{my topography}

Happy new year!

I cannot think of a better way to toast in the new year than to hurtle downhill on a sled. Wild, silly fun. Bean’s grin spreading like sunshine across his face. DH laughing, truly in the moment and content, just before he bites snow for the hundredth time. The heat of our breath rising up against the cold air, and in between our giggling, how quite the landscape is covered in snow.

I am ready for a new year. And if I had to distill my resolutions for this year into one pure wish, it would be this: to bring loving devotion to every single moment.

I’ll probably write an uberlist over here, tomorrow. In the meantime, if you had to pick one thing for this year–one theme, one goal, what would it be?

Also, happy new year to all of you!

A fire within

As the evening light wanes and indigo fills the heavens outside the glass, I watch the black silhouettes of doves flying to roost in the pines along our drive. I spent part of the day pushing furniture around in my studio, and the space feels freer. With my desk in a new corner, I can see both windows and the door, and feel snug with my chin resting on my knee as I type, trying like I always do to stretch the minutes out between interruptions to be long enough for me to get to the core of something that matters, and to put it on the page.

The past few days have been filled with the kind of conversations that make my heart quaver. Hard conversations, because we’re at the very brink of things, teetering and uncertain of us, of our direction, of anything. The wide expanse of possibility stretches out before us like a vast canyon and we’re on uneven footing right at the edge.

Here at the brink, I am still fiercely holding on to the hand of the man I love. Yet I am also threatening to leap, because I cannot settle for just enough, and this is what our life has become. The pressure of living here with what we have, and what we are, has crept up like kudzu, and filled the wildness of our days with mediocrity. I’m not content with just surviving, with making ends meet, with each day starting where the last left off, simply subsisting, and the fact that many of our days have become this is why we find ourselves here at the edge of our love, our hearts thudding in our throats.

There is something wild, and fragile, and breathtaking in me, like a field of irises; something unstoppable, like the innate sense that leads the salmon upstream through rapids and turbines to the sweetwater scent of its origins. Something that tells me that life is meant to be lived voraciously, not spent. It is a restless yearning to grow, a longing so intense it wrecks havoc when things become static in my life.

I keep trying to imagine us together in a different way than we are now. A way that is more awake, more whole, more passionate. I imagine a life with more intention and clarity, because right now I see how our existence has dulled and also, I see how the fire in his eyes has dwindled as the pressures of finances and differed dreams have risen up. There is a promethean part in me that will run the risk of being burned in order to return it to his eyes. Even if this means loosing him in the end.

So over the past few days, interwoven with moments of sheer delight—sledding pell-mell downhill with Bean in our backyard after snow fell all day, sipping cider with it’s heady scent filling a warm house, or pressing our lips together tenderly in the dark—we’ve been having hard conversations. Conversations that make us weep and beg and sometimes, gratefully, laugh. Conversations that tear through our souls like a wildfire, and leave us exposed to the quick.

I keep thinking about how the greenest grass always springs up after the forest is charred and I want to believe that this is what will happen as we talk. Yet coming back to this stuff day after day feels awful and pathetic and humbling. And also, it is a bit like digging up the awesome skeleton of a tyrannosaurs-rex with a teaspoon, such fragile work, so much to be found and had, yet so much to loose without careful, diligent, stubborn effort.

“I want to make you happy,” he says, with a tight expression spreading out about his lips that makes him look, almost, as though he is wearing a smiling mask over an expression of absolute grief. He’s said this many times before.

I turn away, my chest tightening. Then I try to explain something I know to be true: something that is indelible like a birthmark on my soul—how one cannot make another person happy, and also, that if one is barren and desolate inside, one cannot give any joy away.

“Don’t,” I beg. “Make yourself happy instead.”

He looks put off.

