{my topography}

Scraps

It is somehow already Thursday. I am like salt in a shaker, scattered haphazardly over the things of my days. Small scraps that I want to remember.

***

Coming back to the classroom I put a jar full of tulips by my desk, and smiled when it was the boys who noticed. A little girl came in with a Tupperware of salamanders for our terrarium. A boy who constantly pushes my buttons looked like he was up to no good, so I swung by his table and discovered he was writing: You are the best teacher in the world on a heart he’d drawn in marker.

Also: we’re studying matter, and we’ve been having the best conversations.

Me: What do you think matter is?
Kid: Maybe whatever it is, the person who invented it is named Matt?

Me: Matter is anything you can touch or feel.
Kid: If it’s anything we can touch or feel, do we eat matter?
Kid: Do we breath matter? We can feel air, so we must!
Kid: Matter is ANYTHING.
Kid: If matter is EVERYTHING, is there anything that ISN’T MATTER?
Kid: If matter is everything, then is God matter?

***
Yesterday we went to a two-bit circus with Bean. It’s a tiny family circus that seems to tour the country—360 shows per year. What a life. All the clowns and acrobats and jugglers were either too young or too old to make a crack at it anywhere else, and the ponies napped between rides when everyone was taking a break to buy popcorn and bright bobbing star-specked balloons and sparkling wands. But it still had magic. There were moments when I gasped. And Bean, big eyed from his daddy’s lap, his face sticky with cotton candy, could not take his eyes off everything that was going on.

I always remember loving the circus. As in: I wanted to run away and join.

Now I’m bitten with the peculiar desire to follow a troupe around and write their story. I often wonder if anyone else is curious about this? How these people live, all year, in trailers, going from place to place, performing, practicing, always on the road. How does the 12 year old Peruvian juggling marvel (who dropped his props) go to school? Or his sister, the contortionist who could twirl her entire body bent over backwards by holding onto a swivel with her mouth. But I can’t imagine they’d want me there, poking into the private corners of their lives, after fake eyelashes have been removed and the ponies are bedded down for the night.

***
Today I came home from work nearly staggering. Tired. I buried my head under pillows.
I’ve always loved my bed, wherever it’s been. It’s the thing I think of when I think of home. Soft sheets, the window open just a sliver, light falling golden through the big-leafed tree in the blue bowl by the bed. Without intending to, I was asleep. Not slumber, but black out sleep, that when I awakened I could not recall. The kind of sleep where you’re not sure if you were asleep at all, yet the shadows are longer.

Bean and DH let me sleep until dinner time, at which point I emerged like a baby raccoon. Clumsily and disoriented, at the very least.

Onwards.

Happy heart

A weekend trip south, to Blue Poppy’s, to spend time with wonderful Lizardek and her lovely mom, and Elizabeth and her T. Ambling walks in the sunshine with a crowd of golden pups. Every moment filled up with wonder and delight and gratitude: these women come from my planet.

Some days I feel entirely alien to the orbit of people I’m surrounded with at work. People who aren’t apt to contemplate karma, or Annie Dillard, or gel matte transfers, or the way light falls on a row of golden gourds on a vintage chest of drawers. But these women, they are brilliant, insightful, generous, and beautiful. They make my heart sing. (BP and I were mistaken for sisters several times, and it delighted me to no end. She is absolutely gorgeous. Inside and out.)

Not to mention is was lovely to sip wine until late and then slumber late without anyone to coax me awake (save for an invitation to see a moose). And also to be fed perfect blueberry pancakes with warm maple syrup and blueberries.

A post in pictures

Artichokes for dinner: a Bean favorite. Mine too. We eat all the way to the heart, dipping each leaf in lemon butter; then wonder at the purple and pale green thistle center.

It’s suddenly warm here. Days perfect for drinking fizzy water and limes. Days for getting first sunburns, working in the garden. A week of vacation: to catch up on writing and sleep and time with my boys.

