i believe in the unrelenting poetry of life

i believe in the unrelenting poetry of life.
of the deep depths of science.
of the morning bird that calls out to her mate in the evening, shrill and beautiful against the dusky sky.
I believe that Death comes uncalled for and unmade for.
                      robbing beds of lovers and cribs rocked in grief.

i believe in the unrelenting poetry of life. 
of promises never filled forgiven,
of all thing made anew when under clean sheets hung to dry out on the line in the midsummer sun.
of eyes closed, lashes filled with the motes of memory, drawing deep in sleep.

i believe in boken hearts & Newton & Einstein & Darwin & Louis Leaky,
in the darkest depth of black holes and in an earth not formed yesterday,
but in nanoseconds of a moment billions upon billions of years ago
in a collapsing clap off the shoulders of God.

I believe in the unrelenting poetry of life.

happy equinox, happy easter, JOYEUSES PÂQUES, happy, happy day to everyone. xxoo


PS. this one may look innocent, however, she is on the hunt right now for easter eggs to devour before the boys get a chance to even look. it is her one, once a year fault. her brother however, who is often naughty, still has horrid gas from the chocolate covered almonds he ate earlier in the week. but that, for him, is par for the course. 

13/52

 

there is an exhaustion you have at the end of a day well spent. 

           an exhaustion in the quietness of your body when every single molecule has been pushed 

           and pulled and exercised. 

           there is a quiet that comes in the knowing that at the end of the day, it has been well spent.

           well spent in the sun. 

           well spent mucking up the sand.

           well spent freezing your toes in not quite warm, but ever so inviting water. 

well spent shivering under a towel waiting for the cocoa that you hoped was packed into a thermos, into a bag, onto the beach; cocoa in a thermos, tight lidded and steaming, waiting to be drunk. 

          an exhaustion from well spent time 

          chasing birds and and the trails of snail sand foam across the crunching crushed stones of 

                           a thousand waves. 

making yourself incredibly happy...or not

I wonder about all sorts of happiness. I wonder what brings me joy & what brings others bliss. I wonder what makes me happy now & what will make me happy tomorrow. I am sure that when I was younger, I knew happiness: pure light filled happiness that just fed my soul and grew my ego.

Now that I am older, I have certainly not put away my childish things but I understand better, from a constructive, adult-ish point of view, that there are layers of happiness out there.

Layers as lovely as an iced cake for your birthday & layers of joy from the rotting compost of sorrow, decomposing, nurturing and fertilizing a better tomorrow.

My children are mixed into those layers. The layers of icing on the cake and the composting pile in the backyard. They mix into my own happiness. They mix into my soul and shake all those clearly defined borders of who I am and where I am going.  I know for certain they have a list of what would make them happy.
It is long, especially when you

midweek messiness & flowers to boot

life is often the dance of the stitch in between the thread of the needle and the cloth that binds it. that small space that closes down on the looping string and the scrubbed patch of cotton. the hollow embroidery & the test of the needle against your skin. 

life fills me up messy some days. even when the stitch is tight and the the day is all mended. life means messy. & beautiful. acrid. unclear. sweet. gooey. loving. unkind. passionate. dull. I keep searching for all the ways that I am supposed to make myself work a bit better. make life a bit neater. fix wounds and tie shoelaces and unlock the secrets shelved in

poetic pause :: memories

& i made memories. memories of when they slept in unmade beds. they slept. deep. in dreams. 