I try to explain how I am: how the superficial masks people usually put on for each other each day are mostly transparent to me, and how I’ve always been that girl who can walk into a room of almost strangers, and pick up within seconds the deeper vibration of their hearts, despite what they might be saying to each other. I try to make him understand how this sensitivity I have like the sixth sense of a water dowser, makes it impossible for me to go along with his motions of happiness, his tight smiles, his constant banter, the jokes, the stupid songs, because below this I feel the desolation of his creative self—something I can tell he is hardly aware of, yet is reacting to, like an animal, always on the defensive, and ready to attack.

“I want you to understand that putting me first, putting your family first, your son first, your work first, you are routinely robbing yourself of something vital to you, and to us.” I say pleading, my voice soft and low.

“It’s like this,” I say. “Picture a tin cup. If it has a leak in it, even if it is being filled, it will never be full enough to overflow.” I pause and watch his face, turned towards mine, brows furrowed, still angry, still confused.

“Even though the cup may hold some water,” I start in again, “Enough to drink from and to survive, it cannot hold enough to give any away. But if the cup is whole and being regularly filled it overflows with abundance.”

I can tell by his expression that on some level this makes sense to him, but that he has no idea how to translate this into anything meaningful for his life, and this is where I come up short. I don’t know how to beg him to be selfish, to pursue the bugle calling of his soul, to plan for and to fight for the wildest and most impossible things that he can dream. I don’t know how to make him understand that when we’re both growing, no matter how hard our daily life gets, deep happiness will burble up like an unexpected spring, and that I’ll go with him anywhere if he’s striving for something that truly matters to his soul.

Often, I’ve been accused of being selfish. I am someone who needs vast amounts of time spent alone and creatively in order to be whole. I am also intensely driven and I grew up in a family of seekers. Both my parents asked difficult questions of themselves, and grappled with their ever-changing understanding of the role of human incarnation across the arc of life. Both parents strove to grow spiritually, and to be whole, and my mother continues on this quest, doggedly and with mindfulness, now that my father is dead.

So this in some way is my model: that as human beings, we are called to grow, and that we must, lest the landscape of our soul becomes vacant and sterile. My model couldn’t be more opposite from his.

A family of traditional Italians, they eat and laugh, and when they fight it is behind closed doors and no one is allowed to ever speak of it again. They are a family without a lexicon to make meaning from loss or grief. Anger takes the place subtler emotions, and the palette used to describe life-altering events is starkly black and white. Things are either good or bad, and happiness has somehow become synonymous with many external things: good food and company, and also pretty clothes, new cars, career success. Hence, in some incomplete way his model has been this: that as human beings, we should strive for success by making money and enjoying a good life marked by the acquisition of external things.

In our conversations we’re meeting on this slender ledge, and trying to turn the language that we know into a tightrope so that we can cross into the territory of our souls that has no capacity to be named. We’re trying to take the blueprints that defined our childhood longing, and re-designate their boundaries from this different vantage point of love. We’re trying to dream together, something new and different. But this is difficult and painful because always, there is the chance that we’ll end up falling, and without the right words or the right maps, we might fail to reach out fast enough to break the other’s fall.

Merry & bright

A perfect sourcream apple cake, bright blue skies, an orange tractor with doors that really open, lick-your-fingers good sticky cinnamon buns, sleeping in so late, singing to the tree with real candels lit, Bean’s face on at 6am on Christmas morning, tossled hair, kissing, watching Holiday at the movie theater, snuggled up with my guy, and wishing for snow. It was a lovely holiday. I hope yours was too!

Today I’m slated to clean my studio which is a ferocious mess of slick papers, gel medium, glue and stamps; and to wander downtown taking advantage of half-off sales, and hot chocolate.

Things that are good:

* Sucking on a maple lollypop while doing secretive artsy things.

* Watching the neighbor kids put on a Christmas play in the barn with sheep and donkeys, and all the grown ups singing carols.

* Sipping hot cider and talking to neighbors while Bean raced around with a delicate waffle cookie clenched tightly in both hands.

* The row of metal snowflake lights hanging in our kitchen.

