only what is ripe

August 4, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

August always arrives with a chest-twinge. Summer is waning and the urge is strong to grab everything I can. I want to do all of the things before it ends.

What is this urge? I feel it in my work to grow Lucia. It feel it in my love relationship, too. I want to have all of the answers and make all of the memories, preferably before September. 

"What do you need right now?," he asked. It was late Friday night and we were stealing a found hour together at the end of a work week, the way real couples do. A candle glowed between us and our necks were tilted back to gaze at the small handful of stars visible through Seattle's city lights.

"Two days away from town," I replied. "With you, in nature. I want to sleep under cedars and stars." 

He arrived Sunday morning with a broad smile and a Subaru filled with gear, food, air mattresses and music. This relationship is still tender, unfinished, uncertain, unknown. It is also adventurous, comedic, patient and brave.

Marrowstone Island is off the beaten path. We rolled in without a reservation, like outlaws, asking every ranger we met to help settle our wager over whether a particular variety of tree is named "madrone" or "madrona."

A high-cliff campsite was available and from it we could see the sea. Fresh saltwater air and the cluster of old growth cedars around the fire pit sealed the deal. Our tent went up beneath a massive "madrone" (ahem) and I exhaled completely. 

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The next day I point-shouted out the window as we drove the long country road, "Blackberries!" He braked, threw it in reverse, and parked in the hot sun. We barely said another word and climbed out of the car. I went left, he went right. We got straight to work.

Some of the fruit was deep black and bursting, but most of the berries within reach were not quite ripe. You know the kind, mostly black but with one or two small spots of red. Still firm to the touch, they needed more time in the sun. In my eagerness to grab everything this summer has to offer before it ends, I picked all of them. Completely, with abandon. 

We met back at the car, my gray hat filled with sweet and sour berries. I looked into his strong, patient palms and saw he had only picked the fattest, softest, ripest ones. He shared them all with me.

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The next day, my sister texted some photos of my two-year-old niece directing the blackberry-picking behind their house. "Da bwack ones!" she exclaims, pointing them out for her mother to reach. As in, "Don't pick the ones that aren't ripe yet, Mama."

Leave them be. It is August. Savor what is sweet. Let the rest stay on the vine. 

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.

stef

Stef by Sally Bryson

Twice a week I take horseback riding lessons. I pull my car up the steep driveway to the horse barn, sending a cloud of dust behind me. I am in a charged state of mind from trying to understand whatever crises the morning brought to my home. I climb up onto my horse, and suddenly I don’t understand anything at all about what I’m supposed to be doing.

Let me tell you about the horse. First, he isn’t actually my horse, I just like to pretend that he is. His name is Stefano, Stef we call him. He is reddish brown, like cherry wood. His mane is thick and black and strong. I grip that mane when I’m sliding off. He is some kind of German breed I should probably know the name of and he weighs maybe a thousand pounds.

Stef’s gaze contains patience. His gait contains dignity. His feet are huge like dinner plates and contain stability. His legs are long and knobby. They have all the power, like writing pencils. When he comes to a trot, it feels like riding in a boat that is hydroplaning out of the water. One of us in that moment is graceful and free.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a beginner. Stef knows it. No point in posturing as anything else. I’ve never been very flexible, and this sport is murder on my inner thighs. “Ten minutes a day of yoga is all you need,” the horse trainer Emma tells me. “I’m not really a yoga person,” I say, clenching my jaw. My teeth are gritted because I so want to get this right. There is so much to remember: my seat, my balance through the core, weight in the lower leg, heels down, shoulders back, hands in front, hands low, lower, reins taut… it goes on.

Photo by Julie Patton

I’m concentrating. My jaw is clenched again, and Emma notices. “You’re not seeing the bigger picture,” Emma calls. She points out that I’m trying so hard to get the nuts and bolts right that I’m forgetting to sit back and yes, enjoy the ride.

Is this how I do my life? Turn every relationship into a project?

“Look around you,” Emma says. I’m ten feet off the ground. Stef is holding me up. The sky is pale blue, the late summer air, dusty. A kettle of vultures soars in slow motion in the shape of a crown that tops the morning. The horse barn sleeps lazily against a hillside that leans away from me covered in ten thousand pines huddled in green forest silence. Save for the wind. It moves against the branches whispering secrets. And I’m simply a woman on a horse.

I have taken horseback riding lessons twice before as an adult. Both times I quit. Quitting had something to do with being overwhelmed by how much there is to know. Riding seemed like a project I could never master within the allotted timeline I had unconsciously set for myself. So what was the point?

But there came a moment when I had exhausted my old commentary. I became weary of the stories I told myself. And in any case, I love being on a horse. I tried a different way.

With Stef I don’t run out and buy fancy riding breeches and boots. I don’t read ten thousand how-to books. In fact, I don’t even think much about riding between lessons. I stop pinning so much on riding, which means that when I go to see Stef, I don’t bring an agenda, I bring only myself.

I plunk down off Stef at the end of the riding lesson. My knees are wobbly as I lead him back to the pasture. Sometimes the lesson has been tough, frustrating. Stef leans forward over the fence to be stroked. I reach up to feel his neck and pet his soft nose. I stand back and look at him and think, really? I rode him? He is a giant and a mystery and I rode him? I am in awe, of him and of me.  

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Sally Bryson is a freelance writer who specializes in writing short films for non-profits. She lives on Bainbridge Island, WA with her husband and two boys. Connect with Sally at 299hudson@earthlink.net

Photograph by Julie Patton. Visit her at juliepattonphotography.com and on Instagram @juliepatton

cosmos in his eyes

July 14, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

Outside the maple leaves are rustling with the sort of lush, green, thick sound that brings to mind youth. Vibrance. Health. Abundance. It is a time of year one might be tempted to dwell in forever.

But we are mortal and so we are aging. What I really want to write is that my dad could have died over the Fourth of July. I went home that Saturday and saw the cosmos in his eyes. They were deep, dark blue, and they shone. I could not see the surface, nor the bottom. It felt as though he saw through me, too. In those moments, I felt fear and peace at once.

I am recovering, now. Quiet, in my living room. As if things could be normal ever again. He is recovering, too, as he always does. Tough, determined, stubborn and strong. Life is different now that he is on dialysis. Normal is new, new is normal.

He called me "honey" when I telephoned the other day. There was a sweetness in his voice, it sounded like gratitude. Watching the way he and my mother love and care for one another through this, my heart grows and my eyes water. I can feel the expansion in my chest, that familiar and always altogether new sensation of tight, exquisite pangs. It is as if the muscle fibers are drawing away from one another, leaving hundreds of microscopic wounds, the way we do when we grow. The tearing comes first, then we heal. Stronger.

Laying next to my boyfriend on a blanket by the lake last night, I watched the moon rise into a sky of stars. He was telling me something, so I turned my head and met his gaze. My peripheral vision noticed his masculine body silhouetted in the moonlight--youthful, healthy, vibrant--but I saw his eyes through the lens of time, as though he were already 83, like my dad. In that moment, the way I love him deepened. The way I love everything did.

I am beginning to learn how to love what is here, now, before me. It is much different than loving a potential, possible future. It is different than loving a dream. It is more tender, more vulnerable to do it this way. It is also more satisfying. It is real. Like the cosmos in his eyes.

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.