finding things

as november came and went, i found that while the boys were at school i was spending too much time in bed. missing my mother. wondering what to do. ignoring laundry. watching dust bunnies come to life in the corners of the room. counting the minutes until i went to pick them up.

as much as i was blue, i knew i wasn't deeply depressed as i craved life too much. but i found myself lonely.  and that this loneliness was interfering with my ebb and flow of life; the how of what i wrote, and how i perceived things;  i found that my desire for a colorful life was slowly fading into forgotten and flimsy cardboard boxes. and i could see it all unfolding:

i was alice through the looking glass -an aging alice, and my wrinkles were the dancing lines of the jabberwocky; and it was there i saw that no matter what i did, one day my bones would be dust and the imprints i made on this earth would blow away with the wind.

so i knew that i needed more human interaction. the face to face kind, the laugh until your belly hurt kind, the talk too much and then sit next to each other in silence kind. but los angeles, with all of its millions of people, can be just as lonely as an empty desert plain, so it became clear to me, i would have to go out, push myself up off the couch, ease myself up out of bed and go find humanity.

(to be continued on monday, i have boys to wake up and get out of the house for school)

xxoo

the house that jack built

"A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you."
-Alice Munro

(I found this gem, over here via elphantine)

guest post today. The Growing on Rose Runs Wild

Some of you may know that I love to write. I love to write. And I love to take photos, loads of photos. SO when Nicole asked me to guest post on her blog, RoseRunsWild, I was over the moon! Yet another chance to write, and play with photographs!

My post is one in a series on growing up, growing older, and growing on. It is called the Growing, and I have found that all the wonderful woman who have contributed thus far to the series have unique and beautiful voices. I would of course LOVE it if you clicked through to my post here, but especially encourage you to check out the other voices there as well. (including Nicole's very awesome posts !)

As always, let me know what you think. xxoo

mothering, a round, full circle

in a round.
in a circle.
i come back around
to my childhood,
to my home,
looping back,
to the beginning,
to the place where my mother's illness grew.
where the ALS* spread slowly,
taking her body away from her,
taking her away from us.

like the seasons that circle us,
where the cycles encircle us.
round, i spin back
and also forward,
dusting away the thick motes of memory
and the holding pool of hope in my hand.

so i come back,
back around, in a circle,
walking through my childhood
my home. circling around in my mother's thoughts.
circling around death
 and life.

and the strength of my children.
and the strength in my children,
circles, back around,
back around, from my mom to me.
a circle, round, holding me
in.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

*ALS is also known in the states as Lou Gehrig's Disease, however abroad it is know as MND (Motor Neuron Disease). There were many visits to Colorado last summer and fall as my mother was dying from ALS. She died this past November of 2012. This is my first visit to Denver since her death. So in this trip, I am very much thinking of her.  

linking in with Lou for her Nature in the Home Series. 

hope you all are well. xxoo

midweek messiness and lives lived, loved.

When I think of the last 7 days I feel exhausted. I walked into last week tired. and very whiny. I felt the full load of end of school year busy making,  the field trips, and sick children.  My house, cluttered with projects brought home from school and the never ending frustration with the last bits of homework battles. I was tired. messy beyond compare.  

But then after Friday, I wasn't sure what to feel.  My whining and exhaustion were put into focus; messiness mattered not, loving the boys to bits did. 

resilience, hope

and in what we thought were the confines of our humanity, there is hope, there is resilience;
there is a stretching out across the continents, through puddles of blue, and oceans of despair,
hands held together by the common thread of deep love for all of humanity, for all of our children's sake.

we keep our little rafts afloat. we refuse to sink. we refuse to stoop to base convictions that evil should be met with evil and violence met with violence. we meet way out in our tiny little basin of stars, and agree, that as long as we are camping out here on this planet, this little corner, this eternal turning towards the sun and revolving through the ages, we will hold each other accountable to do better.

we will change our tattered pages of history. we will sew down the frayed edges, mend broken spirits and rethread a new story in this quilted milky way of stars.

thank you, every single last one of you, who kept watch in your hearts with me this weekend. who said a kind word on my blog, or hugged their children a bit closer.  thank you, thank you for handing a stranger a look of hope on the street, or offering to carry someone's worries for them.  thank you for your random acts of love and the beautiful dance you create as you step through your day.