* The fact that today was the last day of school, and that tomorrow I will get to sleep in tomorrow with DH under the luxury of a double down comforter (so snug!)

*Plans for delivering cookies to our neighbors with Bean in the red wagon, tomorrow.

The view (and the most random, grumpy post ever)

Here are a bunch of photos I took the other night when the light was doing the most incredible things. On my way home the stormy sky was suddenly ripped open and sun burst through, right in front of the rain—creating the most remarkable and vibrant rainbow I have ever seen. Of course, I didn’t get the camera until after it had faded (rainbows never look as beautiful as they do in real life anyway), but I did walk out onto the cold damp grass to see raindrops hanging like bright jewels from every twig and branch.

I can make no guarantees about where this post will go because I’m sick with an awful stomach bug—the second time this year, and I’m hating every minute of it. My head feels like it’s in a vice, and I feel utter anguish that I’ve left my class to some poor substitute the week before vacation. The kids are so excitable right now; we’ve discussed where Santa lives about a hundred times, and still, the conversation seems to wend its way there. As they terrorize the sub, I’ll spend tomorrow on the couch with Bean patting my cheek and saying, Mama, sick, or more urgently, Mama, get up!

I got whatever I have from DH who woke up yesterday morning feeling sick. To make matters worse, the garbage disposal chose yesterday to jam, which in turn caused the dishwasher to spew its backwash into the sink drain and the sink to start filling. Lovely, no? In a moment of flawless teamwork, a very feverish DH and I worked together to find and remove the pieces of broken plate that had fallen into it, and then, as he retired to the couch threatening to faint, I had to wrestle the darn thing back into place. Sort of like wrestling a greased pig made out of metal. I reinstalled it, to my credit (all kudos are welcome—it was the most disgusting, awkward, frustrating thing I’ve done in a long while!)

This is possibly the least festive I’ve felt at the approach of the holidays, EVER. We bought wreathes the other day, but besides that and baking cookies, our house is decidedly un-holiday like. Oh dear, I’ll stop moping when my stomach stops feeling like someone is excavating it with a child’s sized plastic bulldozer.

22 months

Dear Bean,

As though your heartbeat were the metronome of my time passing, your growing marks my aging. You’re so big now, tousle headed and bright eyed. You stand mid-thigh to me. Two months shy of two years old, you carry rocks and cookies and other small treasures in your pockets. You are passionate about tractors and backhoes and mud and books. You take long walks with us along the muddy dirt road, stomping in puddles and pointing at birds. Recently you began speaking in sentences, stringing syllables together, like so many bright beads on the sea glass necklace of language, and it’s a wonder to hear what you have to say.

In the past two months, the trees have turned into skeletons of bark and twigs and on cold mornings you put your own boots on. You have learned to climb up onto the stools in the kitchen, and we spend many family meals there, the three of us in a circle of yellow light around the butcher block island, passing forks and trying to carry on conversations. With words, you now have the ability to express that you want specific things, right this second. Mama, more milk please. Mama, mama, mama, milk!

The past two months have been difficult though. Not because of you exactly—your beautiful smiles fill up our hearts with heady glee and wonderment—but because your presence makes our lives full to saturation. Since you, there have been few moments for downtime, and fewer moments when your Daddy and I have a chance to gather each other up in our arms and really look at each other.

Parenthood took us like a storm at sea. Together our small red boat of tenderness , we threw ourselves into the process of staying afloat, and have somehow lost track of who we are for each other. The compass of our life trued towards you; your needs so primal and huge pulled our hearts with fierce gravitational tug. But gradually over the past two months, as you’ve become less needy and more independent, we find ourselves trying to redirect the vessel of our love. Often, we find ourselves flailing about, clutching at the driftwood of who we were. So much has changed. The raw fibers of our selves have been stretched and pummeled utterly.

