misplaced mama

I am home alone.

This happens never. I just ate a brownie without having to hide it or share it. I made a pot of french press and didn’t clean up the leaking liquid from a cracked vessel. It streamed and dripped on my floor and I ignored it.

I sat on the toilet and read a whole magazine.

I write.

There is laundry piled by my side, next to me right now. See, there. I just touched it. I touched it with thanks. We have clothes. So many of them that they can make piles that I can then ignore to write.

The sun is blinding my left eye right now and I am trying to type through it without moving an inch. It’s so warm, hot really, melting the inches of snow that has accumulated on our balcony. The bay waters sparkle beyond it all, the snow melts back and returns to it’s source, the entirity of all things fluid. Liquid. Sea. Wet. Water. Me.

I have read over and over again how hard writing is. The work. The pain. The suffering. The work. The anguish. The work. I want to feel that. I do. It must mean that you feel that way when you are a real writer. That when you are writing good stuff it’s never much fun.

This is not what it’s like for me. It’s the only thing that never feels like work. It’s the only thing that makes me feel relieved. When I am writing, like really writing and the words are just coming out and then when I go back and read them and shift them and change them and edit and revise and rewrite over and over again, when I am doing all that, it’s the one place that I don’t feel like I am suppose to be somewhere else. It’s my home.

Being a mom is hard work and at times painful. Being a wife, too. Being a housekeeper often sucks every last bit of joy out of me. Being a cook to a band of banshees who want nothing but a loaf of cheese and a popsicle can be downright excruciating. Being a daughter has pained my heart at times. But being a writer? Nope.

The Not Writing is work. The Not Writing is anguish. The Not Writing rips me up a bunch for a moment or two or a thousand depending on the day and how present I want to be to what’s in front of me.

You know when that spark flies and you are ready to go and you have all these words that want to dance out of you somehow and it’s up to you put them in order and you CAN’T, you just can’t write? As a writer I loose 85% of my creative ideas to the ether because I don’t have the life where I can pick and choose when I want and write. But what that does is make it even sweeter when I get to, so I am thankful, I do not take these moments for granted. My life is not a writers life. It’s a mother’s life. And to be honest it’s the life I always imagined for myself. I love where I am and who I get to be with daily. It’s hard to say No to myself when time is the illusion and and kids are the reality. I am working in this moment and so I will stay where I am and I am in love. With this. These words. This process. This life,

I love the process. Each moment is filled with a word or the space between words. Having no idea what the story means but just letting it talk somehow, free floating through and down and yes, it probably sucks the first time and the second time and the third time. But the fourth time. You recognize the seed. You notice the aroma of soil. You pay attention to the little petal that is gently flapping against skin. There, right there. It’s the sweet spot and it can grow. This is how it is for me. There is no code or formula or even an idea about how it looks. After 14 hours of writing in the past 2 days, I’ve come up for air, to open my eyes, or at least one and take a peak around the world again. I come here and type in this comfort zone, looser words, where mistakes are OK, and I can let go as soon as they come out. I can tell my own story, my own moments, the filling inside the good stuff. And I can say that it’s the process that feels so good, writing somewhere else or here, it matters not, but I can say it’s better than most things regardless of how uncomfortable and unglamorous it is. My ass spreads over the chair; I don’t care. I have horrible posture; whatever. I get wrinkles in my forehead from squinting at the screen; bring it. My wrists ache; oh well. My lower back feels likes it’s been compounded to a millimeter; boohoo deal with it. The sun goes down and my room gets dark and I too into the moment to get up and turn the light on; i work between shadows.

Sometimes I write laying on my stomach on my bed and my neck feels like it’s going to snap in half. All the better, I say.

There is another part I loathe, the part I am scared to let happen. The final thing. Whatever it is. What I wrote. “The Product”. I have no attachment to it is, I could care less about it, and want to just keep on moving on past the last letter.

