ON CREATING AND INTENTION

One thing that I have experienced over and over in the past few years is that when you approach the creative process with intention, something will come out of it. Whenever you are genuinely seeking answers, looking for new ideas or wanting to go deeper in your artistic expression, your yearning will not go unattended.

This year, I haven’t made a lot of art. My creating has focused on things outside of my identity as a photographer or writer. It’s focused on home, purpose, motherhood and relationships.

But it’s all part of the same creative process. New ideas/artistic growth/inspiration all pull from the same source.

It can come from within:

Like an untapped well that has been patiently waiting for your bucket to drop.

It can come from without:

An older man beside me on the subway asks if I like Chekhov. He tells me that in his youth he asked every woman he dated to read The Lady and the Dog, to find out if she were the one. And something inside of me softens.

The girl working checkout at Target looks over my shoulder and I catch an expression on her face that she doesn’t mean for anyone to see. And something inside of me is moved.

Last night, laying on my back outside the front door, I study the shape of the clouds passing over the moon. And something inside of me comes to life.

Song lyrics, a poem you find on instagram, a mother and child waiting at the bus stop in front of your house. The way your kid looks up at you when you’re putting them to bed.

It can come from actively engaging in the creative process:

Picking up a pen and opening to a blank page. Creating a space in your home to make art. Taking a class, reading a book, going for a walk with your camera. Attempting to make a cake in the shape of a pterodactyl for your daughters 5th birthday.

Or it can come from a spiritual practice:

Taking time to be quiet and alone with yourself, to listen to whatever comes to you. Asking questions in earnest even when you don’t understand or even believe in the higher power you’re asking them to. Going for a hike, a swim, a run, cutting up vegetables, doing the dishes, folding the laundry slowly with the intention of feeling connected to a more expansive sense of life. Waking up in the morning open and ready to receive. Waking up in the morning closed off and choosing to be open and ready to receive. Looking at everything around you with wonder - especially people - the miracle and generosity of friendship, beauty emanating out of a complete stranger. Recognizing the goodness in your life even when it’s filled with frustration or sadness. Asking yourself, what does it actually look like to be truly vulnerable, truly humble? Staying open to the possibility that you’re capable, right here and now, of tapping into a realm of existence that is throbbing with love, with clarity, with life.

ALL of this is creative practice. Whether or not it shows up as a period of artistic awakening, or how it did for me this past year as I moved out of a decade-long relationship and was led to a sweet little rental near downtown that feels like a sanctuary. Learning balance and joy as a single mom. Figuring out how to support my family - sometimes just barely - by stubbornly pursuing what I love.

Doing things that terrify me. Spending time searching to firmly understand my purpose, my why, my strengths, what I have to offer in terms of business and as a person. The extreme amount of creative growth that has come from not knowing where the rent is going to come from each month, even though it’s been exhausting and overwhelming to maintain that amount of trust.

All of this is part of the same creative process.

All of this requires setting intention and putting faith in the mystery. Opening ourselves to a creative source that we can contemplate and hypothesize about, but that we can’t begin to wholly understand.

 

SIXTEEN

When I was 16 years old my best friend and I hitch-hiked up and down the cape, two girls in summer dresses on the sandy side of the road.

There was this boy named Chandler, he’d walked to Provincetown all the way from some other place that was far away. Like a spiritual kind of journey even though nobody knew why he really did it.

One night a few of us went to the ocean and swam naked in the bioluminescence, the water lit up green around our pale teenage bodies. The next morning we waded in the low tide and Chandler showed me a starfish he had found, placed it carefully in the palm of my hand.

When I got back home to my suburban town I had this dream that maybe Chandler would come and find me. There was a low skylight above my bed and for awhile every night I’d lean outside and watch the corner of my road, half expecting him to show up in the street light. He was the kind of boy who walked thirty miles to a seaside town for no good reason, who knows what kind of crazy thing he’d do for love.

Chandler was just a 17 year old kid who showed me a starfish and never thought of me again. And I’m 42 years old, but some nights I find myself still holding my breath, waiting for an irresponsible kind of love to appear outside my bedroom window. Trying to go to sleep without my heart pounding, still trying to convince myself: the kid is never going to come.