& they played at our feet. slipping their fingers in and out of the stems of grass. slowly. tearing each one apart. blowing on dandelions blossomed in the heat. 

gratitude monday

grateful this monday morning for blossoming flowers everywhere.

grateful for boys sleeping in late.

ever so grateful for a bit of quiet time that is not scraped out in between the busy busy business of the boys schooling and errands and running back and forth.

grateful for blue skies and foggy gray ones.

grateful for family and friends.

grateful for all that I am learning and all the searching I am doing while hugging this life I am living.

grateful for two weeks of holiday that will have moments of slowness but go by ever so fast.

just grateful to be grateful.




where is your gratefulness leading you this week? hopefully is adorned and beloved. xxoo

sunday forward into the week :: stills

sunday. morning. 

fog slowly peeling back the blue in the sky letting dapples of sun adorn the mountains across the bay. 

heart. longing.

lazy holiday and star smattered nights. inside tents. watching our cheeks blow our breathe across the remnants of the winter air. uncurling toes tight in covers. 

we are tumbling headlong into the spring holiday. TWO whole weeks of luxiurious freedom that will seem shorter than a baby sneeze; then it will be over with & the boys back into the last round of school before summer. I know it is just three months into the year, but with the mention of the holidays ahead & summer somehow in sight, we seem to have already had such. a very. full year.  

for that i feel blessed & so grateful.  

here are some stills from the past week & this weekend. we live with some wild & unfettered boys at times, so i am glad to capture a growl or two (ahem the youngest in this first photo on the right), but i also love all sweetness of moments caught with some of their younger friends. 

Have you been very mindful this March? I have been trying to make myself ever so more mindful of my taking in and putting out. but mindfulness is a day to day experience, so naturally i falter, almost all the time.  however, i hope when i am able to look back on today, i will actually see that i was able to sketch out a wee bit of meaning in these days of now. 

hope you had loveliest of weekends. 

xxoo

12/52 portraits

1.oldest
2.youngest
3.middle

letting their eyes explain everything.

The week in review. So hard to chose, but here are some I so adore from last week: this babybum; so love little smith; these cuteness punkypoutysmiles; and of course who can resist this babywonder?; & this wee smile?; and this one really makes my heartsquishy -really who can resist all those scribbles? just too much.

hope you are enjoying Jodi's series as much as I am. xo
             
P.S. couldn't resist adding the portrait of our beloved & deranged dog, Mudge. letsleepingdogslie, i say. xxoo

gratitude for a monday on a friday.

today i am so so grateful for clean sheets that wrap you up in the wondrous outside smells of spring, but still keep you warm in the middle of the night when the air is crisp and cool. 

grateful for a sunday morning brunch. life is very busy, sometimes even more so on weekends, so i am so glad when we can take a moment and enjoy, us, as a family, in the middle of all the busy, hectic ways we fill up our lives with on the weekend....

 I am so grateful for nature's art and

medium+happy=

for me, today, finding happy is all about finding my happy medium. not all things are perfect all the time, but if i can find a little balance of this & that; get a little perspective on the here & now; close my eyes & let go of things behind me, then i think i will have found my happy medium...for today anyway. 

how are you finding your own little slice of happy? xo

ps. this is a blog hop...so link up your slice of happy and join the happiness all around! 

flowers for me. a silly poem for thee.

Oh these flowers are for me; 

just to share them here with thee!

and...

 I will like them in this room. 

I will like them when they bloom... 

...I will like them here or there.

 I will like them anywhere!

I will like these these tulips, oh so true.

 I will like them! thank you Lou!

mid-week MESSINESS & notes under pillows

Just to warn you. It is messy in here. If you are stopping over for a cup of tea or coffee or even a glass of wine, please note, it is INCREDIBLY messy, so perhaps it is best that you don't stop by -at least for today anyway.  We have a mid-week messiness of extraordinary proportions going on here.  Not just the usual messiness that raising three boys entails, it is the I am exhausted and slammed and can't get anything done type of messy; let's blame it on the time-change, spring-foward ridiculousness, type of messy.  Laundry needs fixing. AND folding. AND finding. I swear the smell from under the couch is someone's sock, not a leftover food fragment.  The smell is too pungent to ignore, but ignore it, I do! just. out. of. spite.

Doggie fur is floating on the floor, on the couch, on my clothes (it is spring you know...my four-legged friends are shedding at a rapid rate these days). All this fur floats its way up, fighting with the dust motes for space amongst the cobwebs littering the corner's of our ceiling

Even my sweet old ficus is a wee bit neglected. She sits outside on our front porch collecting dust & goo & particles of I don't know what.  I moved her in front of our window so I would remember her.  She is currently pressing herself up against the screen asking for some water.  However, I know she is not last on my list...

