rhythms
March 2, 2016 § 4 Comments
Normal is relative, especially as the seasons change. Dramatic changes in temperature and seasonal colds have created little ripples in our week. As one person heals, another becomes unwell; the patterns of care and caring changing to accommodate shifts in need.
We’re a little tired, overextended, impatient and self-centered. Discomfort does this, it draws us further inside ourselves while exaggerating our perceptions. Inconvenience becomes insurmountable against the scale of ease.
This week I’ve been softening into silence. Moving beyond my strength and relaxing my expectations.
I layer up and force myself, bracing against the wind, to walk our dog; letting the air brush away the germs that seem to follow me. I let the crisp air numb the skin now tender to the touch while burrowing my breath against my scarf.
Warm tea and hot coffee, a new book and an unplanned nap ease the work of extra laundry and interrupted sleep.
I’ve almost become accustomed to this new rhythm of slower paces, but I’m eager for sunshine and wellness. A quicker step and clearer head.
feeling the way
February 17, 2016 § 5 Comments
Last week’s worries were a field of noise. Uncertainties and anxieties that screamed at private insecurities and emotional decisions. It seemed every corner of our family’s days were pulling at my attention for big answers.
Rather than view what wasn’t working from a perspective of need; I decided to begin from a mindset that informed an appreciation for what was possible. I listed what was going well and looked at the good for clues.
Then, borrowing a page from Danielle La Porte’s course work, I asked my loved one’s how they wanted to feel and started mapping the shortest route there.
Passion and joy, purpose and value are ideas our children understand without hesitation; uninhibited truth with an indulgent attention to inspiration. They speak in grand certainties that adults too often caution with worst case scenarios.
So, we dreamed big. Together. Out loud.
I wrote down needs like a grocery list and incorporated requests into an agenda no more complicated than school day class schedules.
Rather than working towards good, we began from someplace better and let that energy create a change that stuck to our actions.
the condition of loving
February 8, 2016 § 7 Comments
This summer, in anticipation of our move, I sorted the long procrastinated corners of cluttered shoeboxes, unmarked envelopes, and half-finished family albums for photographs; gathering keepsakes more intentionally into a single box of memories. Images of my childhood and my children’s haphazardly overlapping in a beautiful chaos of sentiment.
As we settle into our new home, I have come to visit these images regularly; a practice that speaks love and connects me more tenderly to the girl I was and the woman I have become. It is an indulgence of time I cherish, meditative and nourishing to my soul. In these moments, I am at once both daughter and mother. More myself and less of myself.
Today my heart rested on a rare image of my father and I. It is the way I most remember loving him; completely and effervescently, eagerly and devotedly. Without pretense or hesitation, with blind trust and unconditional faith.
For those who know me best, it is a relationship complicated by the contradiction of emotions and experience. We are broken and bound by imperfect love.
My mother tells me stories of how my father loved me, but I am most torn by what I do not remember. I have no memory of my father holding me or the sound of his voice forming words of love or praise, encouragement or pride. There is grief in this knowing even as there is peace in his absence, it is no more and no less than the truth between us.
My father is a faded reminder, not of his love, but of my own; paper that holds crisp the condition of loving.
Whatever disappointment may have once accompanied my memories, there is now only a mindfulness for the preciousness of love and the richness of distributing it enthusiastically to those I love least they live unaware of their worth.
I let the love I wish for the girl in those yellowed photographs illuminate the love I give my own children, unconditionally.
book ’em
February 2, 2016 § 9 Comments
On Sunday I escaped the loosely configured routine of our typical Sunday to explore our new public library with both children. It was a homecoming of sorts, a happy reunion of lost afternoons; memories of old experiences in an unfolding moment of discovery.
For the past nine years we had lived in an unincorporated neighborhood, where the cost of joining our local library was beyond the limitations of our budget – with one exception. On a singular occasion, several years past, we invested our holiday savings into twelve months of indulgence; scooping piles of books into heavy bags, weekly, to fill endless hours of adventure.
At the conclusion of that year, we returned to supplementing our personal library with our children’s school libraries, friendly exchanges, school book sales, and e-readers. Still, we reminisced the luxury of squandering afternoons among shelves of unread stories. The liberty of endless titles.
