Dreamer

At Last

2012-02-16T07:12:00.000-06:00

Two years ago she saw a potter give a demonstration at our local library. She turned to me, eyes shining, and said it as if she’d known all her life: “I want to do that!”

Since then, I have wanted to give her the opportunity. But always, always, there is something else that has to be done first—other needs, other activities, other projects.

She got a small pottery wheel for Christmas this year, and it has taken me this long to get it set up and give her a brief lesson. But we did it. She didn’t want me to stick around very long. She had watched so carefully and waited so long, she just wanted to sit down and try. I gave her a few pointers before she shooed me off, and this is her first creation.

Now the wheel won’t turn, and I think the motor is burned out—it wasn’t strong in the first place, and I suspect it was meant to be more of a toy than a tool. Middle, however, is serious. She got a taste, and she is determined—this is not over.

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In Honor of the Day...

2012-02-14T07:52:00.000-06:00

I’d like to share my all-time favorite fairy tale with you: “The Queen,” by Anna Wahlenberg, from Great Swedish Fairy Tales, illustrated by John Bauer (translated by Holger Lundbergh--my copy has stories selected by Elsa Olenius and was published by Delacorte Press, 1973.)

It has a prince, of course, and romance. No dragon, though (or trolls, for that matter.) And guess what? They end up rescuing each other.

If only I could host a read-aloud on my blog…

What are some of your favorite love stories?

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Touch

2012-02-11T07:35:00.000-06:00

My connection to the physical world was different before I became a mother. I knew I would love my kids. What surprised me was how tangible a thing that love was. I was unprepared for the fact that holding them would be as necessary a thing as drinking water, that I could lose myself looking into their dark, deep, baby eyes, that I would be completely taken not only with their hearts and minds but also with their fingernails and armpits and cheeks and knees. I still experience moments of shock that I am connected to these beautiful, amazing, wholly-real-and-wholly-individual people.

* * *

But what I said about my connection to the physical world—maybe that’s not really true, after all. I remember being in a clothing store on an afternoon off from music camp when I was in high school, all alone and with lots of time on my hands. I walked from rack to rack, admiring all the artistic, too-sophisticated-for-me clothes. The lady behind the counter watched me for a while and then commented, “You like to touch everything and feel the different fabrics, don’t you?” She said it kindly, but I hadn’t realized until that moment that I was seeing as much with my hands as my eyes.

I remember that day in my second grade classroom, sitting on the floor. Maybe it was read-aloud time, maybe it was Show and Tell. I only remember watching another girl playing with dried glue and being struck with the thought that I wanted to do something with my hands. Badly. I wanted to feel something, or make something—just experience something with my fingers.

I remember realizing how enjoyable it was not only to make music with my violin, but also simply to feel the strings under my fingers, and to feel my bow moving against the strings.

I remember noticing that not only did I relish the soothing, repetitive motion of knitting, I relished stopping to run my hands over my work, to feel where I’d been.

My heart and mind—those were always givens. What I seem to forget at times is that I am body, also.

* * *

So I take it back. For all my head-in-the-clouds tendencies, I crave connection. I have always done a certain amount of my living inside my head, but maybe that makes touching the world more important. Yes, it’s still there. Yes, I’m still here.

* * *

Inner life, you can dip and soar, travel anywhere, live boldly, do things nobody would expect from a good, quiet girl. You expect to be free, unchained—wild, even—but something in you craves touch. You need to be able to land sometimes, to touch the earth. For all your otherworldliness, you carry deep within you the objects you ran your fingers over, the words people spoke to you, the things your eyes read in another’s, the food you savored, the scents you breathed in. Maybe this is how you know you didn’t make it all up. Your treasures—yes, they are stored up in your heart, but first they were in this world. Cut loose from them, you might just float away.

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Something I Saw

2012-02-06T10:32:00.000-06:00

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Shapeshifters

2012-02-03T10:56:00.000-06:00

There was a dream I had in high school, one my memory has never been able to do justice. I was wandering through a crowded place—a fair or carnival, maybe. I don’t remember if I was intentionally looking for something, but I joined a large group of people all pressing in the same direction. We walked and walked, and after a while I found myself at a concert, standing in a great throng of people, watching a man play piano. His music was captivating, but the man himself was even more so. He was entirely glass—transparent and shining, dotted all over with multicolored jewels. His piano, too, was all jeweled glass. He played and played and I could not take my eyes off him. It is an image and a feeling that awake I cannot quite grasp, and yet I carry it with me. From time to time I try to bring him out of the depths to look at him clearly, but he is never as in-focus or as beautiful as he was in my dream.

* * *

There is another dream, one that comes back at different times in my life. The surrounding details often change, but the one constant is that I am trying to walk. I am trying to get somewhere, or escape from something, and I cannot move fast enough. Every step is like walking in deep water, slowed, ponderous, strained. And every step is incredibly painful. This is a dream that shadows me in waking hours at times, to the point that it feels like the memory of an actual event.

* * *

Have you ever had one of those conversations that twists out of your grasp? You try to say something, and somehow it changes direction in the space between you and the other person—its meaning floats away on the air like smoke. You feel like you are in a dream, then. You cannot trace back where you’ve been, and you do not know why the conversation has taken the turn it has, but the thing you wanted to say is lost. Somehow, though, you can still feel that thing in your heart. You hope it will stay with you, you wait for it to come back into focus.

* * *

The things you hold but cannot hold. The things you see but can't prove. The things you know but cannot name.

There is something to this—these things that change shape before our eyes, that slip out of our fingers before we can name them for what they are. And there is something about the fact that we see them better when we give them another form—whether in words, or in music, or in a piece of artwork.

* * *

My violin teacher in college taught me many things. Maybe the most important was that it wasn’t enough to just close my eyes and emote whatever. How was that communicating, he challenged me, if I didn’t know what I was trying to say?

Clarity is a hard thing, though. It seems to be something you have to come at sideways, sometimes. Or maybe it has to disintegrate and re-shape itself a few times before you really know what it is you’re dealing with. Sometimes there is nothing to be done but to wait for it to become visible.

* * *

One of the books my parents loved to read to me when I was a child was Attic of the Wind, by Doris Herold Lund. Or maybe it was that I loved hearing it read, I don't remember which, anymore. The attic of the wind was the place where all the things carried off by the wind—bubbles, snowflakes, autumn leaves, all the beautiful things that disappear—ended up. I loved the image of a place in the sky full of all those lovely lost things, and I loved the idea of visiting a place like that. There is something hopeful about the thought that the things which escape, the things that elude you, are gathered somewhere in a secret place.

Waiting for you to arrive.

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Manifesto for the Month of February

2012-01-31T07:47:00.000-06:00

I love winter, but heading into February everything always just seems difficult. I think this is the hang-on time of the year, the keep-plodding time, the let’s-just-do-what-we-can-even-though-we-are-all-worn-out, passing-illnesses-from-person-to-person time of year.

This is the time of year I intentionally look for ways to fight discouragement. This is the time, especially, to cling to read-alouds, and art supplies that take over a room, and new projects of all sorts. Oh, and living room bacchanals—I hope my kids are never too old for those They are the only people on this earth who have ever seen me dance wildly, and so far they are still quite tolerant. I have literally taken to writing manifestos for myself the last few years, not because I’m so good at handling the long stretches of darkness, but because I need to remind myself of how to fight the urge to turn inward completely. So I thought I’d share, just in case you are feeling a bit battle-weary yourself:

Seek out warmth and light and wrap yourself in it.
Then look for somebody else to wrap.
Fill your head with music.
Stop saving the good stuff for special occasions.
Enjoy your food as if you were still a child.
Dance like a maniac.
Pile on everything beautiful and hang on for spring.
Defy the darkness with beauty. Recklessly, if necessary.

And you? What would you add? Is it February, or another time of year for you?

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Come and See

2012-01-27T08:56:00.000-06:00

Sometimes—when I am too tired, or too busy, or too whatever—to notice something, one of my kids will see fit to share it with me anyway.

Sometimes they will insist that I take a picture.

This usually means an interruption, and I am almost always glad for it, in the end.

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On Starting Fires

2012-01-24T09:05:00.000-06:00

“You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us…”

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953)

I finished reading this book recently. It was my second time through, and I found it struck even closer to my heart this time around.

I also just finished reading What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920 – 1933, by Joseph Roth, a collection of articles written for a variety of newspapers. The last essay, standing alone in a section titled, “Look Back in Anger,” is called, ”The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind.” Unlike the previous articles in the collection, which appeared in Berlin newspapers, this one appeared in a Paris paper. It opens with these words:

Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean. The technical apotheosis of the barbarians, the terrible march of the mechanized orangutans, armed with hand grenades, poison gas, ammonia, and nitroglycerine, with gas masks and airplanes, the return of the spiritual (if not the actual) descendants of the Cimbri and Teutoni—all this means far more than the threatened and terrorized world seems to realize: It must be understood. Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this disgraceful capitulation.)

He wrote that in 1933, by the way.

I’m thinking it’s an ancient problem, really. What we love, what we fill our hearts and minds and bodies with, how we choose to use our time and resources, especially when we have a wealth of it at our disposal. It is so easy to be lulled and think that being occupied is something else, entirely. Sometimes when my kids are clamoring to watch another movie or play more video games all I can think is that really what they need is to be bored and alone with themselves, because the world is filled with things to do and infinitely un-boring, and it is far too easy to spend all our energy filling ourselves up with emptiness to even notice.

I’m not against being busy. But what with?

There have been times in my life when I was convinced I did not have time to read “for pleasure.” At some point I decided, to heck with it, I’m going to read anyway. Now I’m convinced I can’t afford not to.

Teachers, artists, musicians, writers—so many of my friends, so much of my family, so many of the people who have touched me, fall into these categories in one way or another. They are people with messages burning in their hearts. They work long and hard to spread the word, to light sparks in other hearts, to "stitch the patches of the universe together", and they deserve more appreciation than they get most of the time.

More and more, I think of them as prophets, crying out in the wilderness.

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7°, the World Wreathed in Light

2012-01-20T09:29:00.000-06:00

It was 7° Tuesday morning when I went running. A stark number. I had every bit of flesh covered except for the strip around my eyes. My face was warm with my own breath, my hands and feet warm from running. I love being out on the edge of the day like this. I got to watch the sun rise and turn the frost on the ground from hematite to gold to silver. My breath gathered frozen on my eyelashes and for the length of my run I saw the world framed in ice, wreathed in light. The feeling of seeing like that lingered for hours, the way dreams sometimes do.

* * *

I can’t exactly explain myself, but last week I signed up to run a half marathon. A couple of friends have been encouraging me and I blame them at least partly. Amy offered the goal of a ten-mile race in October, Ashley suggested the half marathon this spring. And because they think I can do it, I want to try. I want to learn what I can do.

This is, I should tell you, not in the usual realm of things I set out to do.

I have dropped in and out of the habit of running for years. Usually I hit a point where I either get too sick or feel too busy to keep it going, but here it is the dead of winter and I am still running.

There are many reasons, I think. I started taking a daily asthma medication for the first time in my life last fall, and all I can say is, I had no idea. What I took for normal lung capacity apparently wasn’t. Then there is the fact that pretty much daily I feel like I cannot keep up the pace of my own life, daily I feel like I do not have the strength. I want to know more about endurance. I am convinced that the physical exercise helps me cope better emotionally and spiritually.

Running is not just a tool for coping or a new-found strength, though. There is something about the time, about being quiet with myself, about the physical connection. When I am running, I can let everything flow—my thoughts, my imagination, my burdens, the world around me. All of it can wash up and over, and I am free to let it happen—to feel it all, name what I can, and acknowledge the rest. I can know that this is me, real and alive, physical and spiritual, mental and emotional—all of it connected and working at once in this quiet, raw way.

Each day has a different personality. I see the sun rise or set, I watch the seasons change, I witness skies that are fiery or stony or beatific. I have run in cold and heat and rain and snow, and all of it mixes with whatever is happening in my head and heart each day. I wish I could explain to you what that does. I admit things I could never admit, I think crazy thoughts, I have epiphanies. I run towards and away.

* * *

The ice stayed on my eyelashes for my entire run until, a block from home, the warmth of my breath made them melt. They felt like tears sliding down my cheeks, except for their coolness. Even after they were gone, though, I carried them with me, let the light drift alongside me as long as I could through the day.

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Notes from a Suzuki Violin Workshop

2012-01-17T07:46:00.000-06:00

This past weekend my girls and I drove back and forth a couple of times between our home and Quincy, IL for a day and a half of classes with artist teachers Gabe Bolkosky and Christie Felsing. We finished with a recital—the first half featuring Gabe, the second half featuring all the kids who participated in the workshop—and returned home full, spent, and with new resolve. I don’t think you could ask for a better couple of days.

