this moment (and giveaway winner)

(this moment)

A Friday ritual. A moment from the week, no words, to savor and remember.

And hot damn, the winner of the giveaway is mb, my blog sis in Oregon, who said : my word for 2012 is whole. i like trust a whole lot though, too. :) love your aspen journey experience. i also dig your flow chart or trust and gratitude… really resonating for me at the moment.

mb, e-mail me your address and I’ll send you out some 6512 goodies.

homestead happenings: play

It recently occurred to me that it has been weeks since a Christmas carol rolled absentmindedly off my tongue; 2 weekends ago we burned our solstice garland at Col’s birthday party; and, there are 34 more minutes of daylight since winter solstice.

Which is to say there’s a small shift occurring that smells faintly of the memory of grass. It’s like homeopathic medicine, how that expanding sunlight contains the imprint of spinach leaves and wild irises, even if the outside world currently looks like this.

We’ve been getting slammed with snow, well okay, maybe only 8 inches, but I’m a notorious snowfall exaggerator.

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We’ve all become sort of pleasantly agoraphobic, passing entire days at home, inside. By 3pm I feel like I’ve been watching the day-long rehearsal of the new hip Indie film – you know the one that has 2 actors who perform 30 acts in 17 minute segments and you don’t really understand anything but you appreciate the passion of the artists.

Rose: Let’s say I was your puppy.

Col: Yeah, and you wanted to go to the museum (pronounced mu-sem). But then I say: puppy, you aren’t allowed in the museum!

Rose: You don’t say that to your puppy! Puppies can’t hear that.

Col: Sorry puppy. But you can’t go inside.

Rose: Ruff ruff. That means: okay.

Then there’s a scene change and Rose is now the director of the museum, clickity clacking across the tile floor, headachingly, in her tap shoes singing, “I can do anything you want in a jiffy!”

this picture sums up a lot

17 minutes later Col is in his room snapping legos together and Rose is settled on the couch reading Wizard of Oz, her particular version peppered with copious verbs and adverbs, exactly what I warn my writing students against: ”And then she said sweetly, why don’t you come with us to Kansas City to get a brain? It was so sparkly bright that he jumped up excitedly and said, let’s go!”

And then, apropos of nothing, Col comes out of his room wondering about circuses. “Because,” he starts, “when are we ever going to see a circus?”

Me: Maybe this summer. Daddy and I saw one at the fairgrounds before you were born. They brought in a big circus tent and we sat in the bleachers, and…”

Rose: (sarcastically) Oh right, and then they just suck your blood.

Me: Suck your blood?

Rose: Right. The bleachers.

Me: You mean leeches?

Rose: Oh yeah.

Today the kids played 26 rounds of crazy 8′s; the new style is to put all your cards face up and boast wildly about how many crazy 8′s you have.

The kids did a 5 minute play with their snake and mouse puppets, consisting entirely of the sounds “eek eek” and “sssssssss.” It’s riveting; I have the video if anyone wants to watch it.

I am loving all this playing, so passionate and silly and unselfconscious and agenda-less. It’s like the secret handshake of childhood, the ability to blink away the world we adults live in and tumble into the realm of pirates and fairies and puppies.

I was at the pool with Col and Rose recently, where scores of kids were ecstatically shrieking and splashing, chasing each other and doing multiple underwater somersaults in a row. The building was humming. And I thought, holy shit, if you could bottle this energy and exuberance, perhaps you could replace viagra, ambien, prozac, laxatives, appetite suppressants and digestive aids. Not to mention harness clean, renewable energy?

Can someone get on that?

Rose likes to keep tabs on me while I do chicken chores.

I am loving all your responses to this post. Connection, simplicity, align, lightness, go!, action, rise, release, inter-personal, whole…so beautiful. Someone e-mailed me, remarking on how, for her, trust feels out of reach. And just like Rose learning to hula hoop, trusting takes practice. At first, you may only notice how quickly your mind fills with worry, about things that are out of your control, or not even real, fabricated from the energy you give it. But maybe in an indecisive or sorrowful or clenched-jaw moment, you’ll remember your word and whisper it gently to yourself. I do believe this is powerful.

