{my topography}

First steps

Bean started WALKING today. For the past couple weeks he’s been doing these graceful nearly-running transitions between pieces of furniture, hands free, and we’ve been able to coax him to let go of something and sort of stumble-tumble towards us for a few steps for the past week or so. But today he really walked.

I saw the exact moment when it clicked for him—when he realized “I’M STANDING, AND I’M NOT FALLING, AND NOW I’M MOVING FORWARD.” He was holding onto a chair and then let go and took a step towards me, and I started clapping and he stopped moving and just stood still. All on his own. In the middle of the room.

It was as if a lightening bolt of recognition shot through him. He started beaming this wide, pleased grin. And then he took steps towards me. Determined little steps, one after the next, all by himself.

Since that moment he’s walked nearly all the way across the living room, his lower lip sucked in with concentration. Like quicksilver, the neurons in his brain are sending a thousand instantaneous messages urging him to try it again, and again, and again. Out into the middle of the room, away from the peripheries, the furniture, the safety net of mama’s legs—and into the wide expanse of open floor. Suddenly bipedal. Upright.

These steps are his first independent steps towards me, and yet his first steps away from me, as his own person.

This leaves me breathless with wonder and love and terror all at once. There are mornings like this morning—and nights like last night, where everything is awry and he pushes every button and I am left feeling frantic and angry at the end of wrestling him to sleep, or calming him down. He has become so clear about what he wants—and so frustrated and mad when his desires are not met. When he can’t have my cell phone to play with, or worse–when he wants to MUNCH on me while nursing, and I pull away with a fierce yelp, he dissolves in tears. First of remorse, then of fury.

Something has definitely shifted for him. He is aware of himself differently—and aware of his own needs differently. He has preferences. He longs for me intensely when I’m gone and wraps his arms around my neck tightly when I return. He looks up for approval when he tries something new—or stops, just before he does something dastardly, to check in and see if he’s allowed. He has begun to understand that there is an order to things. That there are boundaries. And with each boundary, he pushes to find just how far he can go before he finds it.

It amazes me that this deepening awareness coincides with the beginning of upright independent mobility. Just as he is beginning to discover that there are both obvious boundaries (he no longer crawls headlong towards the edge of the bed without stopping) and implied boundaries (he looks to me, with a wily grin, just before he reaches out to pull CDs off the shelf, because he knows I’ll stop him), he has suddenly gained an entirely different perspective on the world. This is the beginning of doing it his own self.

Already he wants to drink from a cup, his own self. He wants to eat, his own self. He wants to claim this world for his own self. I can only pray I’ll have the patience to navigate this new terrain. Already he has learned how to shake his head “no” and when he wants to do something himself that I am trying to do for him, he shakes his head, “no, no, no.” I nod my head, “yes, yes, yes.”

Now begins the challenge of being consistent. Of remaining steadfast like a buoy, providing him with the security of limits. But also, this is the beginning of a new dance. One where he leads sometimes, and I follow after.

Pause

The days slip by, a blur of busy moments. Sometimes before I really feel like day is here, night returns. I catch myself going too fast. I try to pause. I make tea and savor the whole cup: chai sweetened with raw sugar and milk.

Face to face

I joined a marathon training class last week, and on Tuesday I sat in a room with twenty other people (all but two of which were women) for the first class, where we got to meet each other, talk about our goals, and take a peak at the crazy running schedule we’ve all decided to partake of that will have us running 40 miles a week by early May.

It was funny sitting there, looking at each woman’s face. I imagine all of us were doing the same thing: looking at each other. Sizing each other up in one way or another—looking for inspiration or camaraderie or competition. Yet aside from our names (written on blue and white labels on our shirts) and our previous running experience, we shared very little with one another verbally; most of the information we gathered about each other was based on our visual impressions.

I think it is interesting that when we encounter another person face to face we immediately label them based on the visual information we gather in those few split seconds of meeting. First we label gender. Our minds get hung up on this. If it isn’t easy to discern, we keep looking for identifiers—long hair maybe, or breasts or an angular jaw. Then we look for similarities to ourselves: age, attire, and physical stature, all become a part of the equation we seem to use to decide if we have enough in common to take the risk of starting a conversation.

It takes so much to get past this visual labeling system, and because of it, it often takes a long time to get to know someone new. There are many delicate ‘first date’ conversations as we seek to align ourselves compatibly with one another. Information is conveyed through actions and looks just as much as it is conveyed through words. By comparison, the medium of the blog makes this visual labeling system take the back seat. Through a blog, it is easy to get right to the heart of things—to just out and say things, divulging our selves without the varnish we put on for first impressions.