thank you for keeping a light on in your hearts, and in your home. xxoo

old soul reads

We flew to the east coast today. It was a hurried blue blur of folding, fetching, cleaning and packing before we left early, early to catch our 6am flight out of LAX. Exhausted beyond belief but enjoying the boys' in flight preoccupations I put to use my small fraction of time and read, from cover to cover, the book "Kira, Kira" by Cynthia Kadohata. The prose was simple yet lyrical and it was not a surprise to me that the short but intense read won a Newberry. Perhaps it was because I was exhausted. Perhaps because I have suffered loss in recent months. Perhaps because I know how much my mother would have loved this novel. Perhaps. However this 'perhaps' is written, it's achingly beautiful prose had me weeping openly on the plane for the last 1/4 of the book. This small moment in time left me reflecting on how we, as a society, pass through grief, bury our loved ones, put to rest our dreams.

ripple effect :: smile

art, the humanities, poetry, science, physics, learning, gifted teachers, mentors, community. If there is anything that this last week's events has shown me is that we need more of the aforementioned. we just do.

wilderness first aid kit for the soul

midweek messiness, grateful lists and flowery-goodness come a little late this week.  life is busy with the balancing act of boys back at school, homework, dogs, a broken washing machine and the ever classic oven door handle falling apart. At first I thought the oven door handle was the least of my problems until I tried to bake something actually in the oven. well guess what? you need a handle to open and close the oven door! sigh. it feels like our home is perched precariously up on a balance beam, there are some moments we have just the right amount of time to play and work and do all the things that need to get done; & other days, most days, even some years, it feels as if we are slogging up hill through the mud in the pouring rain, only to find out we have carried our coals to Newcastle and our oven door is broken. 

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. 

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...

Yosemite: The Legacy of Our Mothers, Of Our Fathers

The Legacy of My Mom & the Legacy of John Muir

I spent the last 6 days in Yosemite National Park. To know me, is to know that much of my life is a cause & effect from my upbringing. For example, I love the outdoors (much thanks to my dad) but sometimes I despair when things don't go as planned (much thanks to my mom).

However this trip, chaperoning 7th graders on a science field trip to Yosemite, was different.

It was very much a trip that was suited. just. for. me....a place beyond the reach of my father and my mother.  It didn't matter, despite the dire beginnings when the bus we were all on, blew a tire; and then, after finally getting back on the road with the very restless teens, the bus overheated. We made it anyway. We arrived at our destination. Late & tired; restless from having been on the road for more than 12hours. We made it. Somehow, we knew as a collective group, that it was going to be okay. That the bumps wouldn't break our time here.

On this trip I could feel the weight of this past year lift a bit from the tiny place I have it trapped. Here in this place, I could feel the legacy of my mom, the one she didn't leave for me, the time stolen from us when she died from ALS, the guilt I feel for not being a better daughter, the daughter she had hoped for and imagined, the weight of this unwritten legacy, it lifted, just a bit, allowing me to creep out a bit from my mental hibernation and play in the snow.

I know this blog is about something other than the Outdoors, but this past week has been so profound that I find it difficult to not share it here on this conjured notebook of my life.

Yosemite.

With every crunching, squished snow step crackling in the silence of a dark and cold morning I felt Life breathing. A gift of being that unfolded: A taking apart and refolding of an origami square. Here in this place I was allowed to step from the threshold of my day-to-day life into the Life of living in the exact Moment.It was not a moment of Carpe Diem trapped in its own juggernaut; instead, this week was a compressed Love, tightly bottled up then shattered across the valleys, meadows and mountains of this wonder, falling across this space, carved out of this rocky place we inhabit.

Yosemite.

I must confess, in the beginning, I entered the week with trepidation and a slice of worry. In November and early December I had been excited for the trip. Then suddenly, after the Holidays I became daunted: Leaving behind the tasks and chores and the children I walk with in my every day had me unexpectedly fretting. I didn't want to leave my cup of coffee, my list of things to do, my younger two boys, N and the pups.

Yet somehow I did.

