six is a small age.

You're six years old and live next to your grandparents. Time is a smudged glass in a summer haze. You spend your days without shoes and watch your feet, praying callouses form on your heels. Your mother has a hard brush to rub hers away but you wait for the day when you'll be able to boast, look how far I've walked. Look how many layers I carry.

Six is a small age. Six is sweet plum dumplings in the summer. Six is cold ginger ale cans from a deep basement. Six is red plaid pants and thin cotton t-shirts. Six is leaning against your grandma's knees as she braids your long, wet hair. Six is a singing time.

In the summer, the evening smells like grill smoke and wet dew, burned wood chips and yards of flowers. People stand outside in their yards. Fine day. It is. The tree branches form shade over the yards like a suburban rainforest, and sunlight slips in rings onto the tall grass through the green leaves. You sit in your backyard, on the edge of the sandbox. If you're not careful, you'll get a splinter on the back of your thigh. You're always careful. You make a path in the grass from your house to your grandparents. Home is communal, a haven. You watch for smoke to rise over the brown roof of your grandparent's home. Tuesday, there is nothing. Wednesday, you wait. On Thursday, a puff of white settles into the air, a balloon rising with a halfheartedness like smoke from the hookah's the caterpillars in Alice in Wonderland smoke with a lazy ease.

Hookahs. Alice in Wonderland. You went to the bookstore with your grandma and picked out a large volume. Alice in Wonderland on one side and Through the Looking Glass on the other. You carry it to the register and present it with a proud smile. This is what I want. Later, you struggle through the pages, confused and unhappy by the strangeness. But this comes later.

That Thursday evening, you climb the stone steps to the small backyard patio where you grandpa stands in front of the grill. He has on a cream polo shirt and his hands are in his pockets as he watches the chicken on the grill. Hi grandpa, you say. He gives you a look that means, I know what you're up to, and with the tongs, snips a bit of the skin from one of the wings. Be careful, it's hot, he says, and your fingers burn when you hands you the piece of skin. It melts on your tongue, the fat sizzles and forms a fire in your belly.

He turns a chicken wing over and one drops into the embers. You know what comes next. He picks the wing up with the tong, brushes the charcoal from the edge, and winks. That's your grandma's. It comes everytime and you still laugh. It's tradition, in the smallest sense. He gives you another piece of skin before you walk on the cool stones making up the steps down from the deck. You run barefoot back to your house.

Promises and pasta.

Seasons come and seasons go. Winter gutted me in the worst way. The last week has been spring (barefeet, freshfaced) and the most noticeable change besides the absence of snow is that I'm writing again. In the morning. In the evening. I sliced through soft asparagus and had a thought like an earworm intent on burrowing into my skull. The idea wouldn't go away until I tapped a note into my iPhone. We walked around a suburb of Minneapolis yesterday (uncomfortable in our jeans because of the heat, I might add) and I filled pages in the streets. My dad pointed out an apartment building where my pre-marriage, pre-kids mother lived (your parents having lives outside of your own is a strange thought), and I scribbled a note. I attempted to write while walking, but stopped mid-sidewalk to avoid running into little kids finished with soccer practice, or the camera crew filming for the news outside of Sebastian Joes.

Not only am I becoming home with writing again, but I'm making photos. It's exhilarating. I had a terrible fear this winter that any iota of passion or talent I had towards taking images was an illusion. More accurately, that I had pulled off a feat and fooled myself these past years. Instead of being diligent and focused, I burrowed under blankets and became a hermit. I watched the entire series of How I Met Your Mother, baked sweet things, and didn't pick up my camera for weeks. We had over one hundred days of negative temperatures this winter and my mental state reflected the frostiness of my physical home.

I decided that upon graduating, I am going to pack up and move somewhere warm. Permanently. I'd prefer a state without winters straight from The Snow Queen, thank you very kindly. I don't want to jinx the temperatures and be attacked with a last-ditch blizzard, but thankfully, we're at the last leg of this season. Spring is here. The snow is almost all melted. We're exclusively wearing shorts and foregoing sweaters, even if it means shivering under the wide sun. My legs are white and my arms covered in goosebumps but fifty, sixty degrees feels like heaven. The camera isn't quite as unwieldy in my hands as I thought. I don't need an excuse to write, nor an explanation.

At the library on Tuesday, I hurried straight to the anthology, biography, and memoir section, tucked right next to popular magazines and manga comic books. I walked away with five pieces I'd been waiting to read, and I've started all but two of them. This made me think. Just as some people never re-read books and others continually return to their favorite pages (I'm fortunate to be with the latter group), some people start one book and finish it before beginning another. Others are messy, scattered, and decide to juggle three or so at once. Again, I find I'm part of the latter. At the moment, I'm reading through On Writing by Stephen King (I laughed and cried reading the beginning this morning, both acts surprising me with their suddenness), Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl (who I was first introduced to by Food Network), and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (a book thought-provoking and painfully honest).

