What I know of wearing hats.

What I know: I have three hats and I've never worn them. One is a charming women's hat reminiscent of the thirties. Or perhaps forties. After the flappers, I find history spreads without distinction. The other is a winter hat that if you wear too high on your head, resembles a Russian headpiece. As you can imagine, it's the height of fashion, a category you would see I don't belong to if you looked through my closet. I don't remember the third hat (bowler? fedora? sunhat? I've always wanted a sunhat, but that's another story), so perhaps I only own two. What I also know: I read Nora Ephron and suddenly I am charming, humorous (but not ha-ha funny -- there's a difference between laughter and a gem of dialogue that stays with you until it matures into a joke), and conversational. I talk in short sentences. I manage to fit a stream of thought neatly into a paragraph and somehow it doesn't feel ramble-on and long and I manage to entertain my audience's thoughts the entire process. I am self deprecating minus the deprecation. I poke at myself, gently, and it's more kidding-your-friend than undercutting sarcasm, because what I'm saying is true, it's reality, and it's humorous and delightfully human and it's okay to laugh about that.

At the height of my Ephron stage, I pull out a Kim Edwards novel and I'm thrust into a world dripping with poetry. Thickly layered simplicity piled under metaphors. It's lush and my writing takes on the character of a tropical island in the summer, everything emerald and honeyed and swollen with the descriptions of mangos, fascinating and tragic backstories, plot hooks partially memory, stitched with dreams. My writing becomes nebulous, pure lyricism.  I write lengthy pages of poetry crammed into the constraints of dialogue and narrative and suddenly my characters and friends are sages. They are veritable wise men and women of old. Why, I should take lessons from them! The first being that exclamation marks are a no. This is not a slap-happy comedy. Suddenly, drinking coffee in the morning takes on a dreamy, amber tinted glow, and the line between fact and fantasy blurs until there was no recognizable line at all. It's a buzz in your head, champagne bubbles, silver light on the water. It's addicting. I become convinced I'm a poet and I'm sorry to say I become absolutely maudlin. I know adverbs are the bubonic plague of writing, one case leading to another until soon, they're killing off good, clean prose one by one, but in order to properly describe in effect how terribly melancholic I become, I'll have to let that one slip.

When I'm thoroughly drenched in the violet wine of a recent Edward's novel, I'll start cleaning out my bookshelf, or think, I should read this to the boys, or, I'll look up a quote and get sucked into an old Roald Dahl book. My affair with simplicity and whimsy is rekindled, though I swore (for what seemed like the ninth time) that the dignity of my pieces would remain. I make rendezvous' with words like "fantastic!" "glittery!" and "chummy!" I am animated! And childlike! And exclamation marks pop up like weeds. Excuse me. Like weeds! If Edwards is a grand, matronly lady with a rose garden and a towering mansions, with gallery rooms and an entire wing for a kitchen, then Dahl is the young father of twins, the cheerful nanny who tells deliciously (there goes the adverb again -- they're catching!) chilling tales you can't help but listen to, the best friend in every romcom you feel the heroine should end up with, because sure, the hero has a charming face, but it seems he always falls for the girl after the inevitable makeover. Anyways.

I slip into these writers (and more: I haven't mentioned the simple, kind wisdom of C. S. Lewis or Markus Zusak's brilliant prose, Jane Austen's full-bodied fiction or Nicole Krauss' rapturous words, the charming, humorous writing of Margaret Dilloway, or the shimmering, headying fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on and on) styles. I try on their hats for awhile but none fit quite as well as my own. Except, when I put all those hats away, I find I lost mine. Except, when I try to look for it, I find I can't quite remember it, whether it was black or gray or yellow, if it had a wide brim or if there was a bird on top. Except, by the time I've found it, it wasn't really a hat, more of a headscarf. Of course! I'm not a hat girl, after all, no matter how I try. And there, I think, lies the secret.