Not to mislead you about who I am, for I do so love to feel Life and all her intensity. But Life for me this past year HAS been Intense.  It was just a year ago when we really began to worry about Mom. A worry that was a slipping away of rocks into a tumbling of fear. The worry that was a whispering mountain, looming over us, over me, judging and wondering. What. What. What has come over Mom.  

In the week before I left on the trip, I let the fears of the past take over. I was afraid of being Exhausted.  Again. Drained. Again.
I worried I would see things and hear things that I wouldn't be able to fix. I was afraid of further breaking a bone that was not even set.  I was afraid that something would fall apart and it would be my fault. Again.
Yet.
Yet, Life and her taught string, the woven thread that is connected between our heart and our mind, pulled me through.  There, awash in the hushed winter, every step, each sound and small movement echoed the pattern of my own soul.
Though my heart, still broken from my mom's passing, my heart could feel my Mother brushing across the Mountains.

. 

In the Wind, dusting dry snow across the meadow, and pulling the hair across my face, I could feel my Mom, tucking my unruly short crop behind my ear.

My Mom was there, my Mom, who never much liked the mountains (she preferred the ocean, the salt, the crashing of waves), she was there threading the string through the eye of the needle, helping me sew up my loss in my own Way.  My Mom was there: Letting go of what she wished I could have been and what she had dreamed for me to be. I felt safe there in the shadow of the mountains to be all that my Mom had not wanted in a daughter and felt safe to accept the fact that she loved me nonetheless.

I felt safe there, in those looming rocks and towering mountains.  I felt safe there to be just the daughter I was; to be just the daughter, the friend, the mother that I am.

I felt my heart knitting up my darkest sadness and my largest loss.  Every single beat of my breath seemed to drum inside the caverns of my soul and the largeness of Yosemite stuffed my heart.

The largeness of Yosemite filled my heart up
with the snowballs
and laughter of the teens I was with.

Their silliness,
and invincibleness,
and their disregard for tomorrow seemed to watch over me.

Those young teens,
not quite past their 13th year,
those teens and their love of life
and their trust that things will
somehow
just. work. out.

Yosemite.

.

Yosemite cracked open the empty remains of my grief and filled it up.

Filled it up again
with the stories of the friends I made,

with unexpected cups of coffee,

and with lively lovely meals made with care.

Yosemite etched my heart with her own story, her own lines, her own patterns.


Something that I learned on this trip is that the preservation of this valley and the existence of this place as a national park is largely due to the man John Muir. His inner being was marked by Yosemite's beauty, by the bounty of Nature herself, and he fought desperately to make sure THIS was here for us (for me!) to enjoy.

I am sure Mr. Muir did not necessarily envision that today over 4 million people would visit the park every year. But he did have a vision. A vision where Nature invites us in and lets us stay for as long as we need or are able.

I have also come to understand, through the brief understanding I have of his life, and the paltry quotes of his writing I have read during this past week, that he did in fact hope that this place would, one day, influence those who came here for the better.

Among his working and dreaming John Muir wrote, "I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."

When you read his quotes and learn a  little about this man you realize that the course of American history has been changed, for the better, by him. You can taste his passion for Yosemite, his passion for nature and his passion to preserve the beauty that exists there. You remember that there are those who so blindly believe that they can change the way things are, that they actually do just that.  You remember MLK and Gandhi and Desmund Tutu. You remember those who walked before us and left us a legacy. A legacy of caring deeply for our life and the way we live it.

I hope that I keep a bit of this place, a bit of this legacy inside me. A bit of these stolen moments. A smidgen of the peace I felt at night, knowing that I lived the day to the best of who I am. 

Knowing that for now, for this, I have found a quiet peace.

Inspiration: Follow Your Heart

These words are so tiny.

So very tiny are these words (on this URL image I copied from Pinterest), that you HAVE to almost squint to see them.

However, there is a way these words actual whisper, and it seems properly appropriate to have the words so very tiny, the lettering awash in the background. It is appropriate because the soul and the heart are delicate things. Sometimes they need just a a gentle text, flapping every gently at the door of your self, of who you are.

Tapping and echoing against your heart; whispering "follow. follow. follow. follow."


Hoping that for today, that you follow where ever your heart leads you.

XXOO

words to carry....

“It’s not what you look at that matters.
It’s what you see.”

henry david thoreau