Small Graces.

A delicious late night mudslide made by my husband. With mini chocolate chips sprinkled on top.

Cuddling with our 6 year old as she read to me from a new book.

Baking with the girls - yellow cake and chocolate ganache frosting from scratch.

Watching the Inauguration and realizing how gorgeous my home city is.

Having to stop to take in the beauty of the Inaugural poem.

Texting with girlfriends who make me giggle.

Talking to my nephew and niece overseas and catching up.

A lovely, sunshiny day.

Delivering goody bags to hospitalized children 6 years after S1 was discharged from the intensive care unit - prepared by the girls with cute notes attached and hearts that said "Be Brave."

Watching my president take a moment to pause and take in the view in front of him before exiting the Inauguration platform.

A husband who thinks it's cute that I bring a leopard print covered hot water bottle to bed on cold winter nights.

C'est tout! Bonne Nuit!

Beginnings.

Today our President is publicly sworn in for his second term in office. May the next four years be good ones.

And, my goodness my home is gorgeous in this winter morning light.

Facing the Tigers, Facing Ourselves.

This weekend I had the pleasure of watching the movie Life of Pi with my husband. Though I wasn't sure I was drawn to it initially, I couldn't deny how gorgeous it seemed visually, and the fact that it peaked my curiosity as it was based on the life of a man from India.

Here's the thing. I want to see it again as soon as I can. It was stunning and uplifting and a beautiful tale which speaks to all of us and is an allegory touching on the themes of

• what are our stories and why do we craft them as we do?
• what is the mind,  body and spirit capable of in dire circumstances?
• what is the role of faith and God in our lives?
• do people want to know the truth?
• why do people believe in God?
• why do people isolate themselves when it serves to alienate and encourage the loneliness that will only consume them with unhappiness from the inside out?
• what are our responsibilities as human beings and humane beings toward other people, and animals?
• what barbaric acts are human beings capable of? are we really so evolved?
• how do we face or evade our demons and project them outward?
• what compels us to look away from what scares us and what compels us to face what's difficult?
• why do people become so paralyzingly attached to the stories that cause them pain and suffering?
• when we make a choice how to frame our story in a forgiving and healing way, we become freer and more happy.

Throughout watching the movie last night and thinking about it a lot today, I realize I couldn't help but think of the many articles I read about the young woman in New Delhi who was brutally violated on a bus and her subsequent death from the horrific injuries she sustained.

One of the articles I read on this tragedy mentioned that she and her friend had just come from a screening of the movie The Life of Pi when they were so senselessly attacked. To think that this was such an uplifting and thought-provoking film, about god and faith and resilience and loss and survival --  and also about how horrible people can be to one another -- it struck me all the more. She must have felt uplifted after seeing the film - it was so hopeful and beautiful. And then out in the world she was brutally raped and left for dead by men in a society in which they felt entitled to act out as the most selfish animals might.

It is such deeply impressing and remarkable movie. I recommend it highly - it is hypnotic, gorgeous and a work of genius.

Alight Into Nature!

Today we went to a nearby local park to get away from confined spaces full of coughing people. Our daughter's immunity issue was the perfect reason to take in the freshness of natural surroundings.

We skipped rocks, found the perfect walking sticks, intimidated Canadian Geese who were munching on the grass, played with the ice that had formed on the water in a tiny decorative fountain, jumped over thick, gnarly tree roots, and discovered a tree called a sweet gum that looked like it was made of corrugated cardboard.

We marveled at the stark beauty of bare trees and low winter sunshine. My husband was inspired to photograph the trees for use in future paintings. I am so excited to see the spark of an intention to paint again, because he is a amazingly talented painter!

Our daughters rolled sideways downhill not worried about Goose droppings, peeling off layers of sweaters and coats among the giggles.

Then my husband said to me: "Let's meet here in 30 years and watch our grandchildren play." We agreed it was a gold star moment -- i.e. one to never forget.

Just Write: An Essay on the Craft.

I have often heard it said that in order to be a writer, “just write.” Is this truly how people distill arrival at this much desired destination?

“Just write.” No -- I say plan, envision, immerse, act, think, listen, research, talk, excavate, invert, subvert, mull over and reinvent. It is not sufficient to just write. Nor would I say is it possible without a certain very strong urge and commitment to do so. A life of isolation in your own thoughts and words, with no promise of compensation, validation or financial reward is tough on the ego. Never mind all the rejection one faces when finally ready to share their work with the world. I know people who seem more ready to admit to grave moral failings or remarkable lapses in judgement before they would venture to step out onto the limb of actually calling themselves (gasp) a writer. This is perplexing and sad because writers serve a very important purpose in culture and always have.

Liz Gilbert’s anecdote about “catching” that moment when one is visited by the fickle and fleeting inspiration or muse, captures some of the imprecision of this art.

