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.
The way I operate, My Notebook, Thoughts & observations | Comments (11)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?
Running, Overheard, My Notebook, Thoughts & observations | Comments (4)Tidbits
Bean said, “Mama, why do we wake up instead of down?”
*
My spine feels looser after yoga. I had fun, watching him, hearing his breath, moving through the sun salute.
*
We bought pfeffernusse cookies today; a holiday tradition from my childhood.
*
Snow is falling in fat, wet flakes outside.
*
UPDATED: My brain = mush. Too little sleep. Too many words. I’ll resurface on Sunday-ish. Until then, tell me what are three of your favorite things to receive in your stocking?
NaBloPoMo, Foodie things, Doing, My Notebook | Comments (10)
Tuesday Notebook
Kneel down, hold the ground in your hands
or reach up and hold meteors in your glance
as they plummet through the dark night.
Be thankful.
***
This morning the air felt scrubbed clean after last night’s rain. I went bleary eyed to my studio, pulling on one of DH’s t-shirt sand a pair of old sweatpants, with the intention of doing some art. I’ve been so bombarded with words lately that they’re starting to feel smaller than usual. More one dimensional. I sit down to write and always feel like the words I get on the page are somewhere at the surface of what I want to say, but no where near the heart. So I’ve decided to do some art every day this week. Little pieces. Messy, real. Maybe getting at some of the depth of emotion I’ve been feeling.
Simply: I spent the weekend house hunting with my inlaws and the experienced left me awed, drained, curious. People live their lives in so many different ways, and their homes carry the expression of their lives so deeply. The timbers gradually soak up the emotion of day to day interactions, the windows, the corner tables, the hues on the walls all start telling a version of the life story of the people who dwell there.
But mostly, I left grateful that we’ve found this place up on our hill. I stand at the window of my studio looking out and my heart fills. The ember red of the little barn/chicken coop we just renovated; the dusty ocher of the blowing meadow grasses; the first hint of red at the tips of the maples; the sweeping view. I feel at home here in a way I never have felt anywhere before, and it is a hungry feeling of wanting to sink in. Be more present here. Take more walks. Notice.
Two nights ago we sat in lawn chairs on the driveway looking up at the bowl of stars, partly obscured with stars. Meteors with glimmering tails streaked across the dark. It’s a place I could be for a while, I think. Among the maples and the beeches and the goldenrod that has grown chest high in the lower meadow, where the coyotes and the owls nightly call.
Do you have a place that makes you feel at home like this? A park, a city street, a vast swath of land that’s yours? Or are you thirsty with longing like I was for years before here?
And also, who wants to do some art with me every day this week?
A sense of place, Homefront, My Notebook | Comments (9)To hold the moon…
We were driving home the other night and the moon was following us, the way the moon does. Playing peekaboo, a late summer moon like a milky porcelain saucer tangled between the branches of leaf-heavy trees and slumbering buildings.
Bean was nearly breathless, “It’s so bea-u-ti-ful!” he exclaimed.
And then, “I want to hold the moon, mama!” His voice full with urgent longing.
My Notebook, Mommy?! | Comments (10)Each day, this:
The way the orchid on the windowsill sends up a new stalk bravely into the warm light by the glass, buds swelling with the promise of waxy petals, even though the ceramic bowl of moss and soil that hold its roots are all it has.
The way the sun comes up all over again, spreading the yellow paint of another morning across the sky, even though the night was long. Even though the clouds obscured the stars and the coyotes woke me, howling, and in the morning the neighbor said hed lost another lamb.
The way my small boy goes, lips stained red with berries, running across the lawn to play contentedly with his chickies, while I sit on the stoop with my laptop and type unencumbered, watching. Even though an hour before he was glued to me, whining, tantruming, irrational.
The way there is always grace, even though the world is a place of anguish and everywhere my glance falls, text leaps from the page telling of another way that devastation happens. And it does.
I feel so lucky.
Art Everyday, My Notebook, Thoughts & observations | Comments (9)Always last minute me
I woke up this morning with a sore throat. I always seem to do this: get sick right after I’ve made it through to the end of something stressful. I also always manage to leave everything for last minute: laundry, the rest of my fiction piece, packing. I hate leaving in a rush of packing and hapazardness, but I always seem to manage to find myself there.