Bean and I spend every second outdoors in the afternoons, ambling through our meadows, taking stock of everything that is new and green and budding. He found these old baskets from last autumn’s crysanthemums on the brush pile we’re preparing to burn. Natraully, they offered endless entertainment.

Made the first batch of sun tea this week. The temperature has hit 80, and it’s almost soporific. Just two weeks ago I was wearing down and socks, now I’m barefoot, my toes badly in need of a pedicure.

Writing, upstairs, alone in the house, I heard a thud. Unmistakable, reminding me of a childhood in the Rocky Mountains in a big-windowed cabin and my dad, holding stunned birds in his quiet palms. They always flew away, and compelled, I went downstairs and out the screen door looking. It was there, below the frong windows, wings spread wide, eyes closed. But I scooped it up gently, and held it. (My dad always said holding the birds helped them with the shock.) And eventually, he started to blink, and move about, then perched for a while on my thumb before flying off. A small blessing.

Wildflowers suddenly everywhere, and insects. I’m so damn grateful to be through with winter.

We hung Bean’s first tree swing yesterday. So much nostalgia from childhood: my feet scraping the blue bowl of sky.

I found two today, the first of the year. I think of them as my writing talismans. Last year they brough so much: my writing group, Pam, a piece to be published this summer in the Sun. I’ve pressed them in my new Molskine.

A Mighty Life (1-40 in no particular order)

1. Write and publish a book.
2. Take a roadtrip across the US in a camper.
3. Live in Italy for a year.
4. Drink mint tea in Morocco
5. Learn Italian.
6. Learn to dance.
7. Grow a garden
8. Hanglide.
9. Build my own studio/barn on our land.
10. Take a film class.
11. Take a photography class.
12. Write regularly for a magazine.
13. Buy a potters wheel & kiln and throw pots in the garage.
14. Teach creative writing.
15. Complete a sport triathlon.
16. Own a tiny apartment in a big city to sneak away to.
17. Meditate.
18. Learn to kayak & join a boating club.
20. Take a trip to India.
21. Learn to sail & spend a year homeschooling/sailing with our kid(s).
22. Travel somewhere every year.
23. Grow a rose garden.
25. See the northern lights.
26. Go on a multi-day biking trip with just my guy (again.)
27. Ski black diamonds.
28. Go camping every summer.
29. See the monarch migration in Mexico.
30. Visit Prague
31. keep bees.
32. Build Bean a tree house.
33. Host a dinner party
34. Find more close friends nearby.
35. Own horses.
36. Attend TED.
37. Meet Isabell Illende & Barbara Kingsolver.
38. Spend a winter in New Zealand
39. Use Sharebuilder to make small investments.
40. Lend money at Kiva.org

* Inspired by Mighty Girl I’ve always sort of kept a list like this, tucked into the back of a notebook. A life list. Things that keep you true to the heat at the core of who you are.

What’s on you’r list?

From here

Standing at the kitchen sink this morning rinsing a glass, I was thinking about blogging. About this blog, about how I started it for one reason, and have continued it for another entirely.

The sunlight in the morning has made all the difference lately, and this morning you could see new grass on the lawn, bright green, almost transparent in the light. I made a double shot of espresso for an iced latte to-go, and thought about how my life is different now than one year ago, or two. This blog has become a record for me, of small things. I go back and look at what the weather was like two seasons ago. My mind, full with the present, is fickle in the light of the past.

When I started to write, I was a new mama and every single aspect of parenting felt like fraud to me. It took me more than a year to wrap my head around the idea of being someone’s mother. My heart on the other hand, only required a nanosecond of adjustment: when he was first there in my arms, warm and wet and wide-eyed, he was instantly mine.

