In this moment I am, in fact, typing on a computer, sitting in one of those ergonomically designed chairs with the knee rest. I'm at my mother's desk. The house is quiet, and I suppose that could be kind of Dickinson-esque, but then I draw the camera lens a little wider, and there is the dish detergent I need to get more of, and the pot I left in the sink to soak, and the glorious trip to New York a few weeks ago still ringing, and this new online class I'm taking from Patti Digh, which has me writing on paper bags and index cards, with Sharpies and crayons no less, and I'm thinking of how many Instagram photos I've taken over the past few weeks and how it's developing into a habit, and how I haven't written very much poetry at all except maybe the captions. And my own online teaching, where I fear getting slightly behind with my students, and the fact that I have been advised by a trusted source to begin the process of unifying all of my online identities under one roof because, as she said, "your online presence confuses me," and this is in the context of building more of an audience and finding more students and teaching more workshops and keeping up, in a certain sense, with the Joneses.

All of this while my latest book comes out and I enter into the strange and still unwieldy world of marketing, and then of course thinking about putting ANOTHER collection together of oh so many things - poetry from my blog, and then there's the volumes of "10-line Tuesday" poems to assemble, and little booklets of writing prompts, all in preparation of my upcoming teaching adventure at Squam Art Workshops. Which maybe is a little bit like Emily Dickinson after all, only there's also the part-time job I got recently with a senior relocation company, and the people I've begun to work with in their homes, sorting through their things, helping them figure out what to take and what to let go of. It's a fascinating, thrilling, complicated, bittersweet experience. In some cases, they are moving out of homes they've lived in for 30+ years and into an independent or assisted living facility and the incredible collision of emotions that that brings. I am going through years of someone else's history, and the layers of real and metaphorical dust that have gathered in the interim. It's an archeology of a life, the excavation of a thousand stories. It is humbling and awe-inspiring and it's giving me new and interesting thoughts about aging.

And all of this while I navigate the moonscape of love, following the throes and momentum of our newness and coming upon some unwieldy contours and shadowy places. I feel like I've reached the age when it is hard to be casual about anything. Not work, not writing, not sex, not life. Maybe it's the particular set of experiences that have brought me here - and the almost constant awareness that I am grateful beyond words to be alive and mobile and pain-free - and all of the auxiliary benefits that that brings. Attention to detail. Taking nothing for granted. Pleasure in the smaller landscapes of living. Color on a grey sidewalk. Gems among the ruins. The glow of light everywhere.

My sister left me a voicemail the other day, saying something like, "What's with all the cryptic Facebook updates?" and that was definitely not an Emily Dickinson moment. This is an age of a pummel of communication, status changes and instant photos and like buttons and our every move documented if we wanted. I saw a couple yesterday in the funny little town of Wilbraham, Massachusetts. I was meeting with a client and they walked in and it felt like a TV show. He was bulging with muscles and had tight cropped grey hair. She'd definitely had some work done, that otherworldly slope from the nose to the cheeks, the duck lips, how the eyes were pulled back as if they wouldn't be able to blink. She was wearing black leggings and a vaguely leopard-print tunic cinched tightly at the waist and had recently come out of a tanning booth. He was enormous, the seat he was in looking like a kindergartener's, his shirt tight around his chest. He was gripping the life out of a Coke bottle.

Why do I share this? I don't know. Maybe it's because it's been ages since I've posted here and the small, useless guilt of that, and the way that I need to forgive myself more for going off topic and stepping off the page and changing my mind about things and loving the way that I love and having some of the best days of my recent life spent doing headstands in Central Park and eating breakfast at Astro's and the cocktails at Rudolph's and laughing until my ribs ached, and listening to the most amazing concert right above Columbus Circle and wearing a dress that brought blush-inducing compliments, and walking in cowboy boots on a frigid January afternoon in one of the biggest cities in the world and then days later finding another center in the field across the street, glossed over in places by ice that wasn't melting despite the unseasonably warm winter weather, and then later still finding solace in a cup of tea and just one light on over the desk and a letter keeping me company. Which DOES sound a little like Emily Dickinson, I guess. Heck, we're living in same town now. I might as well get to know her a little.