My sister and I made pasta for dinner. We argued about something stupid and seconds later stood mincing garlic and boiling asparagus side by side. I salted the asparagus water and poured peas into the green tinted pot. She separated garlic cloves and chopped onions. In the fridge, next to the chai tea, sat a pound and a half of mushrooms from Trader Joes. "Too bad mom doesn't have any wine to sauté the mushrooms in," Chloe said. We pan fried chicken with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper, and put together our first summer supper. Due to an unfortunately long winter, Minnesota tends to skip spring and collapse into summer, but I'm not complaining.

(here's the recipe we used if you're interested. The entire Martin clan highly recommends it, except for Samuel who dislikes peas, mushrooms, and parmesan cheese). 

All of this is remarkably simple. Painfully disjointed. Boringly honest? Perhaps. But here's what I'm thinking about: Peach light. Singing over piano keys. The green of asparagus in boiling water. Eli humming as he eats dinner. Wind on my skin. Gifts. I'm making and moving again and I'm sore from stretching, but it's a good feeling. Spring, I will keep you (please stay).

on showing up and breaking open.

Here's the thing, I am trying to show up for life.

I am trying to give voice to my days. Trying to break open, as Mary Oliver would say. But right now, my life is in a middle-ground. It's neither here nor there. It's like a perpetual winter stretching our bones thinner and thinner. I want the marrow and thick of life, and right now, I'm in a milk white, blue-veined moment.

Frankly, (how I love that onomatopoeia of a word), I'm exhausted.

Yesterday, I was sick and slept all day. It was the strangest sensation to watch an entire twenty fours slip by and to be an observer of my life and not a participant. Yesterday was a fog, a veiled face and an unassuming moment. I woke up at ten, perhaps I'll feel better at noon. Then it was a quarter to one and I was uncomfortable. I stood up and almost fell over. I went into another room and curled up on a chair. How are you feeling? Better, I said, when I really meant worse. Sickness does something to your head. Mine shook.

I went and laid down on the couch and when I woke up next, it was four. I wasn't sure where I was. I heard voices and couldn't place them to faces. I was going to do yoga this evening, I laughed and moaned and rolled over. When I looked at the clock next, it was almost seven. In a span of eight minutes, the light in the room went from butter yellow to deep blue shadows like the evening was a bruise heavy under the skin. My stomach hurt but my head felt better. I fell asleep again. Then it was eight and afterwards nine and I ate some raspberries, watched reruns in front of a spattering screen, and finished the day like I had started it, asleep.

This morning I woke up and felt better. Not perfect, but better.

Sidenote, isn't that the case with almost everything in life? I feel better, but not perfect. Digressing. And mulling.

Besides feeling better, I also felt panicked. It was irrational but the thought of missing twenty four hours of my life set me into a frenzy. Were those yellow minutes stretching to hold the sum of my Monday simply gone? When my aunt flew to New Zealand, she lost a day. She skipped it entirely. For the rest of her life, she will have a missing Tuesday. I know that time is relative and dates are a construct, but there's a missing twenty four hours in her life that she never held.

Twenty four hours.

Sometimes life is really hard. That's an understatement. Writing about it seems like trying to collect water by pouring it through a sieve. Everything runs through me and I wonder, where to begin? Or, why? What is the balance between over sharing and being honest, and is there a disconnect that lies with the two? What happens when you have nothing to write at all, or what you have to say is boring, underwhelming, inherently ordinary? What then?

Sometimes, it seems like too much. I'm inundated with things I need to say, words that crawl under my skin, moments that leave me open-handed, chasing wind. Other times, I am a dry well, scraped raw and emptied of everything. Then I say to life, pour into me, in all your beauty and pain and joy. That's when life asks, will you give back? And there lies the act of showing up. Morning and morning. Returning to the page. Returning to the camera. Returning to the road, to the pavement, to the poetry, to the music, to the rhythm of your life. So I do and we do and we hope to make something honest, something that matters, in our twenty four hours.

Because, goodness, I don't want to live my life asleep.

indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

I'm writing a lot lately, except most of it's for me. Which is good but also strange. For the first time, I'm hesitant about sharing the letters and lines that make up the shape of my many, ordinary todays. It's not that they're all precious or beautiful, but they are all personal. Vulnerability is something I never eschew. I am a champion for honesty in everything. But sometimes life hits you hard. A car crash out of no here. A job loss. A heart change. Whatever it may be. And when you're left picking up the pieces, you need space to rearrange them just right. Which is difficult when you're putting them out there asking, is this right? Because that asking leaves little space to figure it out.

I'm tired of putting aside my wonderings instead of wandering through. I'll mess up, but you can stumble into your sweet spot through the struggle. They say you never forget to ride a bike and I believe that's true. However, there's a disconnect between your body and your head. The knowledge, the knowing, is in your bones, but you have to remember where it left you. Maybe that's a little like where I'm walking. Deep down, I'm steady, but this searching is on shifting sand and the light is just beginning to rise. The sun is opening and it's finding me picking up pieces that are a little bit bruised.