My great grandmother was a tiny force of a woman. When she died, she was ninety pounds of muscle memory. They say moments live on in your bones, like words layered brick by brick. You’re a skeletal foundation of stories and your knees are muddy with unthawing. She wore thick white tights soft as the pale fuzz of hair wisping around her face. Her apartment walls were red velvet, plush and cloying in your nose. You took off your shoes before you came in, and there was a clatter of pairs by the door. She made chicken noodle soup and served it on china from the Czech Republic. The plates alone were petals. Grace, she said, and in between breaths, don’t let weeds grow between your ribs. I cried at her funeral and the sound of death broke on my skin, falling like snow. The slush soaked through my boots. We had soup for lunch. That day, her glass bowl slipped on the spring earth into shards as small as seeds.

december mix tape.

listen : DECEMBER SOUNDS

No rhyme or reason, just sounds of the season.

(cheesy)

Happy December! x

you and me, we got our own sense of time.

six pies (three gluten free)
a new baby
a snowless evening
two fat turkeys stuffed with cinnamon raisin bread and celery
card games after dusk
rest

our thanksgiving

"But if we're really honest with ourselves,
our plans usually don't work out as we had hoped.
So instead of asking our young people'What are your plans? 
What do you plan to do with your life?'
maybe we should tell them this:
PLAN TO BESURPRISED."
- Dan in Real Life

on seeds and journeys.

What we don't realize is that you can have a life-changing encounter, travel to a place that causes a shift in your heart, can meet someone who changes you, you can go, do, read, see, watch, something, anything, that makes it just a little harder to breathe. And you think, yes! Here I go, from now on, life will be different. But the thing is, that experience isn't full-grown, it's just the seed. It's the beginning, not the road itself. That's the map that you use as a roadmark, not the trail you'll walk. And it's up to you to decide to continue or retreat into routine and wonder why things didn't change. Too often we go through something revolutionary, good or bad, and then slip back into the normalcy of our day to day lives instead of choosing to do the hard work and tend to that seed. Then we finally take a step back and start asking ourselves why our life doesn't line up with our vision. How could that moment — the experience that mattered so intensely — seem not to have changed anything at all? That's the thing. You can have as many seeds but until you plant them, until you continually water them, until you die to self, choose to go through the process of growing...it's going to be a seed. What matters is what you do with it.

coffee wood mornings where the air smelled like smoke.
when you woke up, if you looked out the windows and stared past the trees, you could see the lake.
cold like swallows of ice water. metal cups in your hand.
late when we arrived, late when we left.
dancing fast in a filled music hall with strangers we'd never see again. my feet were tangled trying to hoedown.
an hour in the woods does a soul good.
small places like home nearer than before.
let's go back.

photo of me by kiley
canon eos 3, kodak portra 800

the tree that is not there.

I just need space to be sad,
lonely whispers into the gray rimmed room.
she turns her face to the window
that is not there and closes her eyes
to the tree that is not there and
touches the ground that is not there
and weeps. in her mind, it is summer.
in her mind, it only rains when
tight-lipped white-lipped women
sleep. water keeps company with moon,
dulling the pounding of rain on roof.
she breathes synonymous with the tide to the
ocean that is not there. and sleeps.
in her mind, there are seagulls.
when she wakes, there is a door.

i swear there’s gold in those hills / acres are plenty in heart.

photos by jon canlas
this time of year, my thoughts shake and scatter. i muse and mull and look for meaning in every nuance.
i play piano again, pick up poetry, write messy words from wondering thoughts.
then there are late nights, piled up deadlines, cups of coffee . . . tangled like string.
knit me a reminder saying, season by season, for such a time as this.
i need rest. a place, the space, to breathe. just be filled.
i don't know what it will look like. i know what it will hold.
slowness. resting. being honest with myself and others. simplifying.
stretching and breathing through everything.

it's been a tough season. not leaves falling, pumpkins and orchards, hot apple cider season.
but this here and now place, these weeks winding around and around into months.
i've been living with so many layers. going through the whole gamut of emotions.