Through blogging I have found many women who I am inspired by, and feel connected to because of our shared experiences, or insights, or humor, or art. Yet I wonder: would we have made these connections if we had initially met as strangers face to face? Sitting there in a room full of other women, each of us looking with wide eyes at the training schedule for all the remaining weeks between now and the end of May, I wanted for just a moment to not see them, and to have instead see the things that really matter to them.

I would know so much more about the woman sitting across from me if I could know that she likes dark plums, black tea, and writing with India ink, and that she just broken up with her boyfriend of four years. Instead all I could gather was that she was probably in her early thirties, has short hair and red shoes, and took a really long time to fill out the marathon registration page.

I can’t help but wonder: am I the only one who feels this way, or is it something innate in the way we interact? Is it easier to take risks with friendship when you don’t have to think about that coffee stain on your shirt or the way your breath smells. Is more at stake when we meet face to face than there is across the page?

Yesterday, the vibrant beginning to a new year

It was so lovely read all of your kind birthday wishes. Thank you!

Driving back from this show at midnight, the temperature hovered just above 0, and wind sent gusts of snow whirling across the road. The region of Canada around Montreal is remarkably flat—all geographic features rubbed smooth by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. Now, fields stretch out as far as the eye can see in either direction from the road. Every mile or so, there is another dairy farm with golden light spilling out onto the snow in puddles underneath the smudged glass of the barn’s windows.

Things felt rushed up to the point of our departure. The company we bought flooring from delivered it to the new house yesterday, and the big truck couldn’t make it up our long snowy driveway—even after we plowed it. So we spent the better part of two hours transferring sap maple flooring into the bed of the pickup truck, and then driving it up the hill and unloading it, before leaving.

We also found ourselves caught off guard by the sudden foreignness of Montreal with it’s maze of one way streets, fast drivers, and French language. The show was intense and amazing. Thousands of lights, and multiple screens allowed the dancers on stage to interact with a computer-generated graphic environment. Once I let go of my expectations of seeing a typical Cirque performance with acrobats and clowns, I became engrossed in the intense visual and musical performance of Delirium, that narrated human being’s quest for self-knowledge in a world that is at once isolated and mechnaized, and yet intensly passionate, dynamic and fleeting.

I left inspired and overwhelmed. The sheer volume and brightness almost felt invasive— the thrumming of the drums making my heart alter its rhythm—but the seeing art in such intensity was also invigorating, and the bright technicolored images of lithe dancers in a forest of sky high dandelions spun through my dreams all night.

Today the air is cold. Hoary fingers of ice travel up windows like the fronds of tiny ferns. In the kitchen my mother-in-law is making cheese cake. Upstairs the neighbors feet make knock-knocking patterns across the floor. The house is wrapped in warmth and early evening comfort—the cats purring in the lamplight, and Bean investigating a pile of blocks. This year was a fitting way to launch the year—with intense creativity, with family, and with a handful of quiet moments.

sunset yesterday

snowy woods at dusk

Canadian farmland

silo silhouette

snow gusting across the road at midnight

Montreal tunnel

Tomorrow, 28

Tomorrow is my birthday, and today my mother sent me a box full of calla lilies. Each waxy bloom perfect, it’s yellow pistil caked with pollen.

She has never sent me flowers before—every delicate stem wrapped in cellophane—and receiving the long lovely box at the door and putting the long-necked blooms into water made me profoundly happy. It is funny that flowers can do this. So much is contained in the gesture of giving them. These flowers were saying: safety, unending love, openness.

This year I became a mother, and as a result, began to see my mother in an entirely different way. Since my father died, my mother and I have been navigating new terrain in our relationship, and it has not been without land mines. So much lies buried in the geography of our shared lives. So much love and wonder and hurt in our souls is brought to the surface when we talk, and sometimes stumbling upon each other’s every weakness—clumsily, hurtfully, without grace. But gradually we are learning to keep some things: to keep safety, to keep openness, to keep love steadfast even when we come up against these jagged edges.

So with my birthday coming tomorrow, I find myself contemplating how this day is wholly mine, and yet wholly hers as well. My birth marked a turning point in her life—that changed everything for her. I understand this now with new wonder and appreciation. I realize the sacrifice, the worry, the frustration of motherhood that she felt—and see myself in her, just as I also see how much I am her opposite.