 

IT IS LATE AND THE DUNES

It is summer. And it is raining. The days are pressing down with that heavy romantic feeling that makes it impossible to do such mundane things as keep the house clean or put away laundry. And I move through the hours like a Victorian woman standing at her bedroom window, wishing someone would feed and bathe her children so she might write poetry in the rain.

I am like that friend who laid down in the grass and the grass was so exquisite it made her cry. A bluebird in a roof gutter, a robin in an overgrown yard. Even the weeds sprawling from the cracks in the driveway are laden with inspiration. And so I take long detours to drive past the river, I wear mascara to do last night’s dishes. I dream of laying on blankets with strangers in the park, telling everyone how beautiful they are.

At night, my heart is too full to sleep. I try to close my eyes but always on the other side of midnight there are things waiting to be seen. My children sleeping, a perfect crescent moon. A rectangle of light from the neighbor’s bedroom window cast against the wall. A gust of wind, passing through the trees outside, branches like long dark arms that brush against the windowsill and enter the room. And I am outside smoking cigarettes in the dark like I’m sixteen years old, or wandering around the backyard in my underwear until I’m caught by the motion detector light next door. Up and down the street, every house light extinguished. The world so quiet that breathing comes easier than it did before.

Do you remember laying awake at night and watching the headlights move across your bedroom wall? A cup of water on the windowsill, the sound of adults moving through the rooms downstairs? Even in this town there are hot muggy nights, sleeping without sheets, a window fan and the sound of a train in the distance. All the elements for a perfect memory, and I think of my own children and know their childhood will be all right.

It is late and the dunes are a deserted country. Stripping off our clothes, we run hell-bent into the ocean. There is laughter, stillness. A wave that picks you up and pushes you towards shore. Though you fear the sharks will eat you, the water calls you home.

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IN APRIL

I woke up this morning and there was the wind.  Sometime during the night it had swept through everything, making things right again.  The house was quiet - Orest in the garage fixing a bike, Eloise and Julian in their pajamas making water balloons on the front lawn.  And I noticed there were things I have looked at but never actually seen.  The bushes outside our front door, the house across the street, the palm of my hand.

Last week I felt discouraged that I would never again be able to make a good photograph.  It seemed unlikely that there was an original idea left in the world - every story already written and no new songs left to be sung.

And then it was after dinner and I was sorting laundry, Ray LaMontagne playing from a boombox on the dresser and my favorite song came on.  Gabriel was crawling through the piles of clean clothes on the bed and I picked him up and we slow danced together around the room.  He turned his cheek against my collarbone, I caught a glimpse in the mirror of his little body tucked against mine.  And as we swayed back and forth between the closet and the bed I felt the singularity of that moment so acutely.  It filled me up, it rushed through me like the wind and touched a thousand different places inside.

And I knew: There will always be a moment that belongs entirely to you.  There will always be a new idea.  There will always be another picture.

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WHO CAN SAY

Sitting outside the open kitchen door at the onset of evening.  The light from the kitchen window catches on a ribbon, a remnant from the last baby shower, as it dances in the wind.  The wind, arriving first before the thunder and the rain - whipping through the yard.  The young poplars almost bending to the ground then springing back as if in joyful defiance to the coming storm.  They know, perhaps, the depth of their own roots and the sinew of their own form, how much their branches can give and if they were rigid, how they would break.

I am nursing Julian in the old velvet rocker on the front porch until it starts to flood.  Which it always does.  I am picking up all the doormats as the rivulets of water rush in towards each other across the dusty cement.  Julian has crawled outside to the line where the rain begins, is covering an old paperback book with dirt.

How are we the same as the trees?  How am I deepening my roots, practicing my flexibility?  Sometimes it takes a force larger than yourself to feel whole again.  Who can say that a spiritual life is not important if they have sat at the edge of a storm and watched the trees in the wind.

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SMALL THINGS

Sitting in a dirt parking lot in the front seat of my mother's car by the wharf - the windows rolled down, Julian asleep in the back.  There is a waft of fried seafood, the cry of a gull as it lands on the roof of the restaurant down the pier.  I am watching two Japanese tourists taking photos of a marble sculpture after examining every angle with great care, and I am eating an almost-ripe banana, tasting every bite.