So the past few months have been drenched with moments where we face each other on the shore of our love and find ourselves unbalanced and hesitant at the edge of the rubble-strewn tide line that stretches out between us. Invariably, you are right there, asking for more noodles, or “Mama, read book, now” and we only manage jagged interjected sentences. Or it’s late at night, and you’re finally asleep, and we’re so exhausted that everything we say comes out slanted and biting.

It’s hard to be in this place. Here, where we can see how the routines that have grown up out of necessity, have made deep grooves across the surface of our lives and love. More than either of us would like to admit, things have become for granted. We spend days hip deep in the mud of surviving; arguing again and again about the things of daily life that accumulate with great banality and abundance day after day. The dishes, the bills, dinner, laundry.

I’m writing about this because someday you’ll be tall and you’ll be shaving, and also, because someday you’ll be in love and you’ll be trying to figure all this out for yourself. I’m also writing about this because I want you to understand how loving travels the full arc between passion and deep despair, and how a lot of the time you’ll find yourself somewhere in the middle of it, flailing like a fish, one moment in the sweetest water, and the next on the harshest sand.

Just now, as I was writing you and Daddy burst into my studio, full of morning excitement, ready to do things with the day. It’s 10:30 am, the weekend before Christmas, and there are cookies to be made, and shopping to be done, and decorations to be hung. Daddy wraps his arms around me, and right away you climb onto my lap, grabbing first at the pencils on my desk, then going for my keyboard. In the three minutes you are in my studio, you scribble in my notebook, collapse my easel, and climb onto the futon, wanting to be read Good Night Moon. You are like a sudden rip tide; when you’re present, you fill the room up and make it impossible for me to do anything but swim with the current, keeping track of the horizon in the distance.

But I’m grateful for this. For the struggle of it. I realize how easy it would be for me to succumb to simply letting life change me gradually and unintentionally, were it not for the latent urgency you bring to my life. When you woke up two mornings ago, I carried you into our room and tucked you into bed between Daddy and I. There in the dark, while both of us were trying for a few more minutes of sleep you began to sing, ever so softly. Suddenly I realized you were singing all the words to the lullaby I sing you every night.
Go to sleep, you sang and stroked my face, and goodnight, and tomorrow will come soon. You sang so sweetly and off key, but you had every word right, and I could feel my heart start thudding with sudden awe. You learned to sing over night, and here I am barely able to get around the width of my ego to say I’m sorry when I’ve hurt your daddy unintentionally, or when I’m so tired that I have nothing to say beyond the superficial.

I opened my eyes and realized you were watching me as you sang. This is what I mean about urgency. You’re watching me. Being your mama I am reminded daily, again and again, of our need and our capacity to grow, to learn, and to become.

I love you,
Mama

Mama, get out

Bean spent the weekend with his Daddy in NJ, leaving me to a blissful empty house to finally get some serious writing done. Six hours at a stretch, uniterrupted. Going to bed in the wee hours of morning and sleeping in. Time to actually revise what I write. Oh lordy, it was good.

But man, I missed those two! On the way home tonight, DH called and then put me on speaker phone so I could talk to the little guy. I told him how excited I was to see him and how much I loved him, and DH said he started grinning, and then looked at the phone and in a plaintive voice said, “Mama, get out.”

Needless to say, I kissed every square inch of his face when I got to finally pick him up and snuggle with him tonight.

In the midst of it

Flecked across the page, the doorway of my heart, wide bands of color from a horsetail brush, a blade, an inkpen. It’s so easy to be hurt. So easy to withhold even the smallest scrap of willingness to travel on, past the point where words were slung about with careless grandeur. Past where the hurt started, reasonably or not.

I can see my shadow here: my ego eclipsing my own generous spirit. But this is what marriage is, isn’t it? To be shown again and again what we fear to look at the most in ourselves. So easy to call it out, to place the placard of blame on the other standing there, shoulders hunched forward, defensive and yelling. So hard to breathe out, and accept how very small our goodness is, when we’re backed against a wall. To say something, anything, that reaches out like a white flag or a bowl full of alms.