I don't know what I want. I don't know if I'm slow and steady or a hurricane. A poem or a song. There's a difference and sometimes I feel like I land in the middle. I call myself an oxymoron. I'm analytical and artistic to my bones, I love the solidity of what we know and the wonder of what could be. I cried in an exhibit at the art museum today and didn't realize it until I couldn't swallow.

There's this piece of art by Matisse that's just a few lines. It's called Nu assis, vu de dos, which translated is just Seated Nude, Seen from the Behind. It's simple and clean. Like you could take a pencil, pull the lead down a page, and you'd have the same piece. I'm finally past believing the appearance of grace is an honest representation of ease. Ballet's roots are snug in my life to this day, and one of the seeds that's grown is an understanding of the process. To make simple the complex, honest the confusing, beautiful the questions -- that is where good art lies.

The drawing was in a exhibition called, Women as Muse in the age of Matisse, and it was fascinating seeing the ways different artists interpreted women as a subject. Something I loved in the end of the description was an assertion that the views of the various painters were only opinions of those men. I wish I had written the description down, but the general gist was that the images were just that, images. Despite the artists best attempts at deciphering women as a muse, the end products were only ideals, depictions of differing thought processes, explanations, and even questions. I think that's beautiful. Some art tries to label reality as black and white, but our realities are best seen through collection of ideas, questions, not facts. Art unifies and connects when it's borne out of, this is what I see, tell me what you see too.

The piece by Matisse made me pause and stare. There's a loneliness in the image, a solitude that's matched the rhythm of my days. I wondered about the sitter. Was she lonely or did Matisse only give her that appearance? What did he see? What did he leave out? Matisse once said to his students, "One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter or where to die away." and I've been thinking about it all day. In art and writing and life. I'm searching for the interesections and trying to find solid ground for that line to lay. Meanwhile, I'm meandering and mulling, I'm wondering and wandering. I'm trying to figure out the shape of this life I'm living. Where it's leading and what path it may take. This I can say, "The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance." That's a promise I believe no matter what waits up ahead.

thin places.

"The universe moves you, and if you move with it, beautiful things will happen." - Amber Dúron

Flow. I'm walking in flux. I'm falling into place with serendipity, stepping into promise and it's black mud and deep earth. This spring is a prayer we're stepping barefoot into, asking please. The earth is thawing. Today I watched the snow collapse into itself with tired exhales, the soft peaks dimpling into slush into water, running running running down the drains in the street where the children race bottle caps in the summer, and into the belly of the city with the twisting black pipes and the cold gray stones, and through the tubes narrow and upwards, and into the green light lakes and rivers we slip into during the summer to soothe our freckled skin, and into the air the water rises again and it's rain.

Flow. To let go. I repeat these words until they run through my fingers. We sat in a warm car under a sudden blackness and the radio was on, we sang until our voices were hoarse and we retreated into the warm cocoon of home to scoop honey sticky on our fingers into cups of tea too hot to hold. This is one of those moments, I think. I listen to the songs we howled last week and am brought back to those moments scraping around trees and pulling our souls clean from our chests. She talked about waiting on God, and I'm sitting and wrestling and working through this place like a snarl of roots, untangling. I want to know, I whisper. I want to understand, I weep. This is my own symphony, and the crescendo doesn't sit well. I'm rearranging. I'm asking, please show up in this place.

Flow. An entire flight and I wrote fourteen pages, three of them about the sky. What we love surfaces. What we seek finds us. Knock, and the door will be opened. "There is no other stream," said the lion. All I know is, I saw the sun set sitting above the earth and I wept. I watched the towns retreat like miniatures, little toy homes, saw entire cities stretch into pinpricks like a child's game, and watched the world round like a ripe orange in my hands, summer. I wept.

If these are the days that must happen to you, then let them come. Let them come and shape this little heart and shake these hands and let them lead to something honest, something sacred. Let this story matter, let mine be true, I fold these words into prayers.

When we meet.

I don’t mind anymore that I don’t know you yet. I don’t mind that you’re a stranger. I have a lifetime to spend discovering the different ways your name tastes on my tongue. I have years and years to dip my toes into the waters of you, the you-ness of your eyes, your laugh, how your hands fold and clasp. I’ve had it all wrong, searching for a reservoir when you are the sea. Honey, I’m wading into my knees, I’m diving deep, I’m underwater with this mystery that is a question of who are you? Just as important, who will you become? Followed by, who will we be? I’m sixteen feet under and still swimming and someday, there will be you. You exhale air to my taut lungs. I let it go. If there are years that ask questions, these are scattered with inquisitions like, are you a tomato from the vine person and do you have callouses on your fingers from strumming a guitar? Small things. Make up a life things. I want to collect the answers like a gift. I don’t mind that I don’t know you yet anymore. My hands hold my hopes. I’ve stopped scattering seeds, I am waiting for good earth, mossy and smelling green. I don’t mind you don’t know my name yet. I have a lifetime to listen to mine fall from your tongue in every color.