And I realize that this is all I need.  To watch someone else walk along the water, or sit with their companion on a park bench taking cellphone photos of the boats.  To be able to see other people in the distance, conversing over fried clam rolls and lobster in the outdoor seating area of the restaurant that hangs over the bay.

A quiet moment alone in this part of the country that feels most like home.  The narrow colonial streets.  The smell of autumn.  How I always took the small idiosyncrasies of New England for granted until I moved away, had three small children and couldn’t afford the trips home.  So then by necessity home had to become something different, something new.

I remember that urgent, panicked feeling I used to have of needing to do something all the time.  Everything all at once, like every moment was fleeting.  I remember, twenty-one years old, when it felt like some kind of fire ran through my blood that could not be quenched.  Flying into San Francisco after my first trip to Kauai and waking up that first morning on the mainland, how I walked several hours from the apartment where I was staying to the shoreline and ran straight into the ocean in all my clothes.  Revisiting the giant body of the Pacific Ocean as if just that one day of travel had already been too long that I had been away.  A week later on my drive home across the country, reaching the Grand Canyon just before sunset and descending to the bottom of the canyon to spend the night alone amidst that vast expanse of solitude.  Running, galloping, the entire ten miles in my flip flops with nothing but a water bottle and a sleeping bag.  Like a palpable need, my feet almost aching for the dusty red dirt of the trail.   

If it were still then, I might drive my mother's car in the middle of the night back to the town I grew up in and slip a canoe into the moon-lit Squannacook river to lay on the bottom of the boat and listen to the water lap against the side.  I might dive into the Newburyport ocean - even though it is fall in New England and the water is frigid - just to taste the salt water and stand afterwards on the shore with the prickly ocean air drying my skin.

But I have been here three days, and I am just now heading down to see the ocean.  I can’t even see it, really, except for a small patch to the left of the ticket-office and to the right of a grassy hill.  The road to the public beach is closed off, and Julian fell asleep in his carseat before we could find a different route to the water.  But I can smell it and I know that it is there.  That it exists now and will continue to exist.  And I have no urge to run to the rivers I grew up on, to revisit every memory, to see every person that I have spent years only thinking about.  Maybe a small urge, but mostly I am just content.  Happy to sit at the edge of the pier and listen to the seagulls and the cars passing over the bridge by the wharf.  To eat a banana slowly and feel the wind blow off the water and into the passenger seat of this car.

And I know that later I will drive to Plum Island and unstrap Julian from his carseat.  I will leave my shoes at the edge of the parking lot and Julian will laugh with delight at the roar of the tide coming in.  He will dig his hands in the sand and rub his eyes with his sandy fists and cry - and we will lay together on a thin towel beside the water while he nurses, his small body turned towards mine, his bare feet pressed against my stomach, bits of sand stuck to his nose and in his eye-lashes, the wind passing above us as the air turns cold at the end of day.  And that will be my equivalent of a night spent alone beside the rush of the Colorado River at the bottom of an empty canyon.  It will fill me up in the same way.  Just as when I am back in Denver again standing in the yard late at night I am filled with almost the same feeling of standing under the moon beside a tent in the White Mountains after everyone else has fallen asleep.  They are small things now - a cup of tea on a cold morning before Julian awakes - which remind me of the depth and majesty of this world.

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ON THE ARRIVAL OF GABRIEL ILYA MOSIJCZUK

March 30th, 2017

Gabriel arrived one week and four days ago.  Though it feels inaccurate to call him “eleven days old" as he was doing just fine on his own - eating and sleeping and hiccuping - before he made his appearance in the outside world.  And after meeting him I am easily convinced that he was just as complete a being before any of us conceived of his existence. 

But he is here at last, sweet Gabriel, the tiniest of humans.  In my arms, squirming in your sleep as I write this.  Your little mouth searching animal-like for my breast.  So small I can’t convey your size in pictures, which is causing me panic because I swear you are getting bigger every day.  And already I am feeling that form of nostalgia described so perfectly in the poem by Basho:  Even in Kyoto— hearing the cuckoo's cry— I long for Kyoto.

