Three Things

1. Overheard, about the nature of a pearl : “It grows in response to an irritant.” A thought that staggers me sometimes, has done so for years, because could you yourself have imagined a better response? It’s so lavish and strong and beautiful. And…lavish.

2. The article I emailed to Oldest, after he looked over my shoulder while I was reading it and asked, “That’s about Malala, isn’t it?” No, somebody else, who is also risking her life for girls to get an education in Pakistan. Whose mother did everything she could, took beatings even, to ensure her daughter’s education. I’m so thankful my son is paying attention.

3. I wonder at my repetitiveness with certain themes. It’s possible I’ve gotten quite boring. But then I counter that thought with the quote my mother has taped to her studio wall: “Knowledge does not equal ability. Knowledge plus 10,000 times equals ability.”

–Shinichi Suzuki

I’m trying to teach myself something, here. Going for ability.

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What Do You Want?

That’s at the heart of New Years’ resolutions, right? What you want? Who you want to be? The things you want to make happen?

When I read an open invitation earlier this week to share my big dreams for the year, I was tempted. The big ones? What if I really did say them out loud? And what about the smaller ones?

I would much rather talk about dreams than resolutions. With the understanding, of course, that dreams are to be acted upon.

I’m not a big fan of resolutions. I love fresh starts, I love setting goals, but big pronouncements about what I’m going to do THIS YEAR, anything too rigid—and my perfectionist side adores rigid—will eventually paralyze me. Give me a skeleton—a vision—a what do you want—and let me fill in the details as I go. That is work I can lose myself in.

I want to create something I know is too big for me.

I want to keep seeing the beauty.

I want to love better.

I want the things I’ve named in my heart but have to keep there.

I want to read and listen and talk and pray and laugh.

I want to dance with my children.

I want to make things.

I want to push back against fear.

What do you want?

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Yellow Flowers

I wore a yellow flower in my hair most of the day Saturday. Youngest put it there, after trapping me in her closet for a beauty treatment. It was our first day home after a week and a half away, and while I felt like I had been with people constantly, she seemed to feel like we needed more us-time. Or maybe I just looked like I needed beautifying. I am rarely fancy enough for that girl. So she closed the door to her closet, made me sit down, waved various articles in front of my face, and stuck one of her flower barrettes in my hair. Voila—beautiful.

A few hours later she caught me in her closet again, putting away laundry, and she shut the door, turned out the light, and gave me a guided “museum tour” of the closet with a flashlight. She is a forceful and passionate and generous soul.

I have often wished to be the sort of person who wore flowers in her hair. In reality, though, it makes me feel out of character—like somebody who’s trying (too hard) to be one of those people who can actually pull it off. But I thought of something I read a few years ago, by a mother who chose to wear the funny hat her daughter gave her, and to pause from her work to watch her daughter’s impromptu ballet, because she didn’t want to run the risk of losing her child and realizing she never did those things. “Not to watch the ballet or wear the hat is a cold and withering sin.” I allowed the words to haunt me and I kept the flower in my hair until I went to bed.

And a funny thing happened. I got to be the person my daughter saw, somebody who could unquestionably pull off a big yellow flower. Somebody more than I might allow myself to be, left to my own devices.

That is a gift.

Because maybe people who wear flowers in their hair are simply the ones who decide, “To hell with it, I feel like wearing a flower in my hair today.” Or maybe they are the ones who had somebody else put the flower there, and that was encouragement enough.

Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

When somebody else can see it too—you with a flower in your hair, for example—sometimes that gives you the strength or the daring or the perseverance you need. It changes your vision. Fortifies it.

When somebody else can see it, that person gives your vision back to you.

By the way, the bit of prose that inspired me to wear the flower? I looked it up to get the exact quote. I hadn’t read it for years, and had forgotten most of the details, beyond the importance of wearing the hat.

It is called “The Gift.”