And today is the second day of the second month of the year and I will leave in a few minutes to go through someone else's basement and later meet a friend for lunch, and deliver a basketball I took accidentally from the gym last week, and do more writing, and shop for ingredients for Saturday's crepe stand and start working on the retreat in April and submit my poetry manuscript to one of a dozen contests coming up, and let go of what needs shedding and invite in what is knocking at the door. And so, here we are again, this every moment: a sip of still-warm coffee, a quick stretch of the limbs, and the button that says "Publish."

The trip to LA in December brought an unexpected inspiration. "We have to Instagram this," someone must have said at least a dozen times during my two-day visit, and though I'd downloaded the application onto my phone at some point in a burst of tech acquisition frenzy (I was downloading everything from Nike workout videos to The Weather Channel), I'd neglected to spend any time exploring this tool.

Meanwhile, everyone was snapping away and uploading their photos while I stayed in my little corner poo-pooing the warp speed of our society's comings and goings and the slim window of time we're actually living before we go and report that life to the world at large. It's a strange sort of narration to me, this hawk-eye stare we apply to our most ordinary moments, but of course, I'm guilty of it too...this blog, after all, is called "This Every Moment" - what else am I doing but training the eye of my proverbial microscope onto the minutiae of my day?

During my two days in Los Angeles, though, I realized that there was, perhaps, another way to look at what I sometimes fear is too much navel-gazing. The photos my friends sharing through Instagram seemed to bring their subject matter to an even more colorful life. It's like this little window actually created a new kind of seeing, and the object itself became elevated, artful, dynamic in a way that it would not have had it not been captured.

So it wasn't long before I found myself exploring the application, testing out its filters and frames to see what would make photograph even more striking. Something about the wash of colors, the jagged borders, and the cropping features has invited a new kind of photographic adventure, and I find myself bending down under logs, honing in on mechanical pencils, stopping during some cooking preparations to bear down my phone camera on a pile of sliced peppers.

It's like poetry, really, at least the way I experience it when I'm writing. The shaping that happens when I'm finding the voice of the poem, the heart of it, which often means paring down the extraneous details, narrowing my gaze. And when I look at these photos, I see that what I'm inspired by is the beauty of the almost-missed: the coil of a garden hose, the holiday lights on a downtown tree, an old wooden floor, sliced red onion on a cutting board, a cast-off action figure on a carpet, the lines of a radiator, the fabric details on a skirt, packaging and signs, an aisle in the grocery store, a moment with a dog, snowflakes on a cold morning, and the ephemeral light of a full moon.

But it isn't just about the image itself. It's the way I can transform it through the frame and filter I pass it through. And of course, of course, I can already feel the metaphor of this. The picture we carry of what we do, where we're going, how we feel, who we are, and how this can bog us down, prevent us from making big leaps and transformations that are more in alignment with how we want to live. It doesn't mean that these pictures aren't true. But I see that there are additional, deeper, granular truths that underlie them, and these have a different texture and color and pulse. But to find these truths, we have to reframe these pictures, these stories, by considering other ways of telling them. There's a freedom in this, an emancipation from old narratives that no longer fit who we are or who we want to be. And it starts by letting our gaze find a new geography. Not the kitchen counter that needs cleaning. But the bowl of clementines resplendent in an otherworldly orange. We have to find what wakes us up. What stirs our senses open. What makes us come incontestibly, unabashedly alive.

 

As always, after an absence from this blog, it's hard to know where to begin. Life like a series of middles, the beginnings lighning fast, impossible to pin down. So instead, these middles, stretches of time and circumstance and sensation, when things are most palpably felt, outer intertwining with inner in strands of thickening rope. The photos help a bit, remind me where I've been, what I did, and what I felt doing it.