I didn't sleep much the night before you were born.  And I didn’t sleep more than an hour the night after your birth, or the next day, or the night after that.  It was like I didn’t want to be apart from you, not even in sleep.  I only wanted to lay beside you, your baby skin soft against mine, and look at you.  Memorizing every detail of your face.  Breathing you in.

And sometime in the middle of night number two, things finally clicked into place.  I saw, as if it hadn’t dawned on me before, that what was happening was entirely about you.  This was your fearless beginning - not your beginning into Life itself - but your courageous start into this life-experience, beginning in the small sanctuary of room 450 in the midst of downtown Denver, bundled in white hospital blankets and placed in my arms.

In that 3 a.m. moment it finally became clear that this birth was not about my own experience - not about the night nurses or the hospital bed and the orange sherbet melting on the cafeteria tray.  It was not about those fabulous mesh panties or the disappointing luke-warm drip of the shower or the view from my window of the building next door.  It was not about how many minutes you had nursed and on which side, how long you had slept or who was coming to visit in the morning.  All those things didn’t really matter.  The birth wasn’t even about the experience of birth itself, the accomplishment of labor, that extraordinary feeling of being held and supported in the midst of excruciating pain as you broke free into the world.

This birth was not about any of that.  It was always about you, all along.  Only you.  Your small, upturned face.  Flickering in and out of a smile as you slept beside me.

I knew that in a few hours the sun would come up and the morning would be filled with daytime nurses, phone calls to family, taking pictures and telling the story of your birth.  And soon you would return home to a family whose voices you already knew, the familiar path from room to room, an entire house of small, unwashed hands fighting to hold you, to touch your soft head and put their faces next to yours.  This modest world you have been born into, already prepared, awaiting your arrival.  And life would once again become not only about you but about the world you had entered.  All the mundane things that fill our days competing for attention.

And so I sat in the dark and tried to hold onto that clarity as long as I could.  I thought of my own life next to yours, and time no longer seemed to make sense.  Only 36 years in and how much love and heartbreak these days have held.  Have the years gone quickly, or am I just setting out?  And will your years pass quickly?  What will they hold?  I felt your life ahead like a wave building up around you and I wanted to hold it back, to shelter you, so innocent towards all to come.  And yet here you were, choosing this life.  How very brave of you, I thought.  Such childlike trust, to begin this journey.  To step so completely into the unknown.

A friend once shared with me the idea that somewhere out beyond what we can humanly comprehend, our children are the ones who have chosen us.  Though the truth in that we can never know, when I think about the possibility of it I feel a great honor and a great responsibility.  And I'm filled with a small bit of hope, that if this child chose me they did so knowing all of who I was.  And maybe it's okay that I'm not yet perfect.  In spite of my struggles, my fall-outs, my weaknesses, they chose me to be their mom.

Looking into your tiny face that night - just barely over twenty-four hours old - and thinking of all this, something inside of me shifted.  I felt such gratitude that I might be given again this chance to be a mother.  To love a child unconditionally.  And all the small injustices, the grudges I’ve held, all my fears and regrets seemed so paper-thin, so insubstantial that I saw they had been unnecessary all along.  I wanted to promise you, from now on, only Love.  In this household, in this family, only love.  I put my face next to yours and laid very still.  “Only love,” I whispered, though it felt foolish to be making promises so early.  But I wanted the chance to keep this one as best I could.

I stayed like that for a long time, in awe of you.  In complete wonder that in the midst of such a messy, worn-out world, another life was just beginning.  A new child was starting out with everything still before him.  It seemed such a contradiction, such a miracle.  And I remember thinking to the Divine, how very wise of you. To keep me up for two nights straight so that I might finally glimpse what this moment is actually all about.

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THIS IS THE TIME

Laying in bed late at night long after everyone else is sleeping. I am exhausted and wide awake. Restless with wanting to be doing. So filled with ideas it feels as if my life is just beginning.

I think about slipping out of bed in the dark, but you're nursing by my side and I don't want to wake you. And so I bury my face in the squall of your hair - even after five months there is still no breath that is deep enough to take in all of you.

This is the time of collecting ideas. Stringing them end to end as if they are small beads that I have found - behind the dresser, under the bed, in an old tin on top of the piano. They are precious, hand-carved, engraved with someday soon.

