back, passing a long field that follows the road for a good stretch, a small pony saw me running, and cantered up to the fence and then ran with me. I stopped and petted her tousled mane, and then continued, delighting in the unexpected equine attention. And then I realize: I was no longer either hungry or grumpy. My mood and body had been off kilter because I’ve been so out of rhythm. My soul misses running, it seems. Just as it misses moving through steady sun salutes on my yoga mat on my sunny studio floor.

So in the past few days I feel like I’ve come back into orbit around the quiet fire of my inner self. I’ve started running again, and I want to do it nearly every day. My body needs to move, just as my mind needs the quiet emptiness of one foot falling in front of the other along the gravel road.

So I’ve cleaned my studio and tackled my to-do list, and finally feel like I’m at least leaning towards a place of balance. Not quite there yet, but at least facing the right direction now.

As I write, thousands (really!) of lady bugs have migrated to our house. They are landing on the windows, twirling through the hazy autumn air in their bumbling flight. Do they hibernate? What are they doing here? Some say lady bugs are good luck. I’m content to imagine that they are.

Feeling the tight stomached ache of waiting, now. For spring, for the fat envelope, for several nights of sleep stacked up against each other like a solid cord of wood.

I finished The Year Of Magical Thinking yesterday, and all day today I keep going back to it in my mind. So many of her sentences are like the unusual pebbles we scoop up at the beach and then finger softly in the white cotton interiors of our pockets all afternoon.

This one, particularly:

“Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”

I randomly opened an old issue of Vanity Fair today, looking for inspiration, and landed on a page with her bird like portrait: frail after so much loss, but fierce. I clipped it to the wire running along the low wall near my desk, with other glossy pages ripped from other sources, each image causing amazement to quicken in my soul.

Waiting always feels like this. I heard from one school, yes. But the other, the one I dearly want, most, utmost, not yet. There are more birds now: doves, grackles, starlings, chickadees and a whole bevy of chatty bluejays at the feeder; but not yet robins from the tree tops, and not yet buds swelling large enough to force in jars along the windowsills. Though surely soon.

(Maple syrup on snow.)

Golden light fills my studio, the first of the morning. The sun, just up, climbs the rungs of the trees. Its smooth white disc of light is etched with a crosshatching of twigs, snow dusted and dark. Last night I made plans to wake up and write for an hour while the newness of day still holds some secrets in. So I am here, wearing my husband’s burly wool sweater and socks pulled up to my calves. My hair is still rumpled from sleep. I haven’t brushed my teeth. But something feels alive in me that allows me to fling a few unguarded sentences at the page.

After forty minutes of revising, the light spreading across my room has turned pale and bright with day. The sun has climbed sky’s ladder now, its face well above the trees, and the mountains look like cardboard cut-outs along the horizon, painted dusty blue. I go down to the kitchen where DH is mopping spilled coffee from the soapstone counter, and Bean, wearing his blue striped train conductor hat, is twirling about the room. They’ve made a fire, but it’s still cold. I pour coffee and maple syrup and milk into a pan and reheat it until the steam rises, and then pour it into a white enamel mug. With a stack of buttered toast, I head back upstairs, back to this desk piled high with books and papers where I wait for words to fit the empty spaces on the page.

After revising the entire essay, reworking sections again and again until the words fit together into a mosaic that I can understand, and that, at least in part, take on the shape of what I’m trying to know, they bust into my studio grinning. It’s 10am now and my coffee is cold. DH is ready for a shower, but before he goes he pulls me close, his hands traveling up under my sweater touching my hot skin. Bean circles my studio, a wreck after preparing for my showing. Empty frames litter the floor. Scraps of paper, one shearling clog, a case of rubber alphabet stamps. He sings, tunelessly, sweetly, as he collects and reorganizes the loot this space provides: tabs of watercolor paint, the wingnuts on the easel, a drawer full of cards, a futon frame without the mattress. He lies on it, his legs and arms spread out to account for the gaps. Perfect balance.

I finish reading This Autumn Morning, by Gretel Ehrlich. It’s an essay in the 1991 collection of Best American Essays, and it speaks to me in a language I know: one of loss and natural wonder both. As I read I relearn something about this art form that I love. That words can travel around and around the heart of whatever it is you’re trying to say, like the circles spreading outward from a pebble tossed. They do not need to go straight like arrows.

Before it melted, the snow was boot deep and crystalline. Now unseasonably warm rains have returned and the ground is slick with black ice at night. Above the bald mountains that rise up from the lake, the full moon was setting just as the sun was rising this morning, white and round like a plate against the pale tablecloth of pink and blue.

I’m busy again, but the past two days have been deeply satisfying. DH and I keep talking, and each time it’s getting easier and richer. We’re moving, not stagnant, and also we’re starting to train for a half marathon. Five miles at the gym yesterday, and then dinner all together. Ice cream with cherries for dessert, and Bean licking his bowl. We’re trying to be gentler with each other than before, and this is good.

I’m also back in the thick of creative work, which I love. Somehow I managed to forget I’m doing an art showing in a café and am supposed to hang my work this weekend, so now my studio is spread with frames and canvasses, as I scurry to prepare for the show. I like it this way, a patchwork of rectangles and brushstrokes.

A good way to start the new year.