But when it’s done, I have to love it. I have to believe in it. I have to sell it. I have to be ready to expand upon it. When really, I’d be happy tossing it away and moving on to the little boy whose coming of age story is sitting at the tip of my heart and wants to be told. Or the grandmother who sits in the 4th corner with an elixir to cure the world and speaks in a language of rainbows she has given to me to share. I would rather just jump into that stuff. But I can’t. Not yet. Timing is of essence. Finish what I start. Market. Network. Sell. The during is like sex with a bathtub organic chocolate truffles, melted, warmed and dark as can be.

The after is the lover who expects way too much and leaves his bit around your otherwise clean bathroom sink.

I buy the veggies. I chop them. I cook them in a soup. I serve it. I wash the bowls. I put them away. I compost the leftover scraps by feeding them to the chickens. They shit them out. I end up eating their shit as my food. It’s all a cycle and I am part of it. Can’t be only present for a moment or two, and this is what I am learning now. It’s more than the writing, it’s more, it’s the whole cycle. I like birthing babies but I can’t toss them aside after that part is over. I have to guide them into the life they came here for. I don’t know how to do it, with the writing and the kids, but I am doing it anyway. We all are.

Homeschooling has been fun. profound. hard. exhausting. liberating. I am going to call what I am doing homeschooling because I haven’t found a better word yet. We aren’t doing a traditional curriculum, but I am finding so much inspiration from online sources, mostly Waldorf based, art based, music based, game based. I can’t say unschooling at this time because that word to me has some propaganda in it, like we have to un-the-school out of them. I don’t think I am doing that and maybe because my girls were barely in the system. I also am not homeschooling because I find the school system inherently bad. I am doing it because it’s right for us right now. I think the world is a great school at the moment, and we are all learning every moment we breath.

{before i had kids, way before, i used to tell people that school is for suckers and that all we needed was a subscription to the NYTimes, a library card, a block of clay, some playing cards, and if you were lucky a passport. that was probably almost 20 years ago, so my list would be different, but this feeling of life learning has lived in my a long time, and i honor it}

What we do do it about 1 hour a day of circle time where we explore stories about language and numbers, use art and ecology and whimsical creatures to help us on our way. So far Mia has been reading more and more and Sula is feeling really comfortable just being with us, listening, playing, and most of the time contributing to conversations. The other day we were “walking the Alphabet Path” with the flower fairies. Each flower fairy represents a letter (i.e. Iris Fairy was for I) and the Iris Fairy told a story about herself and the letter “I” and what the letter “I” was about and all the things that could go along with the I. The girls then draw it all, the story, the letters, the words, the fairy, whatever is born from the story/experience. Storytelling has been the most

I was trying to “teach” Sula something about a word, I can’t even remember what it was but it’s not relevant. Mia looked up at me and said, “hey, mama, let me do it…..so, Sula…” and she proceeded to sing a little song and get a book and show Sula and I just walked away in Awe. She’s going to teach her little sister what she needs to know. She’s going to do it way better than me.

Other than that hour of circle time, we do whatever they want; swim classes, art classes, nature walks, museum trips, movies, library, whatever. What this has done for me is create a deeper connection to being present, being connected with them. I have to say, I can be frantic, frenetic, hurried at my worst and I tend to live a few skips ahead. Knowing that we are in the moment of learning, together, i am more “there” with my kids. I shut my phone off all morning, I engage dialogue in a more conscious way, I am living a practice that I always theorized in my head. It was like a big old reality check for me. Here they are! And they won’t be here for long! It’s about them and you there being a container, however that looks. Be a decent container.

I am coming to realize I have been going through a lot of motions with my kids, burnt out, tired, over it. As much homelearning seems like it would be even more of a recipe for burnt-mama, it’s been quite the opposite. I am tired. My time is filled. Nothing is new there. But I am opening my eyes really to the 7 year old spirit, the 5 year old spirit, the 2 year old spirit. I am opening my heart to the Mia Soul, the Sula Soul, the Echo Soul in ways I hadn’t before. I am not saying that this can only be achieved through this schooling choice, no, not at all. I am saying it’s what has happened for me. I am embarking on a life I knew was mine, but for some reason until now, was not awake enough to completely live. Life gives us different wake up calls. This one was mine. I am glad the alarm was loud enough. I am thankful I decided to get up. Being awake is hard when you are this tired, but going to sleep means missing out on a life, so precious, so filled with truth.