As always, I have a million thoughts rattling around in my head. Here are a few I was able to catch:

• Realizing you are bound by music to a bunch of kids you’ve never met is pretty cool
• So is running around like a maniac with them between classes
• Work—careful, detailed, technical work—can be a joy
• The above is especially true when you’re doing that work in a group
• Cultivating technique as a tool for expression = giving a child power and a voice
• Striving for excellence is so not boring
• Teaching is as much a craft as playing violin
• Ditto for parenting
• This is more about lifestyle than it is about extra-curricular activities
• This is more about who we are developing into as people than anything else

"The heart that feels music will feel people." --Shinichi Suzuki, Ability Development from Age Zero

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Feed Me

2012-01-10T08:15:00.000-06:00

Youngest got paper for Christmas. Not sheets, but rolls—two bountiful rolls of blank paper just waiting for her artwork.

She got her very own art caddy, too, full of supplies.

Her response has in turn been bountiful. The fact that she is not limited to 8 ½” by 11” sheets allows her to think and work continuously. I now have two thick scrolls under my protection to keep safe and round until she can give them to the people for whom she made them. I fully expect there to be more.

Teach a child to read and let her loose in a library. Put a drum set in the basement and don’t complain about the noise. Listen. Find ways to say yes as often as possible. I can’t say I’m always very good about this. But I’m always glad when I put in the extra effort.

Because it’s an amazing power, isn’t it? Offer somebody tools and permission and watch them fly.

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The New is Old Again

2012-01-07T17:15:00.000-06:00

I miss snow. Real snow. Snow that starts in November at the latest and hangs on into April. Snow that packs down on sidewalks and in streets, so that even after shoveling and plowing the sound of your boots on pavement is a bit of a shock. Snow that glitters in the sun and under streetlights at night, snow that gathers in your hair and dampens sound. Because even though shoveling gets to be a pain, and scraping car windows just makes me more late for everything, and even though bare sidewalks in January mean I can keep running outside without worrying about killing myself on a patch of ice, I love winter and I love snow.

It probably couldn’t be any other way. I grew up across the street from a winter fairyland. I can remember two winters specifically, although there may have been more, that I practically lived there after school. There must have been a lot of snow when I was in fourth and fifth grade, because the church parking lot across the street from my house had enormous plow piles all around the edges of it. Tall, magnificent piles you could climb all over, pretending you were traversing endless rugged mountains. There were places, though—miniature chasms and shallow depressions—where you could sit, hidden from the whole world, nestled in snow and quiet. I gathered icicles, smoothed out snow thrones, pretended I was a queen, a fairy, a wanderer. I lost track of everything else in the silence and the glittering snow and the blue shadows.

Did you have places like that?

Do you now?

* * *

I think about where we live now, and wonder if my kids will ever get to play in the snow the way I got to. If—because they were too young and I was too exhausted when we lived in snowy places, or because now we live in a place that has snow only in stingy amounts—they will never while away the hours in that kind of wonderland.

The temperatures this week have gotten into the 50s for days in a row. It feels nothing like winter. The kids have been outside a lot, playing in the dirt. The city dug up a large part of our yard before Christmas because of a storm sewer project, so we not only don’t have snow, we have a wide swath of turned-up earth. Clay, really. And my children have discovered that you can make things out of it. Turns out it’s like having a yard full of free brown Play-doh. They spend hours sitting in our torn-up yard, dreaming and creating. Their hands are stained, and they bring me gifts.

Watching them outside, completely absorbed, I realized the other day that there was a magic to it all that was familiar. A different form of it, and all their own, but I recognized it nonetheless.

For that I am thankful.

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In Case You Missed Them the First Time Around...

2012-01-05T17:34:00.001-06:00

Some of my favorite posts from 2011. I can’t guarantee they’re the best things I’ve written, but they are closest to my heart:

Quiet Girl
Silence
Night
One Friday Morning
The Color Series (If you start at the bottom with "Green" and work up to "White" at the top of the page you will be reading the posts in the order they were written.)

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Shiny New

2012-01-02T10:47:00.000-06:00

The beginning of our New Year has been marked by wind, violent gusts of it at times. No snow. Bright sunshine. Part of me wants very much to hibernate, the other part wants to make and do, to reach out and connect. Somehow, in between the restlessness and the urge to hide, I feel extraordinarily quiet.

I spent the better half of yesterday afternoon reading, letting the laundry stay un-done, the dishwasher stay un-emptied, the new calendar I should be filling out stay not only un-filled-out but also not-yet-bought.

I keep thinking about resolutions, about the urge I have to make some sort of statement about the New Year. And really all I want to do is drag my feet. I want to hold on to Christmas a little while longer. I want to keep hold of that warm beauty that doesn’t last long enough before the calendar turns the corner into new-and-stark-and-cold. I want to not feel quite so keenly this sharpness of wanting.

If I could sum up last year, I would say it was about growing, and growing pains, and stepping ever farther out of my comfort zone, and connecting. It was in many ways a good year, and in many ways a hard one.

* * *

The yarn in that picture above used to be a sweater, one I knit a little over a year ago. I was proud of it, but it never quite fit me. Last week I unraveled the whole thing, winding it back into balls as I went. I hate tearing apart something I spent so many hours creating, but I know I will be happier with it when it is remade. I tell myself it is the same process I have to go through when learning a new piece on the violin: break it down, put it back together, break it down, put it back together. I can take comfort in the process, in the feel of the wool between my fingers, in the pleasure of seeing something grow right in my hands. In the end, the work will always be worth it. This, I believe, is how art becomes art.

* * *

I don’t have any shiny new resolutions this year. But I do feel resolve—mostly to keep going with the things I have started, maybe rework the things that don’t fit quite right. To learn how to love better. To continue reaching out and speaking up. To make decisions in spite of my fears instead of because of them. To lean into the hard stuff. Because even though doing those things feels clumsy and seems to involve more pain up front, I have found more blessings and more friendships—old and new—in the last two years than probably any other time in my life. And from that I don't think there is any looking back.

Happy New Year to you.

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Sandbakelser

2011-12-30T09:21:00.000-06:00

I had no idea we had a secret recipe.

I enjoy baking very much, but it is one of the things that has fallen by the wayside over the past few years. Even Christmas baking has suffered, and this year was the worst. Holding tightly to my homeschooling/teaching violin/writing schedule until the week before Christmas and then immediately leaving town meant letting go of virtually all Christmas preparations.

Last week, though, while we stayed with my parents, I helped my dad make sandbakkels. He has made these cookies almost every year for as long as I can remember. Often he makes fudge, too—dense, sweet logs of it that have to be kept in the refrigerator wrapped in waxed paper. My mom makes jan hagels—Dutch Christmas cookies that we all love even though we aren’t Dutch. Other sweets have come and gone, but these three desserts are steady companions at my parents' table.

Sandbakkels are Norwegian cookies (many claim they are Swedish, but I have Wikipedia on my side.) The name translates as “sand tart,” the flavor and texture sort of a cross between a sugar cookie and shortbread. Scandinavians, I am convinced, know the secret to good cookies: you don’t need much more than flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. Also, you cannot skimp on butter, and you cannot use what Youngest calls “fake butter.” Of course, there’s also the presentation. Rosettes, krumkake, kringle—the Scandinavian cookies I grew up on were as much about their beauty as their flavor.

To make sandbakkels, the dough is pressed into special fluted tins and baked. After baking, each cookie must be carefully removed from its tin. This, to me, is the tricky part. According to my dad, we got the texture perfect this year—delicate and flaky—but only about half of them survived being removed from their tins. The survivors, though, are lovely, buttery cup-shaped cookies. The ones made in my dad’s tins remind me of paper cupcake liners, those made in my tins remind me of flowers. Although we do not fill ours, they are traditionally filled with fruit or preserves and whipped cream. The ultimate treat, according to my dad, is to use cloudberries, which are shaped like raspberries, but are yellowish-orange and slightly bitter. I think they sound like something out of a Scandinavian fairy tale.

My dad helped his mother make sandbakkels from a young age. She, too, taught music lessons in her living room, and made all the delicious Norwegian desserts my dad remembers from childhood Christmases only with help from her family. Her recipe for sandbakkels was special, different from the many other recipes my dad looked at over the years. Her grandmother taught her how to make them, and she had the recipe written down without any specific amount of flour indicated. Apparently flour changed so much from harvest to harvest at that time that cooks had to know by texture when they had the perfect amount. But she won a blue ribbon at the North Dakota State Fair for her sandbakkels when she was just ten years old, competing against grown women because there was no children’s division for that sort of thing.

Watching my dad work, I was struck by his slow, careful movements. Scraping butter off a spoon required the same attention as pressing dough into a mold, and all of it was an artistic undertaking. This is the man who taught me how to play violin, but that is by no means the only thing I received from him. There is a rhythm to this kind of work that we seem to share, and it is careful, loving. Our tempo for this kind of thing is decidedly andante.

When my dad was still a child, his mother figured out the exact measurement for the flour and sent her recipe in to Better Homes and Gardens. He does not remember what the contest was for, but she never heard back from them. The recipe became their property to do with as they wished.

My grandmother died when my dad was thirteen years old. Although I never knew her, I have always felt a deep connection to her. I have her name for my middle name. I discovered, during my senior year in high school when my favorite hour of the day was spent on a pottery wheel in ceramics class, that the beautiful handmade pots scattered throughout our house were her creations. When I took up knitting I learned that she, also, learned to knit as an adult, and gave all her friends mittens with elaborate colorwork for Christmas one year. Even my allergies, and the fact that all my life, every cold or flu-like illness I get wants to descend to my chest and linger there, connects me to her. She, however, suffered far more than I ever did, and died from a sudden, severe case of pneumonia during a flu outbreak.

My dad kept her recipe for sandbakkels, written on a slip of paper, for many years. Eventually it disappeared, he does not know when or how.

Years later, he found a recipe in a Better Homes and Gardens holiday cookbook that almost exactly matched his mother’s. Nestled among recipes for “Springerle” and “Berliner Kranser” is a recipe for “Sandbakelser” that may or may not be his mother’s, but is close enough to hers that we claim it as our own. There are things missing from it—small, secret details that my dad wants to keep within our family, anyway—but it is something tangible, an assurance. Sometimes the things which we think are lost are in fact, not.

No Words, Just a Picture

2011-12-26T06:52:00.000-06:00

Christmas Day, 2011

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Gifts to Share

2011-12-21T11:56:00.002-06:00

Recently a friend shared the name of an unspeakably beautiful piece of music with me, and today I want to share it with you: “Spiegel im Spiegel,” by Arvo Pärt.

Earlier this week, another friend shared her heart on the fourth anniversary of the passing of her 9 week old son.

And earlier this fall another friend, whom I have secretly adopted as a mentor (well, I guess it's not a secret anymore) shared the story behind the picture book as her new story about friendship and loss and love came out. (Making a Friend, by Alison McGhee, illustrated by Marc Rosenthal, S & S/Atheneum, 2011)

Tonight I get to rehearse for my Christmas Eve job, looking forward to a night when friends and families and strangers will gather together in a church, out of the cold and darkness, to sing and worship and pray.

These are things I love: light in the darkness, feeling warmth when surrounded by cold, the sharing of light and life and hope. The sharing of gifts.

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O Christmas Tree

2011-12-19T09:39:00.001-06:00

“Are you ready for Christmas?” The ultrasound technician was just making conversation while she worked, but I had to wonder for a moment if she was seeing something while she clicked on the screen that made her think that after I heard the results Christmas would be the last of my concerns. It seemed cruel, really—after having had ultrasounds where the technician turned the screen so we could see our baby, pointed out everything and explained what we were looking at—to have the screen angled away and to try to make cheerful small talk while what I really wanted to know was, “Is something wrong with me?”

“A doctor will read this, and your doctor’s office should have the results by Monday, or Tuesday at the latest. I would call them if you haven’t heard anything by Wednesday.” It was Friday morning. I waited and tried not to let my imagination get the best of me, even though my imagination really likes to run with things like this. I called Monday afternoon and left a message. I called Tuesday morning and found out that the results were sitting on the doctor’s desk but he was out delivering a baby. I called again Wednesday morning and left another, possibly-desperate-possibly-frustrated-sounding message. I got a call back about an hour later with the assurance that everything was fine. Just a small fibroid tumor that will always be benign and may or may not continue to be annoying.

I am incredibly thankful. I was more worried and distracted than I had thought. But now I can get on with life and attend to that question, “Are you ready for Christmas?”

No. I’m not. My semester is over, though, and I feel like I can finally start to think about Christmas. Except it's almost here. True, I’ve made large amounts of toffee and gotten my family to a record number of parties and Christmas programs, but that’s about it. I have not made a single cookie, I’ve barely started thinking about gifts, the advent calendars are still in the basement, and my husband and I can’t find our Yo-Yo Ma “Songs of Joy and Peace” CD anywhere. (And by the way, isn’t The Wexford Carol beautiful?) Oh, and I completely gave up on Christmas cards a year or two ago.

