Yesterday Per and I went out sailing with Sara and her dad. It was the kind of afternoon one felt nostalgic for even as it was still unfolding. There were a few complications as we got going. Per and I sat and watched as Sara untangled the dinghy line which had gotten wrapped around the boat. I was watching her through the plastic wind guard when the sail finally took the wind properly and we were off. A blurred version of her threw out her arms in the sunshine and exclaimed “We’re sailing!"

Coming out of Jeddore Harbour she pointed out where the family of minks had popped up last year. As we went along the afternoon mixed itself in its mixing bowl, becoming a dreamy mixture of images and sounds combined and no longer linear.

An eel fisherman drew in his nets. Osprey hovered high above or skimmed along just above the surface. Sara said Look At That when one dove down suddenly and caught a fish.

We came out towards the mouth of the Harbour where the open ocean began. Jeddore Rock was ahead in the fog with its automated lighthouse. There used to be a real lighthouse there and someone lived in it. I tried to picture who it might have been, and wondered what they did there with all those evenings in the fog. The buoys chimed and groaned. I closed my eyes to see what it was like to listen for them in fog. The swells got bigger and the movement of the boat changed, rocking over the swells, up and down. I started to feel sick and we laughed.

We listed all the things we wanted to see: whales, seals, porpoises, dolphins. Passing islands I pointed out my favourite ones, this one chosen for its scraggly awkwardness, that one for its round containment.

The boom swooped suddenly to the other side and Sara, standing, ducked narrowly under it. “I was nearly killed!” she said happily, and I understood.

Flickering

There’s a new theme. A new thread running through everything: a thread of messiness and dishevelment and being scattered, cluttered, distracted. Sit down to do one thing while she sleeps and 50 others clamour for attention in the back of my mind: the kitchen is a mess of sticky high chair spilled water scattered cheerios dirty dishes piles of papers and unorganized clutter. I need to get dressed brush teeth put away laundry put brake fluid in car call Anna email Sara find time for tea with Ange. Try to understand and smooth over and start over and be there and listen with Per. Have long neglected writing about Astrid and her days and her teeth and her crawling and how she picked up peas one by one so carefully and elegantly. I still haven’t written my birth story or edited my chapter book or found an apartment or even decided where we’re moving to nor what I will do next for money or how we will solve day-care.

Scattered, stretched thin, giving in all directions yet not expressing anything. Creative energy feels bottled and waiting, hoping for a little time to grow or show.

And this is how it is now. It’s easier when I allow it, simply, to be exactly how it is. Stand back to look at it in bewilderment.

Bewilder:

1 : to cause to lose one's bearings
2 : to perplex or confuse especially by a complexity, variety, or multitude of objects or considerations

Yes.

So? I have found that fighting it doesn’t work. In a way I still fight surrendering to this new state, but I’m beginning to think about how to embrace it instead. How can I express something despite the complications, the lack of time, the busy-ness, the doing-ten-things-at-once madness? Is there a way to let it be, to let it show, to let it be okay?

I still want to. That’s the one way in which I don’t want to surrender to it. Stubbornly I still want to leave traces of my messy days as they are right now. Record scraps of what I see while I’m chasing and watching and feeding and singing to her. Say or make something even when I feel stretched taut, exhausted, or overwhelmed. When it is exultant, jubilant, pure joy. When it’s humbled, quiet wonder. Record something too of the ebb and flow of us. My days with Per. Our states: close quiet days, or yelling and fighting it out, listening, trying to understand, understanding, returning, finding our balance again.

There’s such a battle between the complications and the necessity of simplicity. A fight for balance between them and balance between letting go and holding on.

I’m getting up to look through the window at her sleeping in her stroller out on the deck. Peaceful. Earlier we read some books and while she played with one I looked closely at the bite marks she’d left all over another. Traces of this time, and my heart ached a tiny bit for later when those bite marks will be fossils and documents of the past; and my heart was glad that this time is still now when she’s still leaving bite marks on everything daily and freshly. I love this how she teaches me how to admire the mess and not see anything as too precious to chew up/smear with food/investigate/play around with.

I made her porridge as usual and she kept grinning her toothy grin at me in between bites and I called her my baby crocodile. She crooned for awhile and it sounded like she was singing and I listened as if it were opera. She rolled everywhere while we were changing her and it was frustrating and tried my patience as when she went to sleep this morning after an hours calming down only to sleep for five minutes. There is often such a flickering mix of frustration-impatience-tiredness mixed with awe-wonder-admiration-adoration-big-big-love.