Winter longing

The cold has finally arrived. “Come on,” it says, “hunker down.” It sends us snuggling under comforters, or to the couch to curl around a book, sipping green tea from a tall mug, as its long fingers creep in under the lintel. It gathers around the window glass, leaving hooray etchings where condensation lingered not long before.

The fields are finally dusted with snow—after weeks of off-kilter weather; and all day, in spite of the sun, wondrous, dizzy snowflakes drifted slowly earthward. Not much accumulated, but enough to feel like winter might really arrive. Enough to exhale and feel like though we’re close, we haven’t pushed off over the brink yet. I put on an extra sweater, and though I my feet are cold, I know that I am lucky.

This year has hurtled by me like the herd of wild horses I once watched be rounded up in the tiny French costal village of Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Like them, the days have whirled by, nostrils flaring, eyes large with terror and adrenaline. I was nineteen then, and lithe from a week of rock climbing and sleeping under stars. I remember how I could feel the horses hoof beats reverberating in my heart.

Things were slower then, than now, when instead of measuring my growth by cliffs climbed, or cities traveled, I have the small miracle of a boy who grows each day, and sends love smashing across my heart like that stampede. I look down at my hands and see how a fine filigree of wrinkles are spreading out across my knuckles. I hold my son’s new palm in mine.

Its funny to feel like I’ve been waiting for winter, but somehow that’s the truth. I’ve been waiting for the inevitable stir-crazy introversion that occurs after days and days spent inside looking out. I’ve been waiting for when the time is right gather myself up, and to sift through the collection of artifacts that my soul has become.

And we’re done

NaNoBloPoMo is over, and I’m so ecstatic that I can go back to being frivolous and lazy and completely irresponsible about posting. I’ve also decided that because it became my posting art form this month I’ll leave you with a list of things I hope to accomplish in the next few weeks. To make me very, very happy (or utterly jealous because you’re all sick overachievers) post your lists in the comments.

1) I think I need to go to blog rehab now, to recover from all my crappy, inconsequential posts. To that end, I’m craving returning to my notebook for inspiration. I want to make quick sketches & line drawings, and collages this month…and I want very much to return to the art of writing in complete paragraphs. Yes, I want that very much.

2) I want to send out holiday cards before December 23 when I usually do. I have a crush on getting mail, but I’m so bad at sending anything these days. It doesn’t help that my mail box is at the end of our very long driveway, and the only times I drive past it are either when I’m balancing a cup of coffee and a toasted bagle on my way to work, or when I’m clinging to the wheel with both hands, out of utter exhaustion, on my way home each day. I could walk, you might think, but that generally involves a little Bean who is given to pretending he is incapable of walking at the most inconvenient times (like when I’m holding a large armful of mail and really have to pee.) But the truth is, I just suck at sending mail. Envelopes sit on my counter unstamped. Letters get lost in the car en route to the post office. I can’t be trusted to send anything on time, except, possibly (and rarely) things of critical importance.

3) When Bean pulled my shirt up and his entire baby hand disappeared into the soft expanse of my stomach, the reality finally hit today. I will not survive the holidays without becoming a truck, if I don’t get back into a routine of regular exercise. As it stands, I have already become (according to Bean) a particularly pleasant lump of dough.

4) To that end, I went on a run tonight with DH. At night. In the dark. By flashlight. And I want to beg all of you to try it. It is fantastic to run in the dark, without all the visual distractions, and the thudding rush of your blood rising up like a song in your ears. Also, when we got we gave the flashlight to Bean, and he had the BEST TIME EVER running around the dark yard pointing it at things. Remember flashlight tag? So fun.

5) Lastly, I’d like to finish the mammoth stack of books I now have by my bedside. Like a workout habit, I need to reinstate a few moments in my day meant just for reading. I miss the dreamy other-worldliness of reading for hours, and the way it almost immediatly has a positive affect on my writing, like a I.V. of brilliance to the arm.

What do you want to do before the solstice arrives?