This is the gift and the challenge of being a parent: to shepherd a little person into adulthood and then let them go to be anyone they want to be—entirely unique unto themselves. My son is already, even before he can talk, totally his own person—and I can’t help but wonder how he’ll see me throughout his life. First just as his mama, but maybe later hopefully as a source of inspiration—-and maybe as the writer, the artist, the teacher and dreamer that I am. And I wonder too what he will be like throughout his life, and how I will see him—-as a child first, and then later as his own person, and a source of inspiration.

Last year on my birthday I was immensely pregnant, right on the cusp of the unknown. I couldn’t fathom how my life would be, and my days were heavy with a certain anxiety—not to mention actual the actual heaviness of my belly. Then blink, and a year has passed, and here I am, beginning training for a marathon, in the midst of renovations on a new home, and the mother to a small boy who has started taking steps (!) towards me, eyes twinkling and arms outstretched.

Like each beautiful lily drawing drinking water from the jar, the moments of this year have been sweet and good.

Artist’s Way week 3

I’ve been meaning to check in about The Artist’s Way, which I’ve taken up along side a hundred or so other bloggers, with encouragement from the wonderful Kat, but I never had a moment’s pause. Today however, the rhythm of things seems to have settled somewhat, and I returned to writing morning pages (I did them only twice last week—though a full seven the week before.)

Like several other AW bloggers I Cameron’s emphasis on ‘recovery’ does not resonate with me. Rather, I wanted to do this ‘workshop’ to nurture my muse, to hone my artistic ability, and to develop some creative momentum.

Cameron often seems to be writing for the artist who has left herself behind. She writes: Name five lives you would live if you could do anything. I balked at this. I am still young and carefree enough to be in love with my life—even when I hate it. Even when I come to the page day after day and can write nothing. When there is only pith and rind and no fruit at all.

Yet I also find that there is also great deal of truth for me in many things Cameron writes. Taking time for myself without feeling guilty—and being fully present in the time I do take (without listening to that internal voice that tells me to hurry up, or spend my time better), is something I need to practice, and the Artist’s Way is making me do this. Cameron calls this ‘developing some autonomy with your time.’ That rang true for me. Also: ’show up at the page and pay attention.’

Some things that I have enjoyed doing this week:

• Writing notes in the wide margins of the book. This makes the process of reading interactive. I begin to form my own thoughts in response to the text, and give them validity by putting them down, right away, on paper.

• Being okay with not writing morning pages. I have enough voices in my head making me feel guilty about the things I don’t do every day.

• Bringing a new attentiveness to little segments of time by myself: mini artist dates to the grocery store fruit section, on a walk about my land with a camera, an evening with a cup of tea and collage materials. I think other mothers will relate to this: time for oneself comes in small lurches when the baby is asleep.

• Instead of thinking about imaginary lives, I’ve been thinking about the lives of people that interest me. I’ve been asking myself what interests me about these people. Why do I admire them? People whose lives interest me this week are: William Stafford, Robert Bly, Peekaboo Street, Lynn Hill, Ansel Addams, Martha Grahm, Barack Obama, and Sofia Copola.

• Part of the way I am nurtured creatively is to be learning. I want to make small artist dates with myself to research some aspect of each of the people I listed this week. I want to know: how do they live their lives? What makes them who they are, unique, distinctive, creative?

And I want to know: what makes YOU unique, distinctive, creative?

My answer: I am messy. I get paint on my hands, and glue on my jeans. I am drawn to color. I use bold lines. I am fascinated by language: how it captures the essence of things, how it changes by region by country, how it holds thoughts and love and spirit. I love looking up the origins of words. This helps me know each word’s secret. When I take photographs, my eye searches for texture. When I write, my inner ear searches for a certain cadence that flows naturally. I have a thing for good pens. I use a molskine journal. I eavesdrop constantly. I am each day entirely filled with wonder at the beauty of things in this world.

Your turn.

House work

In a new book by William Stafford that I picked up on my artist date last week I read: “…The process of writing is kind of a trusting to the nowness, to the immediacy of the experience. And if you enter into the artistic endeavor with standards, already arrived-at ideas of what you want to do, you’re not entering creatively into the immediacy of encountering the materials.”

Tonight, using a crowbar to pull up section after section of linoleum, I thought about how this is true for work and art both. Always, when I work with my hands, I find myself right here, in the moment. My mind grows steady, in tandem with my hands.