Because, of course, there are the Dishes.

poetic pause :: street.

i tiptoe past where the jetties lay. looking for the stairs. whispering though the lines that are no longer drawn in the sand. lines that jigsaw, standing imprinted in. imprinted into the pavement.

i ice skate. ice skate on past the concrete that rushes past my bare toed sandals.

spring organizing & editing & creating....

Spring! is almost here and with it comes so many ways in which we unfurl our winter coats, shake the grey skies from our souls and listen more to our earth and the brown in our gardens calling to be greened. 

I need to spring clean. organize. edit. re-arrange.  Really. I do. However, more importantly these days, is not only the cleaning and the scraping and the editing that needs to happen, but I often need to remember what comes out in moments of creativity. Not all of it needs to be thrown out with the bathwater in this busy time of change.  Sometimes, what we say, or perhaps what we write or create, is all crap, which does need to be disregarded; yet other times, we have insight that is well, actually insightful, & perhaps most insightful for our very own self.
         For example:

I wrote a post, which was actually a series of posts, almost two weeks ago, called "the best blogging bootcamp advice for beginners." I thought it was genius. well not pure genius, but it was something I needed to write & then I added pictures to the words to engage the reader a bit more, you can click on the links above to see the actual posts. However, almost two weeks later, and just days before the equinox, which is true spring, I urgently need to remember these words again. SO I write them here, again mostly for me, with a few added words of advice, probably just for me, but perhaps you may like it as well...

the best blogging bootcamp advice for beginners is...

lazy Sunday day

sunday.

I am planning on not arguing with the boys today. Instead I will be folding laundry, unplugging for a bit and working on some neglected projects. AND eating loads of pancakes with the whole merry brood. Loads of pancakes.
Hope you are planning a lazy moment or two....

xxoo

11/52

11/52
Sweet Middle Child: you love talking, even when you are on the bus, feeling a tad green from motion sickness.

Adored Oldest: you love, love, love that dog. Who knew that the most annoying and slightly deranged dog in the world could be one of the most beloved in all the world?

The Youngest & Last, Never the Least: you just love to draw and create. When ever the mood strikes you, you will stop what you are doing and just start "art-ing around."

                                                              love these boys so.

 Right now, I have more than a smidgen of a crush on these these portraits from last week. I heart them:
Something so sweet and lovely from the blog, She Had Us At Hello. 
This one, so quiet & still from Rebecca Tollefsen's blog. 
And the absolute cuteness in this portrait just melted my heart.

& of course there is Jodi, who's portraits inspire so many. 

hope your weekend is lovely. xxoo

notes of a field trip

In and around town: a visit to the Theater with G's class. 

I took some notes...visual notes of sorts.  

A lovely bus ride. We sang some songs to distract ourselves from the tedious nature of the ride. It felt long as we had a bit of a stop on the route and everyone was anxious to get there.  

G was feeling a little sick after the ride though. Part of it was anticipation, part of it was feeling jittery about it all, he loves the theater and all its excitement, but as I said, the bus ride felt long. Had to sneak in some crackers & a bit of cheese before we went into the Theater, but there was no time for a proper snack. We had arrived just in time.  

The Theater. The children were bouncing with excitement, hardly able to contain themselves before they were ushered into the theater itself. The children had met several of the performers earlier in the week as they had done a class visit to show the children their instruments and talk about their passion for music. During the show, as he snuggled up against me, G whispered to me that he wanted to learn how to play the Double Bass. He had simply fallen in love with it.  When the musicians came out after the performance, he was right there, soaking in all he could. His desire to learn to play was so very clear. 

 However, he may need to start with the Cello first as I am pretty sure that is where you have to start when you are his age. I don't think the Double Bass comes in G's size.

