celebration

we give each other books for every birthday.
a tradition i love; a celebration of our deep lives, the inner ones--
how well we know each other, celebrating that
with titles like, the art of eating in
gift from the sea
favorites, sometimes picked up last-minute
wrapped in nothing but an ann taylor bag
last year on your birthday kaylie was wearing that shirt
pregnant as you are.
pregnant with a baby.
when i feel like i'm just pregnant with possibility--
ready to explode in a creative tornado
if i didn't have any homework to attend to.
still my pregnancy grows,
fed by light of film, metering and clicking
writing ridiculous poetry
reading more natalie goldberg
and this pregnancy i'm not off-limits from one single thing
no do-not-eat list perches on my fridge
just wedding announcement photos
I've taken
and feel proud of,
not unlike a baby child
i'd grown myself.

..................................
today is my dad's birthday celebration,
tomorrow the actual day.
sometimes i feel strange that it's alright to move things around when they don't fit your schedule, like valentine's day and birthdays.
he's perpetually 35 to me, the dad in my home videos running the camera while i screw up the courage to run through the sprinkler in my too-pink bathing suit.
he's perpetually a seminary teacher with lots of seminary teacher friends,
and i spy on the grown-up parties they have, with lots of laughing and finger food and it was like an aquarium of fun because i could press my nose to the window and look through without anyone noticing, observe and have a private smile with myself when my dad laughed so hard he coughed and wheezed.
he's perpetually that dad. i haven't wrapped my head around a dad who has two sets of married children, kids-in-laws, and is 49.

as i celebrate the changes--the new pregnancies, jobs, transitions to vegetarianism--i still ache for that too-pink bathing suit, hand in hand with my brother trying to convince me to run through the sprinkler on the simplest of summer days. i still wince at my list of responsibilities and wonder if i'll ever wake up accepting them with wide open hands. i still live in nostalgia and simultaneously run away as fast as i can so i can be the one moving on.

thoughts on abundance.

Does gratitude ever lead you to guilt? That sounds off.

But by the time I've exhausted the list-making approach of gratitude, in the middle of my gratefulness for my lack of gonorrhea and a cardboard house I start to think:
What did I do to deserve my big life full of stuff and opportunity? And the answer is always nothing. So I try to make sense of it, and give myself guilt, telling myself all the things I should do because I'm lucky enough to have all the opposites of the things I'm grateful I don't have.

It's hard to accept abundance.

It's hard to believe there is enough, and that even though I don't deserve it I can embrace it, live in it, and even increase it. It's hard to get away from my picture-perfect me to not only accept what I currently am, but accept, simultaneously, the vastness of what I could be. It's easier to make a list of things I should do that will give me a blue ribbon.
Easier to make gratitude lists long, long, long, so as to appear so thankful. So as to convince myself what I am. I am grateful, I am going to do big things, you know. It seems better than acknowledging the more frequent blah days where I don't do anything spectacular.

But I'm learning that even if all I do is feed myself physically and emotionally and soulfully on those days, I am those few steps closer to living more fully inside the mondo-ness of my potential.
Even when I'm not checking off items on a shiny list, I am still doing important work. It's just kind that can't be checked off that good.

Ten Thousand Hours

I want to kiss this piece of paper, because I worked really hard to gather up this pen and this notebook from the dregs of my bag in the middle of this crowded car on the way home.
A scary q was burning at the edges of my mind:
What do I want to invest 10,000 hours in, to become an expert? What would I be excited about spending that kind of time on?

And the answer was not necessarily photography, not necessarily music education, not necessarily writing or teaching or being a zen-ish person, but just: all forms and flavors of creativity.

I felt excited when I thought it; I'm going to accept things as they come to me as a somewhat transient excited loony artist.

