Closed for the Season
Hello friend,
Today’s the last full moon of 2022, be accordingly.
I’ll be soaking in her glow with a hike, tea, and a naptime dreaming up the reemergence of my studio (!) in the basement. There will be very little action towards it just yet considering a bout of some virus (not covid) I’m trying to recover from.
Four years ago, I invested in a program that, for the first time, had nothing to do with my professional life. It was the first time in five years of building my design business that I put any profit toward my own wellness. Not student loans, upgraded tech, or studio tools.
For the price I was paying a nutritionist I could purchase a larger hard drive. Or a flight to a design conference, or the design conference itself. I was hesitant, is what I’m saying. Not only did a nutrition program require an upfront cost but it required my commitment; to the process, to learning something new, and most of all a promise to my body that I would change for her. For us.
“I hope to be pregnant.”
Another first — I hadn’t spoken those words out loud to anyone but Joel until my consult with the nutritionist. We discussed it briefly from a health angle before I tucked it back into the folds of my safe inner world again. As if saying it out loud would jinx my chances.
The nutrition reset began as I traveled the nation for an event-planning team. I’ll never forget the plane ride home after a week-long event in Seattle; it was the closest I’ve ever physically been to the moon. Harvest full, like our wedding day.
“I don’t want to be floating above my life”, I told the moon. “I want to be boots on the ground in the thick of it.”
I was pregnant by the next full moon.
This is not a message of dreams coming true. It is a reminder of pace. How fast are you going? Why are you trying to get there so quickly?
For me — I was going at breakneck speed into a brick wall. Of course, I didn’t realize it was a brick wall. I thought it was a career. I thought it was what I always wanted but things kept happening that weren’t clicking into place, regardless of my loyalty toward it. The purpose of our generation is to unlearn the marketing.
Here I am again, reminding myself to check the pace. I didn’t expect to be here when the strenuous work schedule faded. Raising a young child has a way of filling the minutes of each day with an achingly slow place when you’re not used to it. So I’m frustrated; why isn’t my body working at full capacity?! I yell in hot tear moments.
I never kidded myself into thinking raising a child would be less work than past jobs but I didn’t think it would be so hard on my body. Raising our daughter is the most physical, emotional, and mental use of energy I’ve ever invested into anything.
The person this heavy lifting eludes the most is me.
The bright spot of this current struggle between body, spirit, and child-raising is how it leads me to places I enjoy. Places that were a mere background blur in the pace of my 20s as I was trying to keep up with…well, I forget now what or who I was trying to keep up with. Oh, the hindsight revelations I find in the aisle of a used bookshop! The revelations pile up next to my bedside table.
I may not know where I’m going next, but damnit if I’m not reading my way there.
Charles Bukowski’s gravestone reads “Don’t try”. It’s a signal of optimism to other artists in his odd little way. What you’re seeking is seeking you and if it’s not, don’t muscle through what isn’t meant for you.
There are seasons of trying, and seasons of resting.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés shares the necessity for rest in the context of her work with women heavily involved in social activism:
Whatever their idea of respite, even though they’re speaking from abject tiredness and frustration, I say that respite is a good idea, it is time to rest. To which they usually screech, “Rest! How can I rest when the whole world is going to hell right before my very eyes?”
But in the end, a woman must rest now, rock now, regain her focus. She must become younger, recover her energy. She thinks she cannot, but she can, for the circle of women, be they mothers, students, artists, or activists, always closes to fill in for those who go on rest leave. A creative woman has to rest now and return to her intense work later. She has to go see the old woman in the forest, the revivifier, the Wild Woman in one of her many leitmotifs. Wild Woman expects that the animus will wear out on a regular basis. She is not shocked that he falls through her door. She is not shocked when we fall through the door. She is ready. She will not rush to us in a panic. She will just pick us up and hold us till we regain our power again.
And neither should we panic when we lose our momentum or focus. But like her, we must calmly hold the idea and be with it a while. Whether our focus is on self-development, world issues, or relationship doesn’t matter, the animus will wear down. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.[…]
For women, it is best if they understand that at the onset of an endeavor, for women tend to be surprised by fatigue. Then they wail, they mutter, they whisper about failure, inadequacy, and such. No, no. This losing of energy is at it is. It is Nature.
— Women Who Run With the Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
She thinks she cannot, but she can.
Let this be your season of rest if you need. I’ll meet you there.
Originally sent to newsletter subscribers in December 2022.
The Gales of November
Hello friend,
Writing to you from the time warp that is the first week of potty training. This is to say, I don’t know what day it is. Not positive my head is, in fact, atop the neck.
But I am positive the baby bum is, in fact, on the potty. My work here is done.
Today is the day I honor the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and drag my family along with me. She sunk in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975 with all twenty-nine of her men. It’s one of the most tragic shipwrecks in Great Lakes history. The bell will toll twenty-nine times at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point tonight to honor each man, and a musician will sing The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot.