Still, I started this blog because I felt some urgency to document the affect becoming a mother had on my life, as though it had been tucked precariously into the nook of a slingshot and then launched, suddenly, all of a stumbled moment. For the first year I diligently wrote letters to my small boy, a baby yet, whose miraculous feats of sitting up, crawling, and walking became also benchmarks for my own life.

Then gradually I stopped feeling that raw ‘new mama’ status. I went from being a ‘first time mom’ to just a mother. My baby was suddenly a kid who could talk and was potty trained and climbed trees. I stopped recording the little things. Each day, exponentially, the things he says astounds me: so much so that at the end I can hardly remember all the delight of talking to him about the way he sees his world. He has become someone that I want to know; someone I love to lie with in the newly growing grass on the back lawn drinking fizzy grapefruit soda and eating blue corn chips.

Now when I write it’s hardly ever about Bean, not really intentionally, but just because my focus has shifted: towards writing and work and the multifaceted inner topography of emotion I’ve been exploring this year.

But oh, he’s a love. He’s SO BIG now, you would hardly believe it. So articulate and observing and funny. It’s like his personality can no longer be contained on the page: I sit down to try to capture a few phrases that he’s said to me, and my mind is instantly crowded like a sky full fluttering parrots. One thing I do know: he still sucks at sleeping through the night.

Really annoying strange stuff is happening in blogland

I don’t get it. My blog has disappeared several times ENTIRELY in the past twenty-four hours. WTF?

Where the edges became frayed

I’ve been shy here, lately. Perhaps dodging myself a bit. Not really sure how to pick up where I’ve left off—I’ve been so sporadic with posting lately—yet I really am missing the regularity of sharing moments and comments. I’ve been fragile this winter.

For the first time since November I felt like I could breathe in again this past week without anxiety fraying the weft of my heart. Miraculously (maybe) or intentionally (with great effort) I’ve stopped feeling like if the world will clatter to a halt around me: a mess of splintered parts if I stop doing everything I do for a split second.

Depression, however fleeting, put me right up against the edges of things: the tattered cuff, the broken branch, mud-spattered snowmelt at the edge of the road. It stained my heart ashy, the color a clouded sky turns after dark.

Not something I was used to, wide awake at night, each day starting out with tight breath and tears close.

I think it had something to do with the fierce longing that I have so often voiced, that eats away at me like a smoldering fire if I’m not careful. A longing to be both here and somewhere else: making a homestead, doing the exact opposite of that (whatever that may be.)

It also had to do with the fact that I was feeling imbalanced at work: I was giving too much, yet not willing to give it. Lately I’ve been feeling less depleted there: allowing myself to focus thinking critically about learning, and children; somehow honing this as a craft.

Perhaps this was what was hardest for me: reconciling the fact that I am still a teacher even as I long with my whole being to be able to write full time. I let myself start hating my work simply because it was the thing that was stopping me from doing the work I was yearning to do. It almost felt like a betrayal to dedicate myself to my work at school, not that that rationally makes any sense.

I realize now that really I was making myself bitterly unhappy because everything in my life was skewed. I resented my work, and myself for doing the work, and this resentment had a corrosive quality like salt and lemon juice. Everything felt scoured and sour. I felt inadequate as a writer, without enough hours in a day, and that inadequacy burned a hole in the very center of my creativity.

Recently, gradually, I’ve been letting myself sink back into the small fragments of my life, not yet whole the way I wish it could be, but certainly a mosaic as it is. I started doing some running again, down our mud slicked road with grooves down the center six inches deep. I started painting. And I got word that I’ll be teaching second graders next year which excites me. I like teaching older kids. I love watching them become thinkers, with writer’s notebooks and organized work spaces, and I like them more than I like the younger ones who need so much reminding about things like nose blowing.

In the end I keep saying it was the winter, and I keep feeling like since the arrival of the first mellow (if not warm) days, my mood has evened out and I’ve become more peaceful. But I cannot say for sure. What is it really that ever makes us sad? I don’t think it can ever be defined entirely by the narrow perimeter of the weather, or for that matter a job or another human being. Somehow, achingly, each arrow of sadness is drawn from the sheaf of our own unquiet soul.