this is what i want

depth and richness
not shallowness and instant gratification -- fleeting
i want lasting
and there are cadences to that
bittersweetness rolling around on your tongue.
sorrow ringing and laughter singing and gratitude stretching through your soul, morning by morning.
i want the pauses that come between heartbreak and joy.
i want the evenings of weeping.
i want the afternoons of growing.
i want the hard days of planting, the long years of process and practice and belief.
i want to sow hope deep in my soul for the white walled years like winter winds.

i need the habit. the hours of work and wrestling. discipline.
to find myself remembering seeds grow unnoticed, at first.
walking barefoot in the fall with the smell of earth heavy, turning, changing.
i want to see that picture as a poem for my life.

able to see mundane as meaningful. turn routine into ritual. live wide eyed.
notice and laugh. notice and weep.
notice and work. notice and rest.
notice and make. notice and sing.
turning each sweeping breath into a prayer of thank you, thank you, thank you.
until there is no longer a hollow ache, a knotted lump, a tightness. but openness, depth, rest.

seasons and seeking and seeing.

further up, further in.

you, of breath and sky, I call soar.
cradle the swallow of air in your lungs.
weave your song into ribbons you leave
marking presence. your wings tipped with
whispers someone will one day                             softly drop
in your ears. these steps and stones, bare bones
are a soft place to land. settle. here is
where you will find flight, gather foundation.
dusk deepens, do not be afraid of night. there
is a time for rest, in wild violet twilight where trees
grow tall from wondering. morning breaks soon
enough, still your beating, still. your eyes leave
petals in the dawn of the world. at length, the sun stretches.
take your flightless arms and reach. this is when you
take heart to sky and find home beating inside you,
light like stars. this is a song you alone sing.

you and I.

Someday, let's pack a picnic of cheese and chocolate and bread. Drink sparkling water like it was wine. Let's spend all our money on photo booths and get lost running in the streets. Buy hot sugared almonds and pick bouquets of wildflowers, leave a trail of petals to find ourselves by. Let's watch the stars and point out constellations for which we have no names.

And so, you get up.

by beautiful anda

Sometimes, life is heavy.

You don't notice it at first. It's like collecting stones. You start slowly, gently. At first, you can't feel the weight. Then it becomes harder to notice what's in front of you. You can't see the scope, the slope of the landscape, because you're focused on carrying the foundation. It's easier to shoulder it all and numb yourself to the weight.

But there's that place. That point where you read your threshold, your valley. Maybe you've walked for so long that you are bone weary and ringed with grief. Or perhaps you ran, the entire way, and your breath is knocked out of you. And you realize . . . you don't know where you are. Or more soberingly, how you arrived. You look back and see that you've missed the markers, missed the milestones, missed the moments. Too busy holding onto the heaviness of the journey. It's been like that for so long that you're afraid you won't know who you are without it.

You have to let it go. To not go apathetic. To not go numb. To not go quiet.

Don't let sorrow swallow your song. You need to be awake - to the world, to life, to yourself. It feels like running for the first time, like stretching your shuddering muscles, like walking in the cold dew of morning. It stings. You start in the dark, with only the promise of sun. There's no light to outline the path. It doesn't matter. You've forgotten the road anyways. You've walked so long without one that trails are unfamiliar and foreign.

There is no hiding from brokenness. There is no running from grief. Some manage to evade it for longer, others find it knocking on their door daily. She has a face you cannot forget, leaves her calling card everywhere she goes. We are each stitched with ribbons of our every heartache, except, some of us are frayed. Even the best of us have tears.

This living, breathing, being awake . . . this is painful. Sometimes, it feels easier, better, to go cold. To give into the pain and become numb, and once again, pick up the skeleton of who you were before grief marked your face. To let your heart harden. Lock it away and melt the key and live in the motions, never the moment. At the very point of pain, it seems less exhausting. But passivity is a silent slow killer, a lie that laps away at the texture of life like water on the stone.

And so, you get up.

You keep moving though your bones ache. You walk until you run. You hum until you can sing. You catalogue small things until you can once again take in the scope. You choose to be awake. It's surprisingly painful. It's sobering to look around and realize you have forgotten what it means to be alive, for so long, for so long. It's February and you're barefoot and the ground has still not thawed.