The tree, however, is decorated.

I love our tree. I am forever a fan of real trees—the smell, the imperfection, the realness of them—but our first year in Minneapolis, when my husband was going to school full time and working almost full time and we had two young children and no money, we switched to a fake one. The year before, when we were living in the U.P. and getting ready to leap into the unknown, we had helped a friend clear some trees and ended up with four fresh, fragrant Christmas trees. That first year in Minneapolis we could not afford the smallest, ugliest tree available. But a student gave my husband a gift certificate to Home Depot and we suddenly felt less miserable. We found the most natural-looking, least-gaudy tree we could and now our tree itself, as plastic and without-fragrance and from a box as it is, has something like hope attached to it.

The lights are my job. I don’t mind at all. I love sitting in the semi-dark, untangling lit strands of lights. It is too beautiful to be annoying, and I’m happy when my hands are busy.

Everybody helps hang ornaments, though. I think all three kids got to hang glass balls this year, which means they’ve all reached a certain level of maturity. Even so, I reserved the small iridescent ones for myself. I bought five of them just after I got married, because they looked so much like the ones my parents had on their tree—like frozen, oversized soap bubbles, and just as delicate. They are possibly my favorite ornaments, ever. One of them slipped out of somebody’s hands last year and shattered on the floor. As disappointed as I was, the way the shards quivered and caught the light was still breathtaking.

Also from my first Christmas after getting married are the 35 tiny folded-paper stars that I spent hours making and have hung on every tree since. Every year, my husband has dutifully checked to make sure all the stars got back into the box, mainly because I love them so much and would hate to lose even one.

This year, though, along with the ornaments from my childhood—the manger scene from a Sunday school teacher, the grasshopper from China that my neighbors brought back for me one year, the wooden duck with the scarf and earmuffs that I received from a Secret Santa in Brownie Scouts, and my husband’s childhood—the nutcracker that comes in its own box, the wooden ones that he painted his name and the year on—my kids have their own ornaments imbued with memories. There are miniature handknit sweaters, paper Norwegian woven hearts (here's a tutorial that shows how to make them), and glittery pinecones from past years when I’ve had more time for crafts and planned ahead better. There are Popsicle stick and construction paper ornaments they made in Sunday School, gifts from people they knew “a long time ago,” and ornaments they’ve received as gifts from friends. It seems that, like me, they love the flash of memory that comes with each one as they take it out of the box and hang it on the tree.

I can’t think of a single, perfect Christmas. There are always the traditions that get lost or forgotten, the worries that overwhelm, the people we miss desperately, the things we can’t have, the confrontations that leave permanent scars, the disappointments, the losses, and the demands. And yet, the beautiful things are still beautiful—achingly so—and even if I can’t experience Christmas quite the way I did as a child, the magic of it is still there. It runs deep.

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Small Things

2011-12-15T06:36:00.002-06:00

I often forget to check pockets when I’m doing laundry. Which means that I’ve found some interesting things in the lint trap—sparkly stones, acorns, plastic “jewels,” the Playmobil crowns Youngest likes to wear as rings. Things worthy of being slipped into a pocket to keep forever.

But really, treasures are everywhere. Last week Middle woke up with the keys to her journal caught in her hair. The kids get time to read in bed every night after we tuck them in, but after the lights go out Middle often stays awake, telling stories to Youngest, or writing in her journal, or reading by flashlight. Her bed collects books, drawings, stories. She looks tired in the morning, but I know how much that time means to her.

I don't know what it is about the kitchen, but it seems to have a secret life as the Depository of Things Without a Home. People come through and shed bits of themselves. A plaster egg Oldest painted at Easter time appears on the windowsill. Books wait for their readers next to the radiator. Postcards perch on a shelf next to packets of seeds I dreamed of planting last spring.

The radiator cover in the downstairs bathroom is devoted to Things Found on Walks. Agates from Lake Superior, "Indian beads" (fossilized crinoid stems), shells, acorns, beach glass. Pieces of the outside world that had to become part of us.

Our bedroom, too, is full of evidences that children have been there. Notes and pictures from the kids, broken jewelry, dolls and stuffed animals, all of it wanders in and stays longer than we intend it to.

I remember my mother's comments after visiting other peoples' houses when I was young: "It looks like people live there," or, "That house seems so sterile." When I go to homes that are lovely and spare and spotless I marvel at the skill it took to achieve such a feat. I also regret my own housekeeping skills. It turns out, though, that as much as I say I value tidyness, I would rather be a champion of small things, of treasures worthy of slipping in your pocket. Dog-eared books and well-loved toys and things old and imperfect and well-loved.

Proof of who has passed through.

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Quiet Girl

2011-12-09T16:58:00.001-06:00

She must have been only two years old, that day at the bagel shop when the man behind the counter seemed so taken with a quiet girl I know. He asked her several questions while he worked on our sandwiches, but she refused to answer. She only watched him. When he turned his back to get something a few steps away, though, she whispered so quietly only I could hear, “I’m very shy.”

I don’t know if she meant for him to hear it. But I love that she spoke up.

I try not to use the word shy very often. Get her alone and she has a ton to say, as long as you make room for her to speak. But with a rather outgoing brother and a very outgoing sister, she is the one who will stand back, stay quiet, take up as little space as possible. She is often quiet.

What most people see is a very good little girl, carefully held together, delicate. In her dreams—what I know of them at least—she is strong and fierce and wild.

* * *

There was another girl once, a quiet girl in a Jr. High art class who sat alone because she didn’t really know anybody in the class and because she was there to draw, anyway. Because she was quiet and well-behaved and sitting alone, her table became the place to put the disruptive students. Because she was quiet and busy drawing, the other kids talked as if she was not there, and she heard stories. Of skipping school, and hickeys, and gangs, and the older girl who was found shot dead in the park the quiet girl’s school bus drove past every day.

There is something about keeping yourself partly-hidden that allows you to see differently.

A year or two earlier, in sixth grade, the same girl was pulled out of class one day by a speech therapist, who asked her to read out loud. She read very carefully, and very well, and the therapist told her that no, she probably didn’t have a speech problem, but one of her teachers had been concerned because she seemed to stutter when she raised her hand in class. The girl knew which class this was, because the therapist had let slip that it was a female teacher who had been concerned, and the girl’s only female teacher that year was for English—her favorite class. She thought about the rush of shakiness that went through her body whenever she raised her hand, and how sometimes it was hard to get the words out, and she decided it was easier to stay quiet.

She learned she had other ways to speak.

Writing things down was perfect, because her nervousness was hidden. She could get everything out without interruptions, without being told why she was wrong. Putting her words on paper gave her time to think, and gave her a safe distance from which to speak more boldly.

By high school she realized she could speak with her violin, too. She had been playing as long as she could remember, but she rarely thought of it as more than a daily activity. One day, though, she realized while she was playing that she could close her eyes and speak right through her instrument. And she had a new voice.

* * *

I worry, sometimes, that there is a danger in being quiet, in keeping part of oneself hidden, in finding roundabout ways to speak. The hidden-ness can become a habit. When something breaks open inside of this quiet girl I know—I suspect that’s something that happens to everybody at some point—when she steps forward and starts to speak out loud, will it seem like a betrayal to those who thought they had been seeing all of her all along? Maybe all that practice finding other voices, coupled with the strong, fierce, wild self that she nurtures in her dreams, will serve her well.

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Notes from a Christmas Play

2011-12-06T08:09:00.001-06:00

• Sometimes, even though you had your heart set on being an angel, you get the less-beautiful-but-more-perfect role of cranky camel. And you shine.

• Backstage is magic.

• Waiting to see what the 3 and 4 year-olds will do makes for wonderful dramatic tension.

• Tinsel will always have its place.

• One of the most important things about being on stage is locating the people you love in the crowd.

• King Herod looks awesome in cowboy boots.

• A beautiful voice does not have to be loud to be noticed.

• Imperfection is completely endearing.

• 5 pieces of fudge, Kool-Aid, and “just a few” cookies after the show = light dessert.

Please note the newly-missing tooth.

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Silence

2011-12-03T07:01:00.000-06:00

Rest (Lat. pause, suspirium; Fr. pause; Ger. pause; It. pausa). A notational sign that indicates the absence of a sounding note or notes; in traditional Western notation every note value has an equivalent form of rest. (New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed.)

Music is not only sound, but the absence of sound. Movement and rest. Song and silence. It is hard, sometimes, to convince students that rests are part of the music, not a break from it. “You have to give the rests the same amount of care you give the notes,” I tell them. They are not to be skipped-over or hurried-through. A rest that doesn’t receive its full time, or lasts longer than its intended amount of time, distorts the flow of the music.

In other words, the absence of sound is as meaningful as the presence of it.

Pay attention to the silence.

The silence at the end of a performance, before the clapping begins.
The silence of not wanting to say the thing that will hurt.
The silence within a hug, the things a touch can say without words.
The silence of listening.
The silence of eyes that meet and understand.

I grew up in the world of classical music, which is very much bound to the page. Improvisation is beyond my comfort level in many ways, although I have tried it from time to time. Here, though, is what I know about improvising: don’t try to fill up every space with sound.

It is a different sort of listening, taking note of the silences.

The silence of having a million things to say but not knowing how to start.
The silence after the thing that should not have been said was said.
The silence that descends when one group is allowed to speak and another is not.
The silence of not knowing.
The silence of being at peace.

Back to that definition from New Grove: “…in traditional Western notation every note value has an equivalent form of rest.” One quarter note = one quarter rest, one half note = one half rest, one whole note = one whole rest. And so on.

What if for every word there was an equivalent form of silence?

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A Week of Thanksgiving

2011-11-28T06:57:00.001-06:00

Monday:
A week off and a chance to regroup. New paint in the bathroom (“Valley Mist,” a blue-green-gray hue that reminds me of water and glass and all things transparent.) Burned-out light bulbs get replaced by new ones. I get the haircut I’ve wanted to schedule since August. A small thing, but I feel refreshed.

Tuesday:
I go running in a light rain. It sounds like Pop Rocks. At home I do laundry and sort through clean clothes. We have been richly blessed in hand-me-downs, and I want to pass along the things that have been outgrown. Stacks of fabric, clean and colorful and still-warm from the dryer, grow and teeter all around me. My husband helps the children clean their rooms. I meet a friend for coffee.

Wednesday:
Today while running I notice the wind chimes. At one point, one particular set pings out notes from “Swan Lake” (see the moment here--particularly at 1:50--but then make sure you stick around for the sunrise at the end.) I wonder if the chimes do this accidentally or by design. More laundry. More room-cleaning. I commit to making a pumpkin-chocolate tart to add to tomorrow’s desserts. I make cranberry sauce and pour it gleaming into a crystal bowl. Every year the brightness of the red strikes me as surreal.

Thursday:
Family. My parents arrive from Minneapolis with baked goods and other lovely things. My mother-in-law brings the turkey and sweet potato casserole. My children have been thinking all month about the fact that Thanksgiving is at our house for a second year in a row, instead of in Lincoln with my grandma. It doesn’t seem right to them to stay home. I miss her, too. I have celebrated Thanksgiving in many different places and ways through the years, though. Some of them just couldn’t feel right, didn’t seem real. A year ago we celebrated in the midst of what I will probably always think of as a year of loss, but it felt very real. This year was different again, but also real. No doubt being with people I love is the key.

Friday:
A full day with my family. Also Black Friday. I have been thinking all week about this video. “Everybody wants to live a life of meaning. And today we live in a money economy, where we don’t really depend on the gifts of anybody, but we buy everything. Therefore we don’t really need anybody, because whoever grew my food or made my clothes or built my house, well, if they died or if I alienate them...that's okay, because I can just pay someone else to do it.” I first saw it here. I encourage you to listen, even if you don’t think you agree with everything you’ve heard about the movement.

Saturday:
I take part in a 5K run/walk sponsored by our local YMCA. It is cold and raining, but I so enjoy the sense of community, my family cheering me on, the act of making myself move forward when I want to quit. I had no illusions about being particularly fast, but am pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t quite as slow as I thought I would be. I hope I never stop setting goals for myself, never stop stretching.

Sunday:
Quiet days are good. Rest is good. Tomorrow I will jump back in to a schedule, and I know how easy it is to forget what I’m trying to be about. Doing, creating, giving, loving—being in the middle of all of it doesn’t mean I always keep my focus. It is good to step back. To give thanks. Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. May we all carry that—the giving and the thanks—along with us as we move on through the coming weeks.

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Thanksgiving at the Retirement Home

2011-11-22T11:31:00.001-06:00

“You have such pretty eyes,”
he told my three year-old daughter.
“And your hair’s real pretty, too.
I think you’re just about perfect.
If you were mine, you’d tell me what to do
and I’d do it, just like that.
I’d do whatever you wanted,
and we’d have fun.”