Life Goals.

Travel the world. Travel some more. Write a book. Make a film. Fall in love. Stay in love. Get married. Travel with my love. Write a book of us. Sing. Learn a new language. Gain a few pounds from eating through Europe. Spend a summer in New Zealand. Have a baby. Have another baby. Have lots of babies. Maybe just a few. Travel with my babies. Kiss my husband. Make another film. Write another book. Have a gallery showing. Buy an RV. Travel across the US. Be honest. Live in another country. Make pancakes on Saturdays. Make pie on Sundays. Buy a house by the water. Sell extra things. Open up our home. Plant a garden. Learn to play piano well. Travel. Go wedding dress shopping with my daughters. Go to little league games. Live out of my gut. Write my grandparent's stories. Kiss at midnight on New Years in Times Square. Get good at yoga. Move cross country. Start over. Stay. Meet the girls my sons love. Photograph what I see. Watch my husband become a grandfather. Spend my anniversary in Paris. Make a movie. Sell my house. Drink good red wine or bad red wine with people I love. Explore. Live with less. Get a dog. Make lots of bread. Stop being afraid. Cook through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Wear dresses more. Start a traveling library. Ditch the TV. Kiss a lot. Start traditions. Keep traditions. Make cinnamon rolls and egg bake for Christmas brunch. Say I'm sorry, I love you, I need you, I like you, I miss you. Understand they're sometimes the same.

today, like a promise.

This morning, I woke up late and ate a cold egg. It was panfried and slippery. My brother brought me a book and I read it to him, him little and round on my lap. I tickled him until his body shook with laughter. If you don't know, that's almost the best sound in the world. It's second only to listening to the slow breathing of someone you love.

This afternoon was a rainfall. I made a cup of coffee. I read the newspaper. I read a book. I played piano. The room was silent and I kept the lights off. It's nice to only sit under what comes through windows. A softness.

Later, I went to a coffee shop. I had a cup of chai. It's my staple though the sugar gives me headaches. This is a language I practice. The hot paper cup under my fingers, comfort. The quiet bustle of people, connection. A silent phone, stillness. I sat at a long communal table by myself, steadiness. In my hands, a book I love. That is called being. Everything was a study in solitude. A song from one of my favorite films came on, and I thought, yes.

How do you describe these spaces? A falling into place. A gentle nudge or a remembrance. That is called release. These moments mark me with rings. I see holiness in their wake. I will not call them serendipitous, but sacred. My ragged edges are softened by these places. The book was set down. I mouthed the words to the music and cried silently next to strangers. Yes. And again, yes.

Tomorrow may be a yellow sharpness in my stomach. My today was a promise. Yes, as it comes. That is called surrender. Another word is thankful, though we've forgotten. I'm carrying it like a prayer.

Taking it all in, wide eyed.

For clementine afternoons and juice running down your cheeks and what summer means to you. For running barefoot on bad knees. For people waiting at a bus stop. For people waiting. For red singing until you are hoarse. For cupping fireflies in your fingers. For sloppy kisses. For goodbye kisses. For kisses. For goodbyes. For missing sour like curdled milk. For books with names of previous owners like a poem. For mint sharp in your mouth and wind in your teeth. For yellow tights. For the stillness of an empty movie theater after the credits stop. For leaving. For traditions wound tight like string around your spine. For flowers growing in your ribs. For graphite on the side of your hand. For lipstick smudges on cheeks. For silver exhales and silver moonlight and silver nights on snow. For photos that stay the same. For cities where no one knows your name. For cracked vinyl diner seats. For dancing slow, sweaty palmed with a boy you love and what his hand feels like on yours. For letting go.

you listen and let go, let go.

Sometimes you know and bury that knowing underneath petitions like, I should do this, or this is expected of me, or people will be disappointed, and that process is called forgetting. Trying on faces and wanting them to fit. They don't and this is called confusion. By this time, you've forgotten what it is and wonder what is going on and why is this not what you thought, and small things trigger small thoughts that remind you of that thing, your thing, the knowing. Seeing an image in a perfect swell of music. Fresh raspberries. Always, the stars opening and closing. Red lipstick, yellow dresses, fuzz on a peach, the way things fit together. Hands moving, holding each other. Driving past yellow lights of windows in the black blue of night. A moment that triggers a dream you had, but before you can stuff it away, you grab the ends of it by the hands and say, wait. And, what was that?

This part of yours that knows is like an old friend that you lost touch with in coming and going, only now, you're remembering how things used to be and how you wanted them to be and how they aren't that way now, so you suck it up. You call her up. You apologize. You say, coffee? with a sad laugh. And when you get together, it's awkward, hesitant, neither of you look like you remember. You're meeting a piece of yourself that you pushed away for years and coming to terms with who you are feels like clawing tooth and nail and howling because you're looking yourself in the face and saying, I don't know you. But you sit there. You drink your chai. You drink your caramel coffee. You have another cup, get a strawberry scone, force yourself to be still. But most importantly, you listen. You don't interject what you thought, what you think. You listen and listen and not say a word, and when she is done talking, you are weeping. Shaking from apologizing. Waking up.

