a clarity--

i am reading the blue jay's dance: a birth year by louise erdrich, and really enjoying it. i am going to copy here a passage from it that struck me with a clarity--for some reason! funny, because i am not in newborn throes--my baby is about to turn 2. yet i am still dealing, at times, with the sense of tragic confusion and with the depression she describes. the clarity i get from this passage comes from how she decides what the depression is, and how she decides where the inability to focus comes from, instead of blaming herself. she makes it seem logical, ok, and natural--a part of life, something that will pass. validating, if you see what i mean. thrilling, isn't it, to not be angry at your own brain/ heart! because that just creates a terribly mired and conflicted situation. . .

"Some days it seems that I have not put her down for weeks. I am her existence, after all, the way she gets what she wants, the outlet, the method, the tool of her need. Sometimes I hold my child in one arm, nursing her, and write with the other hand. With no separation of thought and physical being, there are times I live within a perfect circle.

Then there are the other times. Months go by and with the end of spring the dim realization surfaces--I cannot concentrate on one thought, one idea. Our baby's slumbers have shortened until she's a catnapper, sleeping for irregular, short periods. Her rhythms are neccessarily mine, too, and so I've found that allowing the mind to fuse with itself, to solve a task, is not so much a luxury as a mental neccessity, like dreaming. The primary parent of a new infant loses ability to focus, and that in turn saws on the emotions, wears away fragile strings of nerves.

Hormones, milk, heaviness, no sleep, internal joy, all jam the first few months after a baby is born, so that I experience a state of tragic confusion. Most days, I can't get enough distance on myself to define what I am feeling. I walk through a tunnel from one house to the other. It is dark, scraped out of the emotional mess of life, as gray and ridged as an esophagus. I'm being swallowed alive. One these days, suicide is an idea too persistent for comfort. There isn't a self to kill, I think, filled with dramatic pity for who I used to be. That person is gone. Yet, once I've established that I have no personal self, killing whatever remains seems hardly worth the effort. For those dark and stupid days, I have developed a mantra to ward off the radical lack of perspective which is also called depression. . ."

the owl and the pussycat/ curtains for finn's room

i made them!

rainbows where i wasn't expecting

milk on the steps and a dinosaur hug/ oh turtle sandbox we love you get up

pictured here are some recent playdates with stella and estelle--and also that turtle guy, you may have noticed, is quite the star in some of these photos--my little brother and I literally excavated the turtle sandbox from our parents' backyard, where it had been sunk in the mud for some 20-odd years now.

room of lavendar and papers everywhere, then neatly put back to the place where things that are things might go

this is finn at the adored train table in the library:

and then there's the freshly painted lavendar room yes! and here are two pictures of two different corners in it organized in such a way. . .


and here is the before picture, with the papers and books everywhere, and behind the camera's a me, about to frantically look at every scrap of paper that has crossed my path in the past 5 years--


done and done!

blueberry picking-and-eating (no kerplunks in the pail for finn, just a squishy juicy berry in this mouth everytime!)

my friends, last year on this exact day i posted this. . .!! http://eachsmallthing.blogspot.com/2009/07/blueberries-are-purple-with-whitish.html
and today i post this:
(although the blueberry picking happened last week at some time)

hi guys (bunch of yellow)

my new idea for self (as summer starts slipping, slipping. . .):
do what is possible,
& document doing it.
(by all means, only document what is possible to document.
don't over-do it.)
today: went on a short jaunt (in which i referred to myself as "the toddler-herder")next to the beautiful cedar river with jennifer, keegan, and finn.
on that jaunt, took this photo of a flock of yellow moths. papery!
and that,
is what was possible today.

been drawing (plus morning spider's web)

new drawing pad seen here with vrooming ramp (see some things are possible, like drawing, and writing quick chance things,while hanging out with kiddos)

we walked a sound!--

a larger perspective to measure what you're learning

cicada dust and a wing i like

lately the empty clinging bodies of cicadas are eveywhere! ////the bodies you see collected on the table here got crushed up and turned into what keegan called "cicada dust";;;;he then showed the cicada dust to finnegan, who then promptly popped it in his mouth--at least i can only imagine that is what he did, for i was inside making lunch. and then i was quickly outside pulling legs and eyeballs, dust etc, out of finn's mouth.

shakespeare with my honey and it feels like summer;;;;pencils, portraits

we went on a date, luxurious!, went to see love's labor's lost:::::::and it was outside, in city park, the park where we were married, pure summer magic!(and came home and the boy was sleeping, double magic!!);;;;;


and also i got some new colored pencils::::and looked at my miro lithographs to get inspired;;;;

portrait of self, writing (scratching, scratching--)

self potrait with blank page (am i getting born, or not?)

finn & calvin splash

mammas, mamas, babies & no one should be mean

here are some photos of my mama with my baby-child::::we visited all this week! (a newish good finn word:::CHEERS! and then say "tink" when you clink your glasses together.) my friend lauren had her baby elly a couple of weeks ago;;there is a picture of the gorgeous little sprout:::: also there is an excerpt from a joseph ceravolo poem called "Ho Ho Ho Caribou";;;;his book of selected poems called The Green Lake is Awake is my favorite thing right now. CHEERS! (3 times in a row)






from "Ho Ho Ho Caribou"

9

No one should be mean.
Making affection and all the green
winters wide awake.
Blubber is desert. Out on
the firm lake, o firm
and aboriginal kiss.
To dance, to hunt, to sing,
no one should be mean.
Not needing these things.

10

Like a flower, little light, you open
and we make believe
we die. We die all around
you like a snake in a
well and we come up out
of the warm well and
are born again out of dry
mammas, nourishing mammas, always
holding you as I
love you and am
revived inside you, but
die in you and am
never born again in
the same place; never
stop!

small bits of recent days

reading/writing with a cup of coffee while watching the childrens;;

finn chasing ducks by iowa river;;

finn & keegan swinging;;;