In the spaces between

The roads have turned to mud now: layers of ice-hard earth thawing to slush, sticky and trampled. The yellow evening light is speckled with the flutterng wings of bugs, newly hatched, air eddying around their tiny exoskeletons.

We go for a run, just the two of us, conversation filling in the spaces between hard breathing uphill. A chainsaw whines and the scent of fresh cut wood makes my nostrils flare. Our feet sink a little with each step; muscles suddenly thrumming with heat and momentum. The air is soft, and while the snow still lingers at the edges of the fields, the brown grass lies exposed to the sun most places.

“Every step I take my feet sink,” DH says. The setting sun is at our backs. The sky is like the water I dip my brushes into: a bowl of pale ultramarine and pale saffron spilled at the horizon.

We’re holding hands. It’s the end of our run, and we’re walking back along the muddiest part of the road. In our heads both of us sing, every step you take…

Neither of us sings it aloud, but I know we’re both tuned in to this same static. “Did you just sing that song?” I ask, to be sure.

He nods, laughs. Even more than me, he’s the one doing this: filling in the spaces between thoughts with the flack of a thousand sitcoms, commercials, songs, clichés.

We do this all the time. Pop culture interference broadcasting stuff into the spaces between our thoughts. A word triggering the memory of another. Phrases tumbling unbidden into the twilight in spite of us. Turbulence in the spaces between. It’s a lovely day.

In my palm I feel the heat of him there next to me; so much between us unsaid.

What were like, before it was like this? Before thoughts were so commonly shared: before mass media and marketing, email, texting, technology instantaneously and exponentially making each thought at once more available and more clichés. In the spaces between, there was once an arc of silence. A breath beat without stimulus.

Now our minds hum constantly with unbidden music. Random access memory. Filler.

Without it, what would we be like?

Hieroglyphs of a turbulent heart

Every guy I have ever dated has been the same in one way: they have all been inclined to read my journals. Fools, all of them, for flipping through the blurry pages of my inconsistent heart.

One day I’m only able to see the sun. Everything is bright: my future, the mangos split into perfect segments on the table, the way my son laughs, the way words fall readily into place. Other days my heart plays wild gypsy music. I howl at the moon, lust after long gone loves, linger in the blue light of my laptop screen parsing stilted fragments and run-ons into barely sentences.

In college I remember a boyfriend flipping through the pages of a journal that I’d left tucked into a bag in his room. His jealously about the way I’d described my ex was palpable, his eyes were sparks, he couldn’t take the fact that I would write about anyone other than him with shards of longing, or affection, or anything other than contempt. He was actor. The kind of man who would turn anything into a passionate fight followed by passionate reconciliatory love making.

The fight about the journal was the most bitter. I wouldn’t back down, or say it wasn’t true, or do anything to soothe his wounded ego. And all I could say was, idiot. Why’d you read? My heart is ambiguous, turbulent, and true. Every day the world is a different hue.

This is the way I write here. Each post is a splattered blueprint of my everyday heart on the page, and you’ll get a wildly irregular and possibly skewed perspective. I want to sink into the moment, that’s why I write. I want to remember the way today a warm wind woke us up in the morning, and how it rained all day—leaving the rivers choked with snowmelt, slipping over their banks into the brown meadows of trampled grass. I want to remember the way I feel when we fight, or when I am abundant with joy, or when I am occupying the fragile thin edge of loneliness and longing that circles my life, that makes me hungry.

Today I am trying to get myself motivated to go for a run. Exercise is one of the keys, often missing, that makes my life feel whole. Yesterday I lay in the sun outdoors for hours, under the trees on the newly drying grass, just inches away from melting snow. My skin was singing with sun. I felt a smile blooming somewhere deep inside my solar plexus. Everyday is different.