The Fall

I adore Fall.

It is my favorite season.


Even ugly highways look more beautiful.

But this Fall has been one of those seasons where I can feel the techtonic plates shifting thousands of miles down. Standing in the bathroom to comb my hair, the room tilts suddenly. I try to quickly get my sea legs and steady the objects on the counter. The room levels out eventually.

But I wake up the next morning and start to smell the salty air and earth. This time, the wave comes from a different direction. I am unprepared for it, and everything slides off of the surface revealing something else that I didn't know was there.

I have spent this Fall falling.

When my daughter was an infant, I read books that explained the Moro reflex: how babies will, even in their sleep, suddenly reach with their hands outstretched when they feel the sensation of falling. They also call it the parachute reflex. I feel a bit like that too. There's no way to prevent falling from the tree. And, even if it is in my mind, it is my habit to try to reach, futility, into the air to grab the nothingness.

I'm not sure when I will land. I'm trying to focus on blessings as the sides of the rabbit hole speed past, but my challenge is learning acceptance when things happen that I cannot prevent or repair. I have quit wishing things could be different. But I cannot stop aching for what has been lost, what will be lost, and what I cannot hold in my hands.

Tricks or Treats

Candy for your weekend -

1. The Sartorialist -one of my alltime favorite blogs- has been even more stunning lately.

2. Pink cotton eye candy from Spagat (which means The Splits in Danish).

3. Creative Book list recommendations from Shutter Sisters.

4. Photos for swooning by Paul Johnson.

5. This nail polish (I am loving the one called Sample Sale).

Wordle

This image from Wordle.net represents a speech from Obama on schools. You can use the site to make word clouds from text that you provide. The site explains:

"The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

What a cool tool for a journal or to iron on a canvas bag.

Humor Me

I love this post from friend Grimsaburger.

Does that make me crazy?

Love Ray LaMontagne, as you know. Just discovered this cover he made of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy. Of course, the original bears repeating.

C is for Cookie

...that's good enough for me.

This holiday, my little girl and I are baking and selling cookies to benefit pediatric cancer research. A Band of Parents of children battling cancer put together this website on how to host a bake sale for the cause. I've blogged before about this family and the mom is a mom after my own heart. She asks, "okay, what can I do?" And does it.

There's work to be done.

This is my 200th post and I find myself asking how can I make a difference.

Holiday Card Resource

I have a weekend gig as a photographer. Lately, I've been taking photos of families for their holiday cards. Here, in no particular order, are links to this year's holiday photo card offerings. All of these options allow you to upload your jpeg into a fabulous card design. The links should take you directly to the holiday photo card browsing page for each site.

*Exposures

*Hallmark

*Shutterfly

*Zazzle

*Kodak

*Tiny Prints

This I Believe About Grief

This essay, The Give and Take of Grief, by Michael Newland featured this week on This I Believe is so powerful, I had to steady myself against a wall when I heard it.

With phrases like, "He looked at me, like a dolphin surfacing to look at a fisherman, and then re-submerged when the team took him away to stabilize him," you just have to sit down to listen.

If you can, click the speaker once you are on that page so that you can hear the author read it himself.

Dioramas

This post from 3191 is exactly what I've been thinking about doing as a holiday card for us. I love the outside looking in. I've been trying to photograph our family from the outside the cottage looking in for a while now. I'm waiting for perfect autumn light.


I think this appeals to me (and photos of a room taken from another room) because I have always had a big time fascination with dioramas. Remember making them for school? The smell of Elmers glue, construction paper, clay figures. Taking acorns, sticks and leaves to make 3 dimensional details.

There's a place near my parents house where you can see seemingly life-size ones as you float behind them on the waterway. They are giant doll's houses, all lit up in yellow on the inside against the blue evening light. People are at the dinner table or walking through the house. It is so peaceful to see them living their lives silently, walking up stairs and moving through their days. It reminds me of the scene in Steve Zissou where he takes you on a cross section tour of his boat. (I love that this version of the clip is in italian. I adore Wes Anderson movies and Mark Mothersbaugh who does the amazing music moves me so much). There's something about floating on the waterway that takes the eerie Rear Window voyeur feeling away. Their windows are open after all and we keep moving on.

There's an old Indigo Girls song that I love from Swamp Ophelia called Language or The Kiss, that says something like, "There was a table set for six and five were there. I stood outside and kept my eye upon that empty chair. There was steam on the window from the kitchen. Laughter like a language I once spoke with ease."

I really love that.

