Part of this past week’s progress
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
I wake up at 5:30 to have some quiet before the rest of the house stirs. In the living room, I stretch. The sun comes up behind the maple trees on our street; pink and yellow push against the sky. Our street is lined with strange plants, all beautiful and mysterious in their own ways. I know I’ll live in the world for my entire life without really becoming one with the earth. It’ll still be a win if I learn how to become one with myself. Like a kaleidoscope, the sky keeps turning. It is good.
After breakfast, I lose my temper with N. The agitation courses through my body. We are both frustrated, but I am the adult. There isn’t good reason for my loss of control. I want to be different and I work hard at it, but I know when it happens, I’ll just want to be someone else. It is not good.
I mix peanut butter with banana and yogurt for F. I add chia seeds. N quells her frustration and I do, too. We look into each other’s eyes and I lose myself in the vastness of hers. I see straight into her plum-sized heart, and there is only goodness in there. I’m not perfect, but I’m beginning to understand that I don’t want to be. I want to be a parent who apologizes to their child. I do, and it is good.
After N leaves for school, F and I finish breakfast. We listen to the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack and she watches with interest as I sing along. When I don’t remember the words, I make them up. I laugh at myself and F laughs at me, too. I slip on the yogurt-covered floor but I don’t fall. This is an achievement. F chokes on her own laughter but keeps laughing anyway. I start to worry but then I laugh instead. It is good.
During F’s nap, I draw. I work on a new illustration for my Uppercase column and it challenges me in all the right places. I’m using colors that feel fresh but still like me. I’m excited by my work; I’m working on projects I care about. I’ve tried to listen to myself for years now, and it’s finally paying off. I hear my voice again. I’m saying nomore often. I don’t feel like any particular opportunity will be the one that determines my future. This lesson took me a long time to learn; it’s freeing to finally learn it. It is good.
When F wakes, we sit outside. It’s 56 degrees and the bare branches scrape the stars. I can’t see them but I know they’re there. F scoots around on her stomach and eats dead grass. I pull some of it out of her mouth and then stop bothering. I think about how distracted I feel all of the time—how the more I work on staying still, the less successful I am.
Years ago, a friend sent me an email about a word they thought I’d like: apricity, which means the warmth of the sun in winter. I feel it now, the sharp knife of sun cutting through winter. Cutting it in half. Sunlight glints off of the dead grass, off of the dead branches, off of my small child’s small nose. It warms the shaking part of me. It is good.
TUESDAY
“It’s incredibly comfortable and nice when you can look at your own work and say to yourself, “I did a good job.” And then you let it go, because anything else is going to make you crazy, and anything else, you’re going to be trying to impress people who don’t even like you. That’s the truth! You have to be very careful of letting people who not only don’t know you, but don’t understand you, don’t like you… you can’t let those people determine who you are.
When I did the conversation with Jimmy, there were people standing in line for that—it was more Jimmy than me. I’m very fortunate to have a publisher; I’ve been with HarperCollins now for 40 years. I haven’t jumped around. Poets don’t make money. If you’re not looking for, “Oh, I want to write a book, and there’ll be a movie, and I’ll become rich and famous,” you’ll be happy. There can be a kind of freedom, when the reward is itself the work.”
—Nikki Giovanni in The Creative Independent
WEDNESDAY
I’m thinking about The Dumpster Fire and the Garden by Brad Montague, To Destroy is to Create by Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Breaking My Own Silence by Min Jin Lee.
THURSDAY
“Once upon a time there lived a woman who wanted to exchange her present for her daughter’s future. Little did she know that, if she did so, the two of them would merge into one ungainly creature, at once divided and reconstituted, and time would flow through both of them like water in a single stream. The child became the mother’s future, and the mother became the child’s present, taking up residence in her brain, blood, and bones. The woman vowed that she had no need for God, but her child always wondered, Was the bargain her mother had made a kind of prayer?”
—from A Mother’s Exchange For Her Daughter’s Future by Jiayang Fan
FRIDAY
Still not believing in age I wake
to find myself older than I can understand
with most of my life in a fragment
that only I remember
some of the old colors are still there
but not the voices or what they are saying
how can it be old when it is now
with the sky taking itself for granted
there was no beginning I was there
—No Believer by W.S. Merwin
xx,
M
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