January Cozy-ing
January 4, 2024 § 1 Comment
Unlike many people, it seems, I’ve never minded making New Year’s resolutions. I don’t feel stressed about them. Instead I tend to find them inspiring. I like fresh starts. I’ve always, for better or for worse, liked the idea of reinventing oneself. Or perhaps rather to allow a tucked-away part of oneself to blossom. Resolutions can help with the unfolding.
If I succeed, lovely, but if I don’t, well, I usually find I’ve forgotten about the resolutions and don’t even remember to chastise myself (heh). So it’s all right.
That said, this year I’m finding myself to be a funny paradox. On the one hand, I’ve been reading about and leaning into the idea that winter is for coziness, hibernation, rest, renewal, ease . . . and that SPRING is the natural time to begin new things. I love this. I am a gardener. I feel this in my bones, in the soil in the creases of my hands.
And ALSO: this is 100% my year to get myself into financial ship-shape. After years of dashed hopes, an aching heart, and infertility, I finally had my dream baby at the end of 2022. It took surgeries and IVF to find this little love, and he had a pretty rough start (but now he’s chubby and happy and trying so hard to walk!). As a single mama by choice, I am the sole provider and daycare-payer for our family. I do have some savings and investments, but I need to increase my income and tidy up loose ends in order for us to be solvent, or better yet, to thrive.
I also miss writing terribly. My creative self has largely been tabled while I threw my heart into my nonprofit summer camp community garden all-the-things job. There has absolutely been creativity within that role – gosh, so much, of another kind – but I miss the writer, the dreamer, the girl who posts all the pretty pictures and imagines how to spin beauty around her with words and things.
Luckily, I have two circumstances attempting to bring these opposite tugs back towards one another.
FIRST, my writing, multiple-income-stream-developing, financial-self-education time has to happen when my little one is asleep. So I sit down with a cup of hot chocolate next to a heater that has fake flames and fake crackles (I scoffed at this heater when I read about it and then the reviews convinced me and I actually love it – it’s the littlest bit of easy ambiance, ok? Here’s the link! Not an ad, everyone just needs one). I pull out my computer and I remember how I like to wend my way through words. I remember graduate school in the yellow Victorian house in Iowa, the smell of spices coming from the kitchen, my first golden retriever lying beside me on the floor, so many curly-haired boys the five clever women in our house were crushing on, the late night cups of tea with my dear Japanese friend.
SECOND, my sweet babe has to have a surgery early this month and the recovery is expected to be rather difficult. So I took two weeks off from my job and we will be home. I anticipate mostly holding him, at least for the first week. We are going to be extra, extra cozy. And perhaps in between snuggles and consolation I will find time to write. And if not, the wonderful thing about an imagination is that it works while you are doing other things. I can hold a baby and plan out a book proposal. I can kiss his little head and think of characters for a story. I can have a tired cry in the bathtub while he sleeps and then lean back and remember the hope of new ventures, of easier days.
We push ourselves through challenging things hoping for better times on the other side. Human nature? Optimism? In any case, here we go (again)!
Bouts of Rain
November 10, 2012 § 2 Comments
I woke to heavy rain in the middle of the night. Well, early morning, really. The late evening hours had dragged into midnight and when at last I stumbled upstairs I lay in my bed surrounded by all the dark of loneliness. My poor dog, my faithful companion, is getting arthritic in the evenings, so I hadn’t urged her to walk up the stairs. I didn’t want to hear her whimper. It is always odd not having her there, though, the warm body of a creature who cares for me. My gratitude for dogs really cannot be expressed. Dogs love so willingly.
The rain wasn’t falling then, in the minutes of thought on my pillow, imaginings of another life with more people in it, more dogs, perhaps, and a horse or two. Daydreams can be a solace but at the times when they collide with the very reality of reality they can be horrid, a painful contrast, a look at what can’t be compared with what is. We all have these times, don’t we? When what’s good in our lives fades, and can’t be seen in the pressing gray of disappointments, and we are too tired to fight against the way we feel, and part of it is that we want the right to feel this way, after all.
In between sleeping and waking the rain started, pushed by wind, seemingly in fits and starts, heavy and light. The dog whined at the bottom of the stairs, so I went and got her, and felt glad for her. She snuggled up next to me and then, warm in the fleece and down, I wondered if the rabbits were sheltered enough. I dreamed of one of them chewing through his cage and escaping. I woke and thought perhaps they really ought to have more to protect them from the rain, but it was late/early and that rain fell heavy. I thought about it and then the rain subsided a little and feeling like a guilty, lazy person I pulled on muck boots over my pajamas, strapped on a headlamp, and went out into the eery blue. My plucky rabbits stood up on their hind legs to see me, and the two I had worried about were more damp than they should be. I propped wood against and over their cages and gave them little strokes on the forehead. “Poor darlings.” Though it wasn’t that cold. Thank goodness.
Back upstairs. Back to bed. In the slow morning the neighbor dog came over with her joyful wriggle of being. I started a fire. Put on the coffee. Watched the dogs play in their mouthy way. Decided I would write, because that is part of who I am, a part I can have some level of control over, no matter where I live or what I do or how I feel.
So then. So it is. Almost always, when I make the space to write, I can feel my very self start to settle, to orient itself within the tumble of this world. Writing, before it became a discipline, a major, a career move – before all that, writing came from a little girl’s instinct, a sort of unspoken and unidentified sense that this was something I could and must do. Pen in hand, fingertips on a keyboard, images becoming words becoming story – here is one of the ways that I remember who I am. Here is a partial fulfillment of the person a Very Good Creator made me to be. Yet without pressure; pressure gets pushed aside, and perfection is not the point, or the goal, or the reason why. Here I find my old, hopeful self. Reminding me: Do your gift. And keep dreaming. Bring as many dreams into reality as you can.
Kinds of Honey 