When I look back on 2012, I see a year that was achingly hard in many ways. And a year marked by determination to keep reaching out. But also—and this is what I want to focus on—what I want to move forward with—is that it was a year of friendship. Of people who gave my vision back to me, who saw things I-only-dared-hope were buried deep inside and gave me the strength to believe and act like they really were there. That is quite a gift.

Janus, Roman god, January’s namesake, was a being with two faces—one looking back and one looking forward. On this day of doing both, regardless of what is ahead or behind, I want to wish you a year of yellow flowers. Loads of them.

Happy New Year, my friends.

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Niece

I walked her around at the restaurant last night, because she was fussy and tired and in need of distraction, and both her mom and her nana—her regular, more familiar walking companions—looked like they could use a break. She does not know me as well, doesn’t remember me from six months ago. But we walked around and looked at things together, and got to know each other a little bit, exploring.

We started with the shapes on a tall carved screen, painted bright white. Circle, square. White. She put her finger inside the circle. We looked up, touched the whiteness. We wondered together. Probably about different things, but together, nonetheless.

Not quite eighteen months old, and teething, and tired. I kept moving, kept pointing, kept talking. Look at this Christmas tree! See the lights? They’re so bright! So many shiny things!

We moved on. I pointed out more lights. Chandeliers and shades—red, green, yellow, orange—look, purple, even! Had I noticed that before?

A red velvet couch. Oooh, it’s soft. Soft red. Touch the soft red! I stroked it myself, and held her hand to it so she could feel, too. Soft, soft. She smiled. Back to the tree, and a shiny metal ornament. Hard—we touched that, too. Everything I pointed to, she looked at, all amazement. Look here! A green velvet couch! Touch the soft green! And here—maroon! Touch the soft maroon velvet!

And this is something I love about being with a very young child. Everything is amazement, and at the same time nothing is a surprise. Because it’s all a surprise. The amazement is a perpetual state—taken in stride—it is all new, all amazing, all wonder-ful. No line between fantasy and reality, because every last bit of it is fantasy. And when you come alongside and see things their way for a moment? The world expands. You realize, or maybe resolve anew, that you want to make no time for jadedness. No allowance for cynicism. No room for anything but wow—okay, sure!

Show me more.

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One Reason I Love Winter:

Strip away the green (and I love the green—both when it is young and new and when it is older and glossy and abundant; I love, too, when the colors change—the leaves blazing out with everything they’ve got,) but strip away the green and you have dark lace, delicate and chaotic, and room to see new colors—all the shades of opal and pearl and light that are so easy to miss when the green is prevalent.

That line of white just above the center of the picture? Birds, many of them. I wish you could have seen them the way I saw them this afternoon, catching the light and glowing like pearls.

I am always happy for the shift of seasons. For the in-between and deep-within of each of them, and the chance to see and hear and feel differently.

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Gold I Bring

A recent weekday morning. Downstairs in the kitchen there is butter out on the counter, softening, lying in wait beside a cookbook opened to a recipe for Anise Kringle. I am imagining mixing the ingredients, twisting soft dough into pretzels, the smell of sugar and butter and flour and anise seed filling the house while the cookies bake. Chances are this is wishful thinking, at least for today. There are other things more pressing today, all of them good, and I’m trying to stay focused, trying to remember that I am in fact a responsible adult.

I wish I were baking cookies. I wish there were more time in the day. I wish I could drown myself in good and beauty and not think anymore, about the rest.

*       *      *

I just started reading a book, a fitting book for the time of year I think, in which there is a character who loves color. Except love is not a strong enough word for its pull on him. Color gravity is what he calls it. He is completely drawn in by color, stops in his tracks to witness a sunrise or watch a house being painted. He steals paintings to get it. He wants not only to have it but to dwell inside of it.

Something in my mind is telling me I’m supposed to think he's strange, but the truth is, I get it. That’s kind of where I want to live, too.

I wish I had gold.

You know that longing, too, don’t you? For gold, for color, for beauty? That longing to inhabit only the precious places? To shut out everything else?