The baby stirs and cries, it is midnight and tomorrow I may have ten minutes to begin the thing that calls me.

But I can think great thoughts while I clear the dinner dishes. I can lay in the dark between two sleeping children and write a book without paper. Plan a revolution as my hopes drift into dreams. I can organize inspiration into long list form as it flickers in and out of focus.

In the morning it will be too early. There will be the cold wood floor, a cup of hot tea. Birds at war in the yard, the cat stalking an imaginary prey. The gibberish of squirrels, a human baby quivering with excitement just to be alive. I am watching Moses as he bikes to school, a small boy with tall white socks turning the corner towards the mountains. And last nights ideas that almost burst me will be hard to  find.

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ON A FALL MORNING

Joni Mitchell on a fall morning with the sun heating up the volvo as I drive slowly down Euclid. An unadorned, nostalgic excitement about making art that feels entirely present. A calm clarity. Memory and longing:

The elm at the edge of the woods when I was a kid. Long spider-leg arms thick as trunks and the rotted-out center at the place where the branches spread. How I would climb onto that flat perch of soft dusty wood and peer into the neighbors yard. Thinking, I could sleep up here, I could live here if I needed to.


Listening to mix tapes in high school from my first boyfriend. Somehow he’s managed to record his own voice over Paul McCartney singing I’ve Just Seen a Face and he’s added my name into the chorus. I’m in the mildewy basement. I’m in a pink satin dress taking melodramatic self portraits on black and white film. There’s the concrete crawlspace and how it smelled. The boxes of slides and negatives kept in the way back where it’s too dark to see.

Fifteen years old, it’s 4am on a Tuesday and my hands are sticky with oil pastels. My bedroom a sanctum of solitary rebellion. An entire night that I can own.


What does your inspiration feel like? What does it feel like when you’re filled with that holy presence that comes like a rush and sweeps your insides and you’re left vibrating, empty, open, alive? 



Arriving like a remembrance and a promise at the same time. A reminder that there’s still something inside, waiting for an open door. It’s always been there, it’s not going away. It’s part of who you are, it’s who you are.

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AMES STREET

At 4am last night I crawled into bed on the floor of the new house. It took me a minute to find everyone, tip-toeing through the empty rooms to where they were tucked away. The back bedroom a puzzle of bare mattresses wedged wall-to-wall and Eloise asleep in her underwear, wrapped in a mattress pad breathing softly, her face and feet dirty from the yard.

It felt like days since I’d seen my own children, the past few weeks spent slipping away to paint the walls of the new place and scrub the bathtub we were leaving behind. To fill endless trash bags of broken toys strewn in every corner of the yard while Gabriel slept in the baby swing under the juniper tree. To pick pennies and bits of crayon out of the carpet that had not survived three years and four small children.

And now after one last day of straightening up the property I was driving away from 1337 Ames Street for the last time. The window rolled down, the last pieces of stray furniture strapped to the roof of the car. The road out of town reminding me of so many times picking up and moving.

I am fighting back a flood of tears. I am suddenly panicked, a knot in my chest. Is it strange to say I will miss this part of town? This scrappy, unkempt corner of the city that feels like home.

What is it I am scared of losing?

The wobbly gait of an old man with a plastic shopping bag wandering down our street.
The woman who hides her cardboard box of belongings in the alley behind our house.
The sound of the Mexican popsicle man, stopping to ring his bell at the gate of our chain-link fence.
A laundry mat, a city bus stop and a 7-11 all within walking distance of my front door.
Stepping outside on a hot summer evening to hear a grandmother across the street yelling at her kids.
The reminder that I’m not the only one lacking perfection in their lives.

And there’s the fear of losing a small bit of simplicity. Some undefined sense of freedom that comes with living in a dilapidated rental with thrift-store furniture and everything painted red and sky-blue and sage green.

It feels like betrayal to admit I have laid in bed at night lamenting the fact that I am sleeping with a baby in a bed meant for our toddler. Lamenting the unfinished drywall and scuffed up linoleum, the strip of duct-tape holding down the edge of the living room carpet, the bare lightbulb hanging in the kitchen hallway. And wishing for a house that didn’t feel crowded and chaotic, threadbare and outgrown.