From Postcards to Astrid

I gave you a bath. You’ve learned to REALLY splash with both your legs and arms. You splashed like crazy and had so much fun. Water got all over me, all over the floor, and all over everything. It was wonderful to watch you. But afterwards, once I took you out and you started screaming while I tried to dress you, I started to feel a bit stressed and annoyed- tired, mostly, I guess, thinking about cleaning up the mess in the kitchen and about how soaked and dishevelled I felt.

Once you were dressed and fed and had settled down again, I thought about this- your fabulous time, my feeling annoyed, and I realized that I should be learning from you instead of getting stressed out about a mess and wet clothes. I should be watching you carefully in your willingness to make a mess, or your complete disregard/lack of understanding of a mess as a concept. You saw an opportunity to be full of joy and you seized it. You found a pocket of time in which to feel free and wild, and you took it, unhesitatingly. I suspect that you have a lot to teach me in these sorts of departments: the department of play, the department of freedom, the department of joy.

Quick!

It's time for me to make a big change in the way I do things. Namely, I have to start doing things faster if I want to actually get anything done. I have spent a lot of time in my life hesitiating, pondering, pausing, and considering. Now is not the time for any of those things.

Now that I have a baby, time is different. My use of it is different. It's very unpredictable when I will actually get time to do things: write, make stuff, clean up...or sometimes, on the crazier days, get dressed, eat, think...

I love Astrid dearly. She's my priority right now. She comes first. But for my well-being I have to accomplish other small things over the course of a day. The only way is to use the scraps of time I get and use them quickly! Before she wakes up...

Which is different for me, but sort of freeing too. I don't have time to do things well, necessarily. So there's no pressure. Getting some bits written down, about anything, will be a triumph.

I have always experienced it to be true that haste makes waste. But now I'm being forced to rethink that. Haste makes, for me these days, something, at least. Even if that something is messy, unfinished, distracted, un-thought out.

Thinking about renovations. Not in the literal sense but more as a theme in my life right now. With the arrival of Astrid I feel a need to reconsider my priorities. A need to find new ways to use my time and a new approach to working on projects. What I thought was the end of everything as I knew it is now presenting itself as a wonderful freeing. It's true I don't "have time" as I did before. But it's still possible to use the scattered bits of it I get.

write more as a letter

Renovations

What helps is asking myself: "What can I learn from this?"

life in its biggest renovation stage

when renovations are going on we improvise. drink out of whatever cup is available

allow mess and clutter and chaos

how to do things in short time bits

we thunk about how things could be used/done set up diffenrently

we think about what's functional

reconsidereing priorities

wanting less rather than more,

a necessary simplifying

she's awake again

jansons katastrophe quote

What is being a mother like?

Astrid holds on tight to my finger while i walk around with her in the snugli, reading to her.

this little person sleeping on my lap right now has changed my life. disoriented, living in moment

she's asleep on my lap and seems like such a självklarhet: an obvious thing to exist. and yet, 4 months ago, she wasn't here. she was rolling and kicking in my belly. and 9 months before that...?

but now she BELONGS with me. with us. so much so that it seems she has been with us always.

it's the beginning of her first spring. i want to write her a postcard every day. for later. for me or for her?

time is different now. it is longer and shorter. longer- the days are long and her patience for just having me walk around holding her looking out windows, or being read to. the length of thhe constant activiies of our days. of the future days...

shorter-little slots of time in which to think, dream, create, or accomplish practical tasks.

voice- is differnt. function of voice to reach her from a distance to calm her when i cant reach to put a hand on her. voice as stretching to reach, reaching.

Shake

Sunlight is falling and slanting against the wall and across the floors. The time has changed and it stays light much later into the evenings now. This creates a restlessness and a need for renewal. I want to shake things off like a dog shakes off water. Shake off all my old tries and old ways, all my heavy obstacles and traps I have set up for myself. I feel a need to find ways around those old things. To outsmart myself. I'm sure I've been asking myself the wrong questions. I've feared the wrong things.

There was a snowfall last night. We woke to a white world. I went out to get wood first thing in the morning. It's satisfying to make footprints in deep snow but at the same time a shame to mar the pristine expanse of it.

The day before I was out walking with Astrid in her stroller and I was shedding my toque and mitts in the warm afternoon sun. I was pushing the stroller through mud and picking branches to put in a vase at home and tie feathers to. (decorative Easter branches called påsk-ris in Sweden)
So very March for the seasons to flip back and forth like this.

Anyway, I want to start this spring as if it's the start of the new year. Clean off surfaces, pare everything down to the essential. I crave a bare simplicity. An airiness in which I can breathe and let new ideas float by.

Picture a pine table, free of any objects but a bowl of rising bread dough. Picture a windowsill with a small jar of flowers on it. Picture the line where the water meets the sky. But don't call it the horizon. Name it something new.

