Consciousness and Vegetable Death

The tomato vines have fallen on their faces, sprawling out of the beds and making their gangling way onto the cement patio, as if they were reaching for the back door of our home. Frost will not come here so watching the hot weather crops time themselves out is a totally new process for me. Its a gruesome spectator sport. There's no sudden icy morning to put them out of their misery so instead things go on blossoming at one end and turning slowly brown at the other, growing more and more thin and leggy, finally flopping in exhausted, ridiculous length like the cosmos that just fell over after growing taller than our garage, the neck of each new bloom absurdly lengthened like some overdone body shaping competition. The squash continued fruiting manically while also deteriorating into the most impressive mass of powdery mildew I have ever seen. Its a strange new way to switch growing modes. The swiss chard produced so heavily that I honestly lost sight of ever keeping up with eating it. Everyone received bouquets of big crinkled leaves and sunrise colored stalks but it kept coming and coming....finally I all but abandoned it ("Swiss chard boys?" *crickets*) and such a horde of aphids descended that it looked like black mold, growing all over each stalk and eventually creeping up and covering the leaves. I ended up sawing them all off at the ground to be humane. Its so different to grow here.

 I have grown plants my whole life and yet, BAM.....new biome and I feel totally new, floundering and astonished. A asks me all the time "What's that tree? What do you think that flower is?" and mostly my answers are just a lot of, "I have no idea." Its intimidating if I allow it to suck the air out of the room for a second...but if I just reach for my curiosity and desire to never be jaded and love of learning and excitement then suddenly its means something good. I keep trying to figure out the next thing, be grateful for the questions and stumped moments that keep me scratching my head and practice letting go of my anxiety, my need to be right, my choking expertism and my soul killing perfectionism.

One of the things that's so helpful about newness is that it forces actual conscious experience. So much of what we "know" isn't even actually absorbed or seen or focused on....let alone mulled over and considered. All the things are amazing and shocking and weird if seen from the right angle, newness is a great way to make it happen. It reminds of the phenomenon of seeing a word that you have known all your life and for some reason suddenly being unsure if it "looks right" because you just really see it for some unknown reason and it looks so odd, so whimsical, so bizarre...."Is that really how it goes?" Even though you've seen it your whole life and written and read it countless times, there it is, looking so conscious and oddly impressive. Its how people learning English feel when they see the word for the first time too, and you just got a freak glimpse of it like some odd wrinkle in time. That's me, in California. Although....I guess, its less a freak glimpse and more "learning English." Learn on!

Jewishness and Good Books

I have been tapping away at my electronic genealogy a lot lately. It has become a gigantic web of elastic connections and stories and imaginings, it goes sailing all the way back to the 1100's in some spots and stops abruptly after three generations in others. I love they telescoping strands of married pairs, folding and opening as I click along through them, adding in stray dates, looking up locations and searching for their children, noting the ones that lived past childhood and the ones who were only a little zephyr of a life.

Been fascinated lately about the fact that I am more Jewish than I ever realized. My two greats grandpa was orphaned and then emigrated from Germany with his brother and sister missing Hitler by a solid couple of generations. So strange to think of a relative that close in my line who listened to his mother say the prayer to welcome Sabbath at his own table when it is so different and mysterious to me. I have thought so much about being a tiny shred of Chippewa (cliche though it may be) and because its been talked about so much in my family I feel that chip of my identity so strongly. It was a little surprising to see in my test results (I had my dna tested for my last birthday) that I am more Ashkenazi Jew than I am Native American. I love the idea of Judaism and have been reading Jewish writing and theories for a few years. I also keep making these fabulous Jewish friends by accident who are smart and hilarious and exciting and totally mind expanding. Interesting how lives weaves us onward and keeps plopping the things we should think about down in front of us in little dollops. Then there's my cousin who just spent time living in Israel for a few years with his Jewish spouse. I'm sure thinking about it all.

I am reading again after a hiatus. Life comes in cycles for me. I have to leave things off for a while or take a whole new tack and look at them fresh. I usually alternate cycles of fiction and non-fiction to stave off reading boredom and life-burnout. I was on a super long non-fiction bender for a while there and then I had a break and a mental blank space for a while. I'm now reading some light fiction and enjoying imagination and the playful freedom of pretend worlds and characters. Some non-fiction is starting to sprinkle back in too...all in good time. I have a book on Mary, a book on Mosses and a romance set in Paris on my hot burners right now.