You have another cup of coffee. Calm down. Now what? And she's laughing and saying, well, you know now, you remember. So, go do, kiddo. And you're laughing, what, it can't be that easy? But she's got a smile borne out of waiting and shakes her head slow, sipping the rest of her tea. It's not that easy, but it's that simple. You know. Her smiles slips and she's serious now, holding your hands in hers. To not go after it now is to say your desires don't matter. That your authentic center isn't worth it. That your deepest beliefs and truest hopes and realest loves can't measure up. That your story, message, song isn't enough. Don't do that.

Now you're at the door and you can choose to part ways, say thanks for the coffee, let's talk again soon. Or, you can listen. And you can let go, let go, let go of what you thought, of all the shoulds and coulds and woulds. And you can be brave enough to start over and live out what makes you come alive. You know, a part of you knows, that the same part in your heart that stings listening to this music or cries from that film or feels lopsided and soft in your hands is the same part that knows what you're supposed to be doing, what you want to be doing, what's your thing. Maybe it's like finding out that you knew where home was the entire time, that it wasn't where you thought or what you dreamed, but upon discovering it, walking into it, you realize it's better than what you thought you wanted.

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us." - Joseph Campbell

And to that, I can only say amen.

One of those days.

There's not much to say, except today was a two cup coffee morning. A second piece of peanut butter toast afternoon. A an extra chapter to read evening. You know those days. It was nineteen degrees when I stepped outside and I couldn't stop saying, man, this is beautiful. This is so nice. This feels so good. It must be thirty. And then we got in the car and checked my phone and it felt like a drumroll when the number pulled up. Because when you're used to negative nineteen, nineteen above feels like spring.

Life feels that way lately. Like it's pulling up boots and rubbing red hands together. Alright. Let's get this going. We've got work to do. I'm seeing that work outside. The snow melted in slush around my feet today, so that my socks were wet, but if that's not better than numb feet I don't know what is. I almost didn't wear a coat. I'm squinting and I might see buds on a branch, just maybe. Don't tell me otherwise.

Today has been an exercise in slowness and purpose and it has the feeling of waking up gradually. I'm telling myself that small things done well are enough, that to have a good day and work hard doesn't mean rushing, going full-steam until I collapse. I woke up at 6 and got up after the second snooze button. Finished chapter two of The Artist's Way. Wrote 3,540 words (so far) about a man in love and a woman he loses from illness and well . . . maybe I'll share it some day. I have letters to mail and websites to finish and a workout I really should do. The point is. I'm trying to find the balance between pushing myself and giving myself grace. Sharing and saving it for real life. Working hard and resting. But two things I know: I need early mornings like I need sun (two things which have been sorely lacking this winter), and if I'm not creating every day, my making muscles start to atrophy. So, here's to early rising and another shot of espresso in the morning and plugging away at a piece when you'd rather be anywhere but sitting in front of the page wrestling with words.

Off to finish that story. And maybe make a cup of tea, just to mix it up a little bit.

this is my plan.

This is my plan: host a wild dinner, just once. To call it fancy is incongruous. If anything, it will be the opposite of elegant. Bare feet, old blankets to sit on, mismatched dishes and a guitar. Yes, a guitar, I think. I can't decide if it will be on the beach on hot sand in some rocky alcove, or tucked under tall trees with years like rings, or in the middle of a field with the sky spread wide. Wherever it will be, there will be fairy lights because I am nothing if not a romantic. I believed in fairies as long as I could, and I think I'd like a good light trail to settle under. I will wear a long skirt and bracelets on my arms and my hair will be long and down. I will serve homemade bread and a bowl of chocolate to dip the crusty end pieces in, and cheese, the melty, crusty, crumbly kinds. There will be fresh berries, mostly raspberries, and red red wine. We will have apple pie and strawberry rhubarb pie and the sweetest peach pie. Music, a guitar. I said that. Someone will play. We will sing, off key, perhaps, but we will sing loud and lusty and we will laugh. At the end, there will be a fire. I will dance. And you will be there. We will camp out there all night, drinking hot tea as the evening wanes and telling stories, true ones, the kinds that make your bones shake. And the stars will never look closer.

On finding the right words.

I've made a promise to myself to write everyday for the next month. (Yes, I realize it's nearly the middle of February. That's just how I work.) I struggle with where to start and find my ending is never anything related to the beginning. Don't get me started on the middle. The holy, what is this garbage I'm writing? pulsing, scattered, germinating modem. Earth shifting, shape forming. The middle is a breeding ground for thought (and a lot of bad writing).