My daughter listened, wide-eyed,
squirmed her feet a little.
“Pink shoes! Oh, you’re uptown!
That’s what a girl needs, pink shoes.
I tell you, you’re a real doll.
You’re so pretty.
You’ve got pretty eyes,
and your hair’s real pretty, too.”

“What’s your name?”
She asked him, bold with beauty.
He told her, “Marvin,”
and when he asked her name in return
she pronounced it perfectly—
the first time I ever heard her do it.

My grandma told me later that Marvin
never had children or grandchildren.
Saying goodbye,
Stephanie gave him a hug.
I smiled and took his hand
and wished we were his.

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Trust the Work/Love the Work

2011-11-20T14:35:00.000-06:00

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about the SCBWI conference I attended earlier this month. To be honest, though, I'm still processing.

The conference was wonderful. Exciting. Inspiring.

Overwhelming. I seem to be using that word a lot these days.

I’m thankful for the manuscript critique I got, and I feel like I have some concrete ideas about what needs work and how to proceed. Even though (I admit) I was hoping I didn’t have so much work left to do.

I’m thankful to get to hear and meet keynote speakers who were full of insight, and encouragement, and wisdom. They made me want to do and be better.

I’m thankful to have gotten to spend a day with people who are writing and illustrating and creating for children, and, by extension, their families. It is amazing to think of the kind of love and energy and work that goes into a book.

I drove home literally buzzing with ideas and plans, faces and conversations. I got home to my family and received the best round of bear-hugs ever. Pretty much immediately after that, though, a question smacked me between the eyes: When, exactly, are you going to do all this? Because I’m willing to do the work, but I don’t know how it’s going to be anything but impossibly slow. And done in stolen moments—while laundry is piling up, and dinner needs to be made, and people I love need me.

I’ve been giving myself pep talks: No. You will NOT collapse into a quivering heap of despair. I keep telling myself to trust the work and know that it will produce something.

While I haven’t yet collapsed, I’ll admit that things have been up and down since then. They are the usual kinds of ups and downs, swinging from loving how I get to spend my days to frustration with a schedule that seems to constantly demand. How do I clear the time and space to do this work? Do I have the right to even try?

Trust the work.

Every week I send families home from violin lessons with assignments about what to work on and how to do it. I don't tell them how to make that work in their busy lives. I offer suggestions, sometimes, but ultimately it is for them to figure out. My best advice is, “Do some work every day if you can, and work out from there.” I encourage them to trust the work.

I feel like I can do that because I’ve experienced the results of that kind of work, myself. I remember how hard it was to chart my own progress on violin. Most of it was slow, over the course of months and years. But looking back I could see: every etude book, every exercise, all the metronome work and the hours spent on scales, did in fact increase my technique, give me more tools to communicate and express myself. Keeping at it really does make a difference.

By Wednesday, I felt like a wreck. I was convinced everything was suffering: It seemed like either the house was in chaos because I took some time to write, or else I was so busy taking care of everybody and every thing that there was no room for writing. I was caught in a spiral of frustration.

In the middle of all that, I sat down to read Youngest a book. And oh, I love it when a book speaks right into your life. In Crossing the New Bridge, by Emily Arnold McCully (Putnam Juvenile, 1994) the old bridge into town collapses. The mayor and townspeople call on the Jubilatti family to build a replacement, and the mayor believes all his problems are solved. His plans for a triumphal march across the new bridge are crushed, however, when an old woman reminds him of the town’s tradition: the first person to cross the new bridge must be the happiest person in town. If anybody else crosses first, they will all be cursed. The mayor searches all over, looking for the happiest person, but everybody he encounters, although each seems like s/he should be happy, has a complaint. It finally becomes clear that the happiest people in town are the Jubilattis, themselves, because they love their work and do it well.

Love the work.

I know this well, but I forget more often than I’d like to admit. I looked around me again on Wednesday, and saw Oldest, still glowing from a 95 on his math test. He really is learning how to work, and he’s seeing results. Middle was in my office writing with gusto. She recently googled ‘writing prompts for 4th graders’ and is in love with the list she found. She wants to write every day. Youngest was down in the basement, completely absorbed in painting. She has announced to the family that she is an artist.

There are plenty of things my kids have to do every day that they dislike, but there is also work they do--maybe work they were born to do--that they know how to lose themselves in. This has to be one of the great joys in life. How can I not join them? Doesn’t everyone say it’s all in the journey?

Maybe I haven’t fully found my voice yet. That’s a painful thing to admit. Trusting that there is a voice to find, and having joy in the process—these are both fuel and comfort. Seeing my children looking for their own voices, helping them, watching them discover ways to develop them—these things spur me on. We are indeed fellow travelers.

Sometimes I am able to step back from a day I thought I didn’t know how to live and see that it is chugging along just fine, anyway. How good to get the chance to jump back in and join it mid-swing, trusting and loving the work.

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A Path through the Woods

2011-11-14T12:32:00.001-06:00

As many Fridays as we’ve been able to manage this fall, we have visited this spot. For the most part, our nature walks have been on the same path, mostly because I want to pay attention to how it changes with the weather, the time of day, the change of seasons. I suspect it changes with our moods. Maybe it will change us, as well.

We take fewer notes, these days. I find myself hoping everything we see and hear and think will simply soak right through our skin, instead, and stay with us, even years from now when we no longer visit this place.

I fell in love with these steps the first time I saw them. They are perfect in their wildness and ruggedness and age. They are also steep. Youngest stumbled on them last week. She refused my help when I offered it. “Don’t worry about it, Mommy. I’m strong.”

The very things that make this spot so stunning also make it a little tough: the hill, the uneven steps, the very ruggedness. Funny how that is. I love those characteristics on a hike, but I rail against them in my life.

Youngest is strong. She continually impresses me. But I went back down to her, and we held hands the rest of the way up. Just because.

I hope this place and these times sink through to the bone.

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New Rules Every Time

2011-11-09T16:34:00.001-06:00

Every move, actually, and only one person ever knows what they are. Sometimes there’s even a mid-game board spin. I love stumbling across things like this, especially during a rough, tired-out week.

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10 Bits of Magic

2011-11-07T09:07:00.000-06:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Exuberant drawings
2. Face paint
3. The smell of crayons
4. Messy hair
5. Paper scraps
6. Grass stains
7. Continuous humming
8. Invention journals
9. Books falling off beds in the middle of the night
10. “Mom, I really need staff paper!”

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

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What do You Think?

2011-11-04T22:43:00.000-05:00

Please like it. Tell me it's amazing. But also tell me the truth. Somehow truthfully tell me that this is perfect, the best you've ever seen. But yes, of course, assuming it’s not perfect, tell me what I need to work on. What needs polishing. Are you getting ready to tell me it stinks? You’re wondering what I was thinking when I came up with this? You’re trying to figure out how to gently-but-clearly tell me that I’m completely deluded and should go home immediately? I’m ready to work, really. Just tell me what to do. And please tell me you like it. If you like it, that is. Because I only want to hear the truth…

Tomorrow I’m going to my first-ever writer’s conference. It’s not a huge one as far as they go, I think--for a regional chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators--but for me it is a big deal. I sort-of-but-really-don’t know what to expect. I’m looking forward to meeting people, and hearing speakers, and being on my own for 24+ hours. But most of all, I am looking forward to a 15-minute, one-on-one manuscript critique.

I had weekly violin lessons for more than 20 years. I’ve been teaching in one capacity or another ever since then. I’m very used to the idea of regular feedback, and I’m well aware of how difficult it is to judge one’s own work. I can’t count how many times I felt satisfied with my playing only to find out I still had a long way to go. There were just as many times, though, that I felt miserable about a performance only to be told that it went very well. It’s amazingly easy to latch on to one good or bad thing and allow that alone to define the entire work or performance.

Tomorrow I’m hoping for something similar to a short violin lesson for my writing. Part of me, naturally, wants to hear only wonderful things, but I know too well how helpful the this-might-hurt-right-now-but-it’s-the-truth stuff is. I’m trying to be prepared for anything, but my head is spinning.

Is that passage in tune? Does this phrase make sense? Is my sound projecting? Am I making enough of the dynamics at the end? Where do I need to focus my attention? What works?

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10 Bits of Magic

2011-10-31T08:15:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. A book and hot coffee
2. Rose-colored mums
3. Frost-glittered grass
4. Marble sky
5. Leaf skeletons
6. Smell of wood smoke
7. Sliver of moon
8. Roasted marshmallows
9. Quiet
10. Down comforter

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

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Night

2011-10-28T09:55:00.000-05:00

When I was four I spent a night alone in the hospital in an oxygen tent. I remember very clearly the pink plastic butterfly attached to the I.V. in my arm, the way it rested on top of the white tape the nurse had wrapped carefully over the needle. I remember the view from my bed, walled off by clear vinyl, and wondering what I was supposed to do when I had to go to the bathroom. I remember, too, patiently explaining to somebody (a nurse?) that no, I wasn’t having trouble sleeping, I simply slept with my eyes open. What else could be the explanation? All I ever remembered from the night before was lying in bed, eyes wide open, waiting to fall asleep. Something told me this was a strange explanation, though, because I also remember pretending to be asleep every time somebody walked past my partly-opened door. Open-eyed sleeping would be hard for most people to understand.

* * *

There is a certain clarity to the hours I’ve spent awake at night. The moments that stand out are dream-like; an understandable thing considering their close proximity to sleep. They carry the understanding and detachment of dreams. The vividness, too. They are marked by the darkness and quiet that surround them, framed by solitude.

* * *

Another hospital bed, in the middle of the night, holding a newborn who looks up at me with eyes that are impossibly dark, alert and wise and deep.

Huddled in bed between my parents after a bad dream, safe only here, under these covers, no matter how cramped or hot it is. My own bed is cold and dangerous.

Leaning over the crib railing, dizzy with exhaustion, stroking silky-fine hair and singing, praying that each of us would soon find sleep.

Sitting on the couch in the living room in the middle of the night, knitting a scarf for my mom. There is nothing else I can do, nowhere else I can attach my mind or heart. The tiny new flicker of life inside of me has turned to ash, and everything else threatens to come unbound and drain out of me along with it.

A dorm room late at night, and lots of reading left to do. The satisfaction of underlining things I want to remember is palpable. So, too, is the feeling that my mind is changing shape, making room for new ideas, stretching itself wide as a single phrase pulls everything into focus.

Farther back, in high school, finishing an art project. Realizing that this—the process of creating something—is the one thing that can keep me happily awake all night, fully absorbed.

Lying in bed and unable to sleep because of a first kiss...my first night alone at college...an argument with my mom...the night before my wedding.

Standing in the hallway listening to the rhythms of three sleeping children, feeling that as much as I love them I have once again failed them completely.

A cabin in northern Minnesota the summer before my 11th birthday. My first time at overnight camp, and the two weeks have covered a lifetime. A younger girl is crying because she is homesick, and I let her sleep next to me for comfort. I miss my own parents fiercely.

* * *

I’ve always considered myself a morning person. I like to be up early, and even though I enjoy sleeping in sometimes, I get restless if I stay in bed too long. Daylight is what feels real; I wear it as naturally as my own skin. But these moments at night give off their own light. In the darkness, when everything around me is still, the things I fear and the things I love are illuminated, and everything shifts into focus.

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One Pilgrim to Another

2011-10-26T08:45:00.000-05:00

How often do you hear yourself saying something instructive to a child, only to wonder who the words were really meant for?

My favorite this week:

Honey, writing the words “Cowgirl Shirt” on it with a crayon will not make it a cowgirl shirt.

I think I’ll be chewing on that one for a while.

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10 Bits of Magic

2011-10-24T11:10:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1.

10.

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

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The Power of Community

2011-10-20T07:03:00.001-05:00

It's not about turning out prodigies or wunderkinds. It's not about living vicariously through your children. It's not even about playing violin (or piano, or harp, or flute, or cello, or guitar, or viola, or bass.) It's about how we raise our children, it's about community, it's about truth and beauty and excellence and nobility.

The older I get, the more I realize that this was a crucial element of my childhood, and it influences in more ways than I can count what I am working to do with my own children and with my students:

http://suzukiassociation.org/giving/community/

Monday was the 113th anniversary of Shinichi Suzuki's birth. This week the Suzuki Association of the Americas is working to get the word out about his vision, as well as raise funds for their continuing work. To learn more about the SAA, please follow this link.