Ru has taken off reading himself and is no longer an intimidated or edging nervously round the faux chapter books level kid. He's all nose in the book, missing what you're saying, head over heels confident about reading things he can't even understand. Love to see that I've launched one kid into the world of word adventure. So beautiful to see how much he is enjoying it and the great power there is there for him now to know that any book he sets his hand to can be unlocked and unfolded and chewed into a somewhat digestible meal.

The boys are making friends with the neighbor kids who live on the other side of our tall board fence and have progressed from tossing the basketball back when it accidentally hops over to climbing the orange tree so that they can lean over the fence on their elbows and make commentary on the games the kids are playing in the driveway. I like this magnetic neighborliness, the way kids just can't help peeking through the knot holes at each other and shouting jokes over the 10 foot tall boards. They told us that they used to play with the girl who lived here before us. I found one of her kiss marks on the inside of the office closet walls and a little heart filled in with dark ink inside one of the kitchen cupboards too.

The days are long and the beach is calling, the roses keep putting out new blossoms and the hummingbirds are whirring back and forth across the backyard. I want to can peaches and tomato sauce and bring an armful of sweetcorn home from the farmer's market for dinner. Tomorrow is a new day and we are all going off to reboot ourselves now so that we can get up and have a bright new morning full of coffee, fried eggs and lemon blossoms. Its been a while friends, company has washed into our house in three successive rounds and just now ebbed back away. I have been thinking of you all....of my brushes....of my guitar, Sending you all evening love from my coast to your little corner of the world.

Leaning into December

Feeling restful about this season. December is here and we are gearing up for Christmas, winter, cold, internal times. I have good books lined up on my nightstand (parenting, in-law relationships, fantasy stories, travel guides!!!), a good stock of Earl Grey and a long list of small renovation tasks on the house. I'm all for the chilly months. Lets bring it!

Ru is getting to be a smooth reader which is pretty exciting. I sometimes worried it would never happen. Teaching kids to read reminds me so much potty training. Its partly about them and partly about training yourself and it takes so much faith in your kid and eventuality and so much letting go and taking yourself less seriously. Dee is partway through reading instruction and even Nib is beginning. Little steps.

A and I are continuing to work on our marriage in little steps too. Building trust together has been one of our recent big jobs. I highly recommend the eminent John Gottman's book, The Science of Trust.  I am ridiculously grateful for the tips in that book. We got into a real tailspin in our connection and life together. Its amazing how easy it is once you have a few bad patterns, to pattern your way right into completely hopeless and even emotionally dangerous place. Isn't it wonderful though, to know that people change, that we are the masters of our own choices and that we can make what we like of our lives???? I can't tell you how much I adore being a grown-up. Gottman is a great resource....maybe the most helpful information for A, I felt like I could breathe again after I read Brene Brown's, Daring Greatly and it helped me learn to how to be assertive and yet truly kind...both things I desperately needed. If you have a tough or impossible relationship where you feel stuck...keep trying shit.

 Seriously. It's worth it. You don't have to hate your mom or stop speaking to your next door neighbor or give up on your son, relationships are repairable, human connection skills are learnable and you can learn how to be a better you. I feel like an infomercial. Ha! Whatever. Trust is my new favorite. I know how to make it now and earn it and it's like totally fulfilling super-glue. I love it when I learn new things that I never, ever thought I could hack. Hear me roar!!!!

Marriage and parenthood both have made me ugly cry more than anything in my life. Ever. They've been ridiculously hard for me. Seriously, though....they are also the things that have pushed my edge and helped me learn fantastic things and two of the places where I am most proud of myself. The things that are your most painful experiences are the things that can be your best teachers, if you're game. The key is not giving up, looking the things that terrify you in the eye, remembering the things that are working and trying hard to solve the problems...try ardently, unceasingly, and ever hopefully. We are all in this together. Some of us are writhing with agony over the hard stuff that is career, some of us are socially pained by our difficulty in friendships, and some of us are looking like crazy people because we can't figure out how to teach our kids to be gentle. This is real life. (<------ all="" and="" are="" botch-ups="" favorite="" hacking.="" keep="" my="" of="" overcomers.="" p="" saying="" sorry="" us="" we="">

I Can Have Cookies Magically

We are hitting new stages at our house all the time due to four little boys who are constantly upping their game and discovering the world. This week we reached the, "Bake Their Own Cookies" stage. Ru asked me if he could make cookies and told me that since he knows how to read decently now and he could tell that I was working on dinner...he'd do it alone!

