{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?

Hello friends!

Where have you all scuttled off too this month? I miss you around here… I’ve been changing things up… have you noticed? It’s still a work in progress. (I crashed my entire theme twice. I wish I understood CSS.)

Something about having the kickstarter widget broadcast in the sidebar was really throwing off my mojo the past couple of days. I started to hate seeing the amount of funding flatline… and it has been interesting to listen to my own inner dialogue turn doubtful, even as I’ve gotten the most exciting new (!) and incredible support because of it so far. (Can’t tell yet….not for a while.)

I am discovering that art and risk become something else entirely once a dollar sign is attached. It’s made me take myself seriously as a writer and artist in a hundred ways I never saw coming…and for a long, long time I never took art and writing seriously (although they were the things that made my heart sing) because my father—who was an enormous influence in my life when he was alive—pushed me towards a ‘worthy’ profession. While he appreciated art in a sort of distant and abstract way, he implied often that to pursue it would be self-absorbed and indulgent, compared with pursuing a career in the service of others—as a teacher.

So I became a teacher.

To this day, one of my greatest regrets is that I listened to him when he told me that interning at Ms. would be a frivolous waste of my time. I still wonder how my career would have been different had I taken that internship that I’d been offered.

So it’s been a long time coming for me to believe that my words and art can be a career. And this way, this project has been an incredibly tender and scary and exciting process of self discovery.

I have been breathing, eating, sleeping and dreaming ideas and words. And I’ve been thinking about the community on the web, and what makes it, and about how if we could meet, we’d look each other in the eyes and laugh and share delight and there would be no question in your mind that you’d put ten bucks behind me. But here, in this almost imaginary place, filled with a vast, unfathomable amount of information and creativity, I am small.

So.

There it is.

In the middle of the night I wake up wondering what failing at this might look like. I watch the snow falling outside the window and wonder if it was foolhardy to leap without a parachute, holding only the strings of handful of helium balloon hopes. Then I wake up in the morning and I can feel excitement zinging in my veins. This is what I want. This creative, terrifying journey. This work.

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Every winter I wait for a time when I can no longer remember the way the world looked before white, and then I know that spring is near. I wait until I feel myself falling into the faulty labyrinth of memory. Like a mime, I like to put my hands up against the pretend container of the present and see how well it holds me. And today it happened.

Today I can’t remember leaves. I look at the gray birch out my window, the one that is tall and leaning with the rot gnawing at a burl where a limb was torn away in a summer thunderstorm, and I cannot see it green with shimmering leaves. Logically, I can remember it, but I cannot really see it in my minds eye any longer. This is the beginning of spring fever. This is when snow is wet and heavy and slides off the roof hard and fast in sudden melting avalanches. This is when, invisible mighty things start happening in the earth.

Sap will flow. The birds know. Soon they will start building nest with mud and sticks.

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I’ll be posting about the project once a week from here on out…and over on the kickstarter site maybe more often. (I don’t want this blog to become all about this project all the time.)

Please know that your gentle words of support are just as valid and and inspiring and helpful as a pledge. I get that times are hard, and there are other, bigger things (Haiti, for one).

And I am curious tonight: have you ever ventured out on a limb for something that you wanted or believed in? What was it? How did it turn out?

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.

Sprout took his first steps on my birthday! He’s been venturing out into the wide expanse of floor ever since and it melts me every single time I plunk him down on his little feet and he makes his way towards me hesitantly, grinning ear to ear. I wish you could all meet this kid. I am so smitten with him. I know that’s all I ever say about him–but it’s so true. He’s so easy going and funny and laid back. When he makes it all the way to me he throws his arms around my neck and practically gnaws my cheeks off with drooly kisses and seriously: MELT.

Also: in the middle of making carrot muffins yesterday afternoon as a snow whirled past the windows the phone rang and it was the Red Hen Press calling! To tell me I won the June 09 Short Fiction Contest judged by Judith Freeman . AWESOME.

And: I am thisclose to launching my KICKSTARTER project. It’s so exciting. I’m up to the gills in creativity, which makes me very happy indeed. My only barrier: TIME. I’m hoping I’ll have it up tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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Tomorrow I want to share a bunch of links with you of beautiful blogs and good things I’ve been eating & reading and enjoying for the past couple of days… And I’d love to hear about your favorites right now: what magazine do you love to read? What do you love to have for breakfast? What is one thing you’re going to do this week that you’re a little scared of doing? (That’s right. Commit to that last one.)

xoxo!

Practice breathing in and then out and then in again with nothing else in your thought but your breath.

Practice walking down the road with your small boy, just looking. Bring your camera. See if you can see things differently, even though the road and each individual tree and rut have become familiar to you, now, finally after a little more than four years of living in this place.

Trespass onto the neighbor’s field and look back at the road you’ve been walking on. Notice how everything is different. From here, your house will look small and perched, like a storybook house up on a hill, white and gabled and distant, and for a moment allow yourself to be astounded by the way your legs have carried you all this way, down the road and out into this snowy field where the tracks of voles and fieldmice make fidgety paths between patches of dried grass.