I’m unsure why this ship calls to me from the depths of Lake Superior but I honor her without question. Ritual assuages grief.
What is it about death and decay I am finding so heartrenchingly beautiful?
Mirror to my grief for so many things lost that bolstered me in my life until now. It is poetic to wax on about the metaphors of Winter’s compost leading to Spring’s blooming but many of us seek only the petals climax, ignoring the necessary precursor entirely.
The question is not how quickly and easily you can get what you want, but whether or not you’re ready to stick by it for years, even decades, until you arrive. The life of your dreams is not something you achieve, it’s something you build through your habits. To get there, you don’t need a temporary change in circumstances, you need a permanent change in your behavior. — via @wordsofwomen
Even Daylight Savings is a fickle human attempt to slow down the impending darkness. If all we ever celebrate is light, how will we know how to support one another through the shadows?
It’s a new behavior I’m trying on, this sitting in the shadows. So often do I seek solace in instant gratification but alas I’ve spent hours upon hours this week sitting on a stool in the washroom instead. She sits next to me. An instant later she stands claiming she’s done despite an empty bowl.
“Let’s wait,” I suggest.
Neither of us really wants to but for some reason she listens and sits back down; both guide and novice honoring the unseen. And that’s all we do, we wait without knowing the outcome.
Natural forces will kick in eventually.
They say the wave that took down the Edmund Fitzgerald was as tall as a three-story building. This was an unsinkable ship in a freshwater lake that is more truly a sea.
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the maritime sailors' cathedral
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald— The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot
I am just an onlooker, surrendering to the wave, thinking of Lake Gitchee Gumee.
Originally sent to newsletter subscribers in November 2022.
Practical Magic
Hello friend,
I made a joke a few weeks ago that for every good week, there are six rough ones to follow. Keeps ya humble, on your toes, you know. I said it cheekily but it’s shaping up to be true.
I’ll spare you all of the reasons why and leave the woeful details to my morning pages. I only have the length of a two-hour nap and I’m hoping for some of it to be dedicated to my annual viewing of Practical Magic.
This rut I’ve been trying to claw out of for a few years now may be offering me an opening rather than an ending. I was heartbroken when I felt forced to quit my job a couple of years ago but now that’s it been some time away from who that version of me was, I’m beginning to wonder if that needed to happen for a new path to open to me. Maybe all of these things I’ve identified with for so long — career, relationships, mindsets — needed to be cleared away so I can grab hold of a writing life as Nikki Gemmell writes in Dissolve.
Or maybe it’s how Anne Lamott says, “Other than writing, I’m completely unemployable.”
While I do not consider myself an academically-esteemed writer, or even a very good one at the frazzled moment, I can’t not write. It was just easier when things were, well, easier.
Golden, amber, and ochre hues of leaves drift to the ground around me. I will never see this exact leaf again. There will never be a duplicate budding, resting, dancing from the limb of a maple again in this lifetime. It is like that with people too; our loved ones, our pets, our soulmates, and people we see in town.
It’s deeply somber mixed with the joy that we are here to witness the final flash of harvest celebration. Two dichotomous emotions share the same chair. Death and birth. Grief and love. They weave in and out, they are friends. It is not divisive. It is nature.
Trees, especially in Autumn, are a good metaphor for how beauty is so fleeting. They will come back after a season of dormancy but they will not be the same. Fallen leaves before spring buds are connected by way of compost now feeding the roots. It’s void of mysticism—the logic of how trees cycle—and it is all mysticism when you stomp through the fallen crispness. A scent that will send you to the depths if you let it, and may you, see where it leads. Practical magic.
Despite my whining about how I have no time to myself anymore, how life with a two-year-old Gemini is a constant state of breakneck speed whiplash for this steady, systematic, glacial pace Mama, how I don’t know if I’ll ever have momentum in my career again (& do I even want it?) — I do think it will make sense someday. The spell may be for me to relinquish. And maybe just chill the fuck out.
The seed of the new is in the shell of the old.
— Susan Lipshutz Scorpio New Moon reading
I can’t wait around for the perfect moment to write what is clawing to get out. I can’t wait for when everyone understands me better, when I’m mad at fewer people, or when the child(ren) is grown, to say what feels inherent. My soul will dry up. It already has, you should see the wrinkles! and the thick coat of lotion I now have to apply for dehydration. Drink water you say? That would be too easy and get in the way of all my other more fun drinks.
I suppose I’ve droned on like the person I am these days. It feels good to ramble from an inner rhythm for a few moments before I’m back to saying, “I understand that might make you upset but you can’t have skittles for the fifth snack in a row,” before a slew of tears and tantrums commence.
Sometimes the right thing feels all wrong until it is over and done with.
— Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic
Don’t worry about me though.