And then, because he's a total extrovert who always feels better working in a crowd he recruited all of his brothers to be a part of the occasion, including the naked, potty training toddler. Ha!

It was amazing! He found the recipe, read it, got out all the ingredients, made the cookies and put them in the oven and then cleaned up the work area!

Voila! Life is amazing. He's 8 and we can have fresh cookies whenever we say the word.

Reading, Writing and Skateboarding

This week we learned that Ru's favorite skateboarding instructor is moving to Florida. Sending out a tribute to Burton for all of his laughter, unruffled coolness, his persistence, and his example of rubberized bravery.  I am so excited about the things I am watching the boys learn at the skate park. I am really grateful for Burton's hand in it all and hoping for a grand future for him in his big leap towards his print shop dreams in the land of sunshine down south.

Skateboarding is a fabulous way to learn to belong to a group, to embrace failure as useful and expected and to learn creativity in a kinesthetic form. Ru has always been a mover and shaker. I remember catching him trying to ride his scooter off a wooden chair balanced in our Lazy Boy recliner when he was just a toddler. I love being able to press into those proclivities and direct him into a place where he can flex who he is and grow wiser and more savvy in the process. I kinda thought the idea of skateboard "lessons" sounded ridiculous at first, it seemed like a really upper class, poser kind of idea. I have to say though that it basically amounts to open gym time in a skate park with a big brother or two on hand to give you pointers whenever you want them, low pressure, expansive, and whatever speed the kids who show up need at the moment. Sometimes there are games of tag and "double dog dare ya's" happening and sometimes everybody's lining up to try a new trick together single file. Its as playful or organized as people want and I appreciate that. Its been such a great release in the middle of this frigid, endless winter to have a place where my 7 year old could go blow off steam. He goes to sleep like an angel on the night of his skate class. Love it.

I'm kind of intimidated by being a skate mom but I'm really excited to see my boy take off so avidly towards something he loves. I want to get over my own worry about coolness and his ability to push past his bumped knees and keep going. I am expecting to spend a lot of time at the outdoor skate park in town and I think having a board or two in the trunk is kind of a given now.

Now if I can only figure out how to safely allow Pom to learn. He sobs when Ru skates because he's so jealous and spends all his time trying to climb on the board whenever he gets the chance. Hey. I'm watchin' yard sales this summer y'all! Time to get him a board of his own. If this kid can do it, then so can Pom.

Poetry Friday: Turtle Medicine

Happy Poetry Friday! We made it through the one last full week of winter. That is worth celebrating! Lets have a poem for dessert since we made it, shall we?

On vacation I bought myself a small carved turtle figure, a personal reminder of the life choices I was making and the lessons I keep being reminded of right now.

In Native American teaching, animals can be instructors and messengers sent to teach us things for a while or coming alongside us as tangible reminders of our identity and role in life. I have been learning turtle lessons for a while now and feel like God sends me turtle encounters as gentle nudges of His Presence and my own strengths and callings.

So today, a little turtle poetry...

Turtle Medicine
I am a turtle woman.
Placid rover, called to grounding
Needing slower paced out stalking
Hearer of the ancient wisdom
Trees and rocks and river talking
Drawn by God through paths of effort
Dredging through the channel blocking
Peace within, a well of comfort
Holy salve where fear is knocking
Long-lived being made for always
Eternal creature never stopping
Bearer of the world around me
Pillar-legged never balking
Wearer of my home and haven
Belonging present at each docking
Tortoise, Hawksbill, Slider, Terrapin
Loggerhead, Box and Painted teachers.
God's cold-blooded, scaly speakers
I am turtle woman listening.

You can click through and read more of my poems where I am slowly collecting them, on my Original Verse page. 

Tune in for the rest of this week's participants and see what other poems are out, waiting to speak to you. Our esteemed host for the collection this time around is Kara Newhouse, over at her blog Rogue Anthropologist. I always think a nice dose of poetry browsing is a fantastic way to celebrate a slower weekend morning. May you enjoy the same....