And stay away from those blood-sucking bleachers,

Rachel

trust

This past summer I attended a weekend-long wild plant workshop with herbalist Doug Simons. Doug is a trippy and endearing character who spent 20 years living primitively in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. He knows the local plants like family, cheerily greeting a valerian plant and then settling in its diminutive shadow to gossip about its characteristics and attributes for the next hour. On the end of our last day together, Doug led us to a patch of yellow arnica flowers and advised us to get comfortable.

“We’re going on a plant journey,” Doug announced, “to meet and connect with your plant guide.”

Meeting our plant guide? I thought, while my skeptic-o-meter raised just a bit.

I had also been on several plant walks that summer hosted by the local Native Plant Society, which included a lot of the nerdiness I love—addressing plants by their latin names and cataloging them into genus and family—but these walks often felt dry, lacking the spontaneous love-jams to a wild strawberry or even acknowledgement of the plants’ uses. I was trying to reconcile these different styles and figure out where my path lay.

“Lie down, close your eyes and relax your body and mind” Doug instructed us from against a spruce trunk. He explained, with absolutely no irony, how we’d journey through a dark underground tunnel at the end of which we’d meet our plant guide.

I flicked a deer fly off my face. Adjusted position. Scratched my knee. Everyone was very quiet. Someone yawned. I might have heard snoring. I imagined walking through this dark underground tunnel. And walking. In the darkness.

Right into the arms of the aspen tree.

Oh, hello aspen.

We chatted, aspen and I. We talked about how, in loving plants, some people are scientific, others more esoteric. The approach doesn’t matter, the aspen said, what matters is your love. This is true of many things. I received the word trust. Everything about the aspen embodied trust: being the lone deciduous tree in a forest of conifers (be yourself!); bearing leaves through which the mountain winds comb furiously (be flexible!); growing and then shedding volumes of leaves annually (let go, courageously!).

Later, Doug asked a few of us to share our experiences. It’s more concrete, he said, when you tell someone. So, I’m telling you all. My word for 2012 is trust. Trust!

Only one month into 2012, trusting has been a powerful practice. It feels like the answer to a dozen multiple choice questions my mind serves up daily. How am I going to write this book? What are we going to do all day cooped up in the house? May I suggest the special of the house: trust?

Trust grew up in the same neighborhood as it’s all good, as the wise elder mentoring all the young upstart slogans. Trust is the bucket of water I throw on the hot flames of my worrying mind. The more I practice trusting, the better I get at it, which looks something like this: trust → gratitude → generosity → happiness →  trust → gratitude…

Trusting hushes my mental feedback so I can clearly see what needs to be done; sometimes nothing needs to be done except leaning into the luckiness of this life.

Do you have a word for the new year? Sharing is powerful. Tell me your word in a comment, and on Friday I’ll pick something lovely and delicious and handmade to send off to one of you.

xo,

Rachel

this moment

A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week to savor and remember.

adulthood and other myths

Hi Sweet Ones,

We had a super fun “woodsy” for Col’s birthday.

A woodsy is when you go to the woods not so much with binoculars and journal, but more with friends, beer and elk stew.

If you don’t see many children, it’s because they’re all shoehorned around the cake in this photo.

I think Col has blown out every year’s birthday candles in my arms; he says when everyone sings to him it makes him a little nervous but it’s me that scoops him up unsolicited. If you need a boost when you turn 47, Col, I’m totally here for you.

Junction creek was completely frozen over and the kids only came off the ice to grab hunks of baguette.

Have I told you about the Colorado sun yet? Sunny days are so prevalent here that everyone gets sort of excited on grey, overcast days, finally feeling justified to stay home, drink coffee and do a little pleasantly melancholic journaling. Also, being 6512 feet closer to the sun, even when it’s listing to the south, counts for a lot. It also allows you to have a woodsy in January.

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On another note, and another birthday, Dan recently turned 40! I made that acorn meal cake with chokecherry frosting and damn, it was good.

There’s no better birthday present than kid art, right?

I also published a little story called Adulthood on Mamalode about Dan’s birthday and the craziness of turning 40 when you still remember all the lyrics to Blondie’s Call Me, from 1980.

an exerpt:

Somehow I thought it would be different, this adulthood, like you grow up and the oceanliners “self-confidence” and “competence” anchor at your dock forever. I don’t even have an ironclad parenting philosophy; you know—the kind you wear on your belt, flicking open to produce an array of efficient and appropriate tools to get out of any bind.

