softness is golden

June 10, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

Light is dancing today. Puffy clouds float through the sky and the maples have matured into thick, green adulthood. I am wearing earplugs but can still hear the leaf blowers, and I long for a soft stretch of silence.

Then it comes. A pause in the ruckus next door allows chords from the Spanish guitar on Pandora to strike the foam bullets in my ears, and I feel my heart again.

Is silence truly golden? Or is it softness we treasure and with it the ability to fall in sync with the sound of beauty?

Maybe what's really gold is being softer and lighter on ourselves. It is June and Lucia is now one year old. Bill Gates once said, "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten." 

There is time.

Our small team has accomplished so much in one year, and I feel proud. To brag for a moment...we have printed two beautiful issues of Lucia Journal and won an award for design. We ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise $60,000, and when it ended unfunded we got back up to try again on Indiegogo and raised $12,500. We were written up in Bustle, invited to Seattle's NBC morning show, and offered a blog in the Huffington Post. We are on the shelves of more than 125 stores across the U.S., including selected Barnes & Nobles, Whole Foods, and a growing number of delightful independent creative shops like NICHEoutside and Grapheme. Our team grew to welcome an online editor, who writes stories with lightness and inspiration and is already making great strides in cultivating relationships with talented new voices for luciajournal.com. 

We have accomplished so much! Yet my busy brain fixates on all that is not done yet. When it does, I can grow rigid and anxious and scared.

Issue Three is waiting to be created. There are submissions in my inbox, ideas in my head, and outline after outline scribbled in journals, Word docs, and the notes function of my iPhone. There is a sponsorship program to create, and potential partners to reach out to. There are dozens of incredible independent shops to connect with and invite to carry us. There is a plan brewing for creative fortnightly emails from Lucia. There is more.

Fear likes to loud-whisper in the late afternoon hours when creativity has exhausted herself and can no longer hold the reins. He says things like, "You did this backwards. You should have developed a larger online audience first, before attempting to go to print. You made a mistake by eschewing advertising. You cannot be creative and run a business at the same time. Geez, Laura, what were you thinking?"

I learned long ago to refrain from reacting when fear starts jabbering on about failure. It does get easier, but man does he never shut up.

"Pipe down. Look at what we just did in one year, pal!" I say firmly and loud. The neighbor's gardener, who has finally abandoned his leaf blower in favor of a rake, looks up in the direction of my open door. "You just wait," I mutter, a little softer. "We'll show you what we can do in ten years. Make that two."

I remove my earplugs and hear the steady rise-and-fall swoosh of traffic one block away on Madison Street. The guitar plays on and so I turn the volume up, listening for what is gold.

xo
laura

on swimming holes

On Swimming Holes by Sarah Anne Childers

When you set out on a June afternoon to find a swimming hole at the little lake near home, make sure to pack double lunch because adventuring is hungry work.

Pedal fast in the lead of your caravan of two bicycles past the busy beach packed with swimmers. Wave to the lady leaning out the wide window of the concession stand where kids line up for hot dogs and rainbow snow cones. Do you think she wonders where you're headed with such purpose, and such an impish grin, too? 

Slow down as the lifeguards' calls to "stop that!" and "do this!" fade so you can pay close attention to the shoreline. See how in some places it's naked, just packed dirt? Those exposed patches are fine for others but not for you. You seek a real, honest-to-goodness swimming hole, and those gems are tucked away behind tall grass and stands of alders with leaves that shimmy jazz hands in the breeze. 

A subtle indent in the brush at the lake edge like the start of a deer trail is always worth a stop. Lay your bike down, and take a peek. 

Photo by Sarah Anne Childers

If the lake is too weedy or too shallow or too shady with not enough dappled light, keep going. But if the water sparkles. If you feel like Lucy with her hand on the wardrobe door. If suddenly you want to yodel. Yodel! Yodel and yodel because good swimming holes inspire that sort of racket.

Did you wear your bathing suit under your clothes? Wonderful. Step into the lake. Feel the water's chill and the picking-up wind push waves at you. Look back for a moment to see what was invisible from the outside - the last of the native iris blooms and turquoise-tipped dragonflies everywhere, alighting even on your discarded sneaker that is part of their world now, just another perch.

Photo by Sarah Anne Childers

Wade out over rocks that cede to squishy loam as you go deeper until you must balance en pointe as the bottom suddenly falls away.

Might you play there at the line of shallow and deep, known and unknown? There's mystery in the deep and possibility too. For what? Underwater flips of course! Backwards, forwards, backwards again. And games to dive down and touch the bottom, if there is a bottom, how can you know? It's wild there at the drop off, in the cold depths where sunlight won't go. Oh yes, you can swim back to the warm shallows anytime. The known world, it's there for you.

Roll onto your back. Now your view is only sky and your ears are in the water and you hear the muted whooshes of your arms gently flapping and fish fishing and water bugs bugging but little else. Float there, half-submerged, until it is time for more flips. Until it is time to race those bobbing yellow leaves with brown spots like banana slugs back to land to eat sandwiches, squished-warm and delicious. Float and memorize this place so that you might find it again all summer long before you pedal home up hills so steep you have to stand as you climb, your backpack heavy with the weight of a damp towel swaying you rhythmically side-to-side like the waves at the swimming hole you found.   

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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

june beats

June 2, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

I have a date this weekend. The kind with live music and most likely a bit of bourbon. The kind that matters. And also doesn't. Except when it does. I will probably wear boots.

We go around in circles. I think everyone does. Earth flirts with the sun, leaning in a little closer, tipping away, then returning again in June. Love usually comes back around. If we have done our work, if we are willing to be grounded and vulnerable, and if we pay attention, we see the truth: It is always changing.

"What are you noticing in your body right now?" she asks with a soft smile. She holds my gaze and I close my eyes. It always comes down to this. No matter how many ways I weave my mind through a situation searching for words to resolve it into a story I can tell with a beginning and end, the truest answers never come from inside my head.

So I place one hand on my heart and feel it beating. I had not noticed how it was feeling until this very moment. Like touching a spot of flesh so sensitive it can detect the slightest change in pressure, the smallest shift in temperature. The rawness of loving another human is a thing I often find myself trying to either choreograph away from or steel myself to brace against. It is always a relief to be reminded I cannot.

The beat was like this: June-is-here. June-is-here. June-is-here. Life-is-here. Life-is-here. Life-is-here. 

"My heart feels tender," I replied. "I hadn't noticed that before. My belly feels nervous and excited, like butterflies. Somewhere in between these spaces I can feel my own strength. It is centered and upright and calm and assured."

I opened my eyes. 

"So that is how you feel," she mirrored. "That is what is true."

A tear came then, with a broad smile.

June hearts beat true. We must simply pause to listen. Let them be tender, nervous, excited and strong. For we are all of these things and more. We are always changing.

xo
laura