When I let it, the work becomes a meditation. I find the right question in the nowness of the experience. The bare simplicity of wood and wall, of metal and adhesive define a narrative; clarify the answer.

When I was a teenager my father taught me how to use sledge hammer and ax; and also how to true a line, plumb a sink, and wire an outlet. Now, when I am working with my hands, he always feels nearby. He was the kind of man who could fix carburetor or a motherboard. He understood electrical wiring, and architecture; these were the hobbies he chose to stay grounded in a life full of spiritual pondering.

I feel lucky to be able to share this kind of work with the men of my life. Then, with my father. Now, with my husband, who is in every way exactly opposite from the exacting craftsman that my father was, but just as able with his hands.

Where words sometimes leave DH and I tangled when we try to talk about what we imagine for the house, working side by side is something we do well. This is our second renovation project, and together we own many tools.

We destroyed the last of the old kitchen cabinets today, throwing them into the huge metal dumpster we’ve rented. DH leaned up against the garage door, cheering as I swung the sledge hammer into the wood. The each crack echoed a little in of our quiet valley, where the only sounds were a few nuthatches calling from the tops of birch trees.

It felt good to wield an 8lb hammer. The hear the crack of the wood, to make it splinter. And it felt good to look up and see DH smiling, his face framed in dark tousled hair, backlit by the setting sun slipping over the edge of the hill the is now ours.

seed heads in a snowy meadow

ice from the spring water cistern in the field below the house

the woods at the edge of the upper field

the branches of an heirloom apple tree

spring cistern

our house, seen from the meadow below

The lack of blogging is a direct result of this:

With some graph paper and the kind cabinet guy at Home Depot all sanity has been restored. I was actually making sense, it seems and it took all my willpower to refrain from doing the “I told you so” dance.”

Our first project is the kitchen, because it is the center of our lives. Ours is a house where people always hang out by the stove, poking spoons into pots, nibbling samples of dinner, sipping wine—so we want this kitchen to be big enough to allow for this.

We started by gutting the kitchen and removing massive amounts of wallpaper. Every wall in the house that was not covered in barn board was covered in wallpaper. High quality vinyl wall paper with bold designs that made me dizzy just looking at it, but gleeful ripping it off: each piece came off in a perfect strip, no ripping, no sticking.

Last night DH and I went back to the house ourselves and just sat in each room on the floor, imagining. It is so facinating to be at this point of BEFORE. Before new paint. Before floors. Before daily life fills the spaces with laughter and talk and running feet. Before we’ve grown accustomed to living with those stairs and those windows.

It was snowing gently, and we ate jelly beans, and did other unsayably lovely things. I’m still smiling as a result.

I was warned about this

Things feel fierce when you try to talk in three dimension
and cannot wrap your words around something that is not yet there
the square foot depth of real things:
soapstone traveling the surface of the counter
walls, this thick
cupboards here.

Somehow because you can’t explain
that which you can barely see in your minds eye
everything feels like a soda bottle
after it’s been shaken up.

You talk and talk and then walk away
the plans spread out the table
the lines and measurements in graphite,
easily erasable,
unlike the tone you use to say
the things you’re not quite sure of.

Every hardware store clerk will nod
and say he’s seen it all before.
The disconnect between two minds
trying to see the same thing
from different angles.
If geometry were a language, it would be easier.

Starting in

The Pleiades were rising above our house when we came up the long drive after dusk. The night air was cold and dark. Our house. Such a different feeling than the house we owned in Connecticut, in a jam-packed neighborhood with dogs yapping right next door, and dog poop in our flower beds. Here, the wide expanse of sky spreads out above like the dome of some great church, huge and indigo in the starlight. Here, the silence tucks itself around the corners of the house, wind rushing between the tall poplars and maples on the hill.

We began the process of removing the outdated cabinets, circa the 1970s, and were reminded again (we renovated our last house too) that every project takes twice as long. They used nails with screw-points to install the cabinets, leaving us no way to take them down gracefully. There we were, three of us with crow bars, trying to let our minds slip back in time to imagine what the workmen had thought of, nearly thirty years before. Like a puzzle, each cabinet connected to the next.

Tomorrow we’ll go back with better tools and leather gloves. Tomorrow maybe it will sink in: months of work before the place is home. But tonight in the driveway before piling into the car an hour before midnight, I couldn’t help but twirl a couple of times under the stars, my arms out-stretched. Across the valley the nearly full wedge of a waning moon was rising, like a white teacup, against the tablecloth of night.