My knight in sweatshirt armor will be home shortly. He will drive away in the SUV, bringing the Queen to her desired playground palace soon enough and this wornout damsel will lay on the broken couch saving images of homes she will not live in, well-tailored yet relaxed fits she cannot afford wearing to her secret Pinterest boards as Gilmore Girls reruns play in the background. A true connoisseur of inspiration and comfort television.
I don’t want this season to be done with, I mean maybe the broken couch could improve, but I’m a sucker for some clarity. Maybe I’ll find some if I keep writing through it.
The writer Gail Collins said that, for women, the ‘centre of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home, and the urge to get out of it.’ It’s her story, my story, the female story. The complex annihilation of motherhood.
— Nikki Gemmell, On Quiet
Happy Samhain, witches.
Originally sent to newsletter subscribers in October 2022.
Shaky Bones
Hello friend,
This moment between moons you’ll find me in inner turmoil from lack of a morning routine. I’m mourning my routine…get it? Mom jokes aside (my teenage cousin vehemently believes are not funny): We’ve gone four weeks without a shower, a few days without a toilet, and have welcomed one very particular Polish man to tile the only bathroom in our house. Most of our interactions are me responding to his plea, “No more changes to the tile!” Ahhh, my own little slice of Under the Tuscan Sun, sans divorce or Italian villa.
The good thing about all this chaos is it’s making me notice something about my hip and pelvis pain — less routine, more inflammation.
Brief backstory: This Spring I started training for a half-marathon happening in the Fall. I was very deadset on running this half. I made it to three miles midsummer before I pinched a nerve in my right hip and could barely walk. I’ve been in physical therapy for my hip and pelvis ever since. The second time in two years I’ve had to quit training for this half-marathon.
I’m learning about pain, ego, and not being kind to my body. If only I could’ve run away from it, literally, like I WAS TRYING TO DO. Instead, I must sit with a tennis ball pushed into my right ass cheek and consider the emotions buzzing through this body of mine. My anger stems from feeling no one really cares what was required of me to bring a baby into this world, nor do they try to empathize with decisions I’ve made in response to having my first child knee-deep in a global pandemic. Or try to consider that I might be carrying around some emotional fallout from it all. Just another weight I’m expected to carry with style & grace, I suppose.
It’s so deeply threaded into our cultural language and expectations of women that this is just what women do, now be grateful for it damnit, that it feels like my actual, genuine emotions — this is both scary and sacred, I’m both grieving and elated — are just being glossed over. It’s on constant loop over a loudspeaker no one but me can hear. I want to point vehemently and say, Hello?! Did you hear that? How are you not hearing this?
Any time the topic of mothering, marriage, careers, finances, or pandemic comes up it further validates my piss-poor mood and that is how I know there is healing to be had. Before healing, you have to admit first that you are hurt. PT (physical therapy) diagnosis or not, I believe my inflammation will continue until I come to terms with this chapter of my life. I will have to keep deferring race tickets because the endless loop of the story we tell ourselves can help or it can hurt. That, & the physical exercises I’m being given each week to do at home.
My physical therapist had me sit on a yoga ball, engage my core, and lift my right leg up followed by my left. And, I could not do it.
“I don’t understand how I can go twenty-nine years having my body be strong without me thinking about it. Then I have a kid and now my body doesn’t know how to do anything. How does that happen?” I ask through hot tears of frustration after a round of seemingly simple exercises that have me out of breath and aching.
“You had a kid,” my physical therapist responds, “and you really just breezed right over saying that. Your tight abdominal, pelvic, and hip ligaments stretched further than they ever have before to hold a growing baby. The hormones helped you handle it but all of those have transitioned to a different state now. Those ligaments aren’t just going to snap back. You have to retrain them, and it would be good if you could be gentle with yourself about it.”
My muscles don’t trust me. They don’t believe I can hold my own weight, or whatever I’m lifting, so they tighten as a survival tactic. A sailor’s knot if I’ve ever seen one. This lack of trust is happening north of the initial pain as well. My head was telling my core to lift my leg on that yoga ball and nothing happened. It’s disconcerting to tell your body to do something and have her dismiss the request. Betrayal. So often this interaction between brain & muscle happens too fast to notice in a healthy mind-body connection. But when a part is not working as it should you see there are many steps required for one small action. To imagine all the steps I must take now to get back to that half; some days it depletes me. It depletes me most when I hobble home and there is no water to heal, to wash over this tired, achy body who is lifting her heart out of the car seat for the 100th time today.
I’m no anatomy expert and this will further prove that, but a large piece of my heart left the inner cavern of my ribs as I welcomed my daughter to the outside of me. She is morphed from my own skin, blood, and sinew and I was her container for a brief stint of forever. These bones are shaky as a result, my skeleton click-clacking away. I’m trying to get acclimated with a little less of me on the inside while trying to keep such a close eye on my heartpiece on the outside. And she is growing! Quickly. The weight increases steadfastly.