Thumbs Up

I loved this story on NPR's Friday Morning Edition. Imagine loving what you do in your 80's. These movie critics call themselves Reel Geezers, post reviews on Youtube and have some suggestions in the story link above for movies to add to the netflix cue or movie rental wishlist.

In The Details

My house is sleeping. I have on my favorite headphones and Ray LaMontagne is singing about trouble and wild horses, being saved and asking how come.

I'm thinking back on the week and trying to figure out how to put it into categories and alphabetized files. There are so many things I can't write about on any given week, that it's difficult to process it all. Occupational hazard I guess, but it seems I am in a constant state of (to twist around Robert Frost) confidences to keep and miles to go before I sleep.

I love this time of year though. No matter how long it has been since I had a new class schedule, Fall still feels like it is a time to go back to learn something, start fresh, wait for color. It's small, quiet things that I look forward to all year: details like the ones shared here and here.

We're all conditioned to look for certain details as a sign of changing time, and in looking for those markers that the seasons are changing or that a holiday is coming, or that a child has met a milestone, do we miss other beautiful, not so obvious markers of time and lessons of what this is, being human?

These photo books of a week in the life have elevated seemingly mundane tasks to those worthy of a photograph, a journal entry and a printed page. In close up detail, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Even though I only did the project for one day, thinking of how I would photograph an ordinary task helped me see it as something beautiful. The next time I did the same task without the camera, the sense of purpose and importance of the task had not gone away. If I could hold on to that sense that every thing I do, even monotonous tasks, has purpose and ramifications, that everything about how we all handle each other is a delicate moment, would life be more meaningful? Would I find answers or just more questions?

There's no way to know which details are the salient ones, the ones that will matter most. I can't take in all of them. Just like with writing, I guess it's about choosing the details that seem most closely related to the questions we're trying to answer at the time? I'm still trying to figure this out for myself. But somewhere in all of it is a feeling that I'm not paying close enough attention to my life to find God in every person, to be present enough for the people I love, to figure out why I'm here and what I'm supposed to be doing. I begin each day asking myself, "how may I serve," and the answer seems to change with every cup of coffee. Tomorrow, I think I'll just be and see what happens.




Don't let your mind get weary and confused
Your will be still, don't try
Don't let your heart get heavy child
Inside you there's a strength that lies

Don't let your soul get lonely child
It's only time, it will go by
Don't look for love in faces, places
It's in you, that's where you'll find kindness

Be here now, here now
Be here now, here now

Don't lose your faith in me
And I will try not to lose faith in you
Don't put your trust in walls
'Cause walls will only crush you when they fall

Be here now, here now
Be here now, here now
-Ray LaMontagne

Friday Inspiration

I saw this photo from [b]ecker today and it makes me want to go to Antigua where this sign lives...or at least print a poster for my office.

Get Through This

I'm looking under rocks. Taking books off of the shelf. Searching everywhere for inspiration - for anything uplfiting. Everyone seems so depressed. Is it the economy? Are we all just sick of political commercials?

Here's a lighthouse or two making me think about all of the things about life that are beautiful and worth celebrating.
-Everything on this page is like heaven.

-I'm reading Living Simply With Children, though I wonder if I am simply living. I have some work to do in this regard, but it's a nice place to start.




I'd like to make some mini books for holiday gifts. This book arrived today in the mail and it is lovely.


-My sewing machine is back from repairs. Not sure I remember how to use it, but it's fun to think of the possibilities.

Anything inspiring you these days? Know any good jokes?
Is this thing on?

On Scandal

When I was at The College 700 miles away, one of my professors, Dr. Simon Lewis (one of the greatest teachers of all time) assigned Susan Bordo's The Slender Body to help explain why a protagonist's anorexia was a reaction to oppression around her. (I think the book was Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditons). Even though it has been more than a decade, I still remember it being a completely fascinating discussion fueled by Bordo's essay.

Now my husband works and studies in the same department as Susan Bordo and she has written something new this week that I find equally fascinating.
Check it out here. She is equally tough on both parties, but raises some good points I think.

I am not a person who votes in elections with blind party loyalty. These are not sporting events where we have to root for the home team every time. I look at the candidates. I don't begrudge anyone for their party affiliation or try to change someone else's vote. But, it bothers me in this election that we have a candidate who calls his wife, calls anyone really, the "c" word. I hope we can expect more for our daughters than to choose a commander-in-chief, or an anything really, who views, speaks to, thinks of women (half of his constituents) in this way. Can't we do better? And I will leave it at that.

Travelocity Daddy

Like the Travelocity Gnome, the daddy from my daughter's Fisher Price doll house travels around a lot. We find him in every room of the house at different times of the day.