*       *       *

Yes, I long for gold. I suspect that this time of year brings out that longing even more. You go to the store and think maybe you can buy it for yourself or the ones you love. Collectively we surround ourselves with light and beauty and hope. We work hard to dwell in those places. To assure each other that this fallen world does not in fact have the power to eat us or our loved ones alive, even when the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. We give gifts, in imitation of ancient wise men—things that shine, that scent the air around us, that speak of costliness—that try to get at what is really precious to us.

And I don’t want to get lost in that. I want to lose myself in the real gold, not the physical-thing-that-really-serves-best-as-a-metaphor.

*      *      *

Because we do have gold. Sometimes lots of it, sometimes very little. Sometimes you have to look very hard for it, but oh when you see that glimmer you can’t take your eyes off it.

After Oldest was born—an unplanned, last-minute c-section—I found myself lying alone in a recovery room that reminded me of some dark hidden basement, shaking with cold under a pile of heated blankets. All I wanted in the world at that moment was to hold my baby for the first time, but what I had was a Polaroid of him in his father’s arms, somewhere else in the hospital. And I could not take my eyes off that picture—I held it with my eyes and with every cell in my body and it was pure gold.

*      *       *

I read these words yesterday, in an essay about music education. The author after making the statement, "I have also been musing about the impact of spending so many hours of growing up dedicated to, and inside the creation of, beauty" says this:

“Beauty lives paradoxically in two time frames, the immediate and the eternal; and experiencing this paradoxical reality provides essential nourishment for the challenges and aspirations of the human condition.”

Eric Booth, “El Sistema’s Open Secrets”

This thought takes my breath away.

Dwelling in those places, surrounding ourselves in gold, giving it away to those who are more precious to us than gold itself—it’s good.

What I keep coming back to is that when I feel like there’s not enough, when sickness and sadness and violence and all the rest close in, I will look harder for the gold. I will point it out to others. I will make it, give it, share it, dwell in it as much as I am able, because the alternative is just too bleak.

The anise kringle eventually got made. They are good—delicate and rich and sweet. Do they make up for the fact that I gave up sending Christmas cards two or three years ago, or that it is December 20th and my Christmas shopping is nowhere near done and I am completely overwhelmed by my to-do list? Probably not. But what needs to get done will somehow get done, and I am learning to let the rest fall by the wayside.

There is unending gold to bring.

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Today's Offering

A completed project—part escape, yes, but also an act of praise, a meditation, an attempt to contribute something beautiful. With fresh determination that this is a good way to live.

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'Tis the Season

Forgive me if you are tired of this music. I am not. Many Decembers of my childhood meant a chance to see “The Nutcracker,” and if I was lucky, “Hansel and Gretel,” as well. So far in my adult life I’ve had the chance to play in the pit for each of them only once, and I loved every moment. Maybe if I’d played them more I would be bored with them, but maybe not. Like grilled cheese sandwiches and butterscotch malts, I suspect some things are just good forever. In my world, at least.

This still slays me.

As does this.

(I checked.)

Duke Ellington’s version of the Nutcracker Suite was new to me (fun vintage promotional video here), but I enjoyed that immensely, as well. And look—an accompanying picture book with CD:

More Nutcracker resources here and here.



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Tangible

What a nice chewy word. How perfect that it is so physical to say, so enjoyable in the mouth.

It is a word that came up a few times in the comments on last Thursday’s post, along with a fair amount of talk about knitting and a general agreement that keeping one’s hands busy is a very good thing.

And oh, how I love words, and the intangible in general, and oh, how I love tangible.

I keep trying to get at this thought. At the airiness of words, and the desire to take life and substance and turn them into things that travel through time and space. I want so much for them to take hold and become something of substance again on the other side. It is easy to believe, sometimes, that they get to within a breath of something you can touch. And they fill—they really do. You start to believe you could live off them. Yet sometimes they make you yearn for tangible all the more.

And then there’s this—I am certain that if I had the chance to stand right in front of you, look you in the eye, touch your shoulder, maybe (there—tangible!) my instinct would be to speak words, to tell you what I’m thinking.

Because the physical realm is not enough.

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Quiet Moment

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