I imagine my stretched ligaments, my swollen muscles with all their little knots looking up to that ribcage of mine, to the shadows of the spine. They chatter,
We’re sorry we can’t hold you the way you need at the moment but the sound of those shaky bones, the way they chime, is a beautiful tune.
Mother music.
Woman rhyme.
A chorus of ancestors keeps me company.
—
Other things on my mind:
This summer my favorite book had to be The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George. Poetry in novel form, never read anything like it. Here’s the rest of my summer reading book list for your final beach reads before the frost comes (board books for littles are listed too).
I’m sharing more in bits and bobs because it’s my particular approach to healing. Write from the scar, not from the wound as Marlee Grace quoted in class last week. Uncomfortable as it is it keeps scratching to get out in this form. If today’s letter resonates, here’s another one.
If you read last month’s letter you know I’d like to write a book someday. And god damnit, listen to what happens next; Marlee Grace offers The Architecture of Book Writing class for three Sundays in September and I sign-up the very. next. day.
—
Say one thing you want to do this week, out loud. To your partner, your baby, your mother, your puppy or feline, or friend. Then, observe. See what happens when the trees hold your words. They are the best listeners.
Until next time, Em
Originally sent to newsletter subscribers in September 2022.
Summer book list 2022
A conversation with my mom the other day, in a frenzy where I was leaving my family for a remote corner of the world where no one would find me: “…and I have like 20 books I’m reading but I don’t remember which one’s I’ve started or where I’m at with any of them!”
“I’m the wrong person for this problem, I never know what book I’m reading!”
I’m a firm believer that the books on your shelf will tell me where you’re at in your life. One time we were staying at an aunt and uncle’s house who had recently uprooted their lives as empty nesters and had just moved into a new town. We were visiting, and the uncle I’ve always admired had his bookshelf near the basement guest room we were staying at. I snuck a peek at his current titles and it only made me admire him more.
A person’s bookshelf is nonverbal communication into the inner workings of their psyche. There, I said it! It is that deep & soulful. Let me offer you my inner psyche, ahem - summer bookshelf - for perusal:
Summer Book List
The Little Paris Bookshop – Nina George
Gift From the Sea – Anne Morrow Lindburgh (on repeat each summer)
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest – Suzanne Simard
Summer of ‘69 – Elin Hilderbrand (free little library near the park my daughter plays)
The Idle Parent: Why Laidback Parents Raise Happier & Healthier Kids – Tom Hodgkinson
Maiden to Mother: Unlocking our Archetypal Journey into the Mature Feminine – Sarah Durham Wilson
The Heroine’s Journey – Maureen Murdock
Women of the Bible: 25 Enduring Stories – Special LIFE Edition
If Women Rose Rooted – Susan Blackie
The Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold (free little library again, I must start giving books back!)
The Quilters, Women & Domestic Art – Patricia J. Cooper
Sunflowers, A Novel of Vincent Van Gogh – Sheramy Bundrick
Ya-Yas in Bloom – Rebecca Wells
Mama + Mini Book list (Toddler, 2yrs+)
We have graduated to library days where River is willing to go for the toys, and the toys only. When I encourage her to just pick out one book before going back to play, she has consistently grabbed titles to do with pooping, underwear, and any other excrement kids have coming out of their bodies before she returns to lego-building, rocking fake babies to sleep, and staring at older children. I like her style. Here’s what I choose for her to have my needs met at bedtime:
I Sang You Down From the Stars – Tasha Spillett-Sumner & Michaela Goade
Julían is a Mermaid – Jessica Love
Powwow Day – Traci Sorell & Madelyn Goodnight
Max and The Tag-a-Long Moon (she genuinely likes this one, gifted by Bebe) – Floyd Cooper
Babies in the Forest (board book) – Ginger Swift
No More Pacifier for Piggy! – Bernette G. Ford
Tallulah: Mermaid of the Great Lakes – Denise Brennan-Nelson & Susan Kathleen Hartung
Welcome, friend.
Hello friend,
I was starting my letters from the Spring with “Dear reader” but after a perusal of my subscriber list, I know most of you personally, & you are my friend. Some of us share high school memories, college, some of you from design ventures, some of you my mother’s friends or family who have been so wonderful to me, and some of you a bit more new to me as gals who married the guys that are my husband’s childhood friends.
The overlap is that many of us are mothers now, most are women, and a few of you are guy friends who talk art with me.
I thank you for reading these monthly letters.
Every part of me since September 2018 has shifted. Within one month, I was traveling the country as an event designer in the tech industry, having a run-in with a student threatening my safety in a college course I taught, discovering I was pregnant, and accepting a dream position with Chaco while simultaneously being invited to work on an event in the Netherlands on my due date, and training for my second half-marathon.
I say this not to brag (ok, maybe a little to brag) but to express that when the global pandemic happened and I was furloughed while pregnant and lost all my breastfeeding & delivery classes, and labored with an OB I didn’t trust to deliver my first baby while unsure if my partner could be with me during labor — well, I’ve changed. I imagine you have too. I know you have your own version of loss, grief, and exasperation with what has transpired over the last few years.
