make da honey. right now.

June 24, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

This is my life. Right now.

This ferry ride. This eight o'clock solstice sun on the evening before dad's surgery to have a catheter placed for kidney dialysis. The light pours through my dirty jeep window and I hear massive engines and smell diesel and sea. I wonder if the sun is too intense for my skin and whether the man I might love will still find me sexy when the wrinkles come. Because they are coming. Everything is coming.

Life unfolds in hours and minutes and sunsets as we make revolutions around the brightest star in our sky. The beauty is not in an Instagram post or a pixel-dense capture of the longest day of the year. It is here. In the beeping cars and the low bass growl of the ferry and the gasoline and the waterfowl perched on the pylons watching the show.

The ferrymen work to load us on and off. For tonight, I am coming home. Tomorrow I do not know. This is my life. Right now.

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In the morning, he is ready. He smiles and holds up the red splotch that resembles a dog, the one his two-year-old granddaughter painted for him last weekend as she exclaimed, "Faye painted da dog!" I take a picture of him to text to all of my siblings and say, "Ready pre-op!"

Mom is driving now. My sister, Summer, texts us a photo of herself waving and she writes, "Love you Dad!" and my other sister texts to tell us all that Faye just saw the photo and said, "Auntie Summy at work. Make da honey. Auntie Summy come play da Faye, RIGHT NOW!"

Faye knows that bees work to make the honey. So she has put the logic together herself. When her Dada and Auntie Summy and Zsi Zsi go to "work" they obviously make the honey, too.

RIGHT NOW is a new phrase she has learned, and she applies it well. 

We all laugh. Truth is funny.

My brother, Stuart, is an emergency room doctor in Nashville. He texts us all a photo of his hand holding a nearly empty honey jar, "I'm running low, better get back to work."

This is life. Right now. We are making da honey.

xo
laura

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Laura Lowery is the founder, editor and publisher of Lucia. She does her best to lead a creative life. Whether triumphant or stumbling, Laura shares daily notes (that are often weekly) here on luciajournal, including stories, behind-the-scenes happenings, little doses of inspiration, and large quantities of curiosity and heart. She is pleased to meet you.

she says, because we must

“Lucia means light”

"Lucia means light," she says. but I create in the dark. If the muse is going to come at all, early morning is when she finds me tappity-tapping at the kitchen table circling an idea's glint. I find it, lose it, find it again perhaps, in awe of the encounter in a room lit only by a tea light, even on the longest day of the year.

I churn over what it means to build a creative life within our other lives. You do too, I know it. In pursuit of a nesting doll existence it is tempting to focus on mastering the how. Reduced to sets of practices with accompanying catch phrases, recipes for accomplishing the how resonate in the simple way that common sense does. And then there is the what and the why.

The what is a fingerprint - individual, the marks we leave. Lyrics before falling into bed so you will dream them. The exploration of a movement, an expression. Pixels manipulated on a screen that are the yield of the heavy camera on a scarf around your neck always. Always. Seeds pressed into soil. Carved wooden blocks smeared with ink to print. A soufflé. A family. A goddam revolution. 

The why is our common compulsion. The why is because we must.  

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

sarah@luciajournal.com

we knew how

June 15, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

I cannot recall all of the Junes of my life, but I do remember the way it felt to hide in child-made nests under birch trees in the tall grass that lined Chemawa Road.

School was out. Like little deer mice, we made paths through the weeds and burrowed where we could watch an occasional adult drive slowly by, coming or going from the cul-de-sac. We were hidden, and we were free.

My friend's father brought her a chicken sandwich from McDonald's each day and she always shared them with me there in the shade of the paper barks. In exchange, I'd give her half of however many homemade chocolate chip cookies I'd managed to grab from the glass Planter's Peanuts jar before my mother noticed the heist and said, "That's enough."

We also brought books, magazines, candy, and notes folded neatly into little rectangles with fancy edges securing their contents from prying eyes. It is astonishing what a child has time to learn when school is no longer in session.

The sun was hot in the farm country north of Salem, Oregon, and the smell of sweet grass mixed with cherry bubblegum perfumed our hideaway as we debated whether to set a sprinkler and run through it or ride our bikes down back to the railroad tracks and leave pennies where our parents told us not to.

We knew how to savor June.

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Laura Lowery is the founder, editor and publisher of Lucia. She does her best to lead a creative life. Whether triumphant or stumbling, Laura shares daily notes (that are often weekly) here on luciajournal, including stories, behind-the-scenes happenings, little doses of inspiration, and large quantities of curiosity and heart. She is pleased to meet you.