I am contemplating starting another blog about our adventures because they are indeed colorful and wild and quiet and silly and sometimes boring. I almost laughed just writing that!!!! When would I do that?? Perhaps it can be a project, inviting them to participate in the blogging, teaching them how to upload photos and decide on what they want to share. It’s all part of the Whole, they learn writing skills, digital technology, cyber community, photography….endless…..hopefully that will happen. Mia has named our “school” The Howling Wolf School so we’ll see if we can get a howling wolf blog up and running someday soon….

Until then. be well. mucho besos from my perfect DNA to yours.

The wind is so fierce it pushes a chair from the balcony into the sliding glass doors that are 3 feet from where i write. i jump. and so does the baby (but no so much a baby anymore) that lays across my lap asleep in a silk butterfly nightgown that was once her older sister’s.

He comes over and opens the door a foot. “Are you fucking crazy,” i laugh? the wind doesn’t whistle, it doesn’t whine. It DEMANDS. it demands the space around it to move where it must. “it’s super, super windy, ey? it’s more than super windy, it’s fucking windy.” he goes to take a bath but leaves the balcony door open because he knows i like this wild movement when i write. my dog is scarred and paces, but curious with her nose to the current that rides through the bedroom. i let it rinse me off. clean me. push me through to the other side.

i slowly stand with her hanging from me , barely latched to my nipple with the wind breaking and entering from the crack of the door.. i slide across the wood floor and place her in her little bed, the one she will sleep in for 3 hours until she wakes and pounds her half asleep feet across the room and climbs in next to me for the rest of the night.

i brave it. i walk out there on the balcony. it’s true the wind can steal you completely, blow you into another world and change you forever.

i have started 4 different posts here in some kind of witty or sensitive or profound or sad/angry sort of way. but none of them where my truth. they were only what i am expected to feel like. they were only what i thought i was suppose to feel like. they were not what i know. “start with what you know” daisley used to tell me when i would get anxiety attacks back in 1996 when we shared room. start with what i know. what i know is i don’t really give a shit what other people think about me, even the ones i really, really love because they don’t need me to give a shit because they love me too. AND. it’s really, really windy. it’s so windy. i think my house is blowing away.

before we left arizona i spent some time with an old guy named Doc (not to be mistaken with my husband, Dr. Rock). He was so cool, a gem to stumble into at a coffee shop in scottsdale. of course i would meet Doc my soul mate in my neighborhood 6 months before i move, and of course he is pushing 60 years old. and of course he sits around Coffee Tree and Tea Leaf reading books on karmic astrology and studying charts. we had many conversations regarding the chart he did for me and about my life and one conversation i vividly remember was him suggesting that i write a list of what’s important to me, what i prioritize in life, for lack of better words, i think he said my own moral code, what i value. that was three and half years ago. i think i might be ready.

-Family. Everything to me is about family. My family. My large one and my little one under this roof. Family is not about control or dominance, it is about community and sharing. it’s about these people, that we all somehow came together and share blood and names and grass and toilets. and so family, above all, is Love and Love is above nothing. I have no expectations for my family. We are all perfect exactly how we are and anything we need to change we are all here to witness, love and hold. Opinions can be shared, but opinions are just opinions. more than anything else we value and validate. we listen and we learn. we explore. we don’t hold back. we celebrate tribal living and we value being together.

-Space/Time. Not sure what it means, but i value it, the time/space/time thing where we have plenty and enough of it. I value honoring time, that it does somehow move, expand or travel, and so i value each little fleck of us that is offered to me. I would like to do this more because it seems at when i look each moment of space and time in the eye and Be With It, life slows down and things taste sweeter, linger, imprint on my cells. this is where my learning begins, my “education” so to speak. taking the time to see the meaning in the milliseconds and sleepy breath on a baby in bed or the long winding road we travel together with music on and nobody talking or the sounds of a nursing baby swallowing milk or the patterns of the branches as they take on lovers to the wind or the language my children use at night to help put each other to sleep. I value the the time i am given in the life that i have and i try not to look into the future of the life that will someday be mine but isn’t in this moment in time.

