{my topography}

Trembling heart

Sometimes my heart feels like a starfish belly: outside me, devouring the things I love. Sometimes it feels like an urchin’s purple back: a hundred quills around its pliant center. Sometimes it’s like the soft belly of a cat: turning to the sunlight, thrumming with internal delight. Sometimes it’s hard to have a heart this tender, this wide open to other people’s grief.

At work we’re just finally now sorting through the relics of trauma that we’ve carried like splinters through the school year. I’m more okay than many others, in part, because I was new there, and also because I am young and resilient. The middle kid in my family. The peace maker. The relativist who can see both sides, while still seeing the cup half full. I wasn’t rooted, familiar with the way ‘things always were.’ The lives lost weren’t ones I knew.

And yet, oh and yet, it is so very hard for me to sit in a room with everyone’s emotions running high like floodwaters, just below the surface of their pale blue veins. So hard to see their faces hurt, to see the different sides, to see the grief and feel it all. I try to envision a protective shield to stop some of it from saturating, but the sorrow and loss and anger that fills the building, and eddies as two people pass in the halls, is so present, so tangible, I can’t shake it off. I am devastated, still. And then I read in the paper about the little girl in Portugal, abducted from her hotel room, or about sweet|salty’s beautiful tiny premie boys and my heart feels pulpy and fragile and broken open all over again, as if sorrow were a new ingredient in air.

I came home exhausted today. I think I’ve come home exhausted all year. I thought I was the only one, but in the past two days of meetings, everyone says they’ve been ungodly tired, sleepwalking through the days. Someone said it was like we were trying to fix four flats on a car with the car still moving. And it has really been like that, post trauma, moving full throttle forward because of the wide eyed kids who want to learn about the arctic and the desert and addition and how to spell the word miss-iss-ipp-i.

Then I stumbled on this:

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.

Dawna Markova

Intention

Time to return to the things that matter. To wake up bumble-headed and still trialing the wild ponies of dreams, pour tea, and write. To show up, because this is what I want to do with my life. Even when showing up means having a staring contest with the page, while the birds sing jubulently outside; and dawn spreads across the gravel and the new buds and the eaves. I’m determined, because I have to be, because this is what I’ve chosen. Some days I come away with nothing. Other days, a few sentences, like a pocket full of sea glass shards. Or poems, that tumble from nowhere before I’m even awake.

Two versions of Worship:

I kneel down at the arbor of another day
kissing the small pebbles of wonder that press into my knees,
the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet
I gather the petals that have drifted earthwards
from the quivering globes of roses,
and press them to my heart

April 24

**

my heart is like a music box; many
pronged tin cylinder, twirling
making steady, frail music rise
joining the windstorm of my soul
where the notes are torn and the song
becomes wild and tumultuous
and I feel very small.

April 25

Things I’m excited about, and a small piece of art

* New plants: a tall potted palm for the bedroom, and a delicate fern for downstairs by the kitchen sink.

* Running every day this week except for Monday, and sleeping better at night because of it.

* Starting a half-marathon training program–mid May-ish is the date for several possible runs. Loving the focus a tangible goal provides.

* The earlier daylight savings time this year (this Sunday!) and making plans to spend time in the sun.

* Having a piece accepted for publication in a magazine you can buy at Barnes & Noble. (WHOOhoo!)

Delight

Today I was going through my notebooks and I found this page from last spring. It got me to thinking about the small things that make me smile, right now, no matter what. These are good things to think of. Little things, that pull me into the present, into an immediate experience of pleasure. Here’s my list for today. What is yours?

At the doorway

So I finished, and I’m happy with the manuscript I put together. I wrote well, I think. My body aches from poor posture, and hour after hour in front of the computer.

Getting these applications finished is a milestone for me. I’m standing at the doorway to something I’ve wanted for such a long time, and finally I’ve given myself the all-out green light to go ahead and be a writer.

It still sounds a little scary to say that, to admit that’s what I’m doing by sending this fat envelope off. Like releasing a flock carrier pigeons, hope takes flight on a hundred wings tonight.

Sometimes song…

Every night here, in the swirling darkness of just before dreams, we curl together. His small soft cheek pressed against my heart, song rising up like an offering into the velvet of night. Here, every night, we reclaim each other from the day, his small fingers exploring my face, my arms wrapped tightly around his small bundle of limbs, always growing, now heavy with almost-sleep. Every night in the rocking chair, holding each other close, song is the mortar that connects us, making tesserae of our separate days whole.

Hi. Already.

Hello, Internets !

I haven’t checked my stats in so long, I believe I’ve forgotten my passwords. But I know that there are many cool people out there who come here, and some of you write me absolutely awesome emails, or send me lovely chocolate covered figs, or gorgeous photos, or cds with amazing girly housewarming tunes (thank you, thank you, a zillion times, thank you!)

But others of you I’m sure, lurk your way through my posts each day, never toching your keyboard. And in your honor, it’s that week again. That’s right. NATIONAL DELURKING WEEK. Go ahead, say hi. Every single one of you. You will make my day. My week, even. Really. And just for you, I painted this picture (in keeping with my January art every day resolution.)

Underpants!

His first pair! He ran around the kitchen wildly, high stepping, stomping, grinning. He asked to inspect Mama’s underpants and Daddy’s underpants. He pulled his up, and pulled them down. We took a special trip to the mall tonight to purchase them, as it seems, Bean is ready for potty training.

Gasp. How did we possibly get here, from here? All the cliche’s collide in my mind. How quickly they grow, really. I’m still having trouble picturing what diaperless is like. And of course I need advice. Spill please.

The details: after the gym two nights ago, waiting for DH I gave Bean a cup and showed him how to work the drinking fountain. He was in heaven, and six cups of water and a wet shirt later, DH showed up, we drove home, and I striped the little guy down to his birthday suit. But then, being the utterly lazy mama I am, I decided that the forty five minutes of dinner and and playtime before bed were not enough to warrent the hassel of daipering, so I put him in longjohns and showed him the potty. Causually, I mentioned, “If you need to go potty, you can sit on this one like a big boy.” Then I went about cleaning up the living room, and holy crap, the kid was sitting on the potty and GOING.

He was wildly excited. I was wildly excited. He proceeded to go like six or seven times (all the water!) and each time was delighted to show me his production, and to flush with abandon.

Since then, both nights we’ve had successes–and an amazing poop on the potty! Really. And he wiped. (Apparently all of the times he’s made himself at home in the bathroom while we’re occupied on the white thrown have paid off…worth it, but still. Just once it’d be nice to do my business without having someone try to shove toilet paper down behind me before I’m through.)

Of course, there were a few accidents, but what a way to start, right? What should I do next? For car travel? Night time? Trips out?

You web mamas rock my world.

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.

The ecology of resilience

Like a dislocated limb being reset, it was almost easy to slip back to where we were. A little pain for sure, but the ingrained rhythms of preparation (making charts, sorting crayons) quickly resumed its drumbeat in my heart. Everything had been put back, repaired, restored. Outside, kids and parents came en masse to weed and landscape; to plant trees and put up bird houses. The front doors were painted a bright new blue. And tonight, the community will gather again to hold hands all the way around the school.

This is the ecology of resilience. To choose not to be defined by tragedy, and to bend instead like a new sapling, toward the green sap of hope.