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10 Bits of Magic

2011-10-17T15:25:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. E –A – D – G (same as a violin)
2. Admitting it would be fun
3. A birthday surprise
4. Trying
5. In spite of feeling silly
6. In spite of feeling awkward
7. Sore fingers
8. Delicate, crystal sound
9. Finding stolen moments to practice
10. Developing a new voice

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

One Friday Morning

2011-10-15T11:40:00.003-05:00

This schedule is becoming part of us—life all mixed up, one thing blending into another, seams overlapping, as we all work to grow, expand outward, learn to love a little better.

Friday runs are complicated by Oldest’s newest activity. The boy with the habit of breaking into song has finally stopped claiming he hates to sing and joined the before-school choir. He loves it. And because I can’t manage to get up earlier, I’ve worked my run around his schedule: wake up Oldest, make sure he gets out of bed. Run two miles while he gets dressed and starts breakfast. Return home, wake up the girls, drive Oldest to the school. Park. Oldest goes inside for choir, I run twice around the path that circles the local schools, and we meet up back at the car to go home again.

Running this morning, I realize the sunrise is a friend I’ve come to count on. The thought that in a few weeks the time change will leave my entire run in the dark is a little daunting. The discouraging lines that run through my head some days (“But can she keep up the pace? Does she have the endurance?”) are challenged by the fact that I have recently worked myself up to running five miles most mornings. If I can build up my physical endurance, I have hope for my emotional and spiritual endurance, as well. The emotional meaning to the physical discipline is not lost on me. I feel strong these days, and—nice bonus—my rear is smaller. I will simply have to run in the dark, brace for the cold, find warmer clothes. Quitting isn’t an option this time.

On our way to the school, Oldest is full of plans for selling magazine subscriptions and cookie dough—fund-raisers for band and choir. This is a new concept for him, and he is enthusiastic. In fact, we have added a lot of new experiences this fall, and his enthusiasm for it all is amazing to see. He is flourishing. I drop him off at the door, park the car, and finish my run.

A fifty- or sixty-something gentleman coming towards me on the path smiles and tells me I’m in great shape—keep it up. When we pass each other again on the opposite side of the circle, he asks how many times I’m going around. I hold up my fingers, say “twice,” and he grins. “Wow! You’re doing great!” I’ve never been a particularly strong or fast runner, but I eat up the encouragement. I feel strong, healthy, maybe even almost fast.

I am determined to keep running because I want to be stronger, yes. Also because while I may argue with you that middle-aged is whatever age my parents are, (hasn’t it always been that way?) it’s hard to escape the fact that in less than a year my 30s will be behind me completely. I remember being a little puzzled that my grandma would say she felt the same as she did when she was 25, or that she always referred to her friends as “girls.” Shouldn’t you, after all, be comfortable referring to your peers as “women” by the time you were in your 80s or 90s? But it is becoming ever clearer to me how these things could be. I, too, feel like I could still be somewhere in my 20s. And I am always a little dismayed when college-age men call me “Ma’am.” I may be getting older, but I am determined to fight feeling old.

I am almost finished with my run when I see a crowd of people on the sidewalk ahead of me. I had noticed them gathering at the park down the street my first time around, but now they are walking past the high school—adults with children—some in strollers, a few weaving through the group on bikes. It occurs to me that maybe I know what this is, and the chills that go through my body are hard to manage while running.

One week ago, on another lovely Friday, an 11 year-old boy was found in the woods nearby, apparently dead by his own hand. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that these people are walking in his memory, showing their love and grief. I see nothing in the news about this later, hear nothing in the community. But the possibility is there.

There are other reasons I run, too. The reasons I don’t talk about. There are days when I am running to throw off the frustration and anger that sometimes want to overwhelm me. To release those feelings that come up from dark, hidden places and show themselves in the light of day. “How could somebody do something like that?” people say sometimes, when they hear a particularly terrible news story. I always wonder, “Do they really not know?”

I look towards the parking lot, and there is Oldest, my own precious 11 year-old boy, leaning out the drivers’ side door, a flash of bright blue waving at me. I cut towards him across the lawn, leaving the sidewalk to the walkers. I don’t want to pass them, I don’t want to turn away, but giving them space seems appropriate. Besides, Oldest is waiting for me to take him home. I try to imagine him feeling the kind of pain the other 11 year-old boy felt, and I am in tears by the time I get to the car.

When he was a preschooler and getting braver about venturing out away from me, I always tried to make sure Oldest was wearing a brightly-colored shirt when we went to the playground. I was so worried about losing him. Perhaps the bright color—orange or yellow or blue, usually—would help me keep track of him while he played, make it harder for him to wander too far away from me.

My back is to the walkers now. They look so normal, the children all moving just the way you would expect children to move when they are going for a walk outside with their parents. Oldest has been singing for half an hour, and he is still full of music. He asks why I am crying. He is oblivious, I think, to the kind of pain that makes a person feel like they have no options left. But I don’t know if it will always be that way. I struggle to explain how I can hurt for a stranger simply because he hurt, or how I can feel tied to him because he is the same age as my own son. Does he know how terrified I have felt at losing him, even months before he was born? He is solemn for a moment. He is a compassionate being, a deep-feeling soul, but this is a little beyond him. That’s probably a good thing, I think. 11 years old should be too young to understand some of these things.

                                                “Come away, O human child!
                                                To the waters and the wild
                                                 With a faery, hand in hand,
                                                 For the world’s more full of weeping than you
                                                          can understand.”

                                                                  From “The Stolen Child,” by William Butler Yeats

Free Music and a Challenge

2011-10-12T15:00:00.000-05:00

This isn’t new, but it’s new to me, and definitely worth checking out: violinist Tasmin Little’s free download (with sleeve inserts you can print out for the CD case, even) and her Three Step Challenge (listen to her spoken introduction to each work, listen to the music, and then attend a concert, buy a CD or write to her and tell her why you can’t/won’t do either.) Click here.

The CD is called “The Naked Violin” and consists of three works for unaccompanied violin: Partita No. 3 in E Major by J. S. Bach, Luslawice Variations Op. 50 by Paul Patterson, and Sonata No. 3 in D minor “Ballade” by Eugène Ysaÿe. A chance to hear and respond to some beautiful music. Do take the time to listen, kids and adults, alike.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-10-10T06:10:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Sudden shower of leaves
2. Deep blue sky
3. Tang of dry leaves
4. Woods lit gold
5. The crackle underfoot
6. Flashes of red
7. Seed-head silhouettes
8. Swaths of bronze grass
9. Tree-branch lace
10. Moments of utter quiet

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

Refrigerator-climbing and Other Noble Pursuits

2011-10-06T11:17:00.000-05:00

“Does this music make you want to dance?” I felt like dancing, and Youngest was hopping around restlessly nearby while I made lunch. “No, it makes me want to climb up the refrigerator,” she answered.

At first I took this as a perfect illustration of the great difference between us, the introverted play-it-safe mom and the extraverted wild child. But maybe not. The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that maybe it was a better illustration of a shared personality trait.

When I go to a museum, I return home with itching fingers and a head full of the things I want to make. When I read an amazing book, I want to respond in kind—to capture thoughts, feelings, moments, maybe even light itself—in a perfect stack of bound paper you can hold in one hand and call up at will just by opening the cover. When I hear people making music, I don’t want to sit and let it wash over me; I want to join in, to be in the middle of that swirl of sound, adding my voice to the texture.

I wonder sometimes if this isn’t a condition for which people are encouraged to take medication. There is so much I want to do, so much I want to read, to see, to hear, to create, to play, so many challenges I want to take. Then there are all the opportunities I want to give my kids, all the things I want to say yes to. How does a person not explode with all of it? Or climb a few refrigerators, for that matter?

Then again, how many times have I been in complete dismay over the mess? The chaos? How many times do I have to force myself to let go and allow water to spill, paint to be splattered, Play-Doh colors to be mixed and (heaven help me) all the supplies to get used up, dried-out, or cut to pieces? It is a hard thing to want to be good and safe and responsible while also desiring to nurture some sort of familial hotbed of creativity. Sometimes I recognize the creative goodness all around and revel in it. Other times it sort of looks like a disaster.

How easy to forget that these three are actually quite a bit like me. My kids don’t play or create or imagine in straight lines and neat piles any more than I do. It makes for an interesting home life and yes, a messy house.

Sometimes I think the biggest challenge we have right now, as individuals and as a family, is to learn how to channel all that energy. I wonder who will grow up first, Mom or kids? And what would that actually look like? Is it possible you the reader are reading this and thinking that we’re all actually right where we’re supposed to be, learning and growing together?

So far, I haven’t found anybody on top of the refrigerator, but I have to say: these three mysterious beings I live with are in the habit of surprising me quite often. Who could possibly say what is waiting around the corner?

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10 Bits of Magic

2011-10-03T13:19:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. An opening that shimmers
2. Violin line that plunges and soars
3. Low brass
4. Light against dark
5. Contrast of spare sound with lush
6. Thundering timpani
7. Brooding melodies
8. Moments where time and movement are suspended
9. Full-out, passionate everything
10. Overlapping power and delicacy

Listen to the Sibelius Violin Concerto performed by Itzhak Perlman

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

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What I Saw

2011-10-01T10:37:00.000-05:00

What a blessing that we "have" to take a weekly nature walk these days. The woods are full of treasures:

Collaboration

2011-09-30T10:35:00.000-05:00

Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring, by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, illustrated by Brian Floca, Roaring Brook Press, 2010

Not only do I get to play “Appalachian Spring” next weekend, I stumbled across a picture book about it at our local library. Then, thanks to YouTube, I watched Martha Graham perform the ballet. What a treat.

To be honest, I’ve played a lot of music without knowing the story behind it. For one thing, I haven’t always been interested in doing the research on top of practicing my part. Besides, it is perfectly possible to play a piece well without digging deeply into its historical or theoretical context. But I can’t think of a single time that knowing more has detracted from a work, either.

This book details the collaboration between dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, composer Aaron Copland, and artist Isamu Noguchi in creating the ballet “Appalachian Spring.” From struggling with the script and characters, to going back and forth about the set design, to finding the right notes, the best order of scenes, and the most expressive steps and movements, the authors guide readers through the complete creation of this ballet, from the barest bones of an idea to the first performance. It strikes me as a very good example of the creative process, and I like how both the text and illustrations capture the feel and mood of both the music and the dancing.

My favorite part of the book, though, is the final sentence. After taking readers through the premiere performance, the authors say,

…the life of Appalachian Spring goes on after that great night to become an American favorite, to be danced year after year. New dancers will take their turns to move to Aaron Copland’s music, to interpret Martha Graham’s steps, to dance through Isamu Noguchi’s set. And the collaboration will be created anew.

It would be easy to glide past those last seven words without much thought, but there’s so much packed into them. And the collaboration will be created anew. Classical musicians are not creators in quite the same sense that composers, artists, and writers are. They play a special role, taking something that has been created by someone else and bringing it to life in performance. Their role as interpreter means they are bound to somebody else’s creation, and they walk a line between being faithful to that other person’s intent and making it their own, “creating it anew” every time they play it. Then, too, there is the relationship between conductor and orchestra, and even between individuals in the orchestra, as they work together and respond off of one another. It becomes a living collaboration on all sorts of levels.

Beyond all that, too, there is the play between a piece of music, or a work of art, and its context. Now that I know some of the story behind “Appalachian Spring,” now that I have seen a video of Martha Graham dancing to the music, I will be playing with new understanding. Chances are there won’t be any noticeable changes in what I do, but I will get to interact with the music in a new way, with new understanding. I will step deeper into the collaboration myself, and keep company with some amazing people.

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10 Bits of Magic

2011-09-26T06:59:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Stepping out of routine
2. Making myself say yes when they ask to help
3. Popping fruit from papery husks
4. Busy hands
5. Color
6. Surveying the pile
7. Work chatter
8. Creative mess
9. Bubbling juices
10. Sweet warm kitchen

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

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Slow and Steady

2011-09-21T16:02:00.000-05:00

I’m working on my tortoise side these days. Trying to remind myself that daily work is something that can be trusted. I know from violin that carefully and steadily working through an etude book does amazing things, even if I am unable to accurately judge my progress along the way. Even if I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. So why in real life do I go into a panic every few weeks and try to sprint for long distances?

My dad brought Myrtle the turtle home from a pet store when I was five or six years old. My parents had promised me a puppy after our Old English sheepdog died, but I suddenly got a lot healthier after he was gone, and allergy testing confirmed that I was very, asthmatically, allergic to both dogs and cats. And so, Myrtle entered our lives. She is decidedly un-cuddly, but she's got character.

She is still going strong after 30-some years, and I’ve had many occasions to watch her in action. She has her own strong, stalwart beauty. She is mostly shell of course, but her skin, besides being scaled and wrinkly, is also a deep red-brown color, and her throat is speckled all over with orange. Her legs and neck are incredibly muscular. If you pick her up mid-stride, her legs will keep moving, trying to find the ground, and her neck strains ferociously. It is surprising to feel how much power those limbs have. You might not think a turtle could wiggle out of your hands, but Myrtle has been dropped a number of times through the years, and it isn’t always the result of clumsy handling.

