Remembering to Act

image by +cripswalk+++++++

Dear me. I keep forgetting to blog. I spend plenty of time online, mind you. I read dozens of other blogs every week. I get sucked into Facebook on a regular basis. And email? Don't talk to me about email. I'm practically swimming in it. So online communication is not exactly on the backburner for me. But blogging -- actually writing my own blog posts -- keeps slipping my mind.

Here's the irony: My word for 2009 is Action. Over the past year or two, I've noticed waves of envy when I hear about other people's creative projects. This has happened even when the projects were being done by friends. Even when I loved the idea but had no desire to that specific thing myself. So it's not the "sour grapes" or "I wish I'd thought of that" jealousy. Like most unpleasant emotions, this one was merely trying to get my attention and tell me something.

I realized that I have tons of ideas for creative projects, but rarely ever get past the idea phase. As a result, I'd begun to feel like I had no ideas. Finally I realized that the ideas were there. The missing piece was Action.

Since college I've been a big advocate of learning To Be and not getting caught up in the shallow busyness of life. I wish I could say that I'm really good at this by now in some Zen-like way. (Insert the voice of this woman telling me that Zen-like is an oxymoron because Zen isn't like anything.) While I do value my downtime and make sure to get plenty of it, I fill way too much of it with fretting over what I'm not doing. So it's the Year of Action.

Maybe I'm forgetting to blog because I'm too busy doing other things? Okay, that's actually partially true. I've been focusing on making my house more of a nest, cooking nourishing meals for my family, taking care of ailing kitties, and strengthening connections with friends. I've even been working on one big project. So I am doing. I am acting.

But I continually have to remind myself to be a participant, not a spectator. I am in the process of understanding that I can be the one doing cool, creative projects. I can take all those ideas trotting around my head and figure out ways to put them out into the world. I just need to remember to act.

In which I fall down and cry like a baby

I'm back from New York City. It was a good trip. An important trip. But I'm not ready to talk about that yet. So for now, here's a story about another trip I took.

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I'm standing at the rocky edge of the land, staring out at the cold Atlantic Ocean, and I'm sobbing. I'm crying like a child: loudly, full-throttled, irrationally. I tell my husband that I'm fine, but that I just need to stand here and cry for awhile. He's known me long enough and well enough to understand, so he stands on a boulder somewhere behind me and lets me go.

There is salt everywhere here: in the tears streaming down my face, in the waves crashing on the rocks below me, in the misty air that dampens everything. Salt is a preservative, and right now my salty tears are preserving my sanity. Nothing horrible has happened in this moment. I simply fell down on a slick part of these New England rocks. But my side hurts, my pants and sweater are shellacked with strips of tar, and I broke the camera. The physical pain is bothersome and I know I'll have a big bruise, but that's not why I cry. I wail about the broken camera. Broken on our first day here! And I mourn for my ruined pants and go on and on about how I'd searched for pants like these for 10 years. It's nearly impossible to find the perfect pair of lightweight khaki pants that are perfect for traveling. Nearly impossible!

Mostly I wail about how stupid I was for stepping on that dark patch of sloping rock. I berate myself for being so stupid. So stupid! I say it over and over again, thinking that if I chastise myself enough I'll work through feeling so bad about it all and start to feel better. But that tired tactic never works; I should know that by now.

What works in moments like these is crying like a child. I'm old enough to know that I'm not really crying about the bruise or the busted camera or my soiled clothing or even my poor decision making. Those things are just surface annoyances that release the pressure valve so I can let the real emotions out.

In the end, I don't think too much about what the real emotions were. I cried and then I felt better. We went to the cry cleaner* and my clothes look brand new. My husband fiddled with the camera and it works. In the end, everything was okay.

*Edited to add this note: As Randi points out in the comments, I did write "cry cleaner" instead of "dry cleaner." I would like to say it was intentional, but it was really just an oh-so-appropriate slip, so I think I'll leave it.

Whiteout

image by Badgurl

Yesterday was bright and wet here. The sun came out, the sky turned blue, and all the snow started to melt. Everything was sloppy and sparkly, a real treat. Usually I hate to see the snow melt because I love the look of a winter wonderland. But it was so pretty outside yesterday that I didn't mind. Today we were back to the grey, grey skies of southwestern Pennsylvania. If you don't live here you may not know this, but we have a lot of overcast days. I think everyone I know has a Vitamin D deficiency.

On Friday, I found myself in the middle of a total whiteout. I've never driven in such strange conditions. The snow was coming down so fast that everything was white: the ground, the air, the sky. The road was covered and there were no visible car tracks. Visibility was so low that I couldn't see a school bus coming toward me in the other lane until it was almost upon me. For part of my trip, I saw no other vehicles. I felt like I was totally alone in the world. It was very strange, like something out of a Sci-Fi movie.