And right now I feel excited about my life being cracked right open like an egg and the yolk is just running out all over the wide earth. The snow dusts the mountains, powder-sugaring its cold magic on the little things that live in the fields. I get to see it with my eyes that don't see well without glasses but a lot of times when I see these things I just look and then other times I SEE, and not that my eyeballs bulge or do anything different at all but my heart accepts all kinds of possibilities and I get excited thinking of all the gifts I have in my world, and just thinking of these amazing things that have to be handmade by God and I feel happy and blessed and open and totally undeserving of all the awesome in my life, but still I know God wants me to have it.

I feel my life flowing more toward Him, naturally, and I feel the more I write the more He shows up on my paper and I include Him better, more decisively and consciously. The light is fading outside the car window, but I have to keep going. I have to keep telling about my lifelong paths and quests that other people conduct with ranging levels of seriousness. But I'm dramatic and I take everything in my life seriously because I live this life this way one time and each moment is so new and transitory and sometimes that's so weightful I don't know quite what to do? And how could I? Because I'm appalled by the wastes of time, even how long it took to turn the page to keep on writing.

I've started worrying a little less about the perfect allocation of blame and I've just started working to accept accept accept my life in the world and give away the need to know everything in its proper compartment. I am learning to balance scheduling with being wild. Because I am a wild child control freak spread out and and formed back again, like a cheeseball. A cheeseball that compliments all kinds of crackers and could do any big thing with her life she wanted. She doesn't have to write big but she can.

I feel God slowly and steadily directing the flow of traffic toward those sweet sweet little babies. They are so needy, so full of big ideas and brain waves and I am excited to meet them in a place where they can thrive in my care, in my love that will be big and wide as rivers and oceans and just as full of salt water. I will be able to take care of them with my heart open and my head brimming with ideas about how to teach them, read them fantastic literature and sing them beautiful songs and be their caretaker,
and I wish there was a more beautiful, full word to say what it really is.

It's almost pitch black and it's just the moon lighting up the corner of the blue sky on my right, a perfectly pink gradient of a sunset behind me to the west, on my left. The plants grow still, evergreen in the snow and there is dirt underneath the ice to support. The dirt doesn't die and it still compiles and hardens to make the mountains. Passing the curves of the rolling in the hills and the peaks that people climb, sometimes they even run up them. Listen to your body, the mountains it asks to climb and the world calling out what it needs you to contribute, be it dirt or a seed or a full grown tree.

It is too dark to write now.

Three Line Poems

I started with the title and went for three lines, and sometimes I had more to say.
My favorite is Lace.


Salt Shaker
contained beads of sweat
drip into the ocean
flitting home like a wave of grief.

Lace
A shivering fabric
Chokes up her neck
So fancy and free

Milkweed
Fireflies giggle obnoxiously
in a symphony
You blinked at me with open eyes.

Rice
All of the things in this room stood still
While the rice shattered on the floor
Like opaque diamonds.

Flour
The recipe called for you
And I said I'm improvising
We borrowed an egg from a neighbor
down the street three houses away
Your dad was on a diet
And we licked frosting off
cake for breakfast.

Killing Stones
Strange and expensive
not rare; blood kind
like the deep red flesh of an orange
by the same name.

Hurt
My email was hacked
And I felt hurt--attacked
By spammers in India.

shopko mj

I have French stuck in my head. What's that about?
My house smells like bacon.
I ate dinner at 9:00.
I wear a Michael Jackson shirt to bed every night.
Except it is from someplace like Shopko, and his face is white and his lips are red. I wish he wouldn't do that.
I ache to shoot film.
I have a Japanese umbrella atop my bookcase. It is from LA.
I have a jar with money in it for a someday trip to Japan with the boy I love.
I had a dream last night my mom was pregnant.
I am not bothered the least bit by people's baby comments.
Jared's new favorite thing is to see how long I can tickle him before he gives in and laughs. It makes no sense to me because I am female, but is hilarious.
I have a hot husband and secretly almost kind of want a dog.
I eat a lot of fruit snacks.

Underrated.