You’re welcome to share it with me if you’d like.
I need to write these letters about creativity, motherhood, and healing. I’ve sketched a Venn diagram where they all intersect that I’m much too private to share at the moment but know it’s my reference to go more in-depth in future letters.
Mainly because I’ve had many conversations with people having similar questions and thoughts as me. Whether it’s a distracted discussion on the playground with children pulling at our limbs, a one-liner in the checkout line during endless errand runs, or a text conversation spanning days, we are all asking one another — about our bodies after babies, about the intricacies of emotions with parenting, and the often humorous struggle to find a slice of solitude for our art. Or a nap.
Can I share with you a really far-out dream I have? I hope to write a book someday.
Until then, letters to you, my friend.
Have a wonderful weekend, Em
Originally sent to newsletter subscribers in August 2022.
Archiving as Artform
Dear reader,
Oh, these dog days of summer. Thick, humid heat. Let it lull you to laziness. The only movement to slap a mosquito, point out the firefly bouncing along the day-lilies.
Thanks for reading Emily Bode! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
I'm currently filling these moments muddling through a vulnerability hangover from a decade of writing in “real-time” online.
As the baby naps, I archive my Instagram, circa 2012. Often with the latest Real Housewives in the background (Mothers in the home who had your soaps, I see you.). It’s an arduous process but it heals me to stow past versions of myself away. We all go about moving to the next chapter in different ways. The point is, we must turn the page.
Next chapter I must go. The previous ones have been beautiful, so achingly sweet I don't want to release my grip. Like the muscle in my ass putting me into physical therapy and stopping me from training for a half-marathon — the pain will go away when you release the tension. Thank the literal pain in my ass for this wonderful life advice. Use it to your advantage. Otherwise, my bill is a waste, thank you.
As playwright Sarah Ruhl said to herself when she found out she was having twins:
All right then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses.
I've since found a treasure trove of titles with mother as protagonist since I started actively digging. I keep adding to this list. For anyone thinking Mother is a boring storyline (it is rarely a Mother who thinks this), plot twist: these authors will prove you wrong before you finish the introduction.
A little astro weather report before I leave you to mosquito-scratching and firefly-scouting: today is the Leo New Moon, in the month of Leo Season, halfway through the Lion's Gate portal. Soak it in, express it out.
See you around August 11 full sturgeon moon (this is the day before my birthday & I am INCORRIGIBLE about celebrating my birthday for as long as I can, so just know this if I'm late to the inbox party next month).
Leo blessings, Em
Originally sent to newsletter subscribers in July 2022.
Two
Dear reader,
It’s a special week in the Bode household — our little Gemini turns two years old! I’ve been all emotions as I paint our porch and have frequent party-related outbursts at Joel. What about a child’s birthday that makes the most stable mother transform into a sea creature of lore?
My rational mind KNOWS River won’t notice the wool craft balls to signify cream not white mermaid pearls for the birthday banner. A ludicrous detail for a child who stays outside at all costs, even sleep at sunset. Especially sleep at sunset. Pinecones and dandelions would prove sufficient gifts as these are the gems she finds on our walks to the lake. The painstaking search for a freshwater mermaid book will go unnoticed on the shelf for a while.
As we celebrate River this week, we celebrate the depths. Two years ago it was Joel, me, and our newborn alone in an empty hospital wing. A budding family in an isolated world. We clung to one another desperately. We found light in those crevices. One year ago we flailed in exhaustion, scurrying to stay afloat as a single-income family. Our parents hosted birthday gatherings for their granddaughter at a week’s notice.
This year, our beloved Moon Lodge embraces the light that kisses our shadows. The cuddles that warm an emptiness now filled. Laughter like flowers in the breeze convinces the saddest of souls to fold hands in prayer again. May it be so for our little sunshine girl, this week and always. As she has given to us with her presence alone.
Some creative things worth sharing when I’m not crying in the backyard to Trevor Hall’s The Lime Tree:
Reading The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George.
What is her motive? Or is she a secondary character in her own tale? Is she in the process of editing herself out of her story, because her husband, her career, her children or her job are consuming her entire text? — The Little Paris Bookshop
The word Dune showed up for me at the beginning of 2022. Halfway through the year, a sacred moment at Sleeping Bear Dunes, held by dune. I’m intrigued with the synchronicity between dune and pelvic bowl.
When we are very clear that we want to shine—and if we want to know the Goddess, we want to shine—then we attract into our lives the kinds of relationships that help us do that. Until a woman has given herself permission to be fabulous, she will not find herself with partners who promote her ability to do so. — A Woman's Worth by Marianne Williamson
Watching Derry Girls, a teen sitcom set in 1990s Ireland during The Troubles. Drawn to it due to my desire to travel to Ireland and find an ancestor’s grave. Seasons 1 and 2 are on Netflix, and the final Season 3 is on Channel 4.