One has not only to be poised, well read, practiced and ready when the muses visit, but motivated for the hard work it takes to render something worthwhile of the ideas. These ideas and inspirations often hit us in the middle of daily life when we are doing something like driving our children to school with nary a pencil nor scrap of paper in sight and no red lights to speak of to even be looking for such tools.

They rise like bubbles threatening to become lost in the ether, bursting while we are left searching the air blindly with our fingertips, seeking their imprint. They likely will resurface again in some iteration, somewhere, like long lost friends. And then we will know to repurpose our free moments -- force them if we must -- in order to extend a hand toward these much awaited visitors, grasp their hands firmly, give them their due attention, look them squarely in the eyes and say “it's nice to see you again.”

From there you will seek out a quiet spot, and listen to this revered guest as they spill forth their wisdom. When we lose an idea, it is as though the air has soaked up the good stuff and we are left swilling the aftermath of our own thoughts, the profuse yet fleeting backwash of our brilliant ideas. And nothing is more infuriating, exasperating, or really, more sad for people like us, who keep setting the table for a guest who doesn’t always show up because they keep getting lost on the way.

Writer is a persona: when writing, it is a mask you wear, a character you create if only to withstand the task of creating the work. Some refer to it as being a medium between the muse and the words. A certain sense of remove is what allows me the comfortable distance from which to spill my ideas less self consciously.

We are largely in our own worlds yet I promise you we are slaying dragons of self doubt and frustration behind closed doors.

As writers we absorb and observe the world and make sense of it with words. We love language and words, syntax and context, the playful way reordering words can subtly change meaning. We live in a soup of words that are streaming and echoing in our minds nonstop. We are ruthless observers, and as anyone with a writer friend knows, everyone is fair game, all is grist for the mill and you very well may show up in their writing -- be it veiled or not so veiled. And yes, there is a certain self-centeredness to the notion that all writers feel urgently that they have something important to say. You’ve been warned.

We are visionaries creating something out of many “nothings.” No one’s process is quite the same, yet the mechanics are. Pen to paper, voice into recorder, fingers on the keyboard. I heard writing described by author and playwright Claudia Dey as a ritual akin to taxidermy:

"I often liken it to taxidermy ... you comb the wilds of your world, you find a beast, you enter into a darkened room with this beast, you scissor up the middle, you take out everything that could rot it, and then you create a mannequin and you sew the skin back onto the mannequin. And the more time that you spend artfully enlivening (sic) this beast: so making eyes out of glass, and eyelids out of clay and a nose out of plastic and lips out of wax -- the more the beast comes to approximate life."

Does anyone truly believe that in order to be a writer you must “just write?” Is that all there is? On one level yes, it is the most basic act which defines the vocation / calling / art / profession / obsession.

But the title of writer is far more hard won than that advice suggests. I would say to a budding writer these things: read everything you can, everything that interests you and never stop. Don’t only let yourself gravitate to writing you admire or aspire to be like; push yourself further. Read poetry to learn about the meter of a sentence and the musicality of words. Read novels and essays. Read a lot. Analyze the structure and format of the writing that resonates with you and ponder how a piece that moved you achieved what it did. Always be on the hunt. Always be observing. Never go anywhere without a notepad and a couple of pens or pencils. Put your work aside when it isn’t resonating with you, like someone you love but just need time away from. There inside is something redeeming more often than not but you need perspective to see it.

As Tobias Wolff once said what is writing but “black marks on a page” and yet it has such weight for something so thin. The sum of those scratches can change someone’s life.

Saying just write and that will make you a writer is like saying simply bear a child and you will be a mother. No. It takes much more than that and it’s something you earn.

You also have to be a responsible steward of the gift if you are so lucky as to gain some talent  or recognition from all your hard work along the way. You have to be ready to receive the idea and channel it when it comes. I treat ideas as spirits or as one would handle a scared animal -- don’t look it in the eye or it may skitter off. Allow it to trust you, to get used to your scent and trust then approach. Be ready to receive. It could also be perceived as a commitment phobic lover, the one you’re infatuated with in secret -- the one you desperately want to know but don’t want to crowd. As in that case, give the idea time to breathe and yield to you. If you do, you will witness its approach. Is that a romantic enough view of writing for you?

Then there is the intersection between writer and reader. I think this is where the magic happens. That intersection is what validates the writing and perhaps therefore this is what makes the wordsmith -- toiling away in a vacuum -- a writer. The reader meets you halfway but there is no spark of connection if you do not open your heart and bravely let your writing out into the world for it to be acknowledged and consumed -- for it to touch someone else. A favorite poet of mine -- and someone with whom I've had the pleasure to sit around a table, sharing poetic works -- Billy Collins, once composed a poem called "Night Letter to the Reader" which is the equivalent of a silent nod to the one looking at his words, as if to say "I see you." He often addresses his reader directly. I stood silent when I heard him speak of this: what an intimate exchange, yet on such a large scale. Yet it is this very thing -- the tenuous but riveting connection -- the magic between a writer and reader.