My middle is always a mess. My mother taught me not to use qualifiers, don't say always unless it actually is always, but for me, the middle ground is overgrown, untamed, and unrecognizable. It's also where I figure out what I'm really trying to say. This is a process far less glamorous than I once imagined. It involves stumbling into things, nearly throwing out my pages, letting my tea go cold. Usually, the words are hidden underneath extraneous layers, unimportant details, flowery language. Metaphorically, it's like cleaning out your closet to find a specific shirt except you stumble into a letter hidden in a pocket. The thing is, you start and you realize that what you were looking for wasn't what you thought. But not if you stop. Figuring out what it is is a relentless search made possible only by the promise of clarity, understanding.

I'm going through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, and it's changing my life. I feel silly saying that, but one of my promises to myself for this year is to let myself feel everything as fully as I can. I'm giving myself permission to be soft, to cry, to be okay with being seen as foolish if it means I'm being true to my emotions and where I am. I have unconscious triggers that quell the force of what I'm feeling and they go off as little blurts (as Julia Cameron would say), in my head.

That's too personal
People will laugh
Wow, that's stupid
You're unoriginal
Why are you even crying?

I'm tending to those ugly things I've planted. It's good for my health as an artist and a person. Pulling up the prickly growth that sprouted through years of unconscious neglect. It's a scratchy process but a practice that helps me return to good earth. Some of these weeds are blurts or thoughts I tell myself that are untrue, whereas others are practices I've slipped into out of habit. Dancing around the edge, side-stepping the issue, relying on adverbs, metaphors, and commonalities. That's what Morning Pages and a promise to write everyday, even if what I write is awful and said before, helps me identify and get rid of. Weed through the small, decrepit things that are choking out the seeds.

seed (siːd)
— n
5. the source, beginning, or germ of anything.

I don't want to kill off the growth before it has a change to grow. I don't want to harvest the plant until it's full grown, otherwise, how can I know what it is that I've planted? Yes, I will say things badly and repeat words, but through putting out work everyday I'll hopefully stumble into a new way of thinking. Understanding, perhaps? This is all a muddle, but that's okay. I write and hate what I've written. But I'm determined to keep plucking thoughts like apples, peeling away the outer layer to get the fruit of the seed. This is called, writing words down even if the thoughts galvanizes me with their utter horrendous ness, triteness, imperfectness.

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a sh*tty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it." ― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I'm not a Kerouac admirer. I'm not a fan of his spontaneous prose. I tried to read On the Road and lost interest within seconds. Maybe I don't understand it and surprisingly, I'm okay with this admittance. Sidenote, it's intriguing how easy it is to "love" someone and their work when the general artistic community does as well. His writing is too lucid and lingering for me. It's a compendium of rabbit trails all with the beginning road of a real thought minus the follow through. He took a 4x6 snapshot instead of photographing a series, staying devoted to one message. Capote's dismissal of Kerouac makes me laugh. "That's not writing, that's typing." Yet sometimes (from what little of him I've read), he taps into inner thought and the artist's struggle like music.

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

Isn't that we're all trying to do? Whether we are writers or architects or dancers? Trying to take the clutter and clatter of all the extra noise and stuff and reduce it to the purest, clearest, simplest message? Untangle the knots until we're left with clean, direct lines? Discover the heart for everything What is that? What are our deepest reasons for creating? What are we speaking in our true voices? I wish there was a general answer yet I lift praises that it the answer is as unique as each person who seeks it.

So I keep writing bad drafts. I keep moving through the middle and believe that one day, I'll find the right words, I'll reach the final page, I'll understand. I hope for you the same.

here's the truth.

I was ready to pull the plug.

I sent messages to a few of my best girls and dear friends and said, I can't do this anymore.

To put yourself out there is hard. To share parts of your story, when you can't share the full, is hard. To juggle metaphor and meaning and to be vulnerable and say, this is where I'm at. I'm not always happy. Life is not always sweet. Sometimes it stings and slaps and feels like winter all the time. That's hard.

And then, to be judged by people who don't know your heart, to have assumptions made. To be offered pretty advice or "kind" suggestions. To be told you share too much, not enough, that you're rude, that you're melodramatic, and on and on. That makes my bones ache.

After a string of anonymous messages in the past few days and months, ranging from a myriad of topics, I shook my head, dusted my hands. I'm finished. I don't want to do this anymore. I need to rest.

Because the thing is...knowing and believing are different things. And getting messages telling you to do or don't do, messages telling you who you are and who you aren't, they still hurt. I'm not going to pretend they don't. There's no power in that. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me is a pretty thought, but sadly, not always true. Especially if you're going through something absolutely crappy. If you've had a rotten day. If your heart simply hurts.

No matter that people who love you get it.
No matter that your story, your pain, your joys, are personal to you.
No matter even that you know where you're at.

It still hurts.

And thankfully, truthfully, in the end, the messages don't matter. The words don't stick. But in the middle of places in your life that are raw, they're salt in the wound, lemon on a cut. They exacerbate the pain, even if the source doesn't stick around. I checked my phone and my heart dropped. Another one. That was it. The proverbial last straw, the final blow, the penultimate piece. I felt myself collapsing and crumbling. I love writing. I love sharing. I love creating and connecting and being a part of this place. But it had gotten to the point when doing so didn't feel safe for my heart anymore.