Breathe. Again. And again. Dive into the core and pressure point of your pain, the heart of your ache. It's red hot and white and bitter black. It shakes like starlight. You swallow it like stones. But you emerge and understand, it hasn't added a layer to your heart . . . but a ring. It's not a mark, but a message.

The thing about being awake is you notice things. Good. Bad. Beautiful. Painful. Sorrowing. Sweet. Bitter. Broken. Dizzying between everything. You cry more. You laugh deeper. You understand broken things and encourage flowers to just be. You find your soul sprouting little green things, that the roots of the marrow of being haven't left after all. And it's painful, the fire of wakening running like blood. You've been asleep for so long feeling is foreign.

But you begin to appreciate what is small. You begin to breathe gratitude. You stumble on meaning, find grace woven alongside ache. It's not easy. It's not quick. It's gradual, a journey. This time, instead of collecting stones, you're collecting colors of the sky. You jot down thanks and let them go wild in the plum breath of the evening. The smear of jam on toast, black coffee in the morning, a walk in the evening that lingers.

Look at the trees, how they burn. Look at the fields, how they deepen. Look at the world, how it cries.

It's a choice to go deep and live through your pain, to feel it all, to choose to be awake to what comes. Bravely, when the time beckons, to let it go. Knowing that the struggle and searching builds strength, story, a song. Only, you are alive and present and find the words to sing inside you, and they were, all along.

three sisters.

i. Grace.

When it rains, she collects water in
wooden bowls. Makes soup with
dandelion greens. Down the road,
a boysenberry tree stains the
neighborhood. She gathers the fruit,
barefoot. Her fingers remember
green things.

ii. Beauty.

Inside, she unties string, weaves straw
into gold. She plaits forgiveness into
her roots and drinks moon in her
mother's china. Her laughter
crystallizes the air. When she moves,
it shatters. She slips from the room,
running from the remnants.

iii. Truth.

They had a sister with a voice full
of sun. In the morning, her words
sprouted leaves. She gave the sprouts to
anyone who asked, forgetting people
lost earth. Weeds swelled between
sentences. Her hair faded. She fractured
on thorns. In her hand was a seed.

tomorrow, they collect time.

She carries secrets deep in her chest, braids maps into her hair. Her sleep yells.
Something about a kitchen. When the sun rises, he finds
her dresses flapping on branches, stitched with carrots. He smokes
the air, inhales questions through his teeth.

There is a wilting face, a snow falling voice.
He breaks earth to plant years, washes confusion from his fingers.
Still she weeps. Her heart shakes all summer, cradling
small seeds and spraining weeds.

Now the back of her dresses shed dirt, her palms home for
petals. Rain cuts the ground to streamers and
the sky coughs up gray as they hang pebbles out to dry. The
sun, clattering. The strings she plucks like a harp.

In the backyard they tack maps onto the fence, chart their
dreams with blue ink. Bleeding, snaking rivers through rows of seeds.
Two weeks later, the tips of the carrots are blue and he runs laps between
the shoots. The hanging maps rain white ash and she forgets forests.

Sunday, she gives him white stones for a cup of
moon. The stars, smooth and gray. The sky,
rumpled into the trees. Across the galaxy, they
flicker and she paints Orion onto Russia with watercolors,
what does it mean? His question a pit.

Like a nymph, she slips into trees holding the earth down
with all their might. Her friends are wolves. Her feet
are bare. In the yellow kitchen, he watches the light shatter on, off.
She twists the diamond on her finger and chokes on stones. In the
morning, her smile petrifies.

Sun crumbles on her pillow, burning the
edges where she used to sleep. On his back is a tattoo
saying, I love you in Greek. He cranes his neck
to read what's written in green and his shoulders are
leaves, bending. The bathroom smells sour from dye.

She leaves a ball of yarn by his shoes,
unraveling, and a photograph. I just remembered,
I hate carrots. Her hair is blue. Someday she will learn to tie.