Consider your legs and lungs and breath, and feel how together they have moved you to here: each capillary thundering in minute harmony; each muscle bunchy and sure beneath your jeans, beneath your skin.

Watch your son dash pell-mell ahead and then stop. Watch how your shadow overtakes him; swallow’s him. Hold your breath as you come up next to him and watch his breath rise in the air in a cloud. Together you will look to the tree line, one that you’ve never been to, on property that is not yours. Against the snow it will look abrupt and dark with a thick row of pines just visible over the slope of a snow covered knoll.

Look down. You’ve been standing on coyote tracks. In the dusk when you aren’t present they traverses this field, tongues lolling, breath rising in frothy clouds from their mouths. They’re close, even now. You can feel them. Just there, beyond the fields, somewhere in the woods, maybe asleep or maybe watching with yellow eyes, alerted by your footsteps and the sharp ringing sing-song of your son’s eager voice.

Remember how this is always the case: how the line between you and the wild is thin like the bit of thread you find coiled in your pocket. Your fingers tease it, wanting to know how it’s wound. This is always the way: you always want to know. The thread is yellow and snarled and comes from the windowsill in the room above the garage where you write. You picked it up in the morning meaning to throw it out, but kept it accidentally.

It was from this same window that you saw the foxes last week. The ruckus of the chickens alerted you, and when you looked out a fox was right there in the snowy driveway, so close you could see the way the fur on its chest was clumped with ice.

When you pounded your fist on the glass and began to yell, it looked up, right at you, but didn’t move a muscle until you ran down and out into the snow without your hat or gloves or jacket, boots unlaced, shrieking like a madwoman. Of course it ran then, though not far at first. Just to the top of the hill by the woods and when you followed after, another joined it—they’d staked the chicken house out for sure.

Remember how you felt your heart, hard and raw and pumping in your chest after running through the snow, hair flyaway, clapping your hands. Remember how their fur was rust colored and how when they ran, they became streaks of umber like twin contrails in a dream. Remember how they were so beautiful you started to cry.

Your eyes well up now too, as you bend down with your son to examine some marks where something struggled. Wing marks make fractal circles in the snow. The air is still. The sky is pale and filled with cirrus, and along the road starlings sit on telephone wires calling to one another and lifting and alighting in sudden unison.

Put the thread back into your pocket and take a breath. Take some steps towards the road over wind blown snow. Listen. Far away down the road two men are working on a silo. They have huge cranes and their tools make hard metallic sounds that travel to you in a certain rural morse code. Clink. Clink. Clink. Hold on to this.

In your fingertips you can feel your pulse as you take hold of your son’s mittened hand.

1. January
I quit my job. At the time I took a leave of absence, but already I knew I wouldn’t return. I was enormously pregnant, nesting, wistful, restless.

2. February
Sprout was born, after seven hours of labor, four days after his brother’s fourth birthday. I yelled a lot of expletives while in the shower, in labor, while in my head I kept seeing the image of a mountain–steep, serene and calm. And then. Then. This perfect boy that has filled my year with utter entire joy. We stared at each other. He lay on my belly and we just breathed. I counted his toes, kissed him, smelled him, nuzzled his soft head. He nursed, and looked at me, and was quiet. And so began our love affair.

3. March
Spring fever. Longing for green. And beginning to realize what the year would be. A roller coaster. In the dark looking through windows, everything blurry and unexpected and off-kilter, especially financially, but also emotionally.

4. April
Finally blossoms. Planting seed starts. Feeling the impermanence and indelible insistence of what it means to be a mother of two small boys. Realizing that nothing lasts, even when things were tenuous between us.

5. May
Spring for real. Collecting tadpoles. Taking walks with Bean. Running. Weight lifting. Systematically breaking personal records. Faster, harder, farther. Rhubarb in the garden and snap peas. And also, we slept and dreamed and become something greater than the sum of ourselves this year.

6. June
It was a summer of give-and-take, of us coming face-to-face with the consequences of a life lived pell-mell, with gusto and ambition and also arduous domesticity. We were in the thick of sleep deprivation and summer’s heat and rain. Endless rain. Also rainbows. And lettuce in the garden.

7. July
Evidence of the intangible. Feeling on the cusp of things. Starting my novel. Running hard. Breaking my own records. The first tomatoes. Too much rain.

8. August
Sprout was 6 months old. I started doing freelance copy editing. We went on a horrifically funny camping trip. I received several rejection letters in the mail. Berry picking. Baking. The tomato blight killed most of the tomatoes in the garden. More rain.

9. September
The beginning of all sorts of things…Bean started in a new school… our ten-year anniversary, and laundry. A 10 hour car trip with both boys to Maine. A week with my best friend. Apples ripening. Glorious late summer sun (finally, no rain.) Also: two weddings, the last two of my dearest girlfriends were married.