Type Nerds: This number 2 is set in Clarendon, a slab-serif typeface originally made in 1835 by Robert Besley. Named after the Clarendon Print Press in Oxford, England, home of the Oxford English Dictionary & the King James Version of the bible. My favorite part of Clarendon letterforms is the ball terminals.
Surprised at the crucial role of Groceries. A weekly keystone event that used to be a mundane act pre-children. To be in my 30’s discovering this (the privilege) is laughable. How I think about growing & gathering around food is changing & dare I say, exciting. Interesting to observe my systematic processes once used to get million-dollar events off the ground now tackling my grocery lists & meal-making with fervor.
Related reads: Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist
What are you up to creatively? I’ve lost touch with you. What’s inspiring you? Book you’re reading? Workshop you’ve signed up for? Whatever new thing you’re trying? Vacation you’re taking?! Hit reply & fill me in.
The world is on pause for me as I soak in this moment that River Grace entered this world. See you in your inbox next month, around the July 13 full buck moon.
Thanks for reading! Hope you soak in the Solstice this month, until next time, Em
Originally sent to newsletter subscribers in June 2022.
A Mother’s Embrace
Oh, how the comma looks like a mother's embrace.
Dear reader,
A few days ago our daughter skinned her knees. She tripped on concrete, tears followed, as did the cold water, ointment, and bandage. The following day, she tripped again. On concrete, again. She opened up the same wound that wasn't yet fully healed from the first fall. As I cradled and cooed her, the parallel became clear; I too have wounds not yet healed. They've been reopened before full recovery. It almost hurts worse than the original wound because the skin is more sensitive and tender from the initial fall. The reopening compounds the pain.
And so I think I will do for me what I instinctively do for River; cleanse, salve, bandage, cradle, coo. May it be so for you if you're in a similar space. Some creative things worth sharing:
Many themes of childhood & family resurfacing as evident in this post, written after a difficult week transferring River from crib to bed. My neighbor saw me reading The Artist's Way at the coffee shop and said, "One of those days, huh?". Oh yes, very much yes.
Current notetaking system:
• Google Keep color-coded notes
• Brief recap of key moments in my daily planner
• Index cards dated by month. Kind of like Anne Lamott's index card process, Austin Kleon's daily planner approach, & a touch of my own color-coding obsession. All I'm doing is scribbling notes "for later".If you can't find the book you want to read, write it. I can't write a book right now so I searched a little harder for these titles on motherhood. During this motherhood search maybe it would be more truthful to say I seek books about a woman's inner life.
Read Sunflowers by Sheramy Bundrick, a novel based on Vincent van Gogh's final two years in Provençal France, in preparation for this exhibit. Living vicariously through expat Jamie Beck's lense until we travel there. Adding The Yellow House to my 'to be read' list.
This month's full moon was a total lunar eclipse in the middle of Mercury Retrograde and a big sign transition with Jupiter. So many people are trudging through this moment with difficulty. I can't say I've found any solace through it but reading about it helps.
...the Goddess is returning, she is making her way up, & people without eyes to see will be completely in the dark about the journey of women all around them. As the Goddess begins to make their claim on them, there will be more, rather than fewer, girls who make no sense. — A Woman's Worth by Marianne Williamson
Watched the first season of The Gilded Age. Aunt Agnes' and Aunt Ada's sisterly relationship is as comical as it is dysfunctional.
Aunt Agnes: You are forcing me to reevaluate your character.
Aunt Ada, in response: I can't help that.Watched Turning Red multiple times. The symbolism is powerful, tough emotions are acknowledged, and the mother-daughter relationship is resoundingly relatable. What Jin, Mei's soft-spoken father, says to her before her ritual:
People have all kinds of sides to them. And some sides are messy. The point isn't to push the bad stuff away. It's to make room for it, live with it. — Jin (Turning Red)
Listening to The Marfa Tapes and Palomino. The Marfa Tapes would sound perfect on vinyl. Top three songs:
• I Don't Like It
• Actin' Up
• Country MoneyDipping my pinky toe in the world of letterpress but now I must get my hands dirty. Initial research has begun to acquire a press. "It's easy to forget how nearly everything printed before 1945 was produced on a letterpress of one style or another," from Letterpress Commons.
The GVSU graphic design department has a Vandercook Composing Room cylinder, circa 1912(?) just waiting for someone to get her humming again.This summer, I'll be at my favorite coffee shop near the harbor a couple of days each week. Sign up for a conversation over coffee with me if you're in town. Bring what you're working on, reading, or ideas with your art, and I'll share mine.
I love these yellow roses. Part of Jamie Beck's Rose Month in May.
Thanks for reading! See you in your inbox around the full Strawberry Moon (June 14ish).
Originally sent to newsletter subscribers in May 2022.