And so.

Walking the Highline down to Chelsea in my Frye boots. The strut they give me, the way they make me slow down, find a groove, how I can feel all the dips and rises of my legs and hips in action. My friend Laurie urged me to get these boots years ago, said they would change my life, and they have. The instant I put them on, I feel ready. For what, I don't know. But ready.

The grand scale of New York City. Everything so big and wide my neck swivels wildly to catch it all. The cranes attending to the needs of skyscrapers. The machinery required to clear one square block of concrete. The extravagant noise of new construction. I kept having to remember to look down, see where I was going. And there, minute topographies of stone and metal and detritus. The tiny continents and contents of living.

And then, signs like fortune cookies. Cryptic, funny, perfect.

The bright lights of Lincoln Center after blocks and blocks of walking in the cold. A warm bathroom in a fancy restaurant. A stack of rolled hand towels like a work of art. The view from my uncle's apartment. He's been gone 5 months, but the place still smells exactly like him. The titles from his massive bookshelf tell me I knew only a fraction of who he was, and how strange it is, the fact of his death, now, to begin to peel from the walls, from the rooms, a few more layers of him. Filling in the sketch I've carried for so long with darker, deeper lines.

Back home, reining in the loose monsters of old fear. A new business venture looming, and me knocking one thing off the to-do list at a time. Can I do this? Can I do this. I can do this. I am doing it. That first day at the Saturday Winter Farmers' Market, peddling my wares, drawing the first ring of batter on the crepe pans. How they came wafting in like the scent that rose from those pans, the apple sauce and berry compote I had simmering on the plug-in burners. The perfect alignment in that moment of fantasy and truth. The lesson there for me for a million other things cooking in my head.

Closeups and color and texture and shape. How proximity changes the look of things. The walk down Concourse C at O'Hare. A bowl of cookies. A seatback tray table. Marquee letters. Night vines. Boxes of paper towels. An apple display. Hearts blowing in the Santa Monica breeze. Venice Beach eccentricities. The intimacy of graffit and the chipped paint on an old wall.

A party in full swing. Christine and her grace and hilarity and full-to-bursting generosity. My two days in Los Angeles like a salve, like healing. Unwinding and resettling. Stillness and movement all at once, bubbly magic twinned with a early darkening sky, the heart finding a place of rest and release. A sandy beach in the middle of December, air warm enough for short sleeves. Palm trees giddy and alert. Don't forget to be happy, they were saying. And the flight home, backlit by a slim line of sunset. Like some kind of faith or forgiveness. Or both.

 

Goodbye silver steward of cross-country trips, sweet roadster that squeezed seamlessy into small parking spaces and astonished passengers with its legroom. Goodbye reliable deliverer of groceries and catering bins and moving boxes and impromptu garage sale finds. Goodbye highway hobo and intrepid back-roads adventurer. Goodbye oval dashboard readouts and primitive stereo components and cupholders that held drive-through coffee and countless bottles of water. Goodbye hand-crank windows and non-automatic doors and flat grey carpeting that camouflaged quarters. Goodbye dustballs in the corner. Goodbye sturdy rear defroster. Goodbye slippery gear shift. Goodbye ill-designed headrests. Goodbye canvas of magnetic poetry, bearer of bike rack, frame of decal and registration sticker. Goodbye faithful Chloe, who drove me through thick and through thin, who stayed healthy and cheap to drive, and who sacrificed herself in the end to save me. My deep gratitude for the places you've brought me to, and for the adventures you delivered.

Goodbye autumn light. Goodbye long limbo of afternoon. Goodbye mild air on the evening walk. Goodybe short-sleeve and lightweight cotton. Goodby leaves. Goodbye geese. Goodbye electric reds and bright pinks and the voluminous palette of sunset.

Goodbye old love. Goodbye old failure. Goodbye straight and narrow. Goodbye anonymity. Goodbye perfection. Goodbye fragility. Goodbye impossible. Goodbye solitude. 