When all is said and done, she is faster than you might expect a turtle to be. During warm weather, when she is let out of her aquarium to roam my parents’ house, she disappears quickly. And when she really gets going—when she is in full stride, all muscle and will—she extends her neck all the way out of its shy folds, revealing all those wonderful orange speckles. It turns out her throat is her most beautiful feature.

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10 Bits of Magic

2011-09-19T10:07:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Apple season
2. Spray of tiny yellow flowers
3. Fat toad hiding in plain sight
4. Spider web jeweled with rain
5. Cool nights
6. Slumber party
7. Outdoor art fair
8. A cake baking in the oven
9. Warm sweatshirt
10. Stack of books, waiting to be read

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

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Nature Walk

2011-09-18T14:51:00.000-05:00

Glory be to God for dappled things—
    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
       For rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls; finches’ wings;
    Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
       And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                    Praise him.

                                                   “Pied Beauty”
                                                   By Gerard Manley Hopkins

I took the kids for a hike in the woods on Friday—it was our third time on that particular trail in two weeks, and something I hope to keep up throughout the school year. Everybody had a notebook and pencil, along with instructions to write down whatever they noticed. We could have stayed out there for hours. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time (when is there?) and we had to get home to host a slumber party, but while we were there they couldn’t stop observing. It turns out I couldn’t, either.

I’m not sure it ever struck me quite the same way before, but it seemed like everything I saw was spotted, dotted or striated, everything all about variation. Striped acorns, speckled leaves, layers of sound (wind over birds over crickets and frogs.) Everything was intricate detail, nothing solid, nothing repeated quite the same way twice.

When I was a grad student and playing with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago we had regular coaching sessions with the principal players of the Chicago Symphony. One session that particularly stands out was when one of them addressed the fact that there are a lot of unhappy orchestral musicians out there—bored, unsatisfied people who have been playing the same standard repertoire for years. He, on the other hand, told us he loved his job. There’s no excuse, he told us. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve played a piece; if you don’t discover something new each time, it’s because you aren’t paying attention.

What a thought—that there’s always more there to discover. That there are layers and layers of detail waiting to be noticed, whether I am engaging with a work of art, or a forest, or a person. If I’m looking, there’s always something new.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-09-12T06:32:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. First yellow leaves, gold coins hanging
2. Squirrel spiraling up a tree
3. Playing Copland
4. Fat, green acorn
5. Favorite cinnamon roll, brought from afar
6. A trail through the woods
7. Moss-covered rocks
8. Birthday cake
9. Blowing out every candle on the first try
10. A weekend that ends too soon

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

Overwhelmed

2011-09-11T19:29:00.000-05:00

Dear friends, I hope you’ll forgive my barely-edited ramblings tonight—

I’m overwhelmed right now by your comments. Some of you leave comments on Facebook, where I post links to this blog, others leave comments here. Some of you tell me in person that you have been reading, and some of you send emails. And I don’t know how to respond, exactly, except to say a very heartfelt thank you. I’m listening. I’m paying attention to what you comment on, and I’m trying to learn from it how to be a better writer and a better person. I often feel that I could do a better job responding to what you say, and I can only plead old shy-girl habits, feelings of not having the social grace to respond “correctly.” But thank you for coming back here and reading and responding. You are a blessing, and I do believe you are changing my life. I have no idea how to repay that kind of generosity.

I’m overwhelmed, too, by this day. I feel this urge to say something, to remember, to be wise and serious and hopeful. But I feel like anything I personally have to add is a little cheap. I wasn’t in New York City, or Pennsylvania, or Washington D.C., and while the events of September 11, 2001 affected me deeply, my share of the story is nothing compared to that of those who were more directly involved. Suffice it to say, I remember thinking that it was quite possible the world as I knew it was falling apart right in front of my eyes. It was also the day that Oldest took his first steps alone. And until ten years ago, the significance of September 11th in my life was that it is the day between my mom’s birthday and mine. Now personal joy is forever mixed with communal horror and grief, and there is no denying the darkness, even while I try to keep my focus on the light.

How do you respond to feeling overwhelmed? I tend to get very quiet and withdrawn, to cut myself off from the people around me. After a time I hit a point where I need to talk, write, make things, play music; in essence, to communicate. And coming back out of myself to find other people again—that in itself can be an overwhelming experience. But oh, finding the light, basking in it naked and blinking in the company of friends—that is a beautiful thing. Thank you for letting me know you’re all around me.

White

2011-09-08T11:04:00.000-05:00

Purity. Light. White. I remember when I learned that white was not the absence of color, but the presence of all colors—as if you could take white and tilt it a little to make blue appear, or shake it so that red or green or yellow float to the surface for a while. That white is actually a swirl of colors just waiting to be released. How odd it seems, then, that white can appear so blank sometimes. Were you, like me, tricked somehow into thinking that white was calm, serene, boring even? But how could it be, with all that color going on beneath the surface? I like to imagine white as something teeming and alive. What other color is both searing hot and freezing cold? Life and death? Empty space and Holy Presence?

There is something to the fact that pure white light, illuminating and life-giving, contains all the colors of the spectrum.

There is something, too, about the process by which different colors rise to the surface at different times. Headed into fall, I always look forward to the leaves changing color. I think often of that one fall six years ago, when it struck me so strongly that trees would greet winter—and what looks like death—not quietly but in blazing red, orange, and gold. But especially red. I’m captivated by the thought that all those hues are inside each leaf all along, that the vibrancy is merely hidden by all the green, and only revealed when the chlorophyll leaks away.

Color hidden within color. Waiting. Things hidden and illuminated, seen only when you tilt an object, shake it, let something beautiful bleed out. It seems cruel sometimes, the way new colors rise up, and yet the new can be as beautiful as the old. And all of it is hidden within something as still and clear as white.

Many years ago, in a high school English class, the other students and I were assigned one of my favorite projects ever—to create and present to the class a symbol of ourselves. I made a folded paper box, plain and white on the outside, small enough to fit in my palm. On the inside, the box was full of color, every wall completely decorated. Suspended from the top was a tiny paper crane. From the outside the box didn’t really invite much attention, but if you took the time and effort there was a whole lot to see on the inside. Even then, though, you couldn’t get the whole picture. When the box was open the crane was no longer in its element, flying through the middle of all that color and life. You could imagine the complete picture, but you couldn’t actually see it.

It strikes me that most people in this world would see a little white box and not give a second thought to what might be inside. Even fewer would be tempted to open it. They may be perfectly nice, friendly people: “Nice box. I bet it’s cool inside. I’ve seen that kind of thing before.” But they will never peek inside. I don’t know why this is. Personally, I sometimes feel like I could spend the rest of my life just opening boxes and exploring their contents. Most, I’m convinced, want to be opened, whether they are beckoning or just sitting there.

I kept my little box for years, but after years of storage and being moved from place to place, I think it was eventually crushed and discarded. I’ve lost track of it, anyway. Here, in writing, I find it taking on a new form. To those of you reading—thank you for looking inside.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-09-05T08:38:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Running downhill
2. Singing harmony
3. Melted butter
4. Birthday wish lists
5. Library book sale--new books, cheap
6. "Scary" pictures planted all over the house
7. Mexican food
8. A handmade bowl
9. Creaky floors
10. Barred owls calling, 3 am

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've run across recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

Notes from the First Week of School

2011-09-04T16:24:00.000-05:00

•Hearing Oldest talk about “My new friend _____,” “The boy next to me in math, who’s starting to be my friend,” is pretty darn awesome.

• I absolutely must keep exercising daily. Letting it drop when I get too sick/exhausted/stressed-out cannot be an option this year. Somebody remind me of this in October. Or next week.

• It struck me a few weeks ago, after seeing Youngest in action at family camp, that what I’m missing is a full-time staff. She is extremely happy and manageable when surrounded by handsome camp counselors.

• Big picture. Big picture. Big picture. Big picture. Big picture.

• Middle broke my heart this week when she announced, “I hate the way I look. I’m ugly.” I, on the other hand, am in awe of her beauty. I can hear the teen years rumbling in the distance.

• You know those targeted ads you get on the right-hand side of the screen on Facebook? I had to laugh at the one that suggested I consider becoming a Professional Organizer. I’m pretty sure nobody who knows me well would ever pay me to organize their lives. Everything I do seems to involve making a big mess.

• Re: Facebook completely misjudging me: I’m rather pleased that there are ways in which I am un-pin-down-able.

• The week, warts and all, didn’t go too badly. My biggest question right now: can I keep up the pace?

• All three kids like school. This alone is huge. A miracle. I’m clinging to that and trying to take everything else in stride. (Have I given away my idealist/perfectionist tendencies yet?)

• Hope is a really, really powerful thing. And right now I’m feeling extremely hopeful about the school year ahead. Remind me of this in October. Or next week.

Black

2011-09-01T09:19:00.001-05:00

Halfway through my first year of graduate school, my grandpa died. It was sudden; we had all been at my parents’ house for Christmas and had a lovely time. New Years’ Day he had a massive heart attack. He was unconscious for several days before he died. My mom flew to Nebraska during that time, my sister went along for support. I wanted to go, too, but everybody thought it was important that I head back to school in order to start the semester on time. So I flew back to Chicago and waited.

When I got to Nebraska a few days later for the funeral, it seemed as if everybody had already settled into their roles, everybody knew when and where to pitch in. I wanted to help in some concrete way, but there were a lot of people around, and it was hard to know where exactly to step in. My one job was to play 3 minutes of music for the funeral, and that felt like a meager thing to offer.

I played in a haze. My hands were cold, I felt numb all over, but I kept myself together because that’s what I know how to do when I’m performing. I spent a few days with family, remembering, crying, even laughing a little. And then I tried to return to life as usual.

The loneliness hit hard when I went back to school. I spent hours every day in a practice room, and all I could think about was how insane it felt to be alone in my tiny room, surrounded by other human beings alone in their tiny rooms, all honing our craft, learning how to communicate, and all very much alone. I felt like I was doing anything but communicating. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I was working towards any more. After years of trying to make music my entire life, in the face of death it suddenly looked like nothing.

I started violin lessons when I was 2 ½, but with two free-lance musicians/music teachers for parents, I was surrounded by it from the beginning. Music has been a part of me since before I can even remember; a part of my family, an essential to growing up. For years, though, it was one thing among many. Through high school there were always books to read, stories and poems to write, languages to learn, pictures to draw. Things that drew me in, absorbed my time, my energy, my passion. Then I decided to make music my career, and I went from taking it for granted to thinking it was the only thing I had room for in my life.

I have a tendency to take an all-or-nothing approach to life. Choose one thing and black out all the rest. Put on blinders. I knew music was a tough field, and I convinced myself I had to give up everything else in order to “make it.” After my grandpa died I realized I didn’t want to—I couldn’t, in fact—give up everything for music. I wanted relationship. Family. I couldn’t let music get in the way. I didn’t want to feel the pull between family and career, and I figured if I let go of all my aspirations for one, the other would be all I needed. And so I traded one pair of blinders for another.

My life has not been wasted. Neither has my education or skill. But I’m old enough to see that my story isn’t going to go the way I think it is, either, and music never faded completely into the background the way I thought it would. I both tried to make music my life, and tried to walk away from it. Neither, it turns out, is possible. Somehow it is deeply a part of me in a way I do not understand, nor do I always know how to handle. I’ve learned since my grandpa’s funeral that sometimes just speaking from the heart—gathering up the pain, the love, the hope, and everything else, and offering it up in a piece of music that goes beyond words and deeds—sometimes that is the thing that is needed. It is not such a meager role to play, after all, and it’s what I have to offer.

“You who see, tell the others,” my English teacher wrote in my yearbook at the end of my senior year of high school. Over the last few years I have started to think of that as a call-to-arms for the artist, the musician, the writer. It is a tall order, a high calling. And here I am, a mom and (very) part-time violin teacher living in a small town in the Midwest that’s awfully short on gigs. These days the opportunities that come are precious. They are also few and far between. Maybe that will change, and maybe it won't. But maybe I have a small part to play. Hopefully there are things I can see, things that I can share from this precise point. I'm finding strength in discovering this is still something I can do. That I can be a mom, a wife, a teacher, maybe even a writer, but I have a voice as a violinist, too, and I can once again embrace it. I want to be done with trying to black out certain parts of myself. Somehow they fit together.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-08-29T06:28:00.002-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. A Mendelssohn scherzo
2. Boxes of books arriving for school
3. Fresh notebook paper, ready and waiting
4. Hazy, peach-gold sunset
5. Stopping for a deep breath
6. Perfectly ripe nectarine
7. Clear night sky, countless stars
8. Heat of a campfire on my face
9. Cool of the night on my back
10. Smell of wood smoke lingering in my hair

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

There's no Denying it...