‘And per se and’
Dear reader,
You may wonder why you find this letter dropped on your digital doorstep out of the blue. Well, at some point since 2018, you signed up to hear from me. A lot has happened since then, a lifetime ago. Let's bid adieu if you've understandably moved on by now. Otherwise, continue on for a list of creative things worth sharing.
My nerdy passion for typography has been reignited after teaching type at a local university this winter. Do you know the one about the lovely 'and per se and'?
You troubleshoot, you're in conversation with yourself, & you keep going.
Over the last decade, I've developed my freelance process as a designer. Time dedicated to my art has been abbreviated, challenging me to tweak my process — trying out Anne Lamott's scattered index cards system. Intrigued by Austin Kleon's system of sharing, as I realize I don't have a sequence for distilling information, and maybe his approach can help my daily writing practice. When I begin to overthink it all, Steven Pressfield's no bullshit approach brings me back to just. do. the. damn. thing. already.
I'll have a bed dressed in bright blankets
and embellished quilts to spark your sweat
and set it spilling until it chases
the chill that you've been given.A few lines from the greatest poem in 18th century Ireland sewn seamlessly into my new-old interest in quilting.
Ēostre, goddess of the growing light of Spring. Celebrating these early days of the Spring Equinox in simple ways; painting boiled eggs, fresh tulips for a wee bunny's birthday, and holding space for multiple creation stories. She has risen, indeed.
Is it really that bad if we don't cater to our two-year-olds every whim?
If members of Gen X can blame their high rates of depression and anxiety on latchkey parenting, and if millennials can blame their high rates of depression and anxiety on helicopter parenting, then perhaps a new generation can anticipate blaming their high rates of depression and anxiety on the overvalidation and undercorrection native to gentle parenting. — The Harsh Realm of Gentle Parenting
This summer, I'll be at my favorite coffee shop near the harbor a few days each week. Sign up for a conversation over coffee with me if you're in town. Bring what you're working on, reading, or ideas with your art, and I'll share mine.
Thanks for reading! See you in your inbox at the next full moon (May 16, full Flower Moon).
Until next time, Em
PS. April is national letter-writing month. The paper you write your letters & invitations on is called stationery, with an e.
Originally sent to newsletter subscribers in April 2022.
A Rare Family
I was out the door with my copy of The Artist’s Way in the passenger seat before I noticed grabbing it.
It was a sleepless night; partly because of the wine, mostly because the little one was wide awake from witching hour until the dawn bird’s first song. I woke up dreadful. Unfulfilled, angry, resentful. It’s the booze, the baby, most definitely the sleeping husband just laying there. Luckily the first chapter kicked in quicker than caffeine and forced me to find the core fault.
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
I’m fatigued with each foot dipped in separate pools. It’s like I have 10 feet! and they’re all tripping over each other. One hour I’m submerged in my career, the next I’m negotiating crackers with a toddler to get in the fuckin’ car sweetheart. Negotiating isn’t my strong suit. Toddlers are like dogs, they sense your insecurities and they pounce. My daughter eats a lot of crackers, is what I’m saying.
I may be the matriarch of this schedule for my daughter but don’t assume I like it every day. The years go fast so hold on to every moment they say as if that will stop my tears on random Sundays as her independence grows. That does not help the constant push-pull heartbreak-happiness that your child is healthy & growing…away from you if you’re doing it right. Big eye roll to the stereotypical Mom advice that isn’t advice but a passive-aggressive veil to not talk about the dichotomies we’re so clearly living in. Let’s skirt by the loud disruptive screaming in the room that some of these early days just aren’t fulfilling. Some of these days feel like you’re trying to get that spring-loaded wiggle worm back in the can and sit still for a second. It doesn’t mean you’re an ungrateful Mother to admit that. Your child still feels loved by you and wants to “hold you Mama” when the last dusk bird coos her babies to nest at night.
My mom is my biggest mother example. She didn’t have the life of an unlived parent while raising and childrearing. Not that that hasn’t brought challenging conversations with her now that I’m an adult trying to raise a child, but thank goddess she showed me a Mother deserves a life of her own in addition to being a Mother and she needn’t grovel for it at every turn. The child will have to fall in line with that to some degree as a result. This is an unpopular opinion, I’m sure. It’s insinuated in multitudes that Mother is the ultimate goal instead of a welcomed layer bestowed upon the already multi-faceted woman. When I wondered if we couldn’t have children, Mother was the ultimate goal so I appreciate and understand that season. I was that season and could be again, this is not either-or. I guess I’m just trying to navigate this mother layer in tandem with the artist layer I’m just not willing to give up and I can’t pause any longer. I’m of the belief this will benefit my daughter when she stops bugging me about the crackers.
“A rare family, faced with the myth of the starving artist, tells its children to go right ahead and try for a career in the arts. Instead, if encouraged at all, the children are urged into thinking of the arts as hobbies, creative fluff around the edges of real life.”