First Day, Second Time

It was our annual First Day celebration today! Our first official day of semi-structured home learning....sorta-school. You may remember last year, our first big recognition of the occasion.

I want the boys to feel special, for learning to be ardently celebrated and yet to avoid the pale, cheesy, chasing after "normal," pretend about making a xerox-of-a-public-school here in the living room. Walking that line. I was going for warm tradition capped with a little buzz and hoping to avoid wanna-be mimicry. We had warm apple dumplings for breakfast...apples because they are a modern symbol of teaching and dumplings because they are a once a year treat that goes down delightfully sweet and fallish. Each boy came down to a special congratulatory sign on his plate, welcoming him to his new grade level. And then I put a candle in each boy's dumpling and A and I sang to them "Happy First Day to you, Happy First Day to you, Happy First Day, happy first day of schoooool, Happy First Day to you!" So fun to see big sparkling eyes and happy grins, over the top of the flickering flames.

Then we hopped in the van for our 2nd annual drive around the block to the street in front of the neighborhood school where we hooted and hollered and honked the horn and then wheeled back around and took Daddy A to the train station for work. Once we were home we had a big dance party in the kitchen and commenced the formal learnin'.

Mondays we will studying My Place In This World which is a self-composed course about micro-geography. Our street, our neighborhood, our city, and eventually our state and then a sketch of how that connects to the country and the world. Right now we are going to focus small and work from the concrete things they can easily grasp: What is an address? Where are N S E W in relation to my front door? What is a neighborhood? And move outward.

Tuesdays we will be studying Science, right we will be talking about Fungi, Molds and Their Kin. Lots of hikes and experiments in our future. Hopefully a lot of mushroom picking!

Wednesday will be Art day. We'll be mixing together some big art projects (weaving! beading! drawing in perspective!) and sometimes field trips or artist studies with our new basic piano instruction plan. I am not a piano professional but this a bite sized nobler book about beginner theory on reading and counting music and even I can hack it.

Thursday we will have another mama-hatched ideas, a Social Skills class. This will be like a modern manners course mixed with Life Skills for kids: how to make a friend, how to tell a joke smoothly, how to read body language, cultivating empathy, good listening tips, appropriate greetings, how to read expressively etc. Am excited about this concept and about the many field trips required to make sure my boys get a lot of practice building these skills into instincts.

And we 'll round out the week.with History. We are still going to be in the ancient world moving on past the Mesopotamians, Sumerians and Baylonians to Greece, Egypt and Rome. So much good stuff to read, experiment with and go see together! Very exciting.

Reading, writing and math all happen every day in addition to the daily topic.

Here's to the next learning season! Happy First Day, y'all!

Reading Stack

Cold weather always means an uptick in my reading. Lately I can't get enough. I am greedy at the library, pushing open the door on my way to the car with a teetering stack wedged under my chin. Its a lot harder suddenly, with intensive homeschooling and four wild hooligans to manage to read anything steadily. I am determined though. I finked out on reading towards the end of last year and managed to read pretty much nothing from the end of the summer until Christmas. One of New Year's resolutions was to record the things I'm reading on GoodReads again...in order to do that, one must read. Off I went to the stacks!

I have a couple of new tricks in my arsenal for keeping on. I read a book at a time in audio form using my iPhone and ear buds when I'm washing dishes or driving down the road with all the kids asleep) and sometimes even tuck into a Kindle book on my phone (not my favorite) if I forget to bring a book along and find myself stuck at the doctor's office or the mechanic. I also keep a book or two tucked in the door of the car, sometimes one in the diaper bag and books all over the house for wherever I happen to be having a nursing break. Pull out all the stops is basically the message. Read whenever, however...just have serious tenacity. Bear in mind that in addition to the things I am happily clipping through I am also still hacking away at a book I borrowed from a friend about a year ago. *wince* I am not an emblem of reading perfection. I am only one crazed mommy, doing the best I can, and still in love with the printed page.

Press on.

Poetry Friday: Marriage Advice for Myself

Happy Poetry Friday everyone!

I am writing today about a personal journey I'm having at the moment. I chose a theme word for this year to help me focus my thoughts and ideas and efforts. This is the year of "Acceptance" for me. I'm working more to accept the circumstances I am handed, to accept the problems that I am facing, to accept the people who have been put in my life, to accept myself and my flaws, to accept the good I'm given and the help and creativity and hope around me.