Straw Into Gold

Went for a walk on the beach today. There was a very cold wind. The beach grass had been bleached out by all the winter weather. It was this crazy vibrant yellow colour like the straw spun into gold in Rumpelstiltskin. I had Astrid in the carrier with my coat around her. We went back on a path through the woods. We were breaking the ice propped up along the grass of the path as we went along, which was very satisfying.

Now it’s later, Astrid and I are at home. I stood with her in the carrier in front of the window for a long time, listening to music and watching the clouds turn from bright pink to dusty grey-violet. Watching the waves rolling in endlessly. It stays light outside quite late these days. It’s something I’m still not used to in February after all those years of Swedish winters. It’s wonderful but today it made me feel uneasy. It made me feel the time to hibernate is over and the time for action is here. It made me feel I can’t hide from things: what work I have to do, what I should be and become. Uneasiness that I feel the need for action but don’t yet know what that action is. That the time is here but I don’t know time for what.

Do I feel like change is coming? Isn’t change always coming? There’s no hiding from change, but sometimes I don’t want it. I want the stillness and safety of now. This pocket of time, with my baby close to me, and the red amaryllis blooming on the windowsill. It’s in full bloom; it doesn’t have a hint of decay yet. No sign of its time being past. Its time is simply now, and it is perfect now. I love this now: watching the wind in the trees outside, hearing the woodstove crackle, hearing Astrid cooing, watching the gentle lamplight falling against the wall.

Tucked In

It's snowing. It's snowing the kind of snow where it looks like there's a snow machine dropping fake snow from the sky. Pretty, fluffy, seperate flakes, falling quickly with no wind. Straight down.

Lots of time has gone by. There's been all that happens with each month and with each season. Swimming in the lake in August, arms moving through the water. Fireflies blinking on and off all over the hill behind the house. (Watching them knowing you're here in order to see them) Quick cold dunks in the ocean and the fresh start it always brought.

And when did summer turn to Fall? With its leaves flying the meaning of extravagance. With its crisp fresh breath. Was it when the darker evening wrapped itself closer?

Unexpected animals slipped into the stories of our days. The fox, the rabbits, the pheasants with their comic cowardly squacks and startled departures. Two days spent watching a new fawn learn to walk, its mother nervous and nearby. Its unsure legs and stubborn continuing.

November brought starkness and pared down the landscape to red berries clear and simple alongside cold walks. All the chilly elegance of frosts on windows.

December's bustle arrived made of wrapping paper, reds and greens, chocolate, ribbons, and a tall, surreal, red amaryllis. Snow sneaking back into the everyday until it belonged again on ledges and branches. Until we expected it for our footprints down the path from house to car.

Of course there's been something different amidst the rest this year. Nestled into the seasons and days was our baby growing: inside, snug, mysterious, shifting and kicking and listening.

Slowly I want to think over her arrival. Slowly I'll file away the details of her arrival.

It began like that though: tucked into seasons changing ever so slightly every day.

What dreary weather today. Ice pellets, wind, and grey.

Have been in all day with Astrid, who is now asleep on my chest in the carrier. Staying close to the woodstove and to the opposite of outside: warm yellow lamplight.

The last days of January always seem to pass in a blur of insignificance. Days less focused on than those of the busy cosy rush of December. Nowhere near spring yet, in fact, winter is just settling in.

What do I want this winter to be? This year?

Of course in a way it is laid out for me: love and care for my new little daughter. That is my most important plan for the coming months. It's an occupation I find thrilling and fascinating, and one that gives me immense joy. I want to spends lots of time writing about her, reading to her, playing with her, walking with her, talking to her. I want to be with her in the present of each day and enjoy her I want to fully experience and explore what it is to be a mother, and I want to redefine myself to include this new role without excluding myself and my creative development.

But even though she is just two months old, I feel the need to keep sight of myself by doing something else as well. Small things: writing a few words, making some little messy collages, keeping on with jotting down ideas and striving to work along on "making visible" my ideas.

What I hope for this year are the same things I've wanted for awhile:

-CLARITY in terms of what I most want to spend my time and energy doing (besides being a Mamma). I want to be able to visualize what I want to do. Is it writing? Making things and collage, silkscreening, sewing? How can I know what is most important to me in terms of what I want to accomplish and how I want to spend my days? What I feel my work should be?

-COURAGE to try my ideas for books and projects rather than talk about them. I am so sick of always talking about but never doing. Courage to allow myself to experiment and play creatively without thinking about financial appropriateness/payback.

-A better WORK ETHIC when it comes to my own projects, not just jobs for money.

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