10. October
A post at wishstudio, getting a new job, noticing the light, having things speed up. Exquisite foliage. Also morning poems. Pumpkin picking. Digging up potatoes.

11. November
All about noticing what we have. Navigating a part time job, NaNoWriMo two boys. 50K words. Sort of. New friends. Dinner parties. Moodiness. Teething. Sprout started standing.

12. December
Now. It has been a year of noticing moments. Making cookies for Santa with friends + sledding. The most glorious snow.

When I first started looking back at the year, I could hardly remember it. Blink. The entire year happened. And then I took a breath.

It was a year of intensely lived moments, pervasive financial stress, and newborn sleep-induced forgetfulness. On one hand, I accomplished nothing. On the other: I’m here. We are. We’re in love, big time. I have a novel that I hoard, obsess over, gloat over, feel terror about. I have two boys. I can make bread without a recipe. I can run a six minute mile. I can do a pull up. I’ve begun to paint again.

What about you? I’d love to hear what you are proud of from this year… what you learned or accomplished.

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?

Hi Monday. Apparently I hit publish last night before bed, and this odd collection of urls and lines of text went live yesterday night sometime. Oy. ( I’m glad you liked my ‘experiment,’ Denise.)

I did want to share all sorts of things I’ve been crushing on lately though, including these poems, and enough gorgeous pink blooms here to almost make me weep. Also, this inspiration to play around with some stenciling. (I’ve always had a crush on Banksy.) And this artist’s interpretation of the “Missed Connections” section in the paper, which is where I go, too, when I’m looking for a new story.

Speaking of a new story, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. You all remember my failed attempt in August, I am sure (which was kiboshed by a heaping helping of freelance copy-editing.) This time? No excuses. I need to get this story out of my system. I need to get this story on the page. I need to see my words accumulate following NaNoWriMo’s instructions:

“Do not edit as you go. Editing is for December. Think of November as an experiment in pure output. Even if it’s hard at first, leave ugly prose and poorly written passages on the page to be cleaned up later. Your inner editor will be very grumpy about this, but your inner editor is a nitpicky jerk who foolishly believes that it is possible to write a brilliant first draft if you write it slowly enough. It isn’t. Every book you’ve ever loved started out as a beautifully flawed first draft. In November, embrace imperfection and see where it takes you.”

So basically, it’s ON, November.

Also, I got a part time job at a place that is very close to my heart–doing something I’ve never done before, with lots of opportunities to learn new creative things like In Design which will, in part, help to pay for my writing habit. So this coming month it’s all about time management and balance. A week or so ago, at the suggestion of my very dear and very organized friend, I watched this lecture on time management, and I’m inspired to try to keep a time log this week to attempt to become more aware of how I spend my time. I’ll likely be posting more on this at the end of the week..

This week is all about getting ready for Halloween around our house. Carving pumpkins. An obscene amount of foil tape and a pretty cool robot costume in the works. It’s also about finishing two short stories and getting an essay submitted so that I have a clean plate for November’s novel insanity.

What are you up to? Where do you think you spend your time? Have you ever kept a time log? Where do you know you need to become more efficient?

The ladybugs have arrived. They come every October, en masse through the slanting autumn light, their small vermilion exoskeletons plunking into the window panes, flitting through briefly opened doors, gathering at the corners of the ceilings in every room. They come like clockwork, when the days are short and the light is like amber in a jar, before the hard cold. They bring promises, nostalgia, delight.

Bean bursts into laughter as they land on his pants, his hands, his shoulders. He extends his arms carefully, watching them crawl about then lift off, their small buzzing wings carrying them in drunken zig-zags towards the house, where they seek dark nooks to overwinter. Their arrival marks the end of autumn and the beginning of the long season of snow and cold and boots and socks at the door.

Things are ending now, and beginning. When I wake up the valleys are blue and soft with mist, and the last yellow poplar leaves twirling to the ground make my heart ache: such a certain, gorgeous loss. Which is how I feel now, at the brink of things: new community, new friends, new work.

I want to say that it feels like the end of an era, but I’m not sure what I mean. Just that things feel like they are starting to be different. And it’s good. But also, change is always awkward and slightly devastating, even if its just something temporary (a trench coat left hanging at by the door after the wearer has gone ahead wearing something startlingly bright and full of promise.)

There’s always that moment of hesitation, a glance backward, even as I’m plunging on ahead.

I miss, for example, the days when I was new here, when I had such a voracious voyeuristic enthusiasm for sharing my life and reading about other peoples lives. Those were the days when this blog was my lifeline to a reality I’d thought I’d maybe lost, having just had Bean and moved north to a place where I didn’t know a soul. But now, four, almost five years later, every day is filled with little boys and writing, work, and new friendships, and life has somehow begun to shift more and more off the screen and back into the three dimensions of day-to-day.

And somehow this feels bittersweet.

How do you make these things coexist, reconcile, balance in your life?