I think it would be lovely for him to learn how to play an instrument, really good for him in so many ways, but he has an adventurer's heart so I wonder if he will be able to commit to it in the long term.  I never learned how to play an instrument, though I have often wished I had.

Sometimes I think our vision of greener  pastures for our own children is often not what they are envisioning at all, so I want to tread lightly in this area.

The trip was lovely and joyful. I always love to see how the teachers and the students interact with each other. I have such a great admiration for teachers. I love working with children, but I fear if I was an actual teacher, we would get nothing done. I would spend our classroom days reading them stories, making up games, learning to paint with our toes and building boats and things to float in streams. Then I would be sacked for ill-preparing the children for the future and poor classroom management skills.  Sigh.

xo

grabbing on to spring

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It was cool last night, and a gentle fog rolled into the neighborhood up from the ocean. It made the earth not quite in focus, not quite clear. The younger two ran outside. G tried to capture it on the camera, but the fog was a bit elusive and being difficult. I then took some photos in our back yard before it was time for dinner and to be in for the night. 

Even though it feels like spring is oh so difficult to define out here, I know it is coming. The light lasts longer and the earth is warmer. No need for the heaviest of blankets in our bedrooms. No need to wear fleece hats on the way to school. However, coffee still steams from mugs in the early morning mists though; and there is a quiet that still exists in our house that will not be here once school is out for spring vacation. Though I love change, I love holding onto this undefined time. I love being here in this unclear boundary of a season, when the season is actually in the midst of change.  It is so like the fog from last night: heavy and cool, elusive to define. There is such a clear demarkation between summer and winter; you can hardly confuse the two -but spring and autumn, they both, are a whole different sort of game. They often lay still and quiet, not quite ready to define one from the other. Perhaps that is why I embrace them oh so much.  Both Spring & Autumn resist definition, both embrace the change and defy it at the same time. 

I add this image for the end of this little text because this IS SO clearly spring. Yellow comes alive in such a different way than in the Fall.  Life is brightened by the touch of daffodils and forsythia that deck walkways and doorsteps. I love the undefined parts, but I also adore the parts that trumpet REbirth and REnewal as well. 

what parts do you loathe and/or love about the changing of the seasons?

                                                                                                                xo

joining in with Lou, who inspires me to think about Nature, and inspires me to bring more green into my home.  What joy! xxoo

gratitude monday

These Clouds.

I am so grateful for these clouds that built up across the horizon this past week. They came tumbling over the Santa Monica Mountains and made the boys and I stop in our tracks on the way to school. They were breathtaking. My sorry excuse for a camera does them no justice.

These Palm Trees.

I am so grateful for these Palm Trees. I was out for a morning jaunt and there they were. They reminded me of living, living here close to the sea and how one grows over time. I was grateful for their tall beauty against the bright blue sky.

This Kitchen.

I am so so very grateful for this kitchen. It is where one of my dearest friends makes me tea, makes me lunch, chats with me about her life, my life. So grateful for the sitting and the drinking and the listening and chatting. 

This Teal Blue House. 

It makes me grateful for choices and non-conformity. It is in our neighborhood and at first I was shocked when it was recently painted this color. Now I think, wow, that is so cheery. Who ever owns this house OWNS their LOVE of color. It makes me so very grateful for boldness and bravery.

The Process of Writing and Creating. 
I am grateful for it. Somedays I want to runaway from myself, from the doldrums, from the ho-hums, from life in all of its back-aching living. And yet, when I sit down to write or draw, no matter whether is is fruitful or anything of quality, I am brought back to a centered place, back to my own interior quiet.  

What are you grateful for this week? xo

small reflection to start the week

Sunday is always a nice day to slow down. wear jammies, slouch around a bit. let your cup of coffee get cold, then make some more, just so you can let it get cold again. play board games with the kids and then start the whole thing over again. all over again: jammies. slouch. coffee. make more. play with kids. repeat.
if you can scratch out a few moments to just listen to all the sounds outside, the birds, the rushing sound of a car splashing through puddles, dogs barking off in the distance, all the while finding a second to gulp your coffee up while it is still hot, well, I think that would make it just so.

