{my topography}

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?

Wednesday::

I woke up in the middle of the night to a nosebleed. In the dark I could imagine the color, my cupped hand already filling, reaching for tissues.

In the morning an ice storm, a two hour delay, lingering over coffee.

At school, everything out of routine, topsy turvy, but we’re talking about poems and poems make anything better.

In the evening the sky was navy and threatening, but then suddenly each twig and branch was gilded with light.

Project runway ended. It made me happy.

What is your midweek like?

Attempting

I make lunch the night before; do yoga first thing; then come home from work and play with my boys. The three of us take a long walk down the melting muddied road. It is pock marked with potholes: perfect circles of mud and splashy water, just right for jumping, which Bean does in his black and yellow rain boots. I love the way he pauses before each jump, placing his feet together, crouching down, getting the most out of his small muscled legs. The water goes everywhere in satisfying droplets. I love too the way he pauses to fish around in the muddy, icy cold water, then stands up triumphant: “I found a beautiful rock!” he yells.

I make lunch the night before, circling the counter unaccustomed to thinking about food at 9:38p.m. Especially not a chicken & arugula wrap, fresh berries and yogurt, walnuts and raisins. In the morning I slip from my bed and turn the shower on before thinking. I stand bleary, rubbing my eyes, my feet on the looped lavender bath mat. Then I turn the water off, circle the house, find my yoga mat and breathe. After the fourth or fifth sun salute I realize that the entire right side of my body aches: my ear, throat, hamstrings, ankle bones. I apologize to my body for just living in it so often, without thinking. I take my vitamins. I turn the shower on again. I exfoliate. I let hot water pound on my back until I know it’s made my skin lobster red. I linger. Then I plunge towards the day.

I am trying to live this month as intentionally as I can. Taking care of myself. Making the whirling chaos of my day to day life less chaotic. It’s all about the small things, that I’ve given too little thought to. The things that ultimately bear the Morse code of self discipline. Food. Exercise. Laundry. Dishes. Creativity.

I loved reading your lists about the things you’d do if living “perfectly” for a month. Now I’m wondering: what stops you from doing them? What stops us all, really?

Lists, naps, and a month of living ‘perfectly’

I wake up from dreaming of the Arizona desert and a professor and his wife I don’t actually know in real life. The phrase “sand frills” sticks in my mind, something I’ve invented in sleep: as in, the canons and mesas give way to sand frills. It almost works to describe the way the sand is funneled and scarred with gullies and rivulets, flash floods scraping rivers into dry mud and red rocks. I wake up with an ear ache, the pain sucking at my right ear like altitude.

I slip away from the others, still sleeping: my small boy with his arms flung side to side like the oars of a rowboat, a contented sleep smile staining his face rosy; and my husband who was feverish last night and who wears and orange t-shirt and twitches inadvertently. It is the last day of vacation and I wake up mid day from napping with the sun slanting through the slits of the wooden blinds, dust motes rising and twirling in the air.

Yesterday I napped too, alone with the cats. Both of them curled nose to tail on the flannel. When I joined them, the apricot one chirped a welcome to me. At night she follows me around the house as I turn off the lights, bank the fire, get ready for sleep. She meows plaintively then, wanting one thing: a pinch of cat nip that makes her whirr like a summer fan and fall to the floor like a dervish in a state of ecstasy.

Today I wake up at 2:37 p.m. dreaming of people I don’t know. For the longest time, or what feels like the longest time, I am convinced that I do actually know the man, who in my dream was a professor, we both were it seems. I try to pull my mind from the shallows of near sleep, where thoughts dart like the shadows of trout, illusive and just below the surface.

Gradually I stir, hoping that if I move, inhabit my body again, feel my fingers and toes, I’ll be able to place him and his wife, dark olive skin, but I’m only more confused and the pain from my ear creeps down my neck. When I put my hand up to my throat I find the glands on that side are swollen. Everything participating in the purposeful choreography of falling ill just as vacation is ending, of course.

When I climb from the bed I move the covers, I move my knees, and my ankles and the soles of my bare feet make contact with the wood floor. I can feel the grooves between the planks. The round circles where penny sized tabs of wood cover screw holes. For a minute I sit there at the edge of the bed with the dust motes circling my tangled hair like a halo and am stricken.

I think of all the screws. Thousands, maybe a million, although I can hardly imagine what a million screws would look like, each one made of dark metal, machined somewhere in a plant in Idaho or Tennessee or Mexico or China. I am astounded considering all the people who contributed to my floor in this way: the workers in protective goggles and gloves sorting and correcting package weights; the fork lift driver; those at the shipping yard and at the hardware store, and also the men who likely knelt a million times or more to place each screw, thankful to have an electric or battery operated screw driver.