But then. You lovely, kind, dear people. I don't know how you did it, if you knew. I woke up to messages in my facebook, on my blog, in my tumblr, on my phone. Encouraging thoughts. I'm praying for you. Love and support. A group of beautiful people all walking through your own joys, your own pain, your own stories, taking a moment to stand up and say, I may not know where you're at, but I'm with you.

I was (I am) overwhelmed. I cried. I had chills. I remembered just why we keep on keeping on this thing called blogging.

Because in the process of sharing our stories, in choosing to be open and vulnerable, we create a safe place to say, you are not alone, I'm standing with you, there is hope. In not hiding our brokenness, we form a community built on honesty, authenticity, strength. We create a safe haven for people to gather and share real life and the painfully beautiful and beautifully painful moments that come. We form a place to celebrate the intricacies and nuances of our stories. We are brought together and stand together. And in the places we could find ourselves so very alone, we find ourselves with not one hand to hold, but many.

So, thank you, friends. Thank you for "standing beside me" even if the story is not all told. Thank you for praying, for loving, for encouraging. Thank you for sharing your stories courageously and truthfully. Thank you for spreading light and hope. Thank you for reminding why this community is the way that it is. Thank you for "being there" even if we've never met.

All of it matters more than I can say. You matter more than I can say. I wish I could give you all an enormous hug, could look you in the eyes, could express how overwhelmed and grateful I am and how much you've blessed me. Thank you. 

grief is.

I started this post, grief is and couldn't find words. I laughed at first, but it's hard. A sad little knot in your stomach. It's hard when something you do doesn't come easy. It's hard when one of your things, your way to process and pull apart life and say, it's still good, still beautiful, feels foreign. Like realizing you were speaking gibberish and you thought it a language. That's where I'm at. Unsure. Hesitant. Tasting out words on my tongue and trying to remember if they're the same. I'm reading what I write and telling myself I can't delete the words. That to put something out there, anything, is better than nothing. That the first step to get through is to dive deep.

It's messy. I say that about everything. But life is messy. It's gory. It's gritty. It's unpredictable, in a laugh so hard you pee your pants and ache so hard you stay up all night weeping way. I read something on weeping the other day and it hit me right in the face. One of those pieces where you breathe a little deeper and shift in your skin and can't help but exhale a mmhmmm or amen. Because someone tapped into a raw place and pulled out something still beating. Someone put words to it, like touching a frosted glass with cold fingertips. Brushed the edge of something.

"Weeping is not the same thing as crying. It takes your whole body to weep, and when it’s over, you feel like you don’t have any bones left to hold you up." - Sarah Ockler

I had chills when the word weeping caught my eye and I was crying at the end. Maybe that sounds silly. But to be walking through long and lonely moments only to turn and find someone next to you, saying, I get it. That's a relief. That's what's so delightfully, deliciously, dearly human about us. That we are not alone.

Grief is a funny thing. It's unnerving, unsettling. I start to write a sentence and stop. I put up my camera and set it down. Everything is heavy. There's a weight we carry, unconsciously. Grief clings to our back with cold fingers and we hunch over to compensate. Curl up, close in. I need to apologize more, because I'm so doggone shaky. I'm sorry, I just feel so unsettled. I've said it more than I can count to one of my best girls. I'm sorry, I feel so uprooted.

The irony (coincidence? meaning?) of feeling uprooted when my 2014 word is seed isn't lost on me. What I'm trying to say is. I'm sorry that it takes me a week to reply. I'm sorry that I cry about stupid things. I'm sorry that I ask you what you think twice. I'm sorry that I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, especially now with that last sentence. I'm sorry I snapped at you.

It's just. I'm so tired. Of waiting and hoping. The hoping is what hurts the most. It's like carrying hot coals close to your chest because just a little further on, there's wood. That's what you believe, anyways. It's coming. But the journey, staggering forward and faltering steps...it's numbing. It's exhausting.

I feel sapped (2014 will be the year of plant metaphors). I feel heavy. I feel unhinged, in a quiet, curl up with a third cup of tea and cry it out way. I gained two pounds. I cut my hair. I picked up my camera again. I'm tired of writing when everything feels old. Winter is turning me into a hermit. I want to throw off the stale scent of indoors and last year and scrub everything clean. I want to strip back to the foundation and rebuild with good wood.

I'm waiting for this earth to unthaw enough to plant something new. I don't know. I don't know. My hands are shaking and my head is spinning and all I can think is, the days are lengthening. I make my coffee in the morning. I say yes to chai tea, even if the sugar makes my head buzz. I'm practicing being kind to myself.

Sometimes, it's enough. Right now, it's enough. Grief is. And maybe it's not grief anymore. It feels different, not quite so raw. Maybe the swelling has gone down and it's a sad, slow sorrow. Maybe it's an undercurrent, not the whole melody. The days are lengthening. Thank God it's not the end.

january 12.