This week I am hoping to be a bit more mindful of the quiet and the loud. mindful of our family and the way we can create a bit more space for being together, even when we are at our separate corners of our (very tiny) house. I will try to be mindful of the quiet amidst all this chaos around me -some days it is just so hard to do. Though there are times I am not quite as present as I would like to be, I AM hoping to be a bit more mindful...maybe even mindful enough to: listen in on the quiet, gulp down some coffee while its still hot, all the while enjoying every second the boys are very loud, and very inside the house.

10/52 portraits of the boys in 2013

10/52 

Youngest: You sat with me everyday after school to work on your reading. I love listening to you try to sound things out and I treasure this little ritual that has unexpectedly unfolded. 

 Middle: You have your best friend over. You two are like peas in a pod and I love that you have a close friend that you can depend on. I can see that you are so very happy by the light dancing in your eyes. 

Oldest: Closer and closer everyday to running off to college.  Even though it is 5+ years away, every time I turn around you are doing something more grown-up and more responsible. Today, you came home and made your own egg & toast sandwich for snack. Perhaps next week you can start doing your own laundry?

Looking through the collection of lovely posts over at Jodi's blog, it is really hard to pick one or two. However, here are some of my favorites from last week: 

Amanda's daughter on the blog Ellieboo.  She is so intent on her task. I thought her freckles and her painted fingernails were just so perfect.

Love the way the light frames these sweet faces on Blog a la Cart. 

AND I love these black and white portraits on Rachel's blog Tea With Lucy. 

xo

thoughts from the day

It is well after midnight as I write this. Last few days have been gray & cool. There was a smattering, spritzing sprinkles this morning and now the quiet drips and tinkering of rain splattering here and there across our roof lull my soul a bit. I have been restless these past hours. Struggling to center myself amidst the boys spring-time distraction. Their bodies want to play and move, while all I want is for them to sit still for 5 more minutes and finish their work, finish their supper, finish their chores, complete a task. As I lie here, I remember these spring days haunted me when I was younger. I too wanted to dash across yards, lie in the warming sun, shed my shoes and unwrap myself from the grips of winter.

There was a stretch there that every afternoon I came home from school I would tell my father I had no homework, then I would skip on out to play. After dinner, I would suddenly "remember." Then I would be up late, past everyone's bedtime finishing, or even worse, not getting it done at all and getting in trouble, again. In this late quiet, I wonder, "what was I thinking?" or perhaps more appropriately, "What were my parent's thinking?" I don't have the answers to that, I am sure my father wouldn't remember enough to let me know why they let me do this for months, years on end in springtime, he was very busy. And my mom has passed so I can't ask her. She had her own shop way back then, so perhaps she wasn't paying attention much to my school work either, except when my grades came home.

I share this as I smile. I KNOW my boys perhaps more than they think I know them. We are cut of the same cloth, taken down from the same strip of sky, shaken out of the rippling milky way together.

 I just wish I could convey better to them, that work and play CAN go hand in hand. And if you get your work done first, it will make the play all that more delightful.

wandering about in west L.A.

wandering about ocean park blvd. in between volunteer spots at the boys schools. i was hungry & a bit blue. I needed to nourish myself. i have passed this lovely eatery many times and have never indulged in something for myself. a dear friend brought us food from here when my mom passed so when i wandered by, today seemed just the day to go in.

right there, that was my seat, close enough to the window so that I had lovely light, but tucked away from traffic so i could focus on eating, not people watching. i didn't know it when i took the photo, but it was waiting for me. i had forgotten how nice it was just. to. sit. & be. i hadn't been quiet with myself for a while. i did play peek-a-boo with a cutie-patotie almost big four year old. but i had oodles of time to just focus on this:

my belly said, "ahhhhhhhhh." my soul sighed relief. i was finally ready to go back out into the real world. filled up.

Thyme Cafe & Market in Santa Monica.