But now it is happening and I am not wanting to let go. In the new house, will I sit in a rust-colored velvet chair on the porch while my kids dig holes in the front lawn? Will there be rogue marker drawings on the living room wall and star wars stickers on the front door? Will there be a couch in the yard and delinquent neighborhood kids showing up for hours without their parent’s permission? Will my kids not pee in the yard when the bathroom is being used by someone else?

These past few years are poignantly significant in all their details - Julian’s floundering first steps across the living room carpet as we cheered him on. Running barefoot out to the street on Moses’s first day of kindergarten to watch him wave proudly out the back window of the Volvo. The concrete floor of the front porch that was covered in bamboo mats and flooded every time it rained. Washing the dishes as Eloise and Julian crouched on their heels outside the kitchen door, studying a millipede, searching for rolly pollies under the rocks that I was constantly moving back into place. Hanging the laundry out to dry on the electrical wires stapled over the front door that stayed open all summer. It’s peeling paint and grubby handprints. The birds in the yard coexisting with the cars on Sheridan, an ambulance on Colfax, the heavy bass of a neighbors truck, traffic that sounds like a drag race.

Mostly, I am afraid that my children won’t remember any of this. That they won’t remember a time when we all shared one bedroom, when they didn’t even know that they were supposed to have their own beds, their own rooms. Maybe they’ll carry with them a hazy sense of a memory, like a large juniper tree with a smooth patch of dirt underneath an old swing. A small bedroom with multiple layers of colorful carpets. Cradling a rolly polly outside the kitchen door.

It is the last evening on Ames street - always so beautiful the way the sun set behind the house and the front yard bathed in shafts of light, turning a small concrete block house into a mecca of heaven. The baby is strapped into the carseat amidst walls of belongings. I am sweaty and hot and exhausted and I am driving way from the first home my children might actually remember.

Turning onto 36 the sun is setting over the foothills turning their outline to purple, blue, then gold. A ray of light shoots up to the sky like some love letter from God, reminding me: The sun sets here too. Nothing is lost. Beauty goes with you wherever you go. My fear turns to awe, there are tears in my eyes. And then over the horizon, a new place we will call home.

 

ON HOW TO FEEL ALIVE

 

It is 13 degrees outside and the sun is burning through the morning mist that hovers over route 36 where it leads out of town.  It is January.  In another lifetime I am unzipping a tent door to a swath of white on a mountain pass and melting a pot of snow.  Pumping a camp stove that belonged to a youthful version of myself who understood that there were many ways to live.

In this lifetime I am driving into Denver early on a Saturday with the heater on full blast and all the windows down.  This may be as close as I come today to nature’s inexplicable beauty.  The frost brushed on trees, everything an opal radiance.  And even this is enough to remind my soul of all the neglected ways a person might feel alive:

Wake up early, hair wet from the shower.  Throw on a heavy jacket and step into the freezing world to roll the trashcan to the curb.

Drive when no-one else is on the road.

Give people gifts.

Go without sleep until your entire body is tingling with exhaustion and when night comes, share your pillow with that tired, drunken mind.  Wandering in and out of brightly lit rooms, unfolding memories as if they are taking place all around you.

The moon in the dark and a summer lake underneath the moon.  Your face, breaking up from the smooth surface into the moonlight.  Suspended in the warm layer of water closest to the sky, an abyss of shadows beneath you.  That stillness that these days is so impossible to find.

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AFTER DINNER

It was after dinner and your new cleats had arrived in the mail. Dada laced them up and every last one of you spilled out the door to watch you run around the backyard. Dada was laughing, Eloise and Julian shrieking and even Nana and the baby stood on the edge of the grass like some Bill Owens photograph of Suburbia.

I had intended on making the bed. A pile of hot sheets bundled in my arms, straight from the dryer. And I paused for a minute at the sliding glass door to watch the shapes of my family in the darkening yard.

I had intended to make the bed but it was such a rare moment, the house so quiet and everyone accounted for. As the fitted sheet billowed over the bare mattress I crawled underneath and curled up as it came floating down. It was soft, and so warm, and when I closed my eyes nobody at all could find me.

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