Jared had his first taste of gelato tonight; hazelnut flavor, and the working man made us say the names in Italian before he'd let us sample them.
I sampled about every flavor, because I chose wrong lots of times.
Hate when that happens, you know?
We used our coupons, laughed about politics (does Rick Santorum look like a perfect mix of Adam Sandler and Jerry Seinfeld to anyone else? Only really, really, un-funny?), and rolled our eyes at ridiculous garbage bags given out by mall stores, and talked about how easy it would be to build a table and how hard it would be to own a restaurant.

Being happily married is way, way underrated. Even when we're not vacationing lavishly, romancing glamorously, or being generally movie-worthy, it's those quiet moments when I look at him and the world is huge, swallows me, and I feel it all in the palm of my hand, in the very same instant. It's seeing backwards to that time he cut his hair in a mullet to be silly and forwards to our babies that will have personalities and being totally awake in the moment at hand, breathing in the whole earth full of bursting love for another human.
And yet, those gigantic inside things happen in regular clothes, coats, and ponytails.

Seventy times a day I talk to his ears about how I can't describe what I feel. It frustrates me, expressor that I am. (See? I just expressed mahself, makin up the word expressor. That's how it should be spelled, no questions asked.)

Only having a wimpy four letter word to account for all that hugeness feels pretty lame.

It's part of what I'll do in this life; turning words and thoughts inside and outside to find every one of the sixteen million ways I can explain how I feel about this boy. He is my dream.

Steps toward bravery.

I'm finally ready to post this--just for your reading, though, just to share, and not for a response. I believe in taking steps toward bravery and vulnerability, even if it's in a medium as small as one's little corner of the internet.
....................................

November 10, 2011

Today my grandpa died.

He was supposed to die yesterday, three weeks ago, ten years ago. They’ve thought he was leaving a lot of times; he’s just a fighter. Man of steel, mom said.

My mom has cared for this man all her adult life, when no one was really around to take care of her. You have your husband but he doesn’t care for you the same way your parents do. She cleaned out their fridge and had the cameras installed in their house to watch them, keep them safe.

The ultimate safety is death.

But that truth doesn’t often transfer well to us still here.

For mom it’s probably about goodbye; for me it’s all the things we didn’t get to do. Not in a I’m-so-gypped way, but a sad reality that’s-the-way-it-was way. That makes no sense.

I want to know him.

I want to know the whole story.

I want to know the battles my mom fought with him as her father.

I want to know the full extent of his genius, about what the patent from 1963 on my bookshelf really means. People ask me and I don’t know.

I watched him watch TV for those months we cared for them. He told us stories, but I still don’t know. I just watched him watch TV, filled up the hot water bottles the way he liked, got impatient when he wasn’t all the way ready to go to bed when we arrived, sweats-clad after long school days and just ready to sleep.

When I was driving home from a meeting in which a girl thoughtlessly joked about my grandpa’s death, I wanted to go to the house where all of that happened. Where I played with handed-down toys with dying batteries, enough to confuse the duck’s sound with the cow’s. Grandma had bright brown hair then--I never saw the gray roots.

I want to sleep, or throw up.

I thought I knew how to process death. Checkmark shebang bam alakazam I’ve got it. A lie to keep myself functioning. Plus I would be heartless—worse than selfish—if I did. 

Sad. I feel sad.

I feel sad about the memories I don’t have for writing in this moment. Just the blaring TV is coming back to me. Running into him at cougar creations in the Wilkinson center—being a little embarrassed that running into my grandpa could happen to me. Didn’t I know this man well enough not to run into him? I mean, see him often enough that our paths would naturally cross?

They did, every Thursday. Why can’t I remember more about grandpa on Thursdays? He took ages in the bathroom.

None of this is right. I need sleep and time.

I need to let my heart ache even if I feel I don’t have permission to let it.

Ache, heart. Do your thing. I set you free.

The ultimate freedom is in death.

Writing like this seems lame but I still think it’s important while it’s fresh. No judgment, just feelings and thoughts that float by in this moment—today, the day of his death. My grandpa is dead. He is gone. He is happy. I want to know him.