It comes as a shock to me that the wooden benches with the shiny finish – tacky and sticky to your fingers – or the stiff lounge chaises are functional. I always thought that they were simply a part of the mall, much like the beams supporting the roof, the guard rails separating levels. Who sits in them? And why? They're magnets for waiting. The faux leather or clementine orange fabric attract people in transit. Maybe strangers give each other a nod, much like runners. Maybe it's a secret club. You're waiting too? You can stay.

There was a woman fiddling on her phone in a long chair better suited for a living room than the middle of a mall. She looked behind her, checked her phone, turned it on, turned it off, leaned back in the chair, sat up. A man with a kind face walked up. I say kind face in utter sincerity, because he had the sort of smile that makes you want to stay. Maybe his name was David and hers Katie. Or maybe it was Jeremy and Liz. I never asked. He pulled a chair closer to the table dividing the two, and the woman pulled out a game – Farkle. They ignored the people walking, talking, coming, going, passing them. She gestured, he laughed. He rolled the dice, maybe she won. I didn't ask. In the middle of the mall, a picture of leaving, they carved out reason enough to stay. It made me want to cry.
*I'm currently on my third cup of tea this morning. The floor is cold under my feet and the kitchen is soft with gray winter light. Sad winter light. We bought a tin of tea 75% off, called Dragonfruit. I prefer sharp, spicy teas, with cinnamon or ginger undertones, and this one is floral, almost peachy. It's pale and drinking it makes me think of a pink book of Japanese mythology sitting under my bed in a box of abandoned fiction. Most little girls loved horses. I loved Mythology. I devoured Norse, Greek, Celtic, Roman, Chinese, Japanese, myths. I could name all the major and minor deities and tell you their stories. Norse mythology was my favorite, though Greek came close. I think I nearly cried when Sif's long, lovely hair was cut off.
*My hair is starting to grow out. I count the months on my fingers, one, two, three? Sometimes I pull the ends to see if they fall lower on my shoulders than before. Yes, I nod to my reflection in the mirror. I can finally put the strands into a bun, though the back falls out if it's too high, and I've been wearing it up lately, out of my face. I need new shampoo. It's funny how you get older and have to focus on mundane things. Like toothpaste. Who thinks about toothpaste? It's always been an afterthought, until the last has been squeezed from the tube. Now I have to buy toothpaste, among other things. I've perfected the art of shopping for something and buying other things to cloak your real cart. No, I'm not purchasing the sixth season of The Office. All this chocolate isn't for me, of course. Maybe you don't understand. Maybe you do. It doesn't matter. I need new shampoo.
*I wish I could remember what normal feels like. I wake up and for a moment, I can forget. It's like waking up the morning after coming home from the lake. You still have the smell on your skin. It won't come off until several washes later. If you close your eyes, slip back into an almost slumber, you're still there. It takes effort, but yes, that's the water against the rocks, not the air conditioner. Those birds are sitting on the trees outside your door. Someone is making bacon. That night, it will rain.
*"Hannah loves this weather." "You do?" "Mhm." "How about that..." It's easier to say yes than explain. How do you describe a love based on needs, that white ice days and snow like rain are allowances for being sad? You don't. You put on an extra sweater, pull out a winter blanket. I never have enough socks so I have to borrow everyone else's. That's another thing you don't think about buying, socks. Getting them for Christmas wouldn't be so bad after all.
*We didn't get a tree until a week before the day. I didn't put ornaments up this year. Not even one. Too busy, or I forgot. For the first time in six years, we didn't put up lights outside. Even last year, when we had what we took to calling 'the death flu', and it hurt to celebrate, we had lights outside. This year was a different kind of hurting. I wish I had made cookies, even just from a box. One year, I went to a cookie decorating party, except there were four of us, two being my sister and I, and we decorated fifty sugar cookies with frosting. They were Betty Crocker, and the frosting, generic. I think we ended up throwing them away. Your favorite cookie, like your favorite anything, says a lot about you. Are you a melting moments kind of girl? And do you struggle with holding the present, just so, in your hands as well? Meringues require patience, situations approached just right. I haven't mastered the technique yet. The last time I made meringues, I used brown sugar and burnt them, and they were like caramel. My aunt's favorites are spritz. She makes extra of the green fluted, buttery cookies so she can freeze them and eat them later. My mom loves thick, hearty gingerbread, most likely because when she was a little girl, her grandmother made tables of them, royal white icing delicately lining the edge. Every year, she and her siblings talk about the cookie table, and how they would sneak broken ones without their grandma knowing. I wonder what I will someday tell my children about my Christmas traditions.
*Outside the kitchen window, the next door neighbor is attached to a tree and is hanging, floating in mid air, suspended by a cable. He's kicking his legs. He carries a chainsaw. I'm waiting to watch branches fall. Snow is slipping from the roof like rain. Winter too, is ending.

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.

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.

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 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.