And hello. Hello to everything else. 

I met Christine on August 5, 2010 during the summer I was finalizing plans for my cross-country poetry project, Tour de Word. I can't quite remember how our paths originally crossed - a friend we both knew, the intersection of our blogs and online social networks, plain old-fashioned kismet, or a combination of all three, but whatever it was, it brought me at last to Christine's house in Santa Monica, and the inaugural writing workshop of the tour.

When I knocked on Christine's gargantuan front door, I was nervous and excited, but largely erring on the side of nervous. I felt the gravity of this first workshop, certainly - this was a testing ground for the workshops I'd be faciliating on my trip, and I had only no idea if the activities and exercises I had planned for the evening would resonate with the participants. I was keenly aware that this event was going to make very real - whether I liked the results or not - all the ideas I'd been playing with in my head over the past few months of planning. I thought that enormous door an apt metaphor for the unknown passageway I was about to enter, the adventure I had been crafting for so long finally coming to life.

From the moment Christine opened that door, I felt all at once entranced and comforted, my spirits simultaneously lifted and grounded. Her smile, bright and golden like the late afternoon Los Angeles light, immediately put me at ease, and my nervousness mysteriously evaporated. Later in the evening, halfway through the workshop of the 10 or so women who had gathered, I found myself in the midst of a feeling I couldn't quite recognize but which later - during the two months that I spent driving the country seeing my project through - I would realize was something quite simple: I felt entirely awake in my body, as if everything I was doing and everything I was being was in complete alignment.

And now that I've spent more time with Christine, I see that it's always like this being around her. She gives me a sense of communion within myself and the world around me. Her humor is infectious. Her laugh is genuine, even healing. Her creative gifts are too numerous to name. And her spirit is generous beyond words. I know that my life and the work that I do have been profoundly inspired - and significantly improved! - by her presence and her support, and I am very pleased to have her visit this blog with thoughts about her latest book, "Desire to Inspire: Using Creative Passion to Transform the World." The book features twenty extraordinary women - writers, artists and entrepreneurs - who share how they create a meaningful life and, in turn, make a positive impact on the world. In addition to a beautiful collection of quotes, stories, and anecdotes, the book features substantive, encouraging exercises to support readers' journeys towards creating a meaningful, mindful life.

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The Desire to Inspire author and contributors and where they are from ~

Image 1:  Christine Mason Miller ~ Santa Monica, California
Image 2:  Pixie Campbell ~ Ojai, California
Image 3:  Anne Carmack ~ Santa Monica, California
Image 4:  Tracey Clark ~ Huntington Beach, California
Image 5:  Christine Castro Hughes ~ Glendale, California
Image 6:  Penelope Dullaghan ~ Raleigh, North Caroline
Image 7:  Marianne Elliott ~ Wellington, New Zealand
Image 8:  Liz Kalloch ~ San Rafael, California
Image 9:  Andrea Kreuzhage ~ Los Angeles, California
Image 10:  Jennifer Lee ~ San Francisco, California
Image 11:  Vineeta Nair ~ Mumbai, India
Image 12:  Christen Olivarez ~ Laguna Hills, California
Image 13:  Mary Anne Radmacher ~ Freeland, Washington
Image 14:  Jamie Ridler ~ Toronto, Canada
Image 15:  Amy Krouse Rosenthal ~ Chicago, Illinois
Image 16:  Carolyn Rubenstein ~ Boston, Massachusetts
Image 17:  McCabe Russell ~ Encinitas, California
Image 18:  Kate Swoboda ~ Bay Area, California
Image 19:  Carmen Torbus ~ Port St. Lucie, Florida
Image 20:  Mindy Tsonas ~ Newbury, Massachusetts

 

My official title associated with Desire to Inspire is Author. I wrote the proposal, negotiated the contract, selected the Contributors, and wrote the book. All that makes me the Author. While I am proud of this accomplishment, and excited to share this creation with the world, I don’t necessarily feel like that particular label interlocks neatly with the variety of hats I’ve had to wear ever since this wild journey began. An author sits in a studio – or maybe a coffee shop – and writes. For hours and days and weeks on end, while his or her consciousness is consumed with characters, ideas, philosophies and story arcs...right? An author’s number one job is to buckle down and write, right?