A lightning storm slices the air black. Hail, he thinks.
Later, he watches the pebbles slip out of their string
wings. When she comes in the morning to gather her
dresses, the ground is taped shut.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

photo by alex anne

weekending.

woke early friday,
to gather bags
finish packing
prepare

only to
stumble into
the car, head
to a drivethrough
for breakfast,
sleep

until stopping
halfway to stretch
and eat a gooey
margherita pizza
we

arrived in
sturgeon bay,
drove the winding road
20 miles per
hour

said hello
proceeded to unpack
ate croissants for
dinner and

waking,
found ourselves
ushered into
a cottage
a family
a love story

for the weekend,
we shot a wedding
left tired but
rested.


(imagine
that)

eyes full of moon.

Sorrow, I think is not
an old man with gnarled fingers.
Rather, she is a young woman
with a beautiful face,
and eyes full of moon,
and hands burned red.
She wears white gloves and
bracelets that jangle to say,
look at me,
look at my loneliness full
in the face.
You need be gentle, when
gentleness is not called for.
Take her aside and bandage her hands when
they bleed.
Wash each and every finger with water
from the white basin sink,
in the bathroom with the
milk green tiles.
Do not fear your reflection.
Sorrow has many names, but always
the same eyes.

8.31.13 : a small list.

making : messes, photos, poems with words just out of reach.
cooking : oatmeal with brown sugar, every morning, to usher in autumn. and because I like it.
drinking : cinnamon apple tea, cucumber lemonwater, coconut oil lattes, hot blueberry honey and lemon water.
reading : man's search for meaning, The Bible, and a menagerie of other books finding their place on the floor by my bed.
wanting : quiet, rest, to be seven again.
looking : for clarity. and my camera battery chargers.
playing : candy crush (yes), rivers roads and rails. piano, pounding the keys.
wasting : like usual, time.
sowing : contemplative stillness, intentional gratitude, purposeful being. large words that mean nothing and something at once. (perhaps)
wishing : to go back to the week of Woodland and live it again, every moment, same.
enjoying : taking walks, watching movies, being with my family. sudden rain storms. poems, even if they are deep waters.
waiting : for fall, tomorrow, what to come to manifest. also, my film camera.
liking : the wind, sudden rainstorms, music without words, prayer.
wondering : and wandering.
loving : my family.
hoping : with that kind of hope to excite us, nothing holds us back.
marveling : about the sweetness and beauty of apples from our own apple tree.
needing : a haircut, to go to bed before midnight.
smelling : cinnamon, wet earth, Moroccan oil, clean clothes.
wearing : cotton, light layers, old t-shirts from my mom's closet.
following : friend's journeys, too many instagram accounts.
noticing : the leaves curling and changing, echoing how seasons in our lives shift, fluctuate without our pause.
knowing : (and feeling:that if day has to become night. this is a beautiful way).
thinking : until my head hurts.
bookmarking : the true story of a seven year marriage, an interview with wendell berry, mother + daughter
opening : windows, closing doors.
giggling : over silly Star Trek graphics with my sister, Kevin from The Office, inside jokes that start with laughter and lead to tears.
feeling : worn and hopeful, sad and grateful. sustained. emptied of words.

list inspired by lovely jodi.

august.

August

These are the last lazy mornings with room for hours of leisure and mugs of coffee long cool before the afternoon rounds. They are peach cobbler evenings, as the light dwindles and the neighborhood treks outdoors to catch the last of laughter, tossed around, the last of the evening, held tight and stuffed in our pockets. We go barefoot and dodge sprinklers making their tch-tch-tch sounds and we sit on the porch and close our eyes. Already, it smells like expectation and cinnamon creeps in with her powdery fingers and we feel the world stretching and broadening and changing. We grip summer tighter. We take her by the hands and spin her around, beg her not to go. She has a younger brother, his name is flush, he is chasing the leaves and brushing them red. Summer runs after him, we run after her, we collapse into autumn and wonder when the trees changed color, why the ground is cold under our toes, if the wind was always so sharp.

words inspired by the beautiful mollie