Collins on the relationship between writers and readers

After all, isn’t that why writers write? To say something to someone? Because perhaps at some point in their life they, in an unguarded moment, were touched by something an author wrote, fell in love with words and decided they too wanted to pursue the craft? Are we writers if we are only writing for ourselves, or are we merely diarists, albeit with a bit more creative flair?

For a writer to be a writer, then, there are a constellation of things that align -- motivations, mechanics, skill, persistence, and making the writing public, among others.


originally composed: December 16, 2011

Throwback: An old essay of mine, on motherhood.

Fickle Tide
May 9, 2010

Like a fickle tide that swoops in to kiss the shore, I find myself seven years into the great journey of Motherhood. 

As a wave must retreat back into the swirl of its own currents, I value time to pull back and take the long view of my journey. I sit and watch the glisten of sun on the harbor, watch the trees submit to the playful breeze, listen to birds and cars driving by, and to people on walks outside the open window. What can be better than this to a mother whose days are filled up with the beautiful and arduous task of caring for her family? Time alone, but filled up at the same time. Kids and husband occupied at a Farmer's Market down the block, leaving me with uninterrupted time to reflect.

Picasso painted Guernica. He also needed to step away now and then to consider the strokes of his brush and perhaps marvel with satisfaction (or criticism) at what he was creating. It is this motherhood two-step I am so taken with. The ability and necessity to be gently aware in the moment of both the brush strokes and the larger work. Too much on one or the other and you lose the purpose and meaning of the Work itself. 

Who has stopped to think about the snapping cameras and smart phones at a child's play at school? Are we in the moment or just obsessed with creating it, staging it, capturing it, framing it, documenting it? Are we encouraging people to grow up performing to cameras or sharing experiences with people? If we all become documentarians of our lives what are we leading but a life outside the flow of constantly gathering experiences rather than merely living them? 

Both are necessary. Looking back on a past event that warms the heart is a tonic in the ever-changing, too often disheartening world. There is certainly a pull to cherish memories but not to the exclusion of living. I would rather have a life that resembles a mosaic constantly on display, than a scrapbook closed and sitting on a shelf. 

As a writer I am caught in the push-pull because of the writer's mindset of pulling in all the grist of life's experience only to experience the need to churn it out again in some form or another. It's a way of being that's so innate to me that it feels only marginally like a choice. So I am often on the edge of what's happening around me and must resist the auto-pilot reflex to accumulate experience rather than live it.

Perhaps this is why so many artists are drawn to the beauty of nature. It pulls us out of our intense need to create. Even if we have not dedicated our lives to studying it in our art, a life of letters tapped out on a keyboard in Key West or overlooking the Annapolis harbor is preferable to a dark room somewhere (yet that's also one of the best parts of being a writer, that it is the ultimate portable, mobile profession). 

The kids will be back soon, the house will fill with energy that itself is a form of meditation in its all-encompassingness. 

The river is outside the windows and I remember the currents of life, the unchanging give and take of nature. I am a wave swelling, waiting to break and crash back onto the frenzied shore of my daughters' daily lives. Sometimes I find rocks smoothed over with my good mothering; other times a sunlit shell shimmering like a jewel, and at yet other moments I find myself on jagged edges and try to negotiate them fluidly as my mother essence tells me to. Thank goodness for the unquestionable reliance I have on those instincts. 

At sea, with the long view, I am flowing water watching the beach. As it has forever, it awaits my return in an almost cavalier way -- the way that only the innate assurance of symbiosis** can create. I picture my girls on that shore, as that shore. There is no goodbye for the ocean and the shore. We are just interlocking parts of one organism. 

I want to give my daughters the steadiness to know it's okay to pull away from the love you have, to nurture and nourish and honor  and search for your own unique essence; and that if you take time to do so, your waves will swell even more. As a result what you have to give will be even more sublimely, tumultuously, uniquely YOU when it reaches the shores of those to whom you offer up your self, your friendship, your love.

**The definition of symbiosis is in flux, and the term has been applied to a wide range of biological interactions. The symbiotic relationship may be categorized as mutualistic, commensal, orparasitic in nature.[3][4] Others define it more narrowly, as only those relationships from which both organisms benefit, in which case it would be synonymous with mutualism. (Wikipedia, 2010).

The Sands of Time & Renewals.

In the spirit of a mandala, my old blog on Blogsome, The Maternal Mandala, has been de-activated. In the spirit of a busy mother, I only found this out a few minutes ago -- the blog has been "gone" since Dec of 2011. Funny...surprising...not surprising, all at once. 

How appropriate to begin, again, here -- putting the pieces back together from what I can find and then forging forward. No loss we experience is not also a gain, right?

Cheers!