I know it isn’t that simple. Different books require different styles of authorship and work habits. The creative process of someone writing a book on how to re-tile a bathroom will be different from someone writing a book of poetry. Technical writing requires different functions of the brain than storytelling, and personal essays need a writer to dig deeper into his or her memory than a book detailing the migratory pattern of monarch butterflies. There are all kinds of different authors who have written all kinds of different books, and I wonder what alternate “job titles” they would assign themselves if given the choice.

I’ve decided that a more apt moniker for my work on Desire to Inspire is Inspiration Wrangler. At almost every stage of the process – which has been a collaboration with editors, designers and my publisher, nineteen contributors, and now dozens of friends and colleagues who are helping me spread the word about the book – I have felt like a circus master in a tutu, trying to keep track of countless details, deadlines, and responsibilities. My job, more than anything, has been to collect all kinds of bits, baubles, and treasures from all over the world, bring them to my studio, lay everything out in front of me, and then thoughtfully, mindfully, creatively piece them together in the most inspiring way I can.

I did, indeed, devote many hours of straight-up writing to Desire to Inspire. In that sense, it is safe to say I’ve earned the title of Author. But that’s only part of the story, one sliver of the whole experience. As an author – as the writer – I worked alone, but once that particular piece of the puzzle was complete, the rest involved a creative collaboration with a band of some of the most inspiring souls on the planet. Together, we managed to channel a tremendous wave of wild creativity and passion towards an idea – an idea that began to take shape when I sat down to write the initial book proposal and is just now beginning to find its place in the world. No matter where it goes, I’m in extraordinary company - a happy wrangler riding towards sunset. 

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Christine Mason Miller is a Santa Monica-based artist, writer, and explorer. Her next book – Desire to Inspire: Using Creative Passion to Transform the World – is now available at bookstores everywhere and Amazon.com. Follow her adventures at www.christinemasonmiller.com.

I decided last week to stop feeling guilty about not updating this blog as often as I'd originally thought I would, realizing that apparently my life right now is meant to be more lived than documented. So I'm letting these bursts of entries be just what they are, little recesses from the regularly scheduled program, a time out, a brief pocket of collecting my breath and teasing out the bits and pieces of things that caught my attention. Like this:

Mascara, carefully, before a first date.
Energetic, slightly illegible graffiti.
The dark bones of an old tree.
My mother, after a week of uncertainty, braving it on the ride.
Winter vegetables ready for the oven.
Brick as canvas, leaves as art.
What instinctively reaches skyward.
The almost unbearable beauty of fall.
Unabashed truthtelling.
A permission slip from a grocery aisle.
Small art that satisfies.
The invitation of stacked bowls.
It's your story. Tell it.
Attempts at impressive cooking, followed by humility, then humor.
Lists and reminders and messages from beyond.
The apex of autumn colliding with the first snow.
Love budding out of nowhere.
Bridges and metaphors.
Transparency and strength.

And these stories, weaving in:
A car accident in the middle of almost nowhere, saved not by airbags but by unseen hands, slipping through the storm into the tiny space the collision allowed. I don't think I will ever forget the profound sense of safety and calm I felt, even as the truck's headlights came barreling forward.

The season turning and shifting, taking me with it. It feels like passing through a series of doors, opening the one ahead, closing the one behind, mindful not to let too much of a draft through.

Running through the UMass campus, alternating between sprinting and skipping and side-shuffling, the crisp air whistling through my lungs, my headphones pumping in loud music, feeling the strength and length of my body covering ground, parting the invisible air with my footsteps.