2011-08-27T09:31:00.000-05:00

For better or for worse, some of my most effective teaching seems to be by example.

Use Your Words

2011-08-24T16:06:00.000-05:00

“You’re doing well. You’re doing good things, with and for your children.” A friend called me last week, and although I missed the call, she left a voicemail that said just that, among other things. She has seen me struggle with homeschooling, with trying to figure out what is best to do, with trying to even make a decision I can live with. Do I have to tell you how much power her words carried? I don’t know about you, but other people’s words—the true, heartfelt ones—have the power to lift me up and carry me a lot farther than I can go on my own power.

When I’m teaching violin, my job is not to stroke egos; it is to help children learn to do something to the very best of their ability. My attention goes automatically to what needs fixing, what needs to get better. But one of the wonderful things about the Suzuki Method is the emphasis on an encouraging environment. I can’t remember where I saw it, but I read once about somebody criticizing Suzuki for praising a child who had just played terribly. Suzuki pointed out that he had not, in fact, praised the child for the way he had played. He had said, “Good! You played!” Sometimes that’s where you have to start. But the discipline of seeing what is good, and pointing it out to the student before going on to the hard work, is invaluable. “Wow, your sound is really strong and clear today! You can make it even better by making sure all those Ds are perfectly in tune,” is profoundly different from saying, “That was out of tune. All your Ds were flat.” It’s not about flattery, it’s about showing the person where they succeeded, and then giving them what they need—the knowledge, or strength, or whatever—to do the hard work ahead.

Over and over again, I come back to the realization that this is something I need to keep working on, this seeing and acknowledging—out loud—what is good. It has always seemed easier to keep quiet. But if I have the power to speak into other people’s lives the way people have spoken into mine and I stay silent, I’m missing the opportunity of a lifetime.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-08-22T06:30:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Monarch flickering by
2. Phone call from a friend
3. Banana chocolate chip muffins with ginger, still warm
4. Cricket-filled nights
5. Open windows
6. Clouds moving fast across the sky
7. Up early, the only one awake
8. Cuddling with my children
9. Bare feet
10. Quiet Sunday afternoon

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I would love to have you join in! List your own "10 Bits of Magic" on your blog with a link back to me, and use Mister Linky to leave your own link below. (Or, if you prefer, just list a few bits you've seen recently in the comments below. It is a joy to hear from you, either way.)

Day 2 at the American Suzuki Institute (In Case you were Wondering what it was Like)

2011-08-20T07:53:00.000-05:00

5:30 am     The alarm goes off; I hit snooze until 6.
6:00-7:00 Get ready for the day, check messages, wake girls, make sack lunches, brush and braid the girls’ hair.
7:00          Make at least 3 trips to hotel lobby for coffee/various breakfast items.
7:15           Dad knocks on hotel room door to make sure we are still alive.
7:30           Head out to car. Rainclouds threaten. The girls finish breakfast while we drive.
7:37           Glance longingly at Starbucks as we drive past—no time to stop for strong coffee. It is sprinkling.
7:40           Park. Locate Youngest’s missing nametag. The rain is coming harder now. It occurs to me that bringing a working umbrella would have been a good idea. Then I immediately decide nobody has the hands to hold it anyway. We walk to class in the rain.
7:50           We are amazingly the first to arrive at our classroom. Youngest and I finish our breakfast and my hotel coffee outside the door while Middle gets out her violin.
8-8:50        Middle’s B Class: Group class with focus on technique. Already Middle is opening up more with her bow, and adapting beautifully to all sorts of new things. She asks me before class, “Am I doing such a good job you could die?” I tell her she is. Youngest announces three minutes into the class that she is ready for lunch. At first she lies with her had in my lap, eating raisins and humming along with whatever the class is playing. She spends the rest of the hour experimenting with different cuddle positions in my lap. I try to keep taking notes, despite the acrobatics.
8:50           We head for the Fine Arts Building. On the way Middle desperately needs to use the bathroom. I weigh being on time against being able to concentrate and avoiding embarrassing accidents. Being on time loses.
9:03           I rush Middle to her A Class. This is a master class, where each of the four students take turns working one-on-one with a teacher while the rest watch. All four are about at the same level, so all the lessons are on pieces/skills they have recently worked on, are currently working on, or will be working on soon. Middle was supposed to go first today, but they’ve already started. Time is short and there’s lots to do. I leave her there to unpack and take Youngest to her C Class, a large group class that focuses on repertoire. Taking Middle first was a good gamble; there are still a few kids standing in line waiting to have their violins tuned. Another mother offers to wait with Youngest after class until I get back with Middle. As much as I would like to stay and watch this class, which promises to be a lot of fun, it is more important to be at the individual lessons. Rushing back to Middle’s class I realize I am already exhausted.
9:15-9:27    Middle’s mini-lesson. They work on Minuet in G Minor, particularly one 4th-finger “A” that is consistently out of tune. The teacher mentions one of my favorite Suzuki quotes, “You don’t practice something until you get it right, you practice it until you can’t get it wrong.” Middle accepts the challenge to practice it 100 times correctly.
10:00          A free hour. We find a bench in the Fine Arts building in which to camp out for a while. The sound of rain on the roof is thunderous. Youngest finds friends from some of her classes yesterday, and their father and I speak while the kids play for a while. We share amazement at what is happening all around us, how kids from all over the world can come together and have this music in common. After they have run off a good amount of steam, I collect the girls for a quick practice session.
11:00          Enrichment classes are available for kids, with simultaneous lectures for parents and teachers-in-training. Youngest goes to a class to learn to dance the minuet; Middle goes to Dalcroze Eurhythmics, a music and movement class. I go to a class titled “Favorite Recipes for Practice,” offering practice tips and strategies. It is heavily attended.
Noon           Lunch. We eat sack lunches in the center area of the Fine Arts building. Youngest makes a friend and nearly forgets to eat. Middle falls while galloping back from the trash can and bends her left wrist backwards. It doesn’t seem too serious but she is very upset. “I’m not crying because it hurts, I’m crying because it might be broken and then I won’t be able to play!”
1:00-1:50     B Class (technique) for Youngest, Reading Orchestra for Middle. We drop Middle off. She is excited to get to play “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” again. I take Youngest to her class and watch them work for a while. Then I go back to watch Middle in orchestra. This is her first experience, both playing in a group like this and doing this level and amount of sight-reading, although we’ve worked on note-reading all year. She is rising to the occasion beautifully. I return to Youngest’s class to see that she is standing with the group, playing “O Come, Little Children,” a piece she has not worked on but has heard so often she probably thinks she has. I remember this happening to me, too, years ago. She makes her way through the piece quite well, playing by ear and watching the teacher’s bow.
2:00           We are all tired and I am desperate for coffee. The rain has stopped, so we walk the equivalent of five blocks to Starbucks. I buy the girls snacks and finally sit down with a cup of the darkest brew they have. We will practice later; this was time well-spent.
3:00-3:50 Our last classes of the day; I drop Middle off at her C Class (repertoire) and take Youngest to her A Class (the mini-lesson.) Youngest is clearly tired, but she works hard for her allotted 12 minutes. The teacher focuses on bow technique, and they work in-depth on how she is moving her right arm, as well as keeping her bow hold soft and flexible, a “pillow” hand as opposed to a “rock” hand.
4:00             Recital time. We had arranged for Middle to go to the auditorium with another family from her C Class, so even though Youngest is spent for the day and crying, we go to the recital. I carry her most of the way, despite the fact that even though she is almost five she is the size of many seven year-olds. She calms down before the music starts, and sleeps in my arms through most of the recital.
5:00             We head back to the hotel to meet up with Nana and Grandpa. My mom has arrived from Minneapolis to help me with the girls for the rest of the week, and I could not be more thankful. The girls could not be more excited. We are skipping the 5:00 presentations and evening recital in lieu of a relaxed dinner and down-time. It has been a full day already.
Evening After a full day and dinner out, we squeeze in a little more practicing. There are advantages to doing small amounts at different times through the day. Nana works with Youngest, while Middle and I start in on her 100 repetitions. The number is daunting, but as we get going and she realizes how many she can do in a short period of time, she gets excited. We get to 70 and decide we can fit the rest in before breakfast tomorrow. We both feel proud and exhausted.
8:30 or so     We tuck the girls into bed and they promptly lose consciousness. I will do the same in a few more hours. I can’t believe we get to do this again tomorrow—I will likely be processing our experiences here for a long time.

Gray

2011-08-17T14:54:00.001-05:00

I took Oldest to school today. After months of struggling with this decision, agonizing over the best thing for all of us, I enrolled him part-time at the middle school last week. Today was his first day. He will attend two classes there, and can stay for lunch if he wants to (he does—at least sometimes.) He is taking a third class with a small group of homeschoolers, and we will cover the rest of his subjects at home.

For a long time, I thought I had to decide between all homeschooling or all public school, and I was overwhelmed. I’m aware that people do all sorts of combinations of things when it comes to their children’s education, but all I could see for my family were the extremes. It took a friend to show me the gray area, suggest that I could try walking there for a while.

Gray is a lovely color. Mysterious. Delicate. A place where light and dark dwell together, the vast area between extremes. The place we spend most of our time in this earthly home. The thing about in-betweens, though, is that you don’t always know exactly where you are. Choose to walk there and you may have to admit that you are walking, just a little bit, in the unknown

Assuming that you have two or more choices that are potentially good, how do you choose The Best? I don’t really know. We prayed, we deliberated, we sought advice, but there was no direct word from heaven on this one. For now, I think we have a compromise that is Good. Oldest will inhabit two worlds for the time being. He will get a taste of middle school without giving up homeschooling. We are holding on to some precious goals but adding new experiences to the mix. It is a bit of an odd place to be in, but this may be where the balancing point is for us, right now.

At sixth grade orientation on Monday, I watched Oldest navigate the hallways, find his locker, locate his classrooms. I watched him work the combination for his locker over and over, watched him test the metal button on the inside that releases the door to the upper compartment with an extremely satisfying pop. This challenge, this gray place, will be good for him, I hope. Today when I dropped him off at the Middle School, I watched him walk up to the door alone, wearing the gray t-shirt he got at camp this summer. He looked taller to me. Strong, too.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-08-15T09:13:00.002-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Children spontaneously breaking into song
2. Friends who listen
3. Shadows through a window-shade
4. Dew-glazed grass
5. Car flooded with the smell of basil
6. One last afternoon at the pool
7. Multi-colored tomatoes
8. The sound of pencil on paper
9. Rope swing
10. Flock of birds overhead, glinting bronze

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

Yellow

2011-08-12T14:12:00.000-05:00

This song was one of my favorites in high school. It was the chorus that spoke to me: I still haven’t shaken it/This feeling of fakin’ it. What a perfect soundtrack for certain seasons of my life. I imagine singing it like a song going into battle—scared and unprepared, but going nevertheless. There is something joyful to admitting that I don’t really know what I’m doing. That I often don’t feel the way I think I should. I might as well sing and dance a little while I plunge into unknown territory. Maybe after a while I won’t even be faking anymore.

How is it, anyway, that yellow--the domain of caution signs and cowardice--is also the color of smiley faces?

In the violinist part of my life, I am used to preparing. I get the music ahead of time, I mark fingerings and bowings, I practice, I rehearse, and even if I have a performance after only one rehearsal, I’ve got the music in front of me and years of experience behind me. It may not be perfect, but I feel pretty comfortable with the setup.

But there was this one gig in Chicago. I don’t remember how I got it, but I assumed I would be playing in a string quartet or some other small ensemble, and that the contractor had music for me at the very least. But when I got to the restaurant at Navy Pier, it became clear that this was a strolling gig—two violins, playing in parts, from memory. That meant a whole repertoire of music I didn’t know, in a style of music I had never played. You know those stress dreams you have sometimes, when you are in college again and have to take a final exam in a class you never attended, or you are at the church for your wedding, everybody waiting for you, but you don’t have your dress, or you are on stage for a big solo performance with an orchestra and you suddenly realize you never learned the piece? This was like one of those dreams, but real.

We had no choice but to fake it. The other violinist told me to play things I knew, as much as I could remember of them, and he would harmonize whatever I came up with. He made lots of suggestions, and if I knew the melody I played it. We played the first page of the first movement of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” We played bits of Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, portions of Vivaldi “Spring” and some Beatles tunes. Pachelbel Canon. Somehow we filled at least an hour with music and then I got out of there as quickly as I could.

