a slow transition

May 13, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

“Things take longer than we think”

— a friend said this. She is older than me, and I believe her.

What I often fail to account for are the transitions. The time it takes to move from one state of being to another is not inconsequential, nor is it swift; especially when one is moving from her thinking brain down into the wiser space of her heart.

Earning a living as a public relations consultant for innovative companies while working toward creating this dream of Lucia, I encounter transition on a daily basis. My day timer has slots for every thirty minute period of the day, and I learned long ago that organization is not as simple as fitting my list of tasks neatly inside those lines. It is difficult to move back and forth between thinking-tasks and feeling-tasks more than once a day. It takes time to drop into the heart space.

Transitions often require more time and energy than the tasks that lie between them.

On a slow day, I send 60-75 emails. I receive more than 150 (not counting email for Lucia). Each one is a decision. Keep? Delete? Read? Respond? If so, how quickly? Is it urgent? What to say? How do I convey what I mean efficiently, effectively, professionally? Anyone who makes a living communicating on email will understand what I mean at the end of the day when I sigh, "My brain is so tired."

Someone I love recently said, "I'm not very good at multi-tasking." Oh, baby, none of us are. It is the stuff of crazy-making. Yet we go around pretending like it is possible and we allow those who claim it as a mark of their superiority to convince us they have more intelligence, more drive, more talent than we do. But the truth is they do not. No one can be fully present in two places at once. Our brains and our hearts are connected, yes. They are also different locations with different functions. Getting back to the heart takes time, but it is the more powerful place to inhabit.

The roses are blooming now. 

Outside my office and living room windows they make the gentlest slow-motion explosion. It started as a mass of tiny buds. Now, soft pink blooms climb this sweet farmhouse like something straight out of a fairytale. 

Today is Friday, and I marked the moment of transition from week to weekend by stopping to stand beneath them. I smelled every one I could reach, noticing how its own scent was slightly different from the others. I whispered, "I love you," because I do. I closed my eyes and touched the leaves and petals. I breathed.

Thoughts slid slowly from my brain downward into the well of my moving heart. It slowed. I listened to the beats and for a moment could not tell if the rhythm belonged to me, or to the rosebush. Maybe it was a two-part harmony.

An hour later I am back at my desk, still transitioning. If all goes well, this shift from week-brain to weekend-heart will only take about twelve more hours. Quiet music from Patty Griffin on Pandora soothes my psyche, coaxing the progression downward with an easy rhythm that entrains with my pulse, just like the roses did.

These things take time: Making a living. Loving another person. Creating a new magazine. Building a team. Cultivating a tribe. Helping raise a child. Composing a life. Everything does, really.

Whatever you are working toward, know this: It will take longer than you think. There will be transitions. And they, as much as any other passage on your life's journey, are where beauty and meaning and vitality are waiting. Breathe in. Drop down. Stop thinking. Start feeling. Smell the roses.

Happy Friday.

xo
laura

my hands in the dirt

Photo by Sarah Anne Childers

“Because May is for mothers and gardens, a story in two parts about those things and other things too. This is part one.”

My Hands in the Dirt by Sarah Anne Childers

I longed to put my hands in the dirt.

Four springs ago I built a garden in my neighbor Laura's backyard. She had five raised beds made of graying wood. There was a narrow strip along the north fence, a fat square against a thicket of raspberry canes, and in the lawn three identical rectangles like Lego blocks pressed into a green base.

Laura’s house is around the corner from my building. I can make out her roofline from my balcony, but we didn’t meet until she sent a message to the staggeringly long and slow moving wait list for a plot in our neighborhood’s community pea patch. I responded, and that evening after putting my toddler daughter to bed, I went to meet Laura in her backyard. I was not the first. An avid outdoorswoman close to retirement with cropped silver hair and a trace of an east coast accent, Laura had for several years offered up her garden beds for others to cultivate. In return she asked only that we rid the raspberries of the strangling morning glory vines that snaked from under a neighbor’s fence.

Laura gave me a tour. It was twilight, but I saw that the soil was low and sodden from winter rain, and that the weeds had already seeded and were throwing parties and inviting all of their friends. The rotting fence sported rodent-sized holes at the base. The raspberry canes had not been cut back and lay flopped all over the place. Yet I could hardly believe my luck. It looked like possibility to me. “I haven’t been back here in awhile,” Laura admitted, absentmindedly bending to pull tufts of chickweed from the cracks between the pavers while she talked, as gardeners do. “It might be a lot of work,” she said. The garden was work I wanted. I thanked Laura and meant it.