You may remember that Mamalode is that site where I get paid based on the number of unique clicks the story receives. And I wish that instead of explaining this detail every time I write for them, I had a code word I could drop. It could be like on Portlandia (which Dan and I watch on Netflix, crying with laughter), when the pink-haired girl wants a way to say “stop” to her sex-crazed boyfriend and comes up with the code word “cacao.” And then she goes a little overboard, hissing “cacao” when he puts his hand on her shoulders, or just texting him the word “cacao.”

Anyway, check out Adulthood, share with your friends and be well,

Rachel

ps: Mamalode is a great site, with excellent writers and a cool mission, that you should check out anyway.

pps: thanks for crying and celebrating with me on this post.

Seven

Dear Col,

You are SEVEN.

All week my girlfriends have been shaking their heads in disbelieving solidarity. “Seven,” they utter, laying the heavy brick of this word gently in my lap. Because it’s easy for us Mamas to forget sometimes while we’re making meals and cleaning up meals and earning a little money and then dropping everything to tend to feverish bodies, that you children are growing as naturally as wild grass spearing up towards the sun. Because that is what you do.

But here’s the truth. Seven is fabulous. It’s like this twist cone of complimentary flavors. Sweetness and independence swirled together in a staggeringly lovely combo. “Kiss me here,” you instruct, pushing an unembarrassed puckered mouth towards my face when I drop you off at art class.

And then a blink later you and your friends disappear for an hour, roaming the alleyway behind our house, searching out snakes and dinosaur bones.

On this occasion of your 7th birthday, I’ve been re-reading my journals from your first few months, those 101 days you spent in the Neonatal ICU. I’m struck by what was our life at the time. “Col wears a C-PAP to keep his lungs inflated,” I wrote, as if I were simply filling in the baby book section on, say, chronic lung disease.

The first few weeks of your life, I found myself repeating, like a line from a script handed to me at your birth: this is my life. When I entered the NICU, past security, past the hand-washing station, into the sea of incubators where a symphony of alarms blared, I’d rehearse: this is my life, this is my baby, this is my life. When I returned at night to the Denver Ronald McDonald House, where volunteers served us mounds of spaghetti and tried to inquire inoffensively, “why are you here?” Because this is my life.

Eventually, we settled in. I pumped breast milk every 2-3 hours, setting an alarm to wake me twice in the night. Dan assembled the plastic pump parts at 2:00 am and I trotted the warm milk out to the freezer on the 3rd floor kitchen, where the speakers constantly whispered 80′s rock and the Denver skyline twinkled beyond the huge dining room windows.

We visited you 3x/day; 2 of those 3 times we got to hold you for one hour, which we looked forward to every moment we weren’t. It took 2 people to lift you from your incubator. One to portage your floppy body in two steady hands while another trailed behind with your tubes and wires like a wedding attendant carrying the bride’s train. We’d lay you on our chests, skin-to-skin, a warmed blanket cinching us together, feeling as if we were part of your life-saving team. You’d snooze while we told stories about the world outside, about our home. Each story—of the mountains, friends, our garden—was a prayer of hopefulness. Grow and get strong and we’ll show you all of this.

I’ve never shown anyone outside of our family this picture; it’s so vulnerable. This was my baby. This was my life.

When we weren’t at the hospital, Dan shot his bow in Denver City Park and we walked to Wild Oats to buy butter, eggs, kale and coffee beans. Dan flew home early on and drove our truck back, loaded with packages of frozen elk, which he grilled outside at the Ronald McDonald House, gaining popularity by feeding tender bites to the matriarchs of the 3rd floor (he was one of the few men at the RMD house). We pretended the legions of Canada Geese ripping grass from the city parks were truly wild. “You would love the Canada geese here,” Dan whispered while you slept, “you can hear their big flapping wings, squinch squinch squinch, as they fly overhead.”

back at home, safe and sound

Dan and I learned so much during those days. We learned to continue breathing when we showed up at the NICU to find an IV threaded through the soft skin of your tiny scalp, delivering a blood transfusion. We learned to celebrate small victories, like weight-gain measured in grams. We learned that a community can hold you up when you think you’re falling. We learned that families are adaptable and that love is a powerful medicine. We’d do it all over again in a heartbeat for you, darling boy.