The floor is old, and when we bought the house, the finish was almost black with age. It didn’t gleam, and by the windows in my studio, a lot of water damage. Someone left the windows open more than once during a summer rain. Now it gleams, sanded and finished twice over. Our sweat. Our bending knees. My feet make contact with the floor. I pull myself to standing. I pull on jeans. I pull on a white terry sweatshirt that I’ve just put through the wash with a few tablespoons of Chlorox.

In the dryer I added a Mrs. Myers Clean Day geranium scented dryer sheet. The smell made me happy. It spelled clean and not cloying, though not natural either. The house is clean now, at the end of vacation. My life feels in order. I’ve spent the week putting things in order: paints on the shelf in my studio, carmine and cobalt and cerulean. I’ve scheduled things: doctors appointments, dental check ups, hair cuts, meals with friends. I’ve crossed things off my list: updated accounts, passport papers, green peppers and Irish oats and oranges for squeezing. On the bag they say “Take home and give us a squeeze.” Like some sort of huggable small trolls nestled together there in the orange webbed bag.

I’m reading Don DeLillo’s book White Noise, and am fascinated with the way he uses lists to tell the story. Lists spiraling and deepening, a little the way Tim O’Brian did in The Things They Carried. This month, March, is a month of lists. It’s a month I’ve decided to live contentiously, focusing on the small things like replying to emails regularly and packing my lunch for work the night before. I get so outside myself, tilting towards the big picture, towards the hungry heat of my passions, that I forget to be here much, and here has a way of getting crowded and overwhelming as a result.

In O Magazine, someone wrote an article about “A Month of Living Perfectly” and I laughed, because it was my idea, the very thing I said to DH. “What if we spend March living the way we always say we want to live? No waffling.”

He nodded over toast. He wasn’t really listening to me. It was the end of February and the snow had numbed his brain. It keeps falling, by the way, falling nearly nightly. Making the woods white and glittering and the driveway slick when it melts and then turns to ice in the dark. But now March is here, and I’m going ahead with my proposition, ready, set, go.

If you were to live “perfectly” for a month, what are the top five things you would do every day?

Create, live with abandon.

The snow is falling outside, making everything like a milky dream. The trees are flocked with white, and I can’t remember the scent of summer: cut grass, ripening blackberries, dust rising up from the dirt road; in the same way I can’t really remember what last year was like, so much uncertain, heartache like broken dishes gathered in a paper sack. I never imagined that I’d have to reach out and cut my fingers on the shards to grow in a marriage; in fact I never really pictured this life at all.

This small boy, this man, this house, these fields dappled blue and white with snow and shadows. How can you ever really imagine how your life will be? Dreams are so fickle, so rife with longing. It’s good to have them—and to send them on whispered breath out into the world like so much dandelion furze. But I’m grateful that the Universe has a bigger dream for me.

Grateful that in the year between then and now, we’ve come together again, pulled towards one another inevitably like the tiny magnets on the backs of Bean’s toy trains that hitche one to the next. Grateful the embering heat of the wood stove, the heat of his love, and the inches of powder that keeps falling out of the sky, making it possible, finally, for me to learn to ski.

Yesterday Bean spent the night at his grandparents for the first time ever. We went out for dinner with friends, sipping champagne and honeyed martinis in a restaurant with silver painted walls. Gold and white balloons bobbed from the backs of our chairs. Our voices carried certainly to the neighboring tables, our laughter rising up ruckus and often among forkfuls of roasted garlic, olives, flatbreads, crab cakes with micro greens, carpaccio, crème brule. Then we came home and were just us, in the soft flannel of our bed when the pale morning light pulled us from slumber. Just us, and the siren song of bare skin and warm shoulders calling for an embrace.

Then we made coffee, buttered raisin toast, and eggs, and talked about our resolutions for 2008.

Mine:
Publish at least five pieces of writing.
Get more organized (with everything from regular writing time, to planning what’s for dinner.)
Kick some booty as an athlete: get to be better at climbing, yoga, running (maybe a triathlon?) and skiing.
Grow a garden.
Live with abandon.

Saved by a meme

I was tagged with a meme for 7 random things about me, and since it is Thursday night and I’m exhausted, but I’m stubbornly not quitting NaBloPoMo, a meme is all you get:

• I’m a stomach sleeper.

• I feel guilty because I have never put photo albums together for either my wedding, or Bean’s first year.

• I have a weird, bordering on frenzied, dislike for any lettuce or leafy green that becomes black and slimy.

• I contributed to NPR for the first time this year, and felt very pleased with myself.

• I get nosebleeds in the winter time.

• I’ve been in bars, but I’ve never sat at the counter and ordered a drink or carried on a debaucheries conversation with a hot bartender.