-Creativity. I value the Creatrix. The Artist. I value that each and every thing i do is Art in some way, or it should be. And in art, I mean expression, done with intent and consciousness. Sometimes I have to just stand in front of the mirror and brush my teeth and repeat in my head “I am brushing my teeth” and in that act I am creating something beautiful. Clean teeth or something. I value artistic expression of all kinds and I believe as living beings we have the right to live this expression whenever we can. I do believe Artists, Writers, Creators are just as valuable as lawyers, fundraisers, accountants, doctors…etc…and i believe that they should be treated that way. I value living my life as an Artist and Creator of Worlds. I believe that I can do what I love and offer questions and beauty and debate and stories to the world and the world will then provide and ear or and eye.

-Spirit. I believe in spirit. I believe in god. I believe in the multi-layers of this Place, this Universe. I believe that i open up to this Spirit, this God Energy and I believe it is not something outside myself. I value Love and Kindness and Compassion and know that this Spirit is the matter that creates those seeds in all of us. I honor and give thanks for Life Force, Divine and Ever-Changing. I will admit to NOT know what it means and I will admit to love the Mystery of it all, to love the Not Knowing more than even the searching. I value that I am loved and held by this Spirit, nameless and all that jazz.

-Practice. I honor my practices; Breath. Patience. Stillness. Stretch. Words on Page. And trying to understand everything on the planet. My practice is not to judge or force my opinions down anyone’s throat. I do not wish to change the minds of people. I honor the personal choices everyone makes, regardless what they are. My practice is to understand actions of others and to find comfort in the fact that we are all finding our way. My practice is to listen, first to myself and then to what i hear around me. I filter out what I don’t need and keep what I am meant to keep. I quietly deliberate and try to grow from the thoughts shared from my community. As I said I value Spirit, and that Spirit works through all of us, using each and everyone of us as a tool to help us find ourselves, our way, back Home.

-Energy. I honor energy. from the sun, from the earth, from the ether, from the material world. we need energy and i know there is an abundance of it and i embrace that abundance and I am ready to allow that to flow through me when i am ready to handle the intensity of it all.

-Birth. I place birth high upon the Pedestal and know that it is NOT just a day in the life, but the essence of lifetimes of power running through us. It is a storyteller of my past present and future. It is my internal hieroglyphics being revealed to me and the listening world. it need not matter what it looks like, it is what is happening inside me that changes me forever.

-Nature. as the wind blows through the 100 year old wood of my walls and the drafts come from every corner. the sky is so black it is endless and water smashes against itself and tree limbs are racing each other down the empty street and the pumpkins compost themselves back into the garden and tomorrow the broccoli flowers will scatter with these winds and rains. there is nothing more to say about that. Nature Rules; she is my mirror and I am Hers. I value that Nature feeds me, provides me with Life on this planet. I value everything about Nature and value every moment i get to sink my feet in the dirt of the forest floor or body into a steaming hot spring.

that’s the start of that list. thanks Doc. i think he mentioned that when i can do this, the next part of my life will begin to open up. maybe so. maybe it already did. maybe this is all there is. regardless, i am grateful and one happy mama blessed with an abundance of all things Important and Not So Important and Beautiful and Not So Beautiful. Who could ask for anything more.

by the way, homeschooling this week has ROCKED!!! I’m going to try to start composing mini posts about the things we have been doing; making mini documentaries with the Iphone about seals we spied in the Bay, writing a book about chickens, creating our own math board game, writing down every silent letter word [she] sees on signs and books, teaching her 5 year old sister how to sound out words and finding the essential oil combination that completely rids the persian rugs of the smell of piss. Not bad for the first week.

I’ve been silent.

I’ll tell ya, it’s been the only thing saving me for weeks. the silence. if i were to open my mouth here or there or anywhere, the world would get blown inside out from it’s molten core, getting mixed with the clouds and creating cayenne cotton candy. the rocks would quake, shatter, spilt, and turn the land into quick sand.

the waters, without a doubt, would be tossed into the air to be caught by the narrow valleys in between our hills.