Love,

Your Mama

ps: for new readers: background on Col’s amazing birth and early days here, here and here.

home again home again jiggity jig

We’re home and back to our old tricks.

Like, taping our eyelids shut.

And conducting rubber band target practice for homeschool P.E.

Thanks Grandpa Starks for the jumbo rubber bands!

Dan is making scrambled eggs in our tiny kitchen, singing: can we have a day without potty talk? Just. One. Day?

And we’ve determined that Durango in January is pretty much the opposite of Kauai. High, cold, dry, and dormant. But it’s like a dear familiar friend, even if that friend is shivering and breaking out in eczema.

We flew home on a red-eye, sure that we’d sleep easy on the 6-hour flight between Kauai and Phoenix. How do you make God laugh? Right. The kids slept great, outstretched on the bed-lap of a parent, while I passed six hours—six!—wondering what exactly creates turbulence, if the man sleeping next to Rose minded her feet in his lap, and what it would be like to get off the plane in Phoenix on a new day, on Col’s 7th birthday.

We landed at sunrise and I staggered off the plane with Rose, waiting for Dan and Col, who were in a different aisle. Col flung himself into my arms like it had been a long time since we’d seen each other, which it had been; last time I saw him he was six.

I have so much more to say about Col’s birthday, about his birth and about him, but there are so many crazy memories from his time in the NICU bubbling up (it’s that book wanting to be written), I can tell I need some time to organize my thoughts.

I just wanted to let you all know we got home safely. Thanks for all your fruit suggestions and tropical camaraderie.

 

Kalalau trail above Na Pali coast

Back soon.

island, pt 2

The kids are catching up on the last 30 years of pop music since we’re spending more time in the car (and blasting the radio) than usual. Dan and I play: “name that song.” He is uncannily good at nailing hits from 1982 despite currently being more attuned to the subtleties between our neighborhood deer than any music produced in the last decade. “But what does that mean,” Rose asks, “when they say, it’s a long way to the top if you want to Rock and Roll?”

On our morning walk to see the sea turtles and humpback whales.

This island is teeming with feral chickens who apparently were blown free from their coops during Hurricane Iniki in 1992. They’re considered pests, but it’s hard not to secretly love them.

Handsome rooster.

My friend Kristi (who makes the most amazing jewelry - have you ordered some with your 10% off coupon, 6512GROW, yet?), told me she couldn’t really picture Dan in Kauai. True, his idea of vacation is more like blistering up his feet in the San Juan mountains following the musky scent of elk herds. (On Christmas, while the kids and I were in Berkeley, Dan found a cougar-killed deer in the woods, and while the rest of America was tearing into a glazed ham, Dan cut out a small piece of the deer’s backstrap, took it home and ate it. How many people can say they shared Christmas dinner with a mountain lion?).

But don’t you worry about Dan. He’s finding his groove.

He’s also using his hunter’s eyes to scope out fallen coconuts while we’re cruising at 40 miles/hr belting out, I’m gonna keeeeeep on loooooooving yoooooooooooooo. (REO Speedwagon).

Injured baby chick that Col begged to take home, along with a sand crab, baby gecko, pocketful of shells, stinky crab claws and gecko skeleton. Col really is such a friend of the animals. Today, after visiting a beach outhouse, he announced cheerfully that a rat peeked into his stall.

The ocean is amazing – sometimes it feels like this gentle amniotic sea rocking and swaying on the big Mama Earth. Other times, it’s frightening – its depth and power unknowable. The craziest part is gazing out on the horizon and imagining the curve of the Earth, all those oceans sloshing on this sphere and not spilling into space. “Gravity,” my dad shrugs. But still. We swim everyday.

Besides swimming in the ocean, my favorite part of this trip has been visiting the local farmers markets. The vendors are primarily elderly Hawaiian women who sell fistfuls of japanese eggplant for $1, heads of butter lettuce for $1 each, a pound of ginger for $2, or avocados the size of nerf footballs for $2. Some of them are “all business” about their tables of food, others seem like they picked some extra fruit from their backyard and are hoping to make a few bucks while visiting with friends. Those are the ladies that laugh when I ask them what the small, tomatillo-like fruit is. “Filipino cherries. Too sour! You try, you try!” They slip tangerines into Col and Rose’s hands and joke with me, “that’s too much! You can’t eat all that!” when I pile 2 bunches of apple-bananas in my bag.