Frequently, as our errands lead us past the grandness of a building to which we so fleetingly belonged, we would find ourselves lost to sentimental musings of that year among her walls. We resigned ourselves to contentment with the library we built at home.
Books gifted from family friends, keepsakes of my husband’s and my own childhoods, beloved series of our children’s early favorites and required school readings endlessly stacked and reorganized with great affection.
Here, in our new community, it took me too long to consider the possibility of a different experience. Having moved at the start of the school year, my children’s backpacks and hands are perpetually filled with those titles that follow them home from school.
Sunday, I was more a child than my own children.
I visited familiar stories as I sought specific titles, let my hand linger in acknowledgement along well-worn bindings. It was the place of every library I’ve loved and ever story I have lost myself to.
I was a child with a wagon and a girl with large dreams.
A new mother in our first family home, a closely knit community with a modest library just an unhurried walk away. The place of my son and daughter’s first library cards, hot summer days and cold winter afternoons given to stories.
A mother to older children squandering savings on a passport to a year of privilege among so many pages.
A reader and dreamer once more entitled to travel the world of storytellers and sages for free.
a mused
February 1, 2016 § 4 Comments
I worried for a time my joy was too intricately tied to my children’s. From the moment they were born, I could lose myself just marveling at their presence; counting fingers and toes as if to challenge the impossibility of their reality.
Its undeniable, children radiate the most gorgeous, extravagant love. It’s the purest, most uncomplicated and terrifyingly all consuming affection.
I wondered if that energy would change as they matured into new phases and tested expressions of self. It didn’t. Their humor and compassion, the messy mistakes and the perfect clarity of innocent wisdom still leave me winded with gratitude for their presence.
In motherhood I found a new calling of self, too.
I make it my work to assign value to the hours my children are absent in my days, to fill my day with purpose and interest, accomplishment and engagement. The small pursuits and larger dreams that by day’s end reflect my light in their company.
We inspire the best of one another, for one another, together.
This first day of February, I am dwelling in a sentiment of love, a muse of gratitude.
fifteen & eleven
January 28, 2016 § 2 Comments
This is the secret I’ve come to appreciate of fifteen and eleven – for all the fiery independence of their age, both children still clamor for borrowed time.
Some days I forget how little effort that takes.
This morning I leashed our dog and invited myself along for the short walk to their bus stop. Not because either child needed me, but because I could. There was no obligation to intervene in their time together and no vote to challenge my whim. There was also no resistance to my company.
The lawn crackled its protest against our footprints as we cut a path around the ice that mocked our cautiousness. Together we marveled at the pattern of stars scattered across the sidewalk as the moon lit the snow and ice with magic. Little clouds of happy exclamations against the crisp winter air.
I had forgotten how much there is to see and hear in the fleeting moments before dawn. So often I watch both children lingering distractedly over invisible interests, wondering at their amusement, but today I let myself entertain their discoveries.
Minutes stretched in frivolous excess, turning nothing much into something extraordinary for the effort.
As both children boarded their bus I turned my footsteps to walk my afternoon path in reverse; waving one last goodbye as the bus circled the neighborhood en route to school.
Stealing a moment for myself.
stargazing
January 19, 2016 § 9 Comments
I am a great thinker of dreams, a poor planner of deeds. My thoughts are consistently conjuring magic, while my actions are often lost in daydreams. It was this Achilles heel that inspired seasons of good intentions and misplaced effort; glow-in-the-dark stars bundled into forgetfulness.
From the time our first child was born, my husband and I made grand plans to gather the stars for our son. Holidays and birthdays brought books, a telescope, and tiny plastic stars to be stored for another time.
The telescope was a poor quality, a compromise of cost. The books were read and disregarded. The stars, a task postponed until forgotten.
This fall, before the night air became cool, you could find our son lying on the ground outside as our dog ran playful circles around his shape. My teenager was once again the elementary student of the stars, marveling at a sky unpolluted by development.
I would wonder at his thoughts, but leave him to our pup’s companionship. Just a boy and his dog without a care in the world, smaller for the scale of the sky.
There is something comforting beneath the familiarity of the stars; markers of space in memorized shapes.
After our move, watching our son stargaze and our daughter daydream about decorating empty walls, my husband and I revisited an old love with new attentiveness.