I wonder what he thinks about these little positions she leaves him in and where we will find him next. I'll keep you posted.

A Blog of One's Own

Click here for a new post at Skirt!

Wacky Wednesday: Elusive Photoshop

I have so much to learn about photoshop. I have been watching some helpful tutorials online. This one takes the cake. Enjoy. Some language may not be work appropriate.

Coming Up For Air

-I've started writing several posts for this blog in one sitting and scheduling the publish dates so that there should be new material even on days when I'm away for work. Plus, it is such a gift when I check bloglines and see that I have a new post that I've forgotten about. A little piece of sanity back.

-The 29 gifts in 29 days project is so much fun and so easy. Give it a shot if you have the slightest interest.

-I'm in love with Bento boxes and have had the most fun searching for the perfect one for each of us to use for our lunches.

-Why is it that some hotel rooms are so peaceful? The good ones have figured out how we live and also, how to have closed storage and clean surfaces. I am working on creating more of that in my home. It has become a bit of an obsession.

After doing some research and finding this great post: zen habits: a guide to creating a minimalist home, my new project it to ask myself in every room and every drawer, "what is essential?"

I love the suggestion in this article that, "the key is to remove the unnecessary stuff." It is a life philosophy.

I have trouble keeping my head above water in the small house. Putting things away and cleaning is a full time job for all of us. My husband is even more diligent about it than I am, and still, so much of our time is spent trying to find homes for things loose about the house. I think I have figured out the problem. We have no storage space and yet, I'm keeping things as though I do.
No more.

It is so so liberating.

What's more, I realized that I was "storing" every emotion that I associate with each object as well. Freeing up space is literally helping me feel there is room for more good things to come into our lives.

We Feel Fine

Saturday

I decided to try this challenge, at least for one day. In essence, the challenge is to capture the everyday routine, even the mundane and in the process discover the beauty of the present moment. It suggests to, "document the imperfect normalness of your existence."
Here goes...


Waking up in stages.


Leaving the bakery after the three of us shared a pumpkin spice muffin, an everything bagel and a chocolate donut. Coffee and books refills are free there.


This family reminded me of biking to Mooreland Park and the library as a family when I was a child.


The Farmer's Market, full of wonders as always.


One of our favorite farmers teaching about how to prepare and plant the bulbs he is selling.


She got bored with the lesson and laid down. I had to take these photos before scooping her up.






I loved this woman's hair.


Searching for the balloon man.


Reading her babies stories.

I worked on my closet.
He cooked broccoli Roman style with tomatoes and lemon zest that he bought at the market.


A swing together.

Then to a friend's house for dinner and playtime.


Somersaults.


Belly laughs.




Telling stories with friends.

It was a fun day and I enjoyed the challenge, but I think it looks remarkably like blog posts I would write for the family blog on any other Saturday. I don't know that I was still enough- observant enough this time around. I may have to stretch a bit next time.

Please leave links to your Week In The Life posts in the comments.

Closet Purge

Ahhhh...that's better. Just every other corner of the house left to go.

In the world's tiniest house with the world's tiniest closets, it is imperative to purge the house of things that are not being used every season. This time, I am going about it as aggressively as I can. I am asking myself three questions I picked up from some book on the topic.
1. Is it useful?
2. Is it beautiful?
3. Do I love it?

No to all 3 is an automatic out.

We've taken grocery carts full of books to Half Price Books, a box to children's consignment and a ton of stuff to friends, the Salvation Army and Goodwill. I have another load to go to consignment from my closet and I've only scratched the surface.

There's something about the potential for space in the drawers, air in between the jackets and sweaters. Space. It just helps everything feel less rushed. It's hard not to empty the entire house on the yard and bring back in my new favorite mug from Ikea that I bought for .46 cents, a couple of books, the paintings, and sell the rest.

Just me?

Humdingers

Years ago, one of my professors wrote in the margin of my essay, "This starts out as a real humdinger, but then sort of fizzles out." Such has been my week. Yours too?

I hope to spend the weekend solely on loving up my family and creative pursuits. This weekend, I declare with my sword high in the air, will be humdingers only! Right? Something exciting, inspiring, creative. Something fresh and new and colorful!

This week's inspiration links are these:

The coolest challenge from Ali Edwards. I just love the concept. Her posts this week are serene and lovely. There are several others out there inspired by the challenge who have documented the beauty of every day in their lives too. I may have to do this...next week.

Halloween Photo Tips from Photojojo.

29 Gifts in 29 Days- This challenge asks us all to give away one thing per day for 29 days. The gift can be anything: time, money, an object, and at least one thing that you think you can't live without. I love this.