(wait. maybe some of that did happen somewhere in the world but i swear it wasn’t because i wrapped my dreads on top of my head and took the stance of Kali or Shiva or Durga and pulled everything from my gut up and spewed it like cannons).

I stayed still. Quiet. Watched. Listened. Cried. Did not sleep. Ate 5 goats and 3 cows worth of soft cheese and as many baguettes as a girl can stuff in a basket. I read a book. I stood my ground. I chose peace. i got a lawyer. i wrote. i got a massage. i got drunk. i almost got a raincoat but i got a new down comforter instead. i dressed up like Abundance one day and Transmutation the other. i decided that Battlestar Galactica was the most boring show on earth and my husband almost left me because of it.

As so the pause button has been pushed and unpause is now play and here i am. and i’m sorta wordless. which is nice. because i am telling you, if i get started, you’ll want me to shut up. trust me.

she told me she wanted to go to school. she loved it. she raced there. then she started to slow down in the mornings. and then after school hell started breaking loose. then she told me she loved her teacher but she really didn’t want to listen to her teacher for 6 hours a day, maybe 2 but definitely not 6 because she doesn’t even listen to me for more than an hour a day. her words. not mine. and then i began coercing. each. and. every. morning. and finally she broke down and refused. completely refused. and so i listened. and now she isn’t there anymore. and this process wasn’t as easy as it seems but it doesn’t matter. here is what matters to me: i listened to her. she listened to herself. i listened to her. she listened to herself. now we are back to the slower kind of day. hooked up with some friends on this, taking part in a support system out here. she’s so happy. so happy. i’m scared because really i think i’m not worthy of this kind of role, but i suppose that thought is worth nothing.

and so of course the doubt pulses through me, chops off the trust at the neck, and i worry i am allowing her to quit, to not follow through, not stick with it. but then what is my role? my role is her helper in finding what she WANTS to stick with. Fuck the “in life you gotta get up and do things you don’t want to do”. fuck it. either we figure out how to love what we are doing or we do something else. what’s the point of having a whole heap of people walking around not liking what they do for the majority of the day. since i’ve been ‘on my own’ i’ve only done things i’ve wanted to do. granted, i’m broke, but for the most part i live my life, happy and grateful my days unfold as they do. how can i not support that kind of childhood?

i want to hold her hand while she looks. finds. tries. stops. looks more. finds. tries. stops. again and again. i look back on my childhood. and then i look to right now. right now i can heal all that and do what i know, not do what i don’t know. what else are we here for but to let our kids make mistakes and nod yes when they want to keep trying?

unschool, homeschool, free school, mom school, mia school, art school, swim school, walk in the leaves school, fight with your sister school, make some bread school, dress up like a queen school, add up the cost of groceries school, lay around and do nothing school. life is school. but we aren’t looking for an education, we are looking for a whole person comfortable expressing and relating and communicating with the world in a loving and respectful way. we aren’t looking for skills to garner for the future, we are looking for the deepest, most satisfying, most peaceful Self Love and Confidence.

These are the healers of today, and who knows what kind of work they will need to do tomorrow. Whatever it is, I believe the recipe for success is staying true to the moment, learning for the day, savoring what is fun right now, stopping what isn’t feeding the soul and know that what does is right around the corner.

and this goes for me and her. and the others, too. all of us. our whole family. and this is where my heart feels settled inside the fantastical chaos of not knowing what to do, having too many things to do, too many people to please. this place of un-knowing, of living right now with chicken soup on the stove and colored pencils scattered all over the floor and halloween candy hit around the house in places i am not allowed to find.

(one of the cool things about this shift is that my kids will be supported in their endeavors by the Mt. Baker Academy, which is a free resource for homeschooled kids where I live. The reimburse you up to $1500 for classes your kids want to take, such as art or dance or swimming. One of our classes is going to be adventures with local photography Jason Byal. Mia is excited and has been taking photos with my phone any chance she can get………