Midnight Hixsons at Amherst Coffee, fresh-squeezed grapefruit and grenadined cherries and 4 hours of conversation with a fresh face. The first chapter, the crucial chapter. Everything else tumbling out so easily. I had almost forgotten to even hope for this kind of seamlessness. I had almost forgotten to ask for its arrival, until I didn't. I said it out loud, in the car, to myself one night. "This is what I want," and continued with specifics. I knew I had to be clear with my request. Two weeks sailed by, the opening made open. Then that drink, that conversation. Then a long drive west, then burgers and beer, then a kiss like a salve, like healing, like the parting of the stage curtain into an entirely different story, unlike any that came before it.

A sense of intimacy and proximity to everything. Feet touching the ground in greeting and relief, fallen leaves revealing their veined, delicate beauty, one body meeting another and the heart hingeing open again, good as new.

And just like that, winter waves hello. And just like that, I wave back.

A family visit, my sister and the kiddoes descending into Amherst. The nonchalance of their greeting, as if I'd only seen them a few days ago. Wondering if maybe time is just relative. A few days, a month, does it really matter? A wonderful cacophony at the breakfast table, mishaps of spilled yoghurt and why aren't you eating your eggs and be careful with the maple syrup. Eli's morning mohawk and his uncomplicated happiness. Cows, up-close and personal, holding onto Nana's hand. Spontaneous sibling shenigans, bodies squirmy with energy. The cave of a sleeping bag and a brief moment of sharing. Ludicrous attempts at the perfect portrait. Sunshine in eyes, naptime looming, a ladder to climb, too much to do to sit still. Supervising sukkah production from an easy chair. A fascination with the Dustbuster and random acts of cleaning. Silly faces. Mama and her little girl and the web between them. More faces. The intimacy of an earlobe. More impossible family portraits although what matters are the grins the eyes make. A week of beautiful disorder and uncapturable sweetness. The sounds of their slurps against a glass of milk. The unselfconscious holding of hands across the street. The smell of their skin just before bed. How when they say my name, the world fills up with so much oxygen.

A handy tool for art. Surprising beauty in an airport carpet. Homemade is always better. Shadows in the playground mulch. The oddity of a web conference call, and the recognition that certain decisions that felt perfectly fine four months ago feel almost comically inappropriate now. The Cushman rooster, and the comfort of a small-town cafe. Color and light, everywhere I look. Fall sale at the Ashfield library. The hysteria and poetry of titles.

Random moments, random finds. Uncovering whole stories in a blink of an eye. And how the practice of looking this way changes the way I consider my outsides and my insides. I'm finding new rhythm, new patience, new compassion and a thrum of joy even in the most mundane moments. I realized the other day, washing dishes, that it is possible to love even this. Scrubbing like a continuously fresh act of reverence and care. Not a pile. Not even dirt. Just invitation. And now it feels like there's no going back.

 

Again, the week zooms by and so much on the edge of my tongue to share. I will not remember all of it. The pictures help. With the incentive of text photo exchanges with a friend, I've begun to snap things hither and thither, not thinking about the "why" of it, just enjoying its "what-ness." Brief moments entered and just as quickly, exited. I'm lingering only long enough to remind myself where I was. And I'm finding, with just that simple instruction - remember - the self-editors and self-critique fall away. I simply want to see, and to capture that moment of seeing. So I'm learning to scoot down a little, scoot closer, allow an intimacy to form - a short-term one - that gets me eye-level to the things I might normally miss. It's so much less pressure than trying to figure out the big picture.

And so:

- downed leaves on a bridge railing on my afternoon run
- the rim of the gin gimlet on a Thursday night
- flip-flops at the Apple Harvest Fair
- humor in a shop window
- a lone duck at Puffer's Pond
- flea market finds
- a blur of myself
- produce at the Wednesday market
- last-of-the-season Sungolds
- close-ups of fresh art
- railings on the ramp to the George Washington Bridge
- sunset after a rain
- Brave Girls Art with a Twist
- clouds then clearing in the Berkshires
- the emergence of fall

- and something of peace descending in my bones.