With everything in the same shade of white, I started to lose my bearings. At several points I literally didn't know where the road stopped and the abutting hillside began. It was like being in a shaken-up snowglobe. This sensation triggered my claustrophobia. I felt trapped in the big wide open. Maybe that kind of fear all comes down to a loss of control.

The whiteout was a good physical incarnation of how I've been feeling for the past few weeks. I'm in the middle of a large project that I care about very much. I was working furiously to meet deadlines last week. I was immersed. I was in it, you know? I could barely tell which way was up for a few days.

Things aren't quite so frantic now, but the project isn't done yet. I have my bearings now, so if it gets crazy again, I think I'll just pull over for a few minutes and enjoy the beauty of it all until the storm passes.

2008: The Quick & Dirty Review

image by color line

At the start of last year, I posted my retrospective on 2007 and my hopes and plans for 2008. This year I'm taking a less introspective approach and giving you a quick and dirty look back.

I saw this idea on Jena Strong's blog, Bullseye, Baby! Jena apparently stole it from She She, who got it from Magpie Musing. (This internet sure is a tangled web, eh?) Below are the first lines of my first posts for each month of 2008. I'm not sure how well they capture the year as a whole, but I like this kind of word collage. I think it creates a sort of "found" poetry.

(Oh, and if you like it quick and dirty, come back for the next post, which will contain details on an exciting new project that encourages us to be just that in our creative pursuits.)

And now, I give you the first lines of 2008.

I can feel the hopes and goals for 2008 gently swirling around the outskirts of my thoughts.

Ten years ago, when I still lived at home with my parents, and my husband was just my new boyfriend, I inadvertently caused a car accident.

My Dear Body, Oh the times we've had! Do you remember when...

You know what? You're somebody.

There's a springtime snowglobe swirling outside my window.

I gave myself until 2:07am.

Your present question marks are going to succeed.

Thank you to everyone who left a comment on the last post, emailed me, or sent their support via Twitter.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a retrospective on 2007 and a Mondo Beyondo Prospective for 2008.

I don't usually promote my other writing here, but the other day it occurred to me that perhaps a little link love might not be such a bad thing.

Awhile back, I wrote about my failed attempt to rename myself and the lingering desire to try it again.

What I learned from spending the day with a friend, a toddler, and a newborn:

Meditation: Winter Solstice

image by hdiwan

After weeks of overcast skies, the sun has finally returned on this, the darkest night of the year. Today is the First Day of Winter, the day of the Winter Solstice. Tonight the darkness will last longer than at any other time of the year. Tomorrow, daylight slowly returns to supremacy, with light outlasting the dark.

Sunset is in just under an hour. Right now, the sky is my favorite color blue and offset with perfectly puffy clouds. The grass is actually dappled -- dappled! -- with sunlight. From inside my cozy (read: cluttered) studio, the wind blowing the leaves across the quiet street seems friendly and playful. Being outside is another matter: the current temperature is 27 degrees Fahrenheit, with that frolicsome wind making it feel like 12.

Midwinter in Southwestern Pennsylvania is a doleful affair. Grey grey grey is the order of most days. Sometimes it's the type of moody sky full of gradations of grey and luscious layers of clouds. I like those days. The dark, bare tree branches stand out in sweet relief against slate grey and blue. The world is my favorite palette on such days.

But those days are rare, it seems. More often, the world is a washout of whitish-grey, an opaque cloud of sadness shrouding everything. I don't even mind those days sometimes. A little bit of melancholy is always good for me. But lately, they seem to consume the landscape and last for months on end. In turn, I get anxious, lethargic, unfocused. I think this is getting worse as I age.

My brother moved to Arizona several years ago, but always comes home for a few weeks around Christmas and sometimes for a bit in the summer. He admits to missing the seasons we have here, the smell of tree and grass, so different from the smell of cactus and sand. But he can't move back. He's been christened in the sunshine of the Southwest. He tells us that things are easier there; people are more cheerful and friendly. And apart from two months out of the year when it's too hot to do anything, he says, it's always perfect weather for going and doing something. The Southwest is a continual grand adventure, all thanks to the sun.

But as much as I rejoice at the sight of bright blue days here, I don't think I could live in the land of eternal sunshine. After awhile the strong rays wear me out, jangle my nerves, make me twitchy and insecure. Besides, I like thick winter coats, striped gloves, colorful scarves. I've heard that the sky is perpetually blue in Colorado, even after snowfall. Perhaps Denver has the best of both worlds.

In the time it's taken me to type this, the sun has waned and everything has taken on that soft, lovely hue just before sunset. Twilight is my favorite time of day, when everything is blue, comforting, and mysterious. Try as I might to reset my internal clock, I am an undeniable night owl. The sun sets and I come alive. This is my time to think, create, connect, to be most myself.

Tonight, on the darkest night of the year, I embrace the gifts of the dark and wait for the coming light.