An inefficient overachiever, and a sick one at that.
I’ll leave in the morning tomorrow, and drive for six hours. Signing along with the radio, trying to get the directions right, and feeling like my stomach might fall out my mouth, but I’ll try not to focus on that. (Have I mentioned how anxious I get right at the beginning of things–at that cusp of unknown? I have. I know. But I really hate it.) But with all my heart I’m excited to be going, and I have questions that I’m determined to ask of the lady whose prose makes me grin, or catch my breath. But I also want to know answers from you. If you write, or read, or dream of writing, I’d love to hear your thoughs.
* Where are the lines between life and fiction. How can pieces of life, stories, characters, annecdotes become the tapestry of fiction?
* How much is enough? I’m forever writing the long piece. The piece with backstory on the backstory. I want to learn to craft a shorter narritive. Something with just enough to let the reader do the rest. How do you know when to leave off, without saying everything?
* And audiance. I don’t feel like I have a sophisticated enough sense of audiance yet. Kurt Vonnegut says “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” If you write, who is your one person? Who is yoru audiance. Maybe that’s my problem, I can never think of just one person.
Writing, The way I operate, My Notebook | Comments (8)Monday
In the studio smoke from the raku kiln drifts in through the open windows, where water runs in rivulets, like tiny tributaries or capillaries, trembling with early summer rain. It’s been raining softly off and on all day, and I kind of like the way it drenches things: scrubbing the sidewalks clean and soaking the tilled soil in my garden making it easier to turn over into raised beds.
Tonight I sit at the wheel and try new clay: porcelain. White and supple and so soft beneath my fingers, like milk. It takes so little effort to center, to pull up cylinder after cylinder, bowl after bowl. I make eleven pieces. More than I’ve ever made in a night. Four soup bowls, four tall mugs, two plates, and a vase. I can hardly stop myself. The clay slips with little effort in a circling center between my fingers, and the studio is full of banter. Marven Gaye is on for a while, then Beck. Conversations rises and falls like a flock of pigeons alighting for bread, then lifting off into the sky to settle on the ridgeline of a roof somewhere.
I love throwing pots in the studio while my guy loafs around, glazing pots in the opposite corner, making people laugh. My mind stays close to its center, at the wheel. I don’t veer into worry, or anxiety or tiredness; like gardening, the simple act of using my hands in a directed purposeful way fills my soul with a sense of even-keeled grace I easily loose track of as the day whips by me, all talk and clatter and eager kids.
I come home empty, in a grateful, open way. Ink and gesso on the pages of an old book; clay on my jeans; a bottle of massage oil on the bedside table. The day is done.
My Notebook | Comments (7)Four paragraphs & four things beginning with “A”
A full day back at the classroom. They greet me with eager smiles and two-page weekend news letters in ever more confidant print. They use capitals and periods and I challenged them to write about what they felt, saw and said. One little boy wrote, I could feel the wind and I said to J, “Can you feel the wind?” and he said back to me, “Yes I can,” as we biked down the hill. Such sweeties they are, though they seek to wring every ounce of energy and attention from me. If they learned one thing this year, they learned to be kick-ass writers 
A parent share tomorrow, to celebrate the kid’s final writing projects. Books they’ve planned from storyboard to final hard-cover hand sewn copy. Their smiles and their bright pictures and eccentric text placement is something I’ve been wanting to photograph for a while, so I’m bringing my camera! I miss mixing my life more: art and teaching and writing. I like when it overlaps.
At home, before dinner, we got the chicken coop floor framed out, Bean following after us with a hammer—using it with flawless form. The sun angled long, and for dinner we had flat bread pizza. It’s been the third night in a row Bean has gone to sleep super tired by 8, without much cajoling, and slept through the night in his bed until 6 in the morning, when he patters his way into our room. I cannot tell you how utterly thrilled I am about this. I don’t want to jinx it of course.
And a few more paragraphs tonight. Up to ten pages. The story seems to be fitting together in unexpected ways, as though all the jigsaw pieces are speckled with Rorschach prints. I’m just following along, seeing what I recognize and going with what feels right.
And four things I’m enjoying that start with A:
Azaleas blooming along the back wall of my house, unexpected.
Antinori Vermentino wine: delish with sausages and crusty bread.
Aching muscles from hard work.
Animal, Vegitable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver