Good words.

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” -- Joan Didion

Let it go let it go let it go

This just makes me so darn happy. You can't not love these guys.

Come on. He says, "Dance like your life depends on it and celebrate the fact that you are alive." He ends the performance/show with: "Isn't it great to be alive?!" Love it. Methinks these are good themes for the new year.

Related: Drummers are so awesome.




This whole performance is amazing, but watch freaking Michael Shrieve (20 years old!) on the drums. His solo starts at about 3:05. Amazing.

(Of note: Carlos Santana said that during this performance he was so high on mescaline that he thought he was wrestling a snake instead of playing guitar).

All their living.

"Take my picture," my four-year-old daughter Violet demands. It's almost bedtime and she's gotten herself ready. It's quite a sight: footie pajamas, a headband with a sparkly blue bow that she calls her "everyday crown," a purple necklace, a bracelet, a pink heart-shaped ring, and a pair of sunglasses decorated with butterflies. She leans against the wall in the dining room and brings her knees together, turning her foot in slightly. It is an uncanny representation of an awkward model pose. "Take my picture with your phone," she says again. I do, and then let her see it. She smiles. "Put it on Facebook," she says. "Will you put it on Facebook so everyone can see my beautiful face?"

I tell her I will, but I don't -- feeling torn as I watch her scurry down the hall into her bedroom. I'm proud of that kid, enormously proud. And I do think she has a beautiful face. I'm charmed by this new expression of her individuality, the way she carefully picks out her accessories, the way she insists on that "everyday crown" every. single. day. I'm even charmed by her confidence, impressed with it even, because it's something I never had. Not even when I was a kid her age with no reason to believe the world was anything but a wide, welcoming place. Not even now, when I look at everything I am and everything I have accomplished. Why is it that 32 years into this thing called life "believe in yourself" is still the hardest thing I have to do?

I follow my daughter into her bedroom and she leans against the bed, a studied lounge pose, and she asks me to take her picture again. Then she pulls her glasses down around her mouth and asks me to take her picture again. Another pose, another picture. Again and again.

What I'm thinking of as I snap these pictures is humility, and being humble, and how it marks in my mind a delicate line between believing in yourself and not. It's the difference between feeling like you could conquer the world and feeling like the world is conquering you. I don't want to foster arrogance, which my daughter has in spades and then some, no matter how innocent it is, but I also don't want to damage that budding sense of pride she feels in herself, the way she can make decisions about her appearance, things that look good to her, and wear them with absolute confidence that she looks amazing.

And yet. How much of that confidence is already directly tied into what others think of her? "Do you think I look beautiful?" she wants to know, adjusting her headband. "Do you think you look beautiful?" I ask her, and she takes a moment to look at herself in the mirror. "Yes!" She decides. "Well, then, you are," I tell her.

My five-year-old, Madeleine, is still in the bath and I leave Violet to her preening so I can give Mad the five minute warning. "Hey, cutie," I say as I peer around the doorway in the bathroom. "You've got five minutes, and then we pull the plug." Mad beams up at me. "Okay," she says. She's gotten much better at receiving compliments lately. There was a time, not so long ago, that if you told her she is beautiful, she would balk. "I'm not pretty," she'd insist. "Yes, you are," I would tell her, and she'd firmly deny it. "No. I'm. Not."

And this worries me, too. She shies away from the camera, from looking at herself in the mirror, from compliments about her appearance. She's confident in other ways: her athleticism, her ability to catch lizards and snakes, her knowledge of reptiles and bugs. I love this, and I encourage it as much as I can. And I want that to be enough, to make her strong enough to withstand a world that tends to knock little girls down sooner or later. But I'm afraid it isn't, that one day she'll realize that the whole world is judging her based not on how well she can spot and catch a lizard that's 20 feet away, but on how she looks, how she stacks up to some collective image of beauty that none of us can escape.

All of this is mucked up by my own experiences, of course. How, when I was in middle school, a classmate noticed the ribbon trim on my socks didn't match and she spent a good while mocking me for it. "What, are you poor? Does your mother shop at Goodwill?" Angela asked in front of the whole class after lunch as we waited for our teacher to enter the room. I stared down at the pages of my book, face burning red, tears streaming down my face. I refused to look up at her. The next year I was walking down the hall during lunch, between rows of lockers, and I crossed paths with two popular jock boys. "Did you see her?" One boy asked the other in exaggerated horror, fake-shuddering. "She was UGLY." And I felt it like a punch in my chest as I sucked in my tears and refused to let them see me cry.

I never told anyone those stories, too embarrassed to say the words out loud. Because if I did, maybe it would be true. Maybe my ugliness was a secret my loved ones were keeping from me, because they loved me. This is the sad, stupid truth: sometimes I still believe that's true.

Of course I want to save my daughters from feeling like this. But how can I teach them to be confident on their own terms when I have never been that way, not a single day in my life?

It's inevitable that they'll turn outward, measure themselves up against the images of women they see elsewhere -- in school, in stores, in ads, on TV, on the Internet. This is the impossibility of raising daughters today, I'm afraid, because the beauty ideal is so mucked up a woman can never be just right how they are. And our girls are suffering for it. Example: I love the website Pinterest, which is kind of a dumb thing to say because pretty much everyone loves Pinterest. It's a place for people (and I would bet the large majority are women) to pin the things that interest them to inspiration boards. It's really a place to cultivate your ideal life, from making your home beautiful to being a better parent, to dressing better, to looking better, to getting your life organized. It is great inspiration, and yet lately it just feels icky and even dangerous because a lot of what you see there is body image focused, and none of it is consistent.

A picture of a woman's torso, hips thrust up, her hip bones jutting out. The comment: "Visible hipbones....one day." A picture of a woman's body with the tag: #thinspo and a thread of comments like "I wish I could have her body" and "I would give anything to look like that." A picture of a woman's body where a commenter chides the pinner: "Yuck, she's too skinny. That's not healthy; why would you want to look like that?" At worst: A 64-point list of "health" tips that promote anorexia. "Punch yourself in the stomach when you feel hungry." "Tell your parents you are eating dinner at a friend's house, then go for a walk instead of eating."

What is a mother to do?

As Madeleine gets out of the bath and gets dressed and Violet climbs into bed, everyday crown and all, I flip through the pictures on my phone. It's a snapshot of our life over the past year and I see everything: Violet somber, Violet silly, Violet posing, Violet doing her fake grimace-smile for the camera. Madeleine silly, Madeleine studiously avoiding the camera, Madeleine with reptiles she's found on our walks. Of course I think these girls are beautiful. They are the most beautiful things I have ever seen. But more than their beauty I see their life, and all their living, the moments that will stack up to form a sense of self that I hope gives them a clear eye toward what's really important in this world. That what you love is more important than how the world loves you -- that life is for living, for eating up, for savoring. And that this is the only beauty to worry about. Maybe it's not too late for me to figure that out, too.

It's not somebody who's seen the light.

The driveway is swept with orange and yellow and wet, the sky tiny ripples of gray clouds, thick and heavy. A mist of rain is everywhere. Walking outside I take a breath and fill my lungs with clean, cool air. The neighbor down the street has left his Christmas lights on and they are twinkling quietly in the still morning. I close the door against the warmth of the house, my husband making breakfast in the kitchen, my children filling up the house with the steps of their small feet, their PJ'd bodies curling into the comfort of the couch.

I'm waiting for a peppermint chocolate cake and a friend, and listening to Jeff Buckley sing "Remember when I moved in you/and the holy dove was moving too/and every breath we drew was hallelujah." A song so throbbing with sadness and beauty it's almost become a cliche, the way it demands you to feel something.

My heart's been heavy lately, something inside locked and stagnant. I recognize it, a murky, slow dark snarl of depression, and this time it's a little different. It feels untouchable and it grows and grows like some stupid cancer eating me from the inside out. There is a checklist of measures to take when it gets like this, things that let the light in, things that unsnarl the snarled, and I haven't even attempted them, and so it grows.

Why am I letting myself get stuck like that? I don't know. But today there are whispers of beautiful things, little reminders of the light you can pull within. It's a little pluck of pain and I can tug it free, I can. Starting now, with these words, with "And love is not a victory march/it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah," with the fall day folding around me, a perfect quiet blanket.

Assorted.

What I mean to say is that the search for meaning is the beautiful thing, because we cast our eyes inward and we cast them outward, and we find lovely things in both places, in the glowing heart and the lifted sky and everything. We get pummeled but our eyes keep moving. When we are very lucky our eyes settle on the best thing, and the beauty moves in and out of our vision, and we never have to look away, not once.

::

"undun is the story of this kid who becomes criminal, but he wasn't born criminal. He's not the nouveau exotic primitive bug-eyed gunrunner... he's actually thoughtful and is neither victim nor hero. Just some kid who begins to order his world in a way that makes the most sense to him at a given moment. At the end of the day... isn't that what we all do?" -- The Roots

::

her mouth makes a wide O and thunder rumbles out, shakes even her teeth and pulls them up by their roots. she climbs the clouds and gathers molecules and hurls them into walls. you feel them tremble in your sleep but don't wake. instead you dream of coral snakes.

::

Just a freewrite.

We search for meaning, and in the searching meaning conflates with beauty, and so we're never sure what we're searching for. It could mean the same thing, but it doesn't, meaning and beauty. They are the same, the romantic part of you insists, but the small, hard part of you knows otherwise. Because we want beauty but we need meaning, and so for you meaning could be living your small existence from a chair in your living room, pulling strings and waiting for death. And for you it might be living a loud life from atop a cloud, collecting raindrops and scattering them into the wind. The first isn't beautiful, but who is to say that? Isn't there beauty in finding your comfortable place, in living there? Either way?

So you search for a way to feel good, and to feel beauty, as you look for meaning. And that means plucking your eyebrows and buying a new car and spoiling your kids and reading a new book, book after book, or finding the newest and best song that elevates you above the steady thrum of what it means to exist.

What's the point of any of it, the small, hard part of you wants to know. Why does your heart keep opening up and pulling in new things? Because it has to. It does, your heart reaching out and out, your nerves poised and electric, waiting to feel something more and better.

You can't make your heart feel something it won't.

Hi there. It's been awhile. I don't know. Here's a song.

Just the same.

We went in search of different things. Madeleine was looking for creatures to catch in her net, minnows or frogs or bugs or lizards. Violet, with her silent intentions, hunched over near the edge of the pond, looking for rocks or evidence of fairies. Me, in search of that deep breath that comes when I've been outside with the girls long enough, near a thing of great beauty. That breath that empties out my lungs, lets the light in.

The moon hung large on the horizon, completely full, deep yellow, looming. We stayed for a long time, and I took pictures as I waited for that breath to come. Night fell, and the moon rose high enough to reflect on the pond, shimmering through the gentle ripples of water. I tried to take a picture, but the batteries in my camera died just then. So I watched the moon's reflection and found it, that deep sighing breath, the relief of letting go.

When we left I told the girls that that had been my favorite part of the outing. That it has been so long since I saw the moon reflecting on a body of water, and it was just such a lovely sight. "Did you take a picture?" Mad asked, and I told her no. But really, in a sense, I did. I caught the feeling just the same.

Until I am part of it.

The children are sleeping. I hear their silence, a soft void of sound, the whispered noise of small limbs nestled in covers, the delicate din of eyelashes brushing cheeks, tiny breaths, the quiet ring of dreams in the gray-dark. The whole house is dark, black-cloaked windows -- night is pressing in from outside. The light in the kitchen fends it off, and the glow of the television. I am tired. I dice a red onion, slicing the neat rows, and dice the red and yellow bell peppers, and shred the baked chicken from Sunday's dinner. It all comes together in a pot of soup, simmering together in diced tomatoes, green chiles, the warmth of cumin and chili powder and garlic rising in the steam.

Once that task is done, and the kitchen is tidied, I drift into the other part of the house, closer to the glow of the television, and mute the sound. A storm is swelling outside, the rain an audible insistence of sleep against the roof, against the back door that bangs against the house in the wind. There is a slow murmur of thunder. How sad, I think. Me still in my work clothes, shoes and all, as I lay on the couch and curl underneath with a pink fuzzy blanket. There is comfort here, somehow, in the sloppy, unintentional end to this long, long day. The sleep is sudden and easy; I fold myself into the silence until I am part of it.

Grateful to witness love and light.

The air in the house is cold and dark and quiet at 6 in the morning. Without fail these days, I wake to the feeling of Madeleine trampling over my legs to crawl into the swirling warmth of the bed, nestled between me and her father. "Cuddle," she demands as she burrows under the blankets, curling her body into a warm little curve. This is my cue to unfurl myself so that she can lay on my shoulder and I can wrap my other arm around her. It amazes me that her long, skinny frame, all angles and strength, can soften enough to fit against me so perfectly, even now. Just as when she was a baby, and her small body fit perfectly into the nest of my arms, or my eye against the curve of her head, or her head in the curve of my neck, legs pulled up beneath her.

The morning has another start when I walk down the hall to get Violet out of bed. She's usually still asleep. It's warmer in the girls' room and she's still burrowed underneath mounds of covers. The best thing is that I say, "Good morning," softly, and she gives a huge stretch and blinks the sleep from her eyes. "Good morning, mama," she says in her sweet little chirp of a voice, and I sit on her bed and hold out my arms. "Good morning hug?" I ask and she drapes herself against my body, still heavy with dreams and the last of night clinging to her. "I love you," I say, and she says, "I love you, too, mama," with such genuine sincerity. And then she's ready to go, wide awake, the day a grand stretch of possibility laid out for the taking.

I follow her down the hall, bones heavy and creaky, still not quite awake myself. I'm tired, weary in the deepest part of me, but still grateful. Grateful to witness love and light in so many ways, contained in these two girls, in all its hopeful forms.

Making lovely.

I read an article once about how smiling during a workout, particularly on a run, can improve your performance. Something about making yourself smile, no matter how artificial, can get your brain to send out happy signals and give you a little extra push of energy.

Yesterday on the treadmill I was pounding away and a great song came on, and I was feeling it. So I looked up at the black TV screen in front of me and smiled. I looked at my face, the dark circles under my eyes, the overbite, the skin that is inexplicably breaking out (too much Halloween candy?) and I smiled. The screen was so dark I couldn't see how flushed I was, but I could see bits of sweat breaking free from my hair as I ran, and I just felt good. I picked up my gait and upped the speed on the treadmill and went for it. Smiling. Reminding myself to smile. I smiled when feet started to feel kind of leaden, and when my muscles ached and even when I felt a tiny tweak in my right knee. Smiling. Remember to smile.

It hit me somewhere during that time, rounding out my third mile and feeling that familiar mix of tired and exhilarated, that I was excited, feeling really excited about life, and it was something I manufactured right then on the treadmill, pushing myself and wearing myself out and remembering to smile.

I lament sometimes how I am not often excited about life anymore, but what I had forgotten is that excitement is something you make. You can't sit and wait for it to find you. You can't sit back and wait for the circumstances of your life to arrange themselves in a pleasing pattern. Those random, magical moments exist, but they won't find you unless you put yourself out there.

The point of this whole blog has been to recognize those random magical moments, but it's so passive. Observational. I need to start making them, too. Making and celebrating lovely.

(The song I was listening to on the treadmill yesterday).

Gives in peace.

I want to write something of great beauty, maybe the perfect red of the apple I grabbed from the fridge this morning and its lovely name: honeycrisp. It is exactly honey and crisp, sweet and sharp with a satisfying crunch. I want to write about the delicious taste of fall in the air, the cold morning weather, the promise of red leaves, the heavy sigh of evening as the sun rolls downward, tucks itself in, and the moon stretches slowly skyward. But something about this season encourages silence and stillness, except for the animals who are busily preparing for the cold, gathering acorns, finding branches to take shelter in. Lately I face my evening to-do list with a kind of regret. These things are there, to do, and I dismiss them gently, folding myself into bed with a book and the silence of sleeping children down the hall. I feel in the back of mind somewhere that there is more to be done, that this downtime comes at a price. But what it takes in productivity it gives in peace and a quiet mind, a rested body, a ready heart.

This beauty.

I've never felt pretty, not one day in my life. Well, there was one day. It was a few months before I became engaged to you. We were eating burgers in your car and I was wearing a yellow dress that I actually kind of hated, but my mother made me wear it. "Boys want their girls to at least try to look pretty," my mother said. "You could at least try." I was 21 and living at home still, going to school, and my mother was nearly frantic to get me married off. When I started dating you, her eyes started dancing with wedding dresses and linen napkins and matching silverware.

The truth was that I wasn't so sure about you then, and I don't think I ever told you that. But that day in your car I had made some joke, and you laughed a genuine laugh, and I felt a warm glow in the center of my being. And I felt my whole body kind of turn without physically doing so. I was a flower leaning into the sun, and I turned my face up, and you leaned down in all sudden seriousness, and I thought we would kiss. But just as our lips were nearly touching and I felt with surprise that my heart had started a sort of frenzied rhythm, you whispered, "You've got ketchup on the corner of your lip." My hand flew up in surprise and touched my mouth. Ketchup. Of course. I couldn't be lovely and elegant if I tried.

But your eyes were kind as you reached for a napkin and wiped the smudge of ketchup. I wiped my fingers absently on my yellow dress and a second later realized I'd left a smear of red. "Shoot," I muttered. "I'm such a mess."

And you, my kind husband, stopped me from rubbing at the red stain and leaned down and then you did kiss me. It was a long, sweet kiss, one hand in my tousled hair, a natural golden color then, and your other hand just to the side of my thigh. And when you pulled away every cell in my body leaped toward you, shouting, "Come back!" And you did come back, for another, more brief kiss. My skin was singing.

"You're not a mess," you said with a grin. "I love you."

Love. There it was. And before I could even think it through, I said it back. "I love you, too," I said, and the joy flooded your face as you squeezed my hand. "Good," you said. "It's good to have the love of the most beautiful woman in the world."

In that moment, I knew it so certainly. You were right. I was the most beautiful woman in the world.

I'm sad to say I spent the rest of my life chasing that feeling and I never quite found it. It wasn't that you weren't sweet and loving, you certainly were, but I never again felt a moment blossom quite the way that one did. A moment that reached into my core and changed me into something more than I figured I was. Even on our wedding day, standing there in that huge, elaborate white dress, my hair done up just so. You smiled with all the warmth to be found in the world, but it all felt so rote. So routine. This is just another part of my life was actually a thought in my head as I walked down the aisle. This is not to say I was unhappy. I was -- I felt pleased, mostly. Like it was the right thing. I made a good choice was the other thought I had, standing next to my new husband.

We had a good long time together. We went through the whole thing: the jobs, the houses, the cars, the kids. Our lives were settled and the kids were off to college and then we went through the last thing a couple like us will go through: you clutched at your heart after breakfast one morning, your plate of half-eaten toast clattering to the floor. Right before my eyes you fell to the ground and gasped and gasped and as I ran frantically for the phone you stopped gasping, and I wasn't even at your side when your eyes stopped seeing.

This wasn't a thought I had then -- of course it wasn't -- I was too stuck in time, lurching from second to second as I struggled with what my life was without a Jim in it -- but the thought was that beautiful was dead, too. And the things that added up to joy for me now added up to nothing.

I resigned myself to a life without beauty then. Not outside of me and certainly not in me. In my eyes everything looked gray and flat and endless. Our children clucked at me over the phone. "Mom, I'm worried about you," said Jack. Amanda sent care packages, things she knew I loved: honey butter and shortbread cookies and citrus hand cream and a silk scarf in brilliant colors and music so lovely you could weep -- but I didn't feel any of it, not even that little zing of the pleasure you get when you possess a thing of great beauty. Nothing.

Until I had the dream. It was the oddest dream, and I kept having it. Night after night. You and I were on a boat in the middle of a blue sea that glinted under a sun that was all gentle warmth and a benevolent yellow. There was a breeze that felt like blessings through my hair and everything was so silent. Just the occasional call of a seagull and the soft lapping of waves rising and collapsing in the gentle tug of the wind. And suddenly in the dream I knew: you were about to die. But I didn't feel sad or scared, only full of light and joy, because we were both ready. You smiled at me and I smiled at you and then -- and this is the weird part -- you turned into a goldfish. A beautiful orange goldfish with rainbow-tinted fins. You laid there in the boat, thrashing and gasping for air, and with a start I knew what I had to do. I picked you up in my hands, and kissed you, and sent you to the sea. And you were gone.

And that is when I always wake up.

It was the first beauty I've seen since you died. And I got to see it every night.

This dream started invading my days, Jim. I started daydreaming about those waves and that wind and that sun and your rainbow fins glinting as you swam away from me. This kept happening and happening until one day I was at the mall shopping for Amanda's birthday present, and I passed by the most incredible skirt. It wasn't meant for someone my age; music was pumping and blaring through the store entrance and the lighting was dramatic and the clothes were youthful and multi-colored and frenetic, almost. But this skirt.

The skirt was a silent bloom in the middle of all that color, white and billowing with what looked to be incredibly soft material. That material was sprinkled sparsely with silver sequins, just enough to catch the light in such a lovely way. It hit the tall, skinny mannequin at upper-thigh, so I knew it would be way too short on me. But I needed this skirt then. I needed it like the body needs water. My whole self turned to it just like I turned to you that day in the car.

Is it sad that my first glimpse of beauty came from something like a skirt, and not, say, light sliding down through a canopy of green leaves? Oh, but it just didn't matter. This was my light through a canopy of leaves, and I had to have it. This skirt would change me, I felt sure. This skirt would make me feel beautiful again.

When I walked into the store I saw a giant mural on a far wall, featuring models wearing clothes from the store. These young, beautiful men and women were decorated so perfectly, walking down a city street. They all looked like best friends, and in the middle of the group was my skirt. Or more precisely, it was my skirt on a model with a cascade of blond hair. She was wearing that skirt, white tights, white saddle shoes, and a white blazer. She was riding a white bike and the skirt was billowing out and her hair was flying and her face was light with the joy of living.

A prickling awareness came over me then, a tingling, coming-alive kind of feeling. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I felt the most incredible surge of longing for everything in that mural. Even though I knew on some level that it wasn't a real moment, I wanted it to be mine. If I could live in that mural, even for just a moment, I felt like my heart would know beauty again.

So I bought that skirt without even trying it on, as well as the blazer and the tights and the shoes. I was almost afraid to look the young cashier in the eye because I was so embarrassed. But that skirt! It nestled so neatly into my bag with a silent woosh, and billowed out the sides of the bag just a little, and I carried it with a reverent kind of pride as I walked through the mall and out to the car without even getting a present for Amanda.

From there I went straight to a nearby bicycle shop and bought a white bike. I got home and spent the rest of the evening assembling, into the wee hours of the morning. I used your tools, Jim, and I felt so near you right then, holding the red handle of the screwdriver you'd used so often on odd jobs around the house. Opening the toolbox I inhaled the smell of you, that oddly pleasant grease smell. You. You, you, you, inhaled right inside my pores.

And so when the morning dawned the first and only thing I wanted to do was put on that outfit, that gorgeous outfit from the mural, and jump on that bike and ride it down the street of our neighborhood.

Getting dressed felt like something I'd never done before. It felt like a performance or like I imagine a great artist would feel when he'd created something amazing. There was a settling in my chest, a firm weight of certainty. I felt whole, Jim. I know it sounds stupid. But pulling that skirt up over my legs and feeling it fluff around thighs was a magical act. It filled me up and made me whole again. I knew I didn't look like the girl in the mural. I knew I was too old for this skirt. But at the same time I really wasn't because beauty found me right then. I was the living, breathing embodiment of beauty. I was the space between your hand and my thigh that day in the car; I was the ketchup on my dress and the startled O of my mouth when you said "I love you."

I love you. I got on that bike and heard you say the words in my head. You're not a mess, you'd said. And my heart was turning toward you the whole while, becoming something else, becoming yours. Beauty belonged to you. To you, in your hands, and you gave it to me just then, in that magical moment that reached inside of me and yanked me inside out in the most lovely, lovely way. I was balancing on the bike and waiting for another one of those moments. I was finally open and ready for it, ready to feel beautiful again. The love of the most beautiful woman in the world, you'd said, and just then my hair lifted in the wind and I pedaled, your voice in my ear and your hand in my hair, and it was true then, again.

A building's natural resonance.

Mrs. Bright I'm still here.

You should have seen what I saw this morning, Mrs. Bright. It was an old woman - well, not old old - but her face was long and folded into onionskin wrinkles, layers of years - and she had long, frosted hair feathered back from her face, and large sunglasses. But what really caught my eye was her skirt! It was short and it billowed out just so, and it was white and it sparkled like someone's best dream in the fall morning. She had on white tights and white shoes and a white blazer, and she looked like a picture from a magazine. Just like a picture from a magazine. And her face was so out of place in all that white and billow and sparkle, and -

- I forgot to mention she was on a bike, Mrs. Bright! It was a white bike, I don't know the kind, but she wasn't riding it. She was balancing on it, trying to ride it, I think. I only got a glimpse of her because I was driving by her on my way to work, but what I saw was a frown of concentration, and her papery face, and I had that moment you get where your mind tries to add up something that doesn't quite make sense in the first place. I mean, she couldn't ride that bike! It was like she was learning to ride it for the first time this Thursday morning in her fancy outfit, face all serious and studied. You would have loved to see it, Mrs. Bright. It was really something.

I drove on to work with this woman in my mind, and I thought of you. I thought you might have told me: You should have stopped! You should have gotten that story. You should have at least watched her for a moment. I'd be lying if I said the thought didn't occur to me. Of course it did, but it was 7:58 and it takes me five minutes to get to work from where I saw her, so you can see why I didn't stop. Right? I mean, I couldn't have stopped anyway on that cramped street. And there was nowhere for me to turn.

I'm glad I didn't see that in a magazine. I'm glad I got the opportunity to see it in real life, a moment tearing itself out of time for just a moment, something for me to save forever. I hope I remember this forever, Mrs. Bright.

Okay. It's not just the woman on the bicycle. I have a stack of these moments! Yesterday at the craft store I heard a plump black woman tell another plump black woman that she can quilt. And sew, and cross-stitch. "I can do all that stuff," she said, and I sneaked a peek over at her, but not too long, and saw she had these lovely, elegant fingers. She was buying buttons. "Does your mom know?" asked the other woman, and the crafty one said in all seriousness, "No, and you can't tell her. You can't tell anyone I can do that stuff. Nobody knows but you."

That's strange, isn't it? I wanted to know the story. I wanted to follow them around and pluck their words and shove them into my pockets, but I was on my lunch break and I needed to get back to work. So I took just those words, and the image of her hands, hands so obviously built for sewing and crafting, and I put those in my pockets. And it's enough, I guess. Is it, Mrs. Bright?

There's another thing. I was getting my hair cut at the salon and a woman came in who was obviously friends with my hair guy, and she had this enormous tattoo of an owl stretched across her back, two giant eyes peering at me from between the straps of her brown tank top. She seemed a little bedraggled as she came in, plopping tiredly down on the couch to wait her turn for a hair cut. "Hey, Mello," he said to her, and she said, "Hey, B," and he asked how her new baby was doing. And the Asian woman doing the genteel Texas woman's nails in the corner watched in interest. And I think the genteel Texas woman in the white button up shirt and carefully coiffed black hair knew this Mello person. Everyone knew everyone, I think, except me, so I peered down at my magazine and stole glances at everyone as they talked.

Mello went on and on about her home birth and how wonderfully organic it all was, and beautiful, and how it was when her baby boy slipped out between her legs and into the pool of water. She explained to the genteel Texan about doulas and midwives and the evils of hospital births. I had two hospital births, Mrs. Bright -- did I ever tell you that? -- but what Mello was saying didn't bother me at all. I want to believe in the beauty of a woman who finds a center from which to bring her child into the world, completely in the moment and in the comfort of her own home. I imagine she squeezed her eyes shut and tamped the pain down into a small, manageable nugget, and pressed and pressed until that pain was a glittering diamond, and pressed it some more until it was dust, and pressed more until it was nothing but cells and atoms and nuclei floating in the water around her with blood and placenta and her new baby boy. I can believe in that. In diamonds of pain, and the screaming mess of new life in the world.

This woman, this Mello with the large owl tattoo, exuded a persona. Like someone with a finger plugged into some outlet of nature, and she was electrified with it. She spoke of her boyfriend who was so wonderful and so present at the birth and such a dedicated father already, but later she sighed heavily and said that he was carrying around the darkest energy since he became a father. A blackness. They were going to have to give him some kind of cleansing. He needed time away. "Take all the time you need," she told him. And to B and the genteel Texan and the Asian manicurist she said, "This is what we have to do. It's not good for the baby to be around that darkness."

I don't know, Mrs. Bright. Is there such thing as someone who carries dark energy, and who can be a dedicated father but also need to be away from the baby to clear that dark energy? Who am I to judge that, anyway? Who am I to judge someone who knows firsthand that pain can be tamped into diamonds? Someone who has held that diamond in her fists.

The world is so weird sometimes. I saw Mello at the grocery store with that new baby a few weeks later. She was buying landfill-friendly disposable diapers and a pound of organic bacon. I was buying lavender bubble bath and pecan smoked sausage. This is significant, I thought as I stared down at the items in my basket. Somehow, it is.

It is, isn't it? It has to be. Old women in white sparkly skirts on bikes and secret crafting and diamond pain and dark energy and pecan smoked sausage. I don't know. I guess all I mean to say, Mrs. Bright, is that I'm still here. I'd write that I miss you but you've already figured that out.

I'll eat you up I love you so.

"I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. ... What I dread is the isolation. ... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

"I'm a happy old man, but I will cry all my way to the grave."

-- Maurice Sendak

Listen to the fascinating, heartbreaking interview on NPR.

Oh my lands. "Where the Wild Things Are" is so lovely. Maurice Sendak is lovely. That is all.

Not very lovely.

Looking back at pictures from just a year ago, I think: I was happier then. We were happier then. I look at old blog posts from last year and think: I was so optimistic. I had hopes and some clear eye for bigger things. I look at where things are right now. I am grateful for my job; I know it's a good one, but I am not content in it. I am apathetic. I spend too much time away from my family. I neglect the house. My husband has not yet secured a teaching job, so he's working second shift at his regular job and subbing at least two days a week, usually more, and we never see each other. I feel like we are scrambling to pay our bills and do little else, so that we can save money, except we never actually save. Our house needs work, our yards (front and back) are shabby, and nothing is really very clean or organized. I spend evenings searching for lost things: I can find one shoe but not the other, Mad's school library book is missing, I can't find Violet's blanket, and there are no clean towels. I feel a terrible urge to just upend everything, to quit my job, to run away from home, to set the house on fire. I feel smaller wishes: I wish I would get a cold, just so I can spend a day at home and sleep the whole time. How sad. How stupid.

What has changed? What is the thing that put me in this place, where I feel small and confined and resigned to this life of tugging stress and a deficit of time, always struggling to reach something that is just nothing, nothing that excites or inflames me. Nothing that gets me excited about living.

A year ago I had these feelings, but I also had hope. A year ago I had plans and a belief that everything would be fine. That I would conquer the nasty pull of inertia, that I could be more and do more in my life than what I am doing right now. But inertia is an insidious, awful thing. It's worse, really, it's quicksand. I'm shrinking down into it.

There is a sign I posted next to my computer that says "Bloom where you are planted," and I am failing at that. My roots have thinned and stretched out, gasping for water. My leaves have browned. I am hunkering down for a long winter. I guess under this metaphor I need to tend the soil, to strengthen my roots so that I can grow, bloom, cast seeds and grow in other places.

But I don't know what that means. I don't know what my soil needs.

I don't mean to make it sound like I am walking around in a perpetual haze of sadness and depression; I'm not. We have our walks and the evenings I spend with the girls are (usually) very lovely. We manage to squeeze fun into the weekends and I have little hobbies that fulfill me: I read voraciously, I taught myself how to sew these simple fabric flowers, I discovered I don't totally suck at water coloring, I take pictures of nature that make me happy to be alive, just to see these things.

But even with those things I look at the big picture of how we spend our time, what we focus on more often than not, and I think: we're missing the point of life. Somehow. Because whatever it's meant to be, it can't be this.

To be silly.

Nobody wanted to wear the crocodile pajama shirt. It's a crocodile dribbling a basketball; what's not to like? But no.

They weren't just against it, mind you, they were loudly, almost-violently against it. Both girls stared at the shirt like their hearts were splintering at the mere thought of having to wear it to bed.

I felt this hurling sensation that barreled straight from my throat down into my chest, this bottled up, boiling sense of frustration. Violet wanted a pink pajama shirt, or a Lightning McQueen pajama shirt like her sister's, and I knew from the search I had made just a few minutes ago that neither was available. It was foolish of me, really. I knew the crocodile shirt wouldn't fly but it's roomy and soft and has a wide enough neck to fit over Violet's gigantic noggin, and it was the right shirt, darn it. It was.

Try and argue that with a 4-year-old.

It was late. The girls should have been dressed and in their rooms already. We should have been nestled on the bean bags, reading bedtime stories. My mind traveled the short length across the hall into the girls' bedroom, which was strewn with toys and stuffed animals they had dragged in from the playroom. That bottled frustration simmered almost to boiling, and with supreme effort, I unclenched the crocodile shirt from my fist and held it out to Violet. "Just wear the shirt," I said to her in a rush of breath.

"No!" Violet shouted, this ridiculous, wide, desperate look in her eyes. I could see her getting ready to fight this -- the tears were shining in her eyes and her lip carefully formed that downward turn that precedes an epic meltdown. I wanted to shove the thing over her head, let her cry it out, and my mind followed that path a little bit, too, the long, slow recovery from the tears, the nasty pall it would cast over the already-rushed and frazzled evening.

So I said, "Fine. I'll wear it." And I pulled the shirt over my head (told you it was roomy) and somehow wedged my arms into the sleeves, and the thing stretched just to its limits around my shoulders. My arms were immobile, my upper body squished and contorted. I could see my reflection in the bathroom mirror and I looked ridiculous. I looked at the girls, who were grinning at me, little lights shining in their eyes. "I don't think it fits," I said. They giggled at me. I pretended to struggle to get it off. "I think it's stuck," I said. Madeleine laughed loud and Violet continued her giggling as I continued to struggle with the shirt, eventually pulling it off.

Once it was off, Violet's quavery frown was back. "I don't want to wear it," she said again, urgently. "I don't LIKE it!"

Exasperation came flooding back to me. "I don't like it," I said back at her in a high pitched voice, but with a smile so she would know I was kidding.

"I WANT. TO WEAR. LIGHTNING," Violet said, enunciating carefully, forcefully.

"I want. To wear. Lightning," I said back to her in the same voice, smiling and making eye contact with the girls. Madeleine's eyes were bright and happy. "You're just having fun with us!" She said.

"You're just having fun with us!" I copied.

Both girls were laughing and dancing in happy little circles in our tiny bathroom, throwing out things for me to copy in my silly voice, and I felt that tense weight in my chest lighten immeasurably. I had a fleeting second there in the bathroom where I was not so keenly aware of the crushing weight of time, not fleeing ahead of its forceful march (lest I be trampled by it). A recognition that yes, this is how it's supposed to be, and I resolved to find it, that place where time is not the enemy and all you do is make goofy faces at it, and force it into silly pajamas, and laugh and laugh and laugh.

You fall, you bleed, you get up, you carry on.

First, this video is awesome. It makes me feel like an utter waste of flesh, but it's also so very inspiring. I love it. I showed it to the girls and Mad said, "I want to go on that trail!" Violet said, "Because sometimes owies are cool."


This video features one of the girls in the above video, talking about her longboarding experience. She's beautiful, her locale is gorgeous, and her attitude is totally rad. When she says, "This is just like life: you fall, you bleed, you get up, you carry on. And since we get hurt anyway, I'd rather do it in a fun way," it was kind of a nice little kick in the rear, a reminder of the obvious lesson you learn over and over again: life is for living! Go do it! Because sometimes owies are cool. (Right on, Violet!)

As we go.

We're at Open House for the girls. Mad sits in front of the dollhouse in her new classroom, playing quietly by herself. Another girl comes and sits next to her. "Hi," the girl says cheerfully. "Can I play, too?" Mad freezes, I mean literally stops moving, hands going still in the motion of putting the baby into its crib. Her hand hangs there, awkwardly. Another little girl comes and sits on the other side of Madeleine. Mad immediately gets up without saying a word and tries to walk away. I stop her.

The second little girl gets up from the chair and waves at Mad. "Hi Madeleine," she says. "Remember me? I'm Lily."

Mad frowns and won't even look at the little girl.

I crouch down. "Mad, do you remember Lily?" I ask her quietly. Madeleine won't respond even to me now. She's very still, staring off into the distance. It's like she's not even there.

I try again. "Mad, Lily is saying hi to you. Can you say hi back?"

Mad still won't speak. She does move, finally, but it's to try and climb up my body so that I will hold her. I don't pick her up. Lily is still waiting for Mad to say something.

I don't think it's a good idea to jump in on Mad's behalf, but I don't really know what to do. So I turn to the little girl and give her a smile. "Mad's feeling a little shy," I tell the girl. "Why?" she asks, and I shrug. "I guess she has a hard time finding words sometimes," I say.

Mad is burying her face into my leg now, no doubt listening intently. I wonder if I'm teaching her things about herself that I shouldn't, planting ideas that weren't there before. Offering her excuses. Because the truth is that I don't really know if she has trouble finding words. I always get the impression that she just doesn't know what to say. But maybe she's willfully choosing not to speak. Or maybe she's like me when I was a kid. I wouldn't open my mouth even when directly called upon to do so, for the longest time -- and I wasn't necessarily choosing not to, I just felt like I physically couldn't do it. I had some strange fear response to the idea of opening my mouth and talking to someone. So for a long time, I just didn't. Or maybe she's not like me at all. I just have no idea.

The little girl has gone back to the dollhouse and plays with the other little girl. They talk happily, interacting beautifully. I turn to Mad, who is still completely silent, and catch a glimpse of another parent across the room, who gives me a smile. "She'll talk when she's ready to," she says, and I can't tell if it's for my benefit or for Lily's benefit. I feel awkward, then, like any flaws I have in parenting are on display, that everyone has noticed them. I lead Mad from the room.

::

Mad's new teacher seems wonderful, and she is trying hard to engage Madeleine. But Mad won't talk. Not a peep. While Wayland engages Mad in a separate room, I take her teacher aside and give her a debriefing of Mad's issues. I doubt myself even as I'm telling her. I shouldn't have told her that we looked at an Asperger's diagnosis, I think to myself. I don't want to put her in a category unnecessarily. I don't want her to get the wrong idea. Because Mad will talk, eventually. It will just take a long time. It took her more than a year to open up in her two years of pre-K classes. She was just barely learning to interact when it was time to move her to Kindergarten. I tell the teacher about her other issues: with change, with routine, her little rituals. I feel a little crushed, explaining these things, while the other kids are chattering happily around the room, checking things out, seemingly thrilled.

::

Mad and V sit at a table in the 4-year-old classroom, where Violet will be starting on Monday. They are coloring, quietly. Violet has a crayon clenched in her left fist and she's coloring in the letter A very tidily. Across from my girls, two other girls, Lily and Olivia, are making big plans while they color. "We can have a sleepover," says Olivia. "I will bring my sleeping bag and my owl." Lily asks, "Is it a real owl?" And Olivia says yes. "Wow," says Lily. "You have a pet owl?" And Olivia says no. Lily laughs. They continue chatting, planning out their big sleepover they've hatched all on their own, without the help of their parents. The parents are hanging back, smiling at the girls indulgently, bursting with pride.

It's such a stark contrast to my two girls, sitting side by side, so silent, barely glancing up at the two best friends in front of them. I feel wistful.

::

We're in the car on the way home from Open House, and I don't know what to say to Mad about any of this, or if I shouldn't say anything at all. I settle on this:

"Mad, do you ever feel lonely when you're feeling shy? Like, do you feel sad when you don't talk to the kids who want to talk to you?"

"No. Can you turn the music on?"

"In a second," I tell her. "I'm still trying to talk to you. So....you're just happier by yourself?"

"Umm...I guess so," she says.

"Well, I just want you to be happy, so that's good," I tell her. "But if you ever start to feel sad because you can't talk to the other kids, or if you are having a hard time making a friend and you really want one, please tell me. Because I want to help. Okay?"

"Mom, can you turn the music on now?" She asks.

I feel the weight of a thousand worries pressing on my chest, hear all the unsaid things hanging in the air, and I realize that there's not really anything I can do with them. They're just there for now, for awhile maybe. Likely. So I turn the music on and hope we'll be able to figure it out as we go.

A place for you.

There is a name, and a room, and a cramp.

There is a name, a room, and the window is open. A cramp, and you're in the window. Summer heat oozes all around you.

There is a name, it is your name it is your mother's name it is the name of all the people in the window. There is a room and a cramp.

There is a cramp which is just folded time, a crumple quickly unfolding.

There is a room, which is just a place for your blood and bones to rest.

There is a name. It is yours.

And you live there until you don't anymore.

I was not magnificent.

This video combines two of my favorite things: Bon Iver and Iceland. Now when I tell people I want to go to Iceland, and they say, "Iceland?! Why?" I can make them watch this. I am sure when you are in Iceland, this song follows you around, adding to the beauty. Surely it does.

Beet cake.

Every time I bake something, it happens just like this. Very magical and moody and lovely.

beet cake from tiger in a jar on Vimeo.

(I WISH. This is the kind of baking that leaves no mess. You measure and stir and bake and enjoy the end result in your shining spotless kitchen. MY kind of baking ends with chocolate on the ceiling and flour in my hair. I am exaggerating, but only slightly.)

It's you, it's you, it's all for you.

Seeking refuge.

a clutch of rain
at your fingers.

heat swells the form
of this day like old wood.

a wincing breath, and glare,
you squint against
the bleached white air.

seeking refuge
you rake your fingers across the sky

but nothing happens except
a rip rendered, dry dust in the blue

seeking refuge
you curl inward to the closest shade,
and sigh, your eyes pricked open,
aware.

you rest uneasy, and
sleep does not come.

The will to change your hurtling momentum.

The first thing you notice, of course, is the tightness in your joints. Your fingers hurt. Arthritis should not be the first word in your head when you get out of bed when you are this young. Tired is the next word. No no no is what follows as you walk into the bathroom. Every cell is rioting against forward motion. You long to succumb to inertia even as you are fighting against it. Fifteen minutes before you have to leave for work. This is no way to start a day.

So you make a willful effort to reverse your thought process as you stumble into your closet and squint against the overhead light, searching for something to wear. Today will be a good day, you think, pulling down a dress. Yes, you tell yourself. Let's do this.

You think dimly that this is no way to start a day either, forcing yourself to be excited about getting up and living your life. But maybe that's the problem, this living. Or more specifically the how. The how of your living.

Sometimes a morning pep talk is all you have, but you also always have will in your favor. The will to change your hurtling momentum even when it seems impossible. One breath can send you in another direction, just like that. A breath. You have that, too.

There's music on Clinton street all through the evening.

I bet I posted about this song before, but it bears revisiting. I was sitting at my desk at work, feeling kind of -- heavy -- and I was thinking: what is a song that makes me breathe. Clears a space out around me. And I thought of this song. It makes me wish for gray skies, rain, chilly wind, bundling into a raincoat.

Curating Flickr: Iceland

(Click the pics to follow them back to their sources)

There is a word for this.

"Necessity may be the mother of invention, but interdependence is the mother of affection. We humans need one another, so we cooperate — for purely selfish reasons at first. At some point, though, the needing fades and all that remains is the cooperation. We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we're counting on some future payback. There is a word for this: love." -- From "The Geography of Bliss" by Eric Weiner

Why I run.

It takes about half a mile before I feel comfortable in my pace and breathing, so at first that's what I'm reaching for: the easy rhythm, that feeling of settling into the right head space, that singular focus.

Somewhere after the second mile I usually start to feel a little winded, and the little voice in my head starts to tell me it's okay to stop at 20 minutes. Twenty minutes is a good workout, the voice says. I look at the timer on the treadmill and tell myself: 10 more minutes.

And when I power through and make it 10 more minutes, I see that I'm close to three miles, and so I tell myself: go to three miles.

And when I get to three miles, I am sweating in earnest and my heart is pounding, but I see where I am on the little lap marker and say: A quarter of a mile is nothing. And that will get me to a 5K. And so I keep going.

And when I hit that 5K mark my iPod offers up this song, and I say: This song is short. I will run through this song, and I will do it at a pace that fits this song. And so I crank it up to a 9:30 minute pace and toss my towel over the screen so I cannot see how slow or fast I am going, and I keep running, hard.

At the end of the song, my knee feels a little tweaked but it's not bad and I feel so, so good that I decide to keep going. Thanks to the towel I have no idea how long I have been on the treadmill or how far it says I have run, so I think: I will go until I can't go anymore.

And when I get to the part where I feel absolutely drained, I take the towel off and see I am close to the four mile mark, and I have been running for nearly 50 minutes. I am two minutes away from 50 minutes, so I think: I can do anything for two minutes. And I keep going.

After two minutes, I see that I am a little less than a quarter of a mile from hitting 4.25, and I think: Stop underestimating what your body can do, and do it. So I toss the towel back over the screen and run, and run, and just for fun, I crank the incline up a little bit.

I stop at 4.25, but only because I need to get back to work.

::

I never ever feel as good as I do as when I'm running, challenging myself, setting those mini goals and reaching them. A good run proves to me that I am better than I think I am, that I can do more than I think I can. Running is literally fighting inertia. I want that lesson to seep into my brain so that it becomes a part of me, and so it will apply to everything I do in my life.

Tears like diamonds.

Well it looks like I have a new favorite song, judging by the fact that I listened to it 8,000 times in a row yesterday.

Because you have to.

There is this heavy weight pressing on your shoulders at all times. Usually you are only dimly aware of it, but sometimes, with a flick of your thoughts and your eyes cast upward, the weight inverts, and feels lighter than air, and you are close to flying. And sometimes, it's so heavy your feet have to resist the ground to keep from driving down into it. Sometimes your knees hurt with the effort of staying upright.

She says words, good words, words that should make you feel better, or okay, but when you walk out into the parking lot, the tears spill out. And your knees ache with the effort from stiffening against a buckle that will send you straight to the pavement. Words like: it is who she is, this is probably what she'll be dealing with five years from now, 10 years from now. Here is how we help her. It is good. We are moving forward, finding solutions. There is all this hope to be had.

It's just that you look into her eyes and see her better than you see anything else, that unfathomable, bottomless well of deep brown, and you see nameless things there that you have within yourself and you've never quite put a name to them, but it has to be, it is, the awareness of that weight that presses, always, and the effort it takes to make it light, how hard it is to fly. She feels it already, just like you did, and you hurt for her because you remember how much you hurt growing up, feeling the weight that nobody else seemed to feel.

It's a fallacy to think she's like you, he reminds you, and he's right. Of course. It's a different nature and a different nurture, he says. Yes. You see this. But you also see all of it, generations of mothers and daughters stretched out on a vast timeline of decades, and there are threads stretching through, invisible tethers that bind you all together. Good and bad. It all looks the same from up here, the weight reminds you. And so you cry, and you buckle.

And then slowly your knees stiffen and you stand up. You flick your shoulders back, and the weight doesn't loosen for now, but you bear it anyway. Because you have to.

And you begin the arduous process of teaching her how to fly.

My girls.

I want to write about you, and take a picture of you, and remember you just like that, a wisp, a tuft of a girl wafting through your world of colors into mine. You have an insistent way of inserting yourself, you, this tiny light that should have no weight at all -- physically you don't and yet the love that pushes its way into my arms, stubbornly, is heavy and comfortable. You smile and nuzzle; you kiss my arm, you say, "Mama," and it's just this statement of fact. I hold you there, all your colors swirling in the circle of my arms until you shimmer away, and in a blink you are gone again. Your energy! Your determination! You wear it like armor and wear it to inquire about the world, and I want to give you everything I know. But I know better. I know. Sometimes you stare up into the sky and laugh loud, for no reason that I can see, and I know you already know more than I do.

::

A second with you is the life cycle of a star sped up: a sudden glimmer in the dark, a consistent light, a bright flare, a fade back to dark. But you; you contain a whole galaxy in you, and so it's all the stars in the world contained in your tiny body. In the morning the stars are being born in you, and through the day some die and some are reborn, and it is this constant process so that to be near you is to always gaze in wonder at the life flaring inside of you. How exhausting! For you, for me. I am powerless against the sheer force of you because everything you do, you do intensely. In the face of sadness you are the saddest slip of nothing the world has ever seen, and in happiness you are joy wrapped in rainbows, shooting sparklers. Only in love are you gentle, and quick to give as you get. For all your fire and all your life you are content to arrange yourself as part of my own skin, and all quiet and still, whisper "I love you, too," before I can even say a thing.

Getting to the other side. Part 2.

I didn't mean to leave the last post hanging in mid-air for so long. I'm afraid it's built up into something larger than it should be at this point. I imagine scads (ha!) of people waiting with bated breath for the big reveal, when really there is no big reveal, just this: How did my sanity well get depleted? Because I haven't been going to church.

I don't mean church in the chapel-God-folded hands-Bible-prayerful sense. I mean church in the place you go to get connected to your spirit, or a spirit, or something that's bigger than you, or whatever you want to call it.

And for me, of course, that place is outside, even in this wretched, everlasting, scorching hot blast of summer. Because after a long day at work, switching into parenting mode at home, and trying to take care of all the nonsense that needs to get taken care of at home, trudging through 100+ degree, drought-ridden weather sounds absolutely awful.

Except, I realized as I drove home from work one afternoon, there is beauty in the heat -- something affirming -- in being forced out of your comfort zone by the blaze of nature doing what it does this time of year. Beauty in the enduring, in standing below a canopy of trees, the air buzzing with cicadas, in feeling sweat roll down your back. This is work, I think, driving home in my un-air conditioned car. This is discipline. Not succumbing to the terrible pull of the temperature outside, even while you feel like your face is on fire. Not letting it tear your mood down, not raging at it, not feeling bitter because you are dealing with it. It just is. Why fight nature? It always wins.

Upon this realization I called my husband and told him I'd figured out what my damn problem was already, and that we needed to go outside after dinner, even if it was a short hike. And so we did. We did every day that week, and have since, even if it is just playing in the water hose in our backyard, or driving to the hiking/biking trail at the main part of River Legacy, taking a jaunt down to the river, or traipsing down the familiar paths near our home.The very first night of Operation Go Outside Already was a little piece of magic. Because it was hot and we were sweating, and my girls wanted to run the trails with the dog. So my husband took the lead and they dashed down the trail together, and I lingered -- taking pictures, noticing little, beautiful things -- and then ran to catch up with them. We were pink-cheeked and sweaty, but our muscles were singing and our eyes were open and we looked up and around us, and we noticed everything.

And already I felt better.

Getting to the other side. Part 1.

I have been in a funk lately, quite the opposite of celebrating anything, much less lovely. There have been the normal life aggravations and some old-style Madeleine blowups and maybe a little extra dose of circumstantial stress piling on top of it all.

All of the normal stress, plus the bonus stress, piled up and up and up until Saturday night when Madeleine declared quite loudly that she hates me. She doesn't like me at all. She, with her hands clamped over her ears, firmly stated that she would no longer be listening to anything I said. Because of all the hate.

Here we are again, I thought in resignation and outrage all at once, and we battled our way through the evening until she fell into an exhausted sleep, and I fell onto the couch to drink myself into an exhausted oblivion. In the early part of the evening, I sobbed to Wayland, "The worst part of it is that when she gets like that, I just don't feel it at all -- no desire at all to help her. She says she hates me and I want to retreat and let her fend for herself."

I don't do that, of course. I'm there for her no matter what, and some dim part of me recognizes that Mad is actually at her most vulnerable when she lashes out like she does, so I stay and try to be calm. It works out eventually. It always does.

"But," I sobbed to Wayland, "Right now I feel like I have nothing left to give her. Nothing to offer. No patience or understanding. It's like I have this store of maternal energy and it's all dried up. Really it's not just that, even. It's everything. I'm just drained."

"My old boss used to call that his sanity well," Wayland said.

"Yes! My sanity well!" I said. "My sanity well is all dried up and I have no reserves to tap into. I'm a woman on the brink!" I meant for this to be kind of jokey, with all its dramatic flair, but really I kind of meant it. At that moment, staring dully down at my lap and fighting back tears, I didn't really see how to fix anything. Everything felt wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Well, we have to figure out how to refill the well," Wayland said.

"I agree, but I don't know what that is," I mused. I ran through the options. I'd been exercising regularly, eating pretty well, reading a great book....all these things were usually quite restorative for me. But not lately.

"There's nothing," I finally muttered.

Luckily I was wrong about that. The completely obvious solution would not present itself to me until two days later.

You kiss me, I kiss you.

Negligible senescence.

There is something deep and mysterious churning in you. You want to call it dark but it feels like light, golden and shimmering somewhere at its core. It's all this possibility, all this hope. You feel it at the base of your throat, like choking. It's three seconds before sobbing, or three seconds before laughing long and loud, shrieking into an expanse of sky, feeling small, feeling big, feeling large enough to hold up the sky, and foolish enough to try. Brave enough to try. These words mean the same thing. Here it is: A day in the life, a life in the day. You've got to try for something, because that churning in your chest, that feeling swirling there, is what's holding up the sky. Imagine if you let the sky fall. You just can't.

Life is a huge dream. Why work so hard?

You knew the tree and the earth were the same as you.

"When you focused on the leaves fluttering in the dappled light, they vibrated and shimmered into one, becoming a million tiny particles. You felt a shift inside, and you began to vibrate too, on the same freequency as everything else. All secrets were there, all truths, all knowledge. You had to scan with your heart to find what you were seeking. It might not be spoken in words, it might be hidden in rhyme, in song, in images. You knew the tree and the earth were the same as you, made of particles, like you, come together in a different form. You loved it all as you loved yourself." -- "This Life Is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone" by Melissa Coleman.

Breather.

Sometimes you have to take a minute to sit by yourself and breathe for a minute. Feel the hot sun on your skin and say to yourself, "This is okay. Everything will be okay."

Unlock my body and move myself at last/to dance.

The first song here, "Chinese Apple," is a beautiful song by Loose Fur aka Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and other folks. Fun fact: I walked down the aisle to this song! The lyrics are lovely, which brings us to fun fact #2: the lyrics "unlock my body/move myself at last/into warm liquid/flowing blowing glass/classical music/blasting masks the ringing in my ears" repeat themselves in Wilco's "Heavy Metal Drummer," a very different song. Except in that one he says, "move myself to dance" instead of "move myself at last." I like how changing the "at last" to "to dance" totally changes the feeling of the lyrics that follow, and what it might mean to "unlock your body." Both are awesome songs.

The purpose in life is not to find yourself.

This New York Times op-ed, "It's Not About You," was really wonderful and illuminating. My favorites:

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

and

Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

As a whole, our culture likes to preach about "self" -- and it celebrates finding your own path and passions and charting your own territory and being, it must be said, like a Maverick. I certainly indulge in it all the time (see: this entire blog), but I like to think the truth I am leaning into is not so much about me, but about my place in the "we," the great big universe around us. What if we changed our discourse from "you" to "we"? What if we asked ourselves, "How can I best benefit the whole?"

I just finished the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, and I truly thought it was brilliant. It's a dystopian young adult sci-fi thing, where settlers have inhabited a distant planet, only to be "infected" with what they call a germ -- the thoughts of men are suddenly audible/visible. It drives many of them completely nuts and is quite tormenting. By the end of the third book you see what is actually happening is that these settlers have become, in a much more tangible way, connected to the greater "we," and they struggle with their own voices and how they fit into that "we." How the many voices can coexist peacefully. That struggle leads to all kinds of terrible things -- genocide and war among them.

In the third book, we get insight into the alien race on the planet. The settlers call the aliens the Spackle; the aliens call themselves The Land. They exist within a collective identity. They are not their own "people," but part of The Land. They are at peace with, and find comfort in, being part of the "we" on the planet.

There is so much more to the book than this, but I think it's that wonderful metaphor that strikes me so much, just as the author's message does in his "It's Not About You" article -- maybe one of the greatest lessons I can teach my children is that yes, they are very special, not so much because they are their own amazing individuals, but because they are part of the "we," and they can do amazing things within it.

Tell me what you know about dreaming.

I can't stop listening to this cover of Kid Cudi's "Pursuit of Happiness." I love the, I don't know, desperate melancholy of it. The original has the same vibe, with Kid Cudi's added....smirky affectation, I guess. Both are good, but I think I like this version better.

This is a day that matters.

He was right to leave the dog home so we could ride our bikes to the river. It was an easy jaunt, just two miles in and two miles out. A short steep-ish walk down to the river side, which was rocky but completely deserted. We balanced carefully on the stones, trying to step only on the wide, flat ones, but missed sometimes and braced delicate insteps on pointed, angled rocks, wincing the whole way.

The current was thicker, faster here and we walked carefully in - careful of those rocks - and Madeleine wanted to surrender to the current, to let it carry her wherever it wanted to. Wayland held on tight for a bit, then just let her go, keeping close by.

Violet, always a bit slower, more careful, found a spot in the middle of the river and sat, pulling small rocks from the bed and placing them on a large one jutting out of the water. "It's a rock family," she said, placing another "baby" down. "These are the babies, and this is their mama."

Saying "family" like this: fan-uh-wee.

I sat with her, collecting stones of my own, while Wayland and Mad traversed up and then down the river a stretch. They found treasure: a collection of golf balls (21!) washed up on an inset of the river, and a tan and black moth, with surprising hints of orange on the inside of its wings.

We saw a crawdad scuttling from underneath a rock in the river and a millipede-looking creature crawling across the stones. Tiny minnows nipped around our ankles.

It was late afternoon and the sun made light dance on the water. We heard nothing but the rush of water and the call of birds and a little bit of wind clapping against the leaves.

This is a day that matters, like a reset button, a centering force to stick a pin in, so that the rest of your days can revolve around it, focus on it, come back to it. Because these are the things that matter: the careful steps, the sun and the water, the silence and the unexpected treasure, the absolute joy, and of course, the fan-uh-wee.

I belong among the weeds.

This song feels like our frequent walks down to the river, the trails thick with weeds, the heat beating down. It even feels like scratching the bug bite on my forearm, dotted with calamine lotion. These are happy things. Yes, even bug bites in a weird way.

The first time you saw the ocean.

The first time you saw the ocean, you ran to it full tilt like you'd been waiting to do such a thing all your few short years of life so far. It was instant understanding that the huge body of water in front of you was for you, for your own joy, for love of life. And you seized it, your face so full of joy.

It was evening; the light was soft and warm around you and the small waves at the shore swallowed you up to your ankles, and you laughed. Instinct commanded you to jump the waves and you did, venturing a little deeper each time.

No, wait, stop, I almost said. I felt the words rise up in my throat but I stopped them because you weren't going to go too far. I could see that. You'd lunge in and then pull back, just a little when the waves got a little too high, up to your thighs.

I joined you. "Do you want to go deeper?" I asked and you nodded. You really did want to go deeper, but there was something else there, a tinge of fear, of trepidation in your deep brown eyes. "We don't have to," I told you gently, "But I think you will like it."

So you nodded and I picked you up and carried you so that our heads were level and the water was as high as my chest. You could see the shore, but it seemed so far away, and facing out into the wide expanse of green-gray water all you could see was water. It was so close to infinite, this feeling, the perfect feeling of being a small thing contained in something so much larger. I wondered if daughters feel a similar feeling wrapped up in their mother's arms. Tucked safe inside an infinite presence.

We jumped the waves, you and I, rose with the crests and fell with the white caps. We felt the water tug and pull at our bodies and it made us feel anchored, rooted in the sand even as it pulled us a little further out each time. The first swells surprised you and you were afraid, clutching me tightly, a solemn look on your face. Then you relaxed and enjoyed though the fear never really quite left your face.

When I thought it was time to go you swore it wasn't, and in the vast expanse of the ocean, feeling fear and joy in tenuous coexistence and hopefully, comfort and safety, too, you never wanted to go. You wanted to stay in this place forever, and I thought yes. Yes, let's stay in this place forever.

But there were things calling us to the shore -- there is always something, of course -- so I carried you back to dry sand, dragging my legs through the water until I overcame the pull of the ocean, or simply left it behind. But that's an impossible task. Even as evening descended and we walked back to the hotel, we could feel the ghost of waves lapping at our bodies.

You have to be brave with your life so others can be brave with theirs.

Oh. This made me cry. Just lovely.

One day I decided that I was beautiful.

Gabourey Sibide’s response when Harper’s Bazaar asked her where her confidence came from:

It came from me. One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl. I wear colors that I really like, I wear makeup that makes me feel pretty, and it really helps. It doesn’t have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see. Your body is your temple, it’s your home, and … you must decorate it.

From "Are you beautiful?" on Everyday Treats.

Four planets will cluster together

Above you the cosmos are working on a heavenly act, planets
pulling together past great distances, as far as the length
of a fingernail to your elbow, which seems not far at all.
But to the cells of your body it's the great unexplored wild,
and traversing that distance is a heavenly act on its own.

Tonight Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Mars will
lace together and encircle the neck of night,
and be bright amid the black. Tonight you will
travel the distance of an arm, and back again, and
it will take the second of a heartbeat, the celestial forever.

Forest spirits.

It's storming when I leave work, raining hard, thunder rumbling every few seconds, lightning flashing somewhere in the near distance. I've got my umbrella, so I stand in the parking lot and revel in it for just a moment, taking it all in: the deep gray, the low clouds, the cool wind.

And then dread. The dog. The dog will need to go out and pee, as I'm sure she hasn't done that all day. She also hasn't gotten the exercise she needs. What will we do? Wayland isn't home yet, so I will need to take the girls out with the dog. It will be wretched. The dog hates the rain and it takes forever just to get the girls out the door. Plus dinner needs to be made and I have no idea what it will be.

When I get home I swallow the rising swell of stress rolling over me and ask the girls if they want to go for a rain walk. YES, they exclaim, enthusiastic. We don't worry about shoes or raincoats; we just head out the door in 20 seconds flat. A new record.

I anticipate Violet being afraid of the now more distant rumbles of thunder. She isn't. I think Mad will be cold in her shorts. She isn't. I think the dog will refuse to go outside. She doesn't. The girls both just run through the river of rain raveling down the curb, kicking up water, shrieking with joy. The dog tries to pull me faster down the street.

When we hit the trail I'm actually relaxed and the girls are no less joyful, running full tilt to puddle after puddle. Madeleine runs to me and ROARS, and here comes the stress - I think she's going to pretend to be a jungle cat, which always freaks Violet out, but instead she says, "I'm TOTORO!" And Violet laughs. "Are we forest spirits?" I ask. YES! We bend down and raise up from our knees, extending our arms high into the air, roaring the whole time. We are helping the trees to grow, here in the rain. Thunder rumbles and I laugh. "Maybe we can control the storm," I say, and we all roar at the sky.

The dog finally pees and we make it to the bridge, where we look at the spiderwebs tattered and heavy with droplets of rain, illuminated from behind in gray light. The girls run the course of the bridge - we have it all to ourselves in this weather - and look for spider egg sacs tucked into corners. We see all sorts of bugs taking refuge from the rain on the underside of the bridge railing: spiders and aphids and even ant lions.

"This is wonderful," I tell the girls as we head back home, and we are smiling. We talk of warm baths, cozy PJs, and soup and honey bread for dinner.

Life is just this good sometimes, and so surprising. All that dread and worry I felt driving home evaporating in just a second, stepping out into the cold rain, embracing the gray skies and the moments this rain afforded us, three fearless forest spirits controlling the elements.

If I had an orchard.

"Do you ever feel like you're failing yourself?" I ask Wayland. It's nearing midnight and he's mostly asleep, so he pulls himself out of a half-snore and mutters, "Sometimes."

"I think that lately -- that I'm failing myself," I tell him as I walk back into the bathroom to take my contacts out. "I'm not being what I should be." You are what you should be, my brain pulls out of a half-snore to mutter at me. I tamp it down. "But that's okay," I say. "It's a challenge. I can take it."

Like I tell Violet to say out loud every time she falls on a hike and starts wailing, no matter how severe the injury (it's never severe): "I am ROCKING this trail." I urge her to say it, and remind her: "You fell because you are going for it. You are ROCKING it. And you got that fall out of the way, so now there won't be any more falls."

I'm lying to her because of course there will be more falls. There are always more falls, literal and metaphorical. She falls again not five minutes later and there is a small scrape on her knee. A little blood. She does the open mouthed, full body sob. "Violet," I remind her. "You are ROCKING this trail." And she sucks in a breath. "Yes!" She exclaims, turning the tears off almost immediately. "I got that fall out of the way! I'm getting my falls out of the way!"

It's a good lesson, I decide, and not a lie, exactly. You go, you fall, you get up. That fall is out of the way so you can get ready to repeat the process. Is that what life is? Falling down, getting up. Getting up, falling down? Is life more getting up or falling down? I think it's the middle of that, the comma between the phrases, the pause between highs and lows. Keeping balanced when gravity and inertia are working against you.

My problem is not that I am failing myself, it's that I'm in a pause, seeking the high -- when the pauses are what to seek. Where to stay.

It's maybe why this song "Helplessness Blues" by Fleet Foxes basically kills me dead. It's a song about living in the pauses. "If I had an orchard/I'd work 'til I'm raw/If I had an orchard/I'd work 'til I'm sore."