. . . . .

More soon about the specifics, including: the price of truth, awkward family photo re-enactments, the beauty of label-makers, and a Byron Katie workshop at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. Stay tuned.

It began with a full slice of chocolate cake, the night before departure. Perhaps that should have told me something about what the week at Squam Art Workshops would hold, but I didn't want to throw too many expectations - or any, really - on my first time there. For once, I was happy not to know, happy for the surprises that lay in store, happy to loosen my grip from the story I might normally have created before I even shut my drivers' side door and started the engine.

The map. Folded open to the state where I spent 7 years of my adolescence. Everything looked so familiar, the geography imprinted on my brain, my hand steering the wheel almost from memory.

The evening at Nina's house. Swooping Jenica in my arms, like a long-lost friend. The sweet comfort of women around a table, making art. I stayed the night, bundled in my mother's sleeping bag, and woke the next morning to the sound of Pixie. And I knew everything would be just fine.

The drive to Squam Lake. Peaceful, easy. I sang at the top of my lungs to some pop music station. I left 93 for Holderness, and squirreled my way to Rockywold-Deephaven Camps. Parked at Longhouse and walked down to the water. Pristine, soothing. The sound of waves colliding with the dock felt like the beginnings of a mantra.

The buzz of registration. The drive down Deep End Road, where my cabin was. Wayonda. Way yonder. It lay at the furthest edge of camp on a gently curving cove. Unpacking. Meeting my cabin-mates. Reconnecting with Kathy. Everyone lovely, sweet, full of energy. I changed into my swimsuit, walked onto the dock, and dove in without testing the water. It felt like the only way. It was the best way.

Dinner. Reunions. Friends from far-away places. How simple it was to just slide in, the cafeteria full of happy bodies, open, willing, ready to play.

The view from my window at 6:00 in the morning. A pink-tinged sky, like an apple waiting to be plucked.

Art-making in the rain. Penelope guiding us with a perfect blend of instruction and freedom. I swept a space clean, then began. And barely looked up, I was so in it.

A cafeteria that reminded me, in a good way, of being 15. The clatter of silverware. Cranberry juice on ice. A salad bar. Round tables filled with conversation and eagerness and whimsy and glow.

Evenings in front of a fire. Belly laughs I could feel deep, deep in my gut. Swapping stories. Glasses of wine. A bag of Bit o' Honeys left over from a birthday. Nothing too precious to share. Everything, a circle. A linking up. An acceptance.

Breakfast. Waffles and hot syrup. Coffee with cream. The unhurried welcome of morning.

After Susy's delightful class, a walk up Rattlesnake Mountain with her and Noel. Impromptu headstands. Fish pose. Pigeon pose. Wanting to see differently, to try something new, to trust in gravity, to let go.

Building alliances. Joining forces. Jen and her amazing ability to connect the dots. To see the story underneath the story. To navigate new pathways. The feeling of being in her back pocket, tucked away safe and sound.

Reading poems aloud at the Coffeehouse. Taking my time. Feeling new reverence for syllables and sentences strung together. Feeling the importance of voice. Feeling the importance of out loud. Knowing that I was being heard.

Rest. Rejuvenation. Reorientation. More mountaintop yoga. Laughter into the night. A woodstove heating an entire room. Taking nothing for granted - a hot shower, steamed broccoli, a pair of borrowed gloves, a blank canvas, the birth of an idea, the sense of possibility, and even in the dark, trusting my feet to know the way.

There's so much more, of course. Beauty and joy and the kind of astonishment that comes when you realize how much fullness is before you, a smorsgasbord of nourishment. That's what it felt like. There are so many people I want to acknowledge - Kathy for her solid calm, Catrina for her whimsy, Lisa for her enthusiastic companionship during the workshops, Jen and Jonatha who darted among the camp like sprites, Jolie for her warmth and sly smile, Amy for the burst of her giggle and her gin and her big heart, Gretchen for her outrageously good photos, and her unselfconscious humor, Jamie and her earnestness and storytelling, the other Amy for the arrow of her wit and wisdom...and that's just the beginning. Thank you to Elizabeth, the brain behind the beauty of Squam. For creating what is a magical experience for so many.