I went to Laura’s the next morning and most mornings after that once I’d dropped my daughter off at preschool. I had the time because I was in the middle of a year of absence from my job at the university and on leave from graduate school. I half-jokingly referred to the year as my sabbatical, like I had earned it. I told myself to use the time to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up or to at least make a plan for, you know, life. Instead I read science fiction and fantasy novels, made pot after pot of soup that I gave away to friends, and longed to put my hands in the dirt.

The last of Laura’s gardeners left a mess, and that’s where I started because cleaning up was something I knew how to do. After weeding, I dug down into the beds and among the fat happy earthworms found knobby overgrown root systems of lord-knows-what and heaps plastic plant tags. Unearthing these traces of the gardeners before me was like coming upon relics of a love’s past loves. Fascinated and dismissive all at once, I examined everything, puzzling through what it was and what it meant. Then I had a moment of panic that the previous gardeners had done it (this, gardening) better than I would because what I did not tell Laura is that despite being raised by a master gardener (my mother), I had no clue what I was doing. And then I unceremoniously hucked all evidence of those other gardeners into the compost bin. Ciao!  

I took Laura’s request on the behalf of the raspberries seriously and on hands and knees unwound morning glory vines from the delicate emerging canes, pulling great lengths of the weed from the ground only to find that it rematerialized almost instantly. Under a mass of the stuff, in the corner of the raspberries, I found a smooth pale rock etched with the word Little. Little was a bunny. He had belonged to Laura’s daughter. Laura told me that when Little died, her daughter saved her allowance to commission the gravestone and then buried him between the raspberries and the roses.

Laura’s daughter stamped her girl-child sadness on stone. I wrote mine in black ink on plywood crosses in a graveyard long ago covered by salal and blackberry brambles at the edge of my parents’ property, across the lawn from my mother's garden.

Photo by Sarah Anne Childers

The most beloved who have passed are interred in my mother’s garden inside the tall fence meant to deter deer. My grandmother’s ashes in a turquoise urn nestle alongside the remains of Esmeralda the cat, the first being my parents cared for together and my grandmother’s devoted companion in her final days. Cat and grandmother are buried in the garden under a small spruce with dripping branches in a hole I dug in the sideways rain one March home from college. Like Laura’s garden, my mother’s garden is more than an artful collection of plants.

My mother’s garden is cemetery and memorial and raucous riotous celebration of wild creatures and blooms, where death and life interplay, passing the baton back and forth until everyone gets motion sick while the grosbeaks chuckle. My mother’s garden is history, not just a natural history of the land but a family’s history. My mother’s garden is her project, her legacy. My mother’s garden is my inheritance.

(The story continues in rooted.)

---

Sarah Anne Childers is the online editor at luciajournal.com where she happily toggles between curating creatives as an editor and creatively curating ideas and the words they live in as a writer. 

sarah@luciajournal.com

mistakes & self-sealing

May 6, 2015 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

"Place your ribcage into neutral so that your lower ribs are flush with your abdomen," she said.

Standing in line for coffee this morning, I was doing this. Shifting my weight back into my heels first, like she showed me, then aligning my diaphragm over my pelvis. No one noticed my subtle movements but they resulted in soft, centered strength. Mild effort created powerful self-containment; and with it came ease.

Amanda is my strength coach and we are working on my posture. We are always working on my posture. "Your ninety-year old self is so grateful for you today!" she chirps, usually once during our weekly workout. I wonder if my nonagenarian self is still doing these invisible exercises while she waits in line for her morning joe. I wonder what other things she has mastered that I have yet to know. 

What I do know is that we are made of water and so we must cultivate the ability to self-seal if we are to move through this life with any sort of coalescence, with any sort of uprightness, with any sort of ability to guide and have agency over what we do with our time here.

This week has been full of water. I put out a call to hire a social media and sales assistant and received numerous beautiful replies and inquiries. More than I can attend to, truthfully. I interviewed a few this week. I realized, in meeting and talking with talented and creative social media marketers, that I made a mistake.

I do not need someone to do social media for Lucia. Not yet, anyway. I am doing fine with social media. What Lucia needs right now is a revenue-generator, a sales goddess, someone who loves--actually thrives and feels happy--selling Lucia to independent retailers and increasing the amount of money coming in, so that we can keep going.

It's a funny thing when you see you've made a mistake. There are two choices: 1. Pretend like nothing happened and keep going in the wrong direction to save face, or 2. Say the words, "I made a mistake" out loud and then change course.

The universe wants us to choose number two. But that second choice requires the ability to stand upright and contain ourselves. No one else is responsible for your posture but you. There are great coaches in this world (thank you, Amanda Ford) but all they can really do is show us how. We have to do the work of holding ourselves together. 

Coffee lines are good practice zones.

xo
laura