We bought a stick of sugarcane from this beautiful 80 year old Filipino farmer who told the kids to call her “Grandma.”

She demonstrated how to peel the sugarcane.

And then gave the knife to Dan to finish up.

And then promptly took it back. “No, no, no! Like this young grasshopper!

Have you had sugar cane before? It’s like chewing sugar water, which is not unpleasant. (And the ethnobotanical claim that chewing on it strengthened kids teeth sounds like something Rose might have made up).

The plant-life here is outrageous. The conditions are so fertile that every bit of space is colonized. The trees are like tenements, housing every botanical life form with a will to live. Epiphytes, mosses and fungus grow along their trunks, ferns sprout from tree crotches and vines encircle their canopies.

From the botanical garden:

Kava kava: the roots are chewed to give you the feeling, as my herbalist teacher Melanie Rose used to explain, that everything is going to be alright. Mmmm, love kava kava.

Theobroma cacao! Pods of chocolate.

It sounds crazy, because I love the beach and the kids are as happy as seal pups here, but I’m looking forward to getting home, back to the drudgery of tanning hides and fermenting vegetables (and I may or may not be coming home with a bag of local ginger and pineapple peels to make Hawaiian ginger ale and pineapple vinegar!).

See you from back north soon,

Rachel

island

Hi friends,

Did I mention that by the grace of frequent flyer miles and the generosity of my parents we’re in Kauai?

I know. It’s completely insane that places like this exist, places where you could imagine ditching silly things like money and calendars and shoes and becoming a fruitarian, living off mango, coconuts, pineapple, avocados, bananas, rambutans, papaya, and, well, a few chocolate covered macadamia nuts.

If we’re not at the beach, then you can usually find us eating. The locally-grown food is crazy cheap, which is eliciting a frenzy of avocado-eating. However, you may or may not be glad to hear that after a quick discussion, Dan and I passed on the roadkill wild boar spotted yesterday.

Sending much island love to you all.

In search of the maui-wowie,

Rachel

The Now

Greetings on the eve of a New Year.

(Unless you’re devoutly Jewish and celebrated the New Year of 5772 back in September).

Recently Rose was grating ginger—one hard-won sliver at a time—and she looked up proudly from her tiny pile of brown shards and said, “you might want to get your camera and take a picture, Mama.” And I laughed because it’s like that. Dan comes home from work and the kids giddily bum rush him at the door while I run the opposite way for my camera.

Sometimes I worry that in trying to record the moment, I miss the moment. When I began a writing practice in earnest 14 years ago, I started carrying a small pocket notebook to capture the details. One day, at the Durango Soup Kitchen, where I’d go for lunch and character study, my friend Alberta, who was 84 and routinely (and controversially) hauling home garbage bags bulging with donated baguettes for her alleyway pigeons, was telling me a story.

I frantically tried to record everything in my notebook: Alberta’s vernacular, how her eyes would crinkle up when she smiled, the way she always wore a knit hat even in June, how fellow soup-goer Phil would sit down next to her, remarking on something and Alberta would scowl, “WHAT DID HE SAY?” And it occurred to me that there was just the tiniest bit of irony in this frenzy to record The Now while it was being served, warm and fresh, like cookies from the oven.

And it’s still like that. Sometimes I’m driving and the kids are having the funniest, or most poignant, or sweetest conversation in the back seat and I want to etch it into my brain, to scan it in its entirety into my mental hard drive, because of course, of course Dad, I am not going to write it down while driving. And so I remind myself to just appreciate the humor, the poignancy, the sweetness of the moment. But, still, it tugs at me.

This blog is a repository of The Now – a place to store the details and the ordinary sweetness of our days. Writing this blog has been a tool to help slow the fast moving train of our lives long enough to see precisely how the morning sun glints off the sooty smokestack. Some days, most days, I need that.

So thank you readers for being here, for coming back, for participating. A most beautiful start of the new year to you all.

xo,

Rachel