One of the biggest areas I'm really flexing the acceptance muscle is in my marriage. Its so easy to decide that the person we are with needs to change all of their problems, to distance ourselves from them and find ways to differentiate instead of unify, and even to wish away for refuse to acknowledge some of the truth of the current state. I'm on a quest to go to a different place: a knowing and a seeing that is not resignation but just awareness and honesty with overtones of oneness and deep compassion for him and for myself.

And then I made a poem.


If I Were Wise

If I were a wise woman
I would allow my husband to just be.
I'd let him care obsessively about
The exact time he goes to bed and the
The turning off of lights in empty rooms.
I would let him rage about slow traffic
And children who forget to put their shoes on.
I would listen to his worries about the
Dangers of caffeine and alcohol and liberals
And understand it all as his honest now.
I would live like a great warm radiator at his side,
Walking my own path and letting go of his.
I would see myself winking from his mirrored-skin
And hear his voice ripple in my exultant shout
Below the great cement arches of an over-pass. 

Go to Violet's blog this week to see all the other contributors to Poetry Friday today and read a cozy bunch of verse.

Wee Sculpters

Had to share these cool paper-mache sculptures the boys have been making. We've been studying birds in science and Ru had the bright idea to make models of some of the birds we've been reading about. They carefully sculpted and painted them themselves, using our big family bird book as reference. Mostly the littler boys are playing along while Ru and I read about birds together. Jolly times though, learning about how the blue jay's favorite food in the world is acorns and how long a cardinal lives vs a blue jay! Next up he has a plan to make a life sized model of a blue jay nest, complete with stones picked from the beach painted to look like songbird eggs. We may present at our local monthly homeschool sharing night!

Teaching Empowerment

Teaching a small person to decipher letters and learn the secret code of reading is an electric experience. I feel completely amazed at the power of discovery, the beauty of achievement and the incredibly special tenderness of watching literacy unfold.

I have been teaching Ru to learn and he's chomping along in the reading book, learning bigger and bigger words but still not really making the leap to reading himself or devouring story for himself. I continue nudging him along and he's still making steady progress and I am waiting for the lights to blaze full in his face and set him mind buzzing with the possibilities of what he has just grasped.

In the meantime, Dee nuzzled up under my elbow and started begging to have a reading lesson too. At just four year old he's not really ready for the physical elements of writing free-hand but he is able to trace my letters and follow dotted-line letters I set up for him and at his urging I started teaching him the basic first nibbles of reading. By golly, he's getting it! He's reading little words all by himself! I feel like a rockstar in the presence of all this acquisition!

Pencil Drawing

Image by vancouverfilmschool via Flickr

Somebody asked recently to hear and see more about the drawing class A and I are taking together on Monday nights so, I thought I'd give an update. I am still really, really enjoying the class although I have been frustrated a couple of times now in the process of drawing. I know that charcoal is a really hard medium for me to work in...so strong and permanent and messy and so little flexibility in value. I know that I overdue my piece just as easily with drawing as I do with painting. I wish art came with turkey timers that popped up when the piece was at an ideal stopping point. It is so easy for me to just adjust and adjust and adjust and pretty soon I have adjusted what was a beautiful drawing into oblivion. Bah!

I think our teacher is a super lovely soul and I like her non-interventionist style quite well but I do think it would be fun to try taking for somebody more directive and see what that felt like. I like feedback and pointers and while she is very encouraging and open I am not sure how much this class is molding or directing my abilities. I struggle with this not nearly as violently as some of my classmates. It is amusing to listen in on certain students ardently suggesting that she might use more diagrams or give more statistical breakdowns or evaluate our work more stringently. Some people simply go into fits when asked to draw what they see and not criticize the life out of every stroke their pencils create.

The stuff I'm sharing is my favorite out of the produce from the course...there are of course several more clumsy pieces, nobody get the idea that I'm some sort of wizardly, mad drawing genius. I am ridiculously human, truly. I am surprised that after years of being nervous about color and concentrating on black and white art production....I am now struggling to go back into the simple world of black and white.

In some ways I think it is easier to portray something using color because some little bits of a scene are suggestible just by the shade of  green or red or whatever it may be whereas with no colors you must lean only on clean lines and honest shading. So much trickier after all.

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