• In high school and college I was a swimmer. In the past year I’ve been in a pool exactly once. This depresses me.

What are 7 random things about you?

Thankful

…I am thankful for this piece of land. For every return trip that brings me up the gravel drive, rounding the corner to see the house. We’ve found a beautiful metal compass-rose star that hangs between our garage doors, as if to say, “Here is home.” I am thankful for the way the leaves still catch small eddies of late autumn wind, and rise up twirling into the blue sky, and for the meadows with the grass mown down where voles and foxes and mule deer leave their tracks.

…I am thankful for my small, “a little bit big” boy who every single day astounds me. He’s become sweeter, if that’s possible. More thoughtful. The other night, I sank into DH’s arms, sobbing with exhaustion and overwhelm. “Don’t cry mommy,” he said, and then put both hands on my face and tried to move my cheeks into a smile. Tenderly. Earnestly. And I smiled.

…I am thankful for my guy: broad shouldered, full of laughter, driven to make the best life possible for our family; and for the way he’s always game to take the leap with me—to plan for living in Europe in two summers time; or to put up with and support the certain crazy of my writing life. I am thankful for his topaz eyes, and for the fact that he could stop, when we were arguing and wrap me in his arms despite the sharp edged words I’d flung towards him that were hanging in the air.

…And also for my brilliant sisters; my girlfriends; the way my cat curls up to nap at my hip as I sit on the couch; the way the sun falls through our dining room windows; for our wood stove; for morning lattes, kisses, Project Runway, dark chocolate, Bean hugs, books, and you.

Five random things today

I want to write, but cannot make my fingers agree with me. Bullet points are easier.

Five random things I did in the past 24 hours:

* Tried on almost every single shirt or sweater in my possession and found all to be lacking in one way or another. I hate that.

* Taught first graders about the two body parts of a spider (abdomen and cephalothorax)

* Cried in my husband’s arms in bed from sheer exhaustion and overwhelm (being there in those arms—the best thing that happened all day.)

* Tried to skip a page in Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle Duck while reading to Bean, but got in trouble because he seems to know every freaking word. Of every book we own. Time to get new books, I think.

* Took a walk in the cold wearing a powder blue down jacket and woolen hat. It’s starting to feel almost wintry here.

What did you do today?

Tagged: 8 random things

The beautiful boho girl tagged me with this meme: 8 random things you don’t already know about me:

• My first true crush (in fifth grade) was a boy who now plays in this band. We wrote letters all summer the year I moved away.

• I am obsessed with the “sticky note” widget feature on my computer.

• I cannot currently picture loving a second kid as much as I love Bean; cannot fathom my heart being big enough to contain this love, times two.

• People think I am both taller and older than I really am.

• If I were single and childless I’d be living in a funky little apartment somewhere with Salvation Army chairs painted wild colors and chipped china teacups. My bohemian side is somewhat subdued, what with all the toddler things around the house, and a man with contemporary good taste.

• I am currently obsessed with this Greek yogurt + honey.

• I am an INFJ.

• I could survive the rest of my life without coffee or wine, but not poems; without chocolate or television, but not music; without money or things, but not good friends.

I’m tagging: love squalor, la vie en rose , so the fish said, hula seventy, and rosa murillo

Bliss

Have I mentioned that I�m having a divine time? I sat for three hours and wrote this afternoon after receiving brilliant criticism on the piece I am working on. I went to the beach yesterday, with a picnic: spicy fried chicken, pot stickers, salad, grapefruit soda, and a coconut & chocolate chip cookie. Then I watched the sun set over the water.

I heard Maxine Kumin read from her work, and oh, how my breath was lost somewhere as she read, like the flight of birds.

And I went to dinner with Pam and the class tonight. She is charismatic and analytical and forthright. She�s been in the Bronco�s locker room and interviewed Toni Morrison, and she can make a room of people laugh belly laughs repeatedly.

Here are a few things she’s said so far this week that I really want to remember:

On why she writes: �Writing is the way I honor the physical world. I think of it as a kind of prayer.�

On craft: �Sink the story into the metaphor. The challenge is how to sidle up next to the big things without becoming lecturers and making total fools out of ourselves.��

�There is nothing worse than trying to say something. You�ll always fuck it up. Keep it concrete.�

�You don�t have to tell everything. Let the concrete specifics stand in for the general.�

You cannot communicate depth using emotion word. �Just read your seventh grade journal to see that!�

On Revising: by the fourth draft, �take out the things you needed to say to know, but now they can be removed.�

On fiction versus nonfiction: �Everything I write comes out of my experience. I hardly imagine anything.�

Do you know how freeing that was for me to hear? Do you understand how those few sentences made lots of things possible for me with writing, that I hadn�t imagined possible?

On audience; �You must believe your reader is as smart as you are.��