This Christmas we shared with our children a new telescope and linked together evenings under the stars. Already this winter we have begun mapping the sky and searching the texture of the moon. We also, finally, hung those pesky plastic stars above our daughter’s bed.
It was only after the last constellation was contrived that our son mentioned his lost stars, remorsefully considering the years his own ceiling waited on our good intentions. It was our daughter who counted her leftover stars and lead the way to making right an old promise.
Now both children sleep beneath the stars and we are all falling in love with old lessons in an ancient sky.
living brave
January 13, 2016 § 4 Comments
As I approach exercises in Living Brave, I am reflecting on my core values and those individuals who guard my heart and honor my tenderness with safe havens of trust; beginning with home.
If living wholeheartedly means being vulnerable and present in genuine connectivity, then home is the place where we are invited each morning to show up in love and honor what is important to those most important to us. It is the place we first learn we are worthy regardless of our imperfection because we are loved unconditionally.
It is the place we are first brave.
In considering how I live bravely among my values and relationships in the context of home and family, it was quite simple to identify my intentions. Accountability, Compassion, Gratitude, Integrity, Joy, Learning, Love, Perseverance, Reliability, Respect, Sincerity, Trust.
Words like poetry that promise a sacred appreciation for and responsibility to my blessings. It is much harder to look to the places where my actions have not always aligned with my beliefs; where beautiful words spoke to broken promises.
Over the past few years, I struggled to mother against external expectations. I gauged myself against other’s examples of importance and fell into the danger of comparison. In these moments my children were held to an unfair example and I was bound to an impersonal standard that did not reflect my values.
On these occasions I discounted independence and curiosity for submissive conformity. Thankfully, my children remembered my early lessons and knew they were safe to challenge the contradiction in my expectations.
We do this for one another, offer save havens to fail so that we may try again.
This summer life contrived to offer me a second chance. In the chaos of living between houses, we carried the space of home in one another’s company. Our attention was intentional, like those early newborn days. Love and trust in moments of sleepy, disorientation. The entire world condensed in small moments.
More often now I find myself breathing into the difficult moments; softening against frustration to more purposefully cultivate days guided by a kinder attention.
I am more the mother I first chose to be; tender to those I have been entrusted great dreams and simple needs. I want to know that my children are armed for the world with confidence and kindness, that they move through the unknown certain of their worth and brave in uncertain adventures. That work begins with me.
writing on the wall
December 25, 2015 § Leave a comment
Before our move I traded old artwork for a clean slate. Family rules and whimsical subway art for newly painted walls in want of character. I sought new words cautiously and intentionally, joyfully and hopefully.
The choice came unexpectedly, a delightful recognition of a too often forgotten truth. An unadorned love letter to each new day to be placed where we gather our coats and shoes, backpacks and breath before embarking on our individual paths.
A reminder for the busy days, when we wake tired, not yet ready to leave the comfort of our dreams; when the day promises tests of patience or will with discouragement or disappointment; on the occasions we look too far past today or get muddled in days past.
It is an encouragement for times we second guess our abilities or undermine our contributions; a gentle push when we pause too long on the sidelines of our dreams. Words of encouragement written on the wall, a Christmas wish come true.
little nothings
December 23, 2015 § Leave a comment
Today was our children’s last day of school before Christmas vacation. With no great demands upon our day, my husband and I indulged in the gift of time. We visited a bakery, laughing at the foolishness of our whim amid the chaos of their busyness, and tended to a last-minute gift in a familiar shop around the corner from yesterday.
It was this unhurried contentment that cast a spell upon our children’s return from school. Homework forgotten and housekeeping postponed, we settled into a string of old movies and simple distractions. Trading stories of our day and falling into companionable silence.
I doodled cherished characters onto blank gift tags the way I once sketched stories onto school day napkins tucked into lunch boxes. Our daughter filled in the gray pencil outlines with color until each personality took shape. Eventually we traded markers, delighted with our efforts, happily lost to the work of play.
Play became dinner and dinner became stories by the fireplace; our coffee table covered in beloved picture books from holiday’s past. We took turns reading sentimental favorites in funny voices until the sky demanded we admire the uncluttered canvas of stars that seemed to apologize for the absence of snowflakes.
It was magic; peace and joy crafted from paper and words, stars and stolen minutes. Little nothings made into something extraordinary.
scribblechic 