It's hard to wrangle this experience into words, but I feel unmistakably changed. Softer and stronger all at once.

. . .

And the return. How a small window of time can open into a new way of being. This last week has been another transformation, a molting, the pouring out of lessons and learnings. I am seeing my own story differently, identifying places that need re-writing. That need NEW writing. And I'm recognizing how far I've come, too, how much I already carry within me that's solid and real and good. The places where my work has landed, and the people who know me and see me because of that. Squam gave me an orientation around what IS, and that which is TO BECOME. I have been in a flurry of art since I came back, filling canvases with ripped paper and old poems. Dismantling, then building again.

It suits me, I think.

 

 

 

Maybe there's another way to tell the story. Maybe I don't need complete sentences, or even chronology. Maybe there are no uniting themes, or a thesis statement, or a trajectory of standard lines of narrative. Maybe this is about collision, about intersection, about the weave that disparate moments nevertheless make together. I like the thought of that, that it doesn't have to make sense, that I can be in the middle and not call it a middle, not live it like a middle. I like that a thunderstorm can come out of nowhere and make a symphony on the porch roof, even though I don't like fog for more than 2 days in a row. I like the shape of clouds out an airplane window, even if I don't like the sound of the baby crying behind me. I like the funny jostling on the LA freeway, even if I don't liket freeway itself. Every moment is divisible even further, and maybe this is the best thing, this living in snippets, because there is so much to pay attention to when you let yourself get eye-level with what's in front of you, when you give yourself a grace period of not having to figure out what it all means, or what you might to do to "fix it." In the past few weeks, I've gotten very conscious of my surroundings. I can feel their texture, can hear the notes of their particular music. And I've become less reactive in terms of bringing up my defenses when things get disagreeable. I give myself more permission to soften by engaging, to absorb by integrating, and to express by...expressing. I've gotten so much less tough on myself as a result. Being able to witness what's happening and how I feel without immediately trying to make improvements. Relaxing my participation, un-muscling myself.

And so:

The sight of my nephew racing down the side of the stadium track on his bike, then screeching to a halt right at my feet and the wide grin that spilled from his cheeks. Antics in the grocery store, making faces in the dairy aisle, the dollar he handed the cashier for our two plums.

Baby deer in the suburbs. Their unblinking gaze. The strange beauty of what's been discarded and forgotten. The bike ride to Stinson and up to Mt. Tam and the surprise of not falling apart at the seams from exhaustion. Walking the labyrinth. In with a question and out with an answer.

Transformation. Sweetness. A monkey embroidered on a guest towel. Two cats, keeping good company as I typed. Forgotten diorama. Scenes from a party. Glorious wedges of lemon. Christine and her laughter and the hug when I walked in the front door. Memories embedded in concrete. A chicken car. Lychee martinis at sunset at the rooftop bar. Santa Monica at a perfect 72 degrees. The nut bar at Whole Foods. So many choices. The border-less geometry outside an airplane window. The stretch, the stretch, the stretch of land below, disappearing behind the glow of sunset.

Imperfectly perfect heirloom tomatoes. An iced latte after lunch, at the apex of heat. A bike path that almost never ends. Tea on an unexpectedly cool night. The simple joy of reading in the same room that my mother is in. Her sweet house with the curvy driveway and the mint growing just outside the breezeway door.

A river running through the whole state. Strips of carrot on a dinner salad. A tumble of watermelon. What 75 cents will buy you at a community yard sale. Four days of 4-and-a-half milers to the pond and back, the astonishing gift of health and resilience and for how the body wants to remember itself. Small highways that lead to green and more green. A new idea, burgeoning, thrilling itself into being.

There are so many ways to tell the story. It is alright to begin here. Or here. Or here.