I’m grateful I’m part of this rare family Cameron explains. The blank stares and polite changes of the subject have reinforced this in many conversations throughout my life so far. Like the ugly duckling who doesn’t know they’re beautiful because they’re hanging out with a different bird species. Now that I’m a Mother, I know this wasn’t a family default I was born into.
It was my Mother.
She crafted it. She fought like hell for it. Together with my Dad, they made our family’s environment a breeding ground for dreaming and acting upon it throughout their many lived lives as our parents. I was the child who got to witness worlds before I ever left the nest.
Keep those feet in all those different pools. Your child’s inner artist may look back on their rare family with gratitude someday. After the therapy sessions, of course.
Touch
What do you spend your days touching?
My child’s hand.
Whole vegetables, chopped and steamed.
The pen. The paper. The favored candle in amber glass.
Skin. His. Mine.
I smile at the irony.
All this time seeking in my mind what my body spends the entirety of her day holding.
There is nothing more to do.
A Mother's Embrace
Is writing really a bad idea?
I guess it is a bad idea the same way having kids is a bad idea. Your heart will break and there will be tears and you are so tired all the time. And yet. There is also bliss. Unimaginable joy. Euphoria.
There is LIFE in all its twisted glory.
Keep on writing…—but not for success. Write to tell us your truth.
— Kati Helsinki, in a letter to Steven Pressfield
My truth — the last two-ish years I’ve been enthralled in birthing, and subsequently raising, our child. I have been roaming another world completely. I’m softly returning from a landscape of labor, trauma, pain, mysticism, magic in the mundane, anxiety, overwhelm, the deepest love, a daughter who holds the key. I faced death and therefore life. Deep tearing throbs still, breast as nourishment, wild desire, fevers, chills, a range of excrements that leave the body from clear to opaque, milky to bloody. I’m unsure if I’ve fully returned from the underworld or if the work of transformation is still happening. Maybe it always will be from here on out. From maiden to mother.
It’s all a mess and it’s the deepest being alive I’ve ever known.
The message sent to me is that these stories are for the privacy of a medical room. They are not for meal-time monologues, coffee chats, and surely not for women or men who are not parents.
It’s been my experience that the medical room is too bright, sterile, masked, and devoid of the warmth and rawness this trip through transformation requires. Not all of the doctors and nurses are to blame, they are overworked and underslept in this season of pandemic but the patient has to deal with the fallout somehow. This story needs holding. It can not be thrown into the receptacle next to used N95s and forgotten rubber gloves.
This story needs a Mother’s embrace.
The best vessels
There is less time to obsess away these days, with a little one in tow. You would think this would make writing easier but it has paralyzed me instead. I’ve come closer to understanding why with Brian Eno’s take on surrender and control, via Austin Kleon:
“We’ve tended to think of the surrender end as a luxury, a nice thing you add to your life when you’ve done the serious work of getting a job, getting your pension sorted out. I’m saying that’s all wrong.
”I don’t know if you’ve ever read much about the history of shipbuilding?” Not a word. “Old wooden ships had to be constantly caulked up because they leaked. When technology improved, and they could make stiffer ships because of a different way of holding boards together, they broke up. So they went back to making ships that didn’t fit together properly, ships that had flexion. The best vessels surrendered: they allowed themselves to be moved by the circumstances.
“Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.””
The best vessels surrendered. They let themselves be moved by the circumstances. I am in a season of surrender and it is uncomfortable. We are taught control will bring us what we seek because we will have chased after it and wrestled it to the ground. There is a tempting veil of certainty in this approach to everything from selecting the next job to following the Google map to your next destination. We can make whatever we want surrender to us. This is only one side to the story. And I’m on the other side; surrender.
So many moments up to this point in my life have been about controlling the outcome. I’m very good at control, most people are when they’re telling everyone else what to do. Now I’m in a season of surrender without any tools or guidance. Surrender doesn’t come equipped with tools or guidance. Are there any companies, sports teams, armed forces being taught how to lose properly? The definition of surrender suggests it is negative and you do not want to be the one surrendering. It is described as being a victim, a weakness, losing to an opponent or an authority figure.
While these are all true instances of surrender, I am focusing on the surrender of my internal, personal life. My direct experience of the last couple of years as of late where my body was at the mercy of pregnancy, my career at the mercy of the white man’s bottom line, and our world at the mercy of an unknown pandemic.
It’s the first time I’ve had to truly acknowledge the hard truth that many women have learned earlier than me; I am less than in the eyes of society because of my gender. That’s a lot to unpack, a lifetime’s worth. What I’m getting at, in Enos’ metaphor of the surfer, is there is a time for control, a time for surrender to the elements, and a time for control again, and the cycle goes on. I am not in the control part, I am learning how to surrender to the elements, and I must admit — I kinda like it.
Like a well-flexing vessel, I need to find the function of being intentionally bent so that I don’t sink.