Improvising scares me. I don’t think well on my feet. Give me some paper and let me write out whatever I’m going to say, or play, or do, and I feel much better. In the heat of the moment my brain wants to shut off, but whatever is on the page stays there, anchors me, guides me through. One of the problems with life, though, is that so very much of it is improvised, and most of what I get written down to help me through is after the fact. I find this both freeing and terrifying.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned about performing is that sometimes I just have to pretend. Pretend I’m not terrified, pretend I’m relaxed, pretend it’s easy, pretend I meant to do that, pretend that I am in fact a fabulous musician with music just flowing from my pores. Because something happens when I fake it. I play differently when I decide to ignore all my misgivings, my trembling hands, my queasy stomach. I get a lot closer to confidence when I pretend I’ve already got it than if I sit around and wait for it to come to me. Act first and trust the feelings will follow.

It turns out I’m afraid of many things, big and little. Sometimes I think the yellow streak down my back positively glows. But a lot of what this summer—maybe even the past year—has been about for me has been about acting in spite of my fear. Trying out a high ropes course, a zipline, a Tarzan swing while on vacation. Accepting opportunities to improvise on the violin. Going to the writing workshop in Minneapolis. Deciding I’d rather be the one who reached out than the one who said nothing. Saying the things that are burning inside me. Making changes. I would love to tell you that the results have been joyful and glorious, and sometimes they have been, but I’ve also spent a lot of time feeling awkward and clumsy and—to tell the truth—shaking. I am still a coward, but somehow I seem to breathe differently these days.

Yellow dances through the places I am afraid to walk. I’m trying to follow suit, faking it a little as I go.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-08-08T08:01:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. “Slow down, I want to learn it, too!”
2. Going deep
3. Enjoying the work
4. Not knowing if you’ve learned the piece or just heard it so many times it’s a part of you
5. New accomplishments
6. 70+ violins playing Bach Double
7. Playing “Twinkle” with 200 other kids
8. Ice cream after the concert
9. Quiet hours of driving
10. Sleeping in your own bed

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently? I'd love to have others join in! Leave a link in the comments section and link back to me from your blog.

Transparent

2011-08-06T07:50:00.000-05:00

Just a few thoughts at the end of a week of eating, sleeping, and breathing violin, surrounded by both children and adults who are at all levels and stages of learning how to make music:

Some teachers are impressive because of their vast store of knowledge, which they parcel out bit by bit to their hungry students. There are others who work quietly, seem more interested in drawing out and nurturing what is hidden deep within their students.

There are musicians who can astound you with their great skill; they look impressive, their sound is huge, they are unforgettable performers. There are others who take you to the essence of the music while they themselves fade into the background. They make you hear differently, forever change your impression of a composer, show you how to get lost in a piece of music.

There are writers who amaze with their mastery of language, their particular way of saying something, they way they can turn a plot. There are others who leave you with a story, a thought, or insight that haunts you for years.

It’s worth asking what kind of teacher, or musician, or writer I want to be. My gut instinct is that people talk about you more when you direct them towards yourself. And every time I put my work—a piece of myself—out there, I am asking to be heard. But as a musician, I want my audience to hear the music; as a teacher, I want to develop and draw out the student; as a writer, I want people to come away with a story, an idea, light for the darkness. And it strikes me that this requires a certain sort of invisibility on my part.

American Suzuki Institute

2011-08-03T06:35:00.000-05:00

The girls and I are at the American Suzuki Institute in Stevens Point, Wisconsin this week. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here, and my first time as a parent; but what an experience! It’s hard to be coherent about it right now—I’ve gotten my daughters to 16 classes, two recitals, and a play-in in the last two and a half days. There’s been a little eating and sleeping thrown in, too, and lots of walking. Also two scraped knees, a (minor) wrist injury, and a mysterious toothache that shows up around dinnertime which can only be cured with ice cream.

I’m tired, and running mainly on adrenaline at this point, but I can tell you this: it is amazing to be here. I grew up in the Suzuki world, and the philosophy is pretty deeply-embedded in my life. But these ideas—that music can be a vehicle for developing noble human beings, that every child can learn, that we can go deeply with even young children into something as complex as playing an instrument by taking tiny steps—these ideas do not grow old. Am I overwhelmed? Absolutely. But I’m thankful we’re here, and I can’t wait to see what we learn by the end of the week.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-08-01T06:20:00.000-05:00

Photo by Brooke Collins

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Taking the leap
2. The terrifying, delicious ride down, before swinging up and out again
3. Sunlight, golden through the trees
4. Deep-sleep breathing from the tops of three bunks
5. Sharing stories
6. Bullfrogs croaking (chirping?) at night
7. The sound of water lapping against a boat
8. Time together
9. Time alone
10. Going beyond words

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

On Vacation

2011-07-23T14:18:00.001-05:00

I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, and posting and/or responding to comments will be difficult at best. I look forward to reconnecting with all of you again in August!

Details

2011-07-20T07:40:00.001-05:00

Mole Music, written and illustrated by David McPhail, Henry Holt and Company, 1999

I’m guessing that many of you are familiar with this book, but in case you aren’t, it is a wonderful, sweet story about a mole who realizes something is missing from his life and decides to learn to play violin. At first he is unable to make a single pleasant sound on the instrument. He keeps at it, and after a week he can play a note. He keeps practicing, and learns to play another note, and eventually a simple piece. After many years of practicing, he is an accomplished musician, dreaming of music while he digs tunnels during the day and dreaming of changing the world with his music while he plays his violin alone underground at night. The thing he doesn’t realize, but which the illustrations make clear, is that the people above ground can hear him, and his music has a profound impact on the world around him.

I love how the words and illustrations work together in this book. The text provides Mole’s perspective, only, while the pictures reveal the deeper story. I love, too, the little details you might not catch the first or second time through—things that reward you for looking a little more carefully. The music, for instance. The snippets of music floating up through the oak tree that connects Mole’s burrow with the world above him are not just random notes sprinkled over a staff. They are quotes from real pieces, and they add their own dimension to the story.

The first “simple song” Mole learns to play? “Simple Gifts.” His next piece is “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Later on, when he has gotten really good and dreams of playing for an audience, the illustrations contain excerpts from the 4th movement of Brahms’ Symphony No. 1. The music that inspires soldiers to lay down their arms is the opening from the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (“The Pastoral”)—a movement Beethoven inscribed with the title, “Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country.” And while the soldiers embrace in brotherly love, Mole is playing the"Ode to Joy" theme from the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. ("Your magic reunites/What custom strictly divided./All men become brothers,/Where your gentle wing rests.") Finally, at the end of the book Mole plays everybody to sleep with Brahms’ Lullaby before he goes to sleep, himself.

Knowing these pieces and how they fit with the text and illustrations is not necessary for understanding the book, but I love what they add to it, and that David McPhail carried his art to that detail. And that’s what I love about a good picture book—it is a piece of art in a simple, accessible, relatively inexpensive form.

From Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life, compiled by Carole F. Chase:

“Why do you write for children?” My immediate response to this question is, “I don’t.” Of course I don’t. I don’t suppose most children’s writers do…

If it’s not good enough for adults, it’s not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-07-18T06:57:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Catching up with old friends
2. Falling asleep in the sun at the pool
3. Splashing water
4. Taking your time with a popsicle
5. Sleepover giggles
6. Friendship bracelets
7. Singing together
8. Homemade pizza
9. Golden moon
10. Staying up too late

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

I Was Trying to Remember Not to Run

2011-07-14T20:55:00.000-05:00

Youngest fell at the pool on Tuesday and scraped her leg in a couple of places. I didn’t see her fall, just heard the sound and looked up to see her splayed on the ground with that familiar shocked/wounded/should-I-cry look on her face. As we went in search of Band-aids, I asked her if she had been running. She hesitated before answering. “I was trying to remember not to run.”

My husband and I have spent a fair amount of time through the years explaining the difference between accidentally and on purpose. Also how you still have to apologize even if it was an accident, and how even after all that, being sorry cannot erase consequences. Sometimes life just hurts. And because of all the random ways we or the people we love can get hurt, we make rules to try to avoid the pain. Rules like, “Don’t run at the pool,” because even though the pool and friends and playing and running are inextricably linked with fun, all the grownups can imagine (or have seen) heads bouncing off concrete and a moment that can’t be un-lived, and we would give almost anything to avoid that scene. Still, when I hear myself telling my kids not to run at the pool, or not to run too fast down that hill because they could lose control and fall, I wonder what I've turned into, because I know that the very best moment is precisely the one right before you lose control and fall—that that is sometimes the whole point of running down the hill.

I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but there is something poetic about the fact that the bowl of watermelon featured in Monday morning’s 10 Bits of Magic came to such a dramatic end Monday afternoon. I have this (apparently bad) habit of thinking that if I can get the door (or drawer, or suitcase zipper) shut on something, that means it fits. And I was able to cram the bowl of watermelon onto the top shelf of the refrigerator and get the door shut with very little trouble, so I didn’t give it another thought. When I opened the door two minutes later to put something else away I was completely surprised that the bowl, released from the pressure put on it by the butter compartment, flew out and shattered on the floor.

I have broken my share of bowls, plates, glasses, baking dishes, pitchers, coffee decanters, and jars since I started pretending to be an adult. I’m almost used to the mess, but getting hurt isn’t usually part of the equation. This time was different. My husband, who is rather proud of his relaxed stance towards injury and illness, took one look at the gash on my leg and made me lie down on the floor right where I was. It was obvious I needed stitches. Youngest came into the kitchen at this point and started crying. “Mommy’s okay, honey. I’m fine,” I assured her, lying on my back surrounded by broken glass and watermelon chunks and thinking there was quite a bit of blood on the floor considering there had only been a second or two between when I got cut and when I started applying pressure. “But the bowl is broken!!” she wailed. Maybe I was being a little too calm.

I did get stitches—seven—and I’m sure the scar will be just lovely. It’s one more way that I bear my life outwardly, and it makes me wish I had felt more beautiful when I was seventeen.

I have mixed feelings sometimes about my 10 Bits of Magic posts. They are important to me because I want to keep seeing what is good—it is an excellent antidote to the fears and anxieties and general negativity that want to overwhelm me at times. But I’m aware of the danger that they will sound trite or sentimental. I worry about somebody reading them and thinking I am oblivious to the pain and struggle that they have in their lives, or that I have mastered those things in my own life. The truth is that the more it hurts, the more I feel the need to count the good and beautiful. Keeping my eyes open seems to be getting more and more important.

I can't stop thinking about Youngest’s response to my question about running. There are a lot of things I’m trying to remember, myself. I cannot count how many times I've tried to stuff things where they don’t fit since Monday. My guess is that I will never quite have learned my lesson. And why, exactly, do I expect to be so wise? It strikes me that the whole world is overflowing with any number of things, danger and beauty and pain and grace included. May I never get used to it. After all, nothing fits quite the way I think it will in the first place.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-07-11T06:31:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. A bowl of watermelon
2. Hugs for no reason
3. Braiding hair
4. Painted toenails
5. Crushed ice
6. Smell of fresh-cut grass
7. Lavender
8. Frogs singing at night
9. Sitting in front of the fan
10. Jogging in the rain

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

Purple

2011-07-08T11:37:00.002-05:00

Youngest was born into the crumbling of my idealized adult life. I spent most of my pregnancy hardly believing she would be born, still reeling after my recent miscarriage, the death of a friend, and loved ones’ health emergencies. The secure job we were sure my husband would land right after finishing his doctorate had not materialized, and all our hard work only seemed to produce more hard work.

Youngest did not have a freshly-painted nursery (she slept in a portable bassinet in the hallway outside our bedroom door), and she wasn’t a neatly-spaced two years younger than Middle, the way I had envisioned she would be. Our health insurance ended a week after she was born, and we spent the first year of her life paying as we went at the doctor’s office, hoping that the health emergency that could ruin us wasn’t just around the corner. We had friends, but I felt close to nobody, out of touch with old friends after moving several times, and unable to feel like I connected with the new ones. I sat with acquaintances while they compared notes about home renovations and quietly hated the white walls of our apartment, wondering what everybody around me had done to be able to own a home. I was not the gentle, abundant, glowing homeschooling mom I wanted to be. I was tired and disorganized, and my husband worked long hours and got paid only a few dollars an hour more than the babysitters we hired once in a while when there was no other choice.

And then, Youngest herself spent the first two years of her life showing me that my determination to have well-behaved, disciplined children and a perfect, well-groomed family was pure fantasy. She was loud, emotional, headstrong. She got into things my older two never dreamed of—kitchen knives, for example. She seemed bent on mischief and destruction. My parents referred to her as a force of nature. It was fitting, actually, that when a tornado struck our town two years ago, she couldn’t shake the idea that it was a person, not a thing, that did all the damage.

People love to say that being a mother is hard. What I wish they would say, even though it isn’t very good advertising, is that motherhood will probably at some point not only take you to the edge of yourself, it will hold you over the edge and let you dangle. Older women would stop me at the grocery store sometimes, and say things like, “You’ve got a big job there. I remember what those days were like. Hang in there—these are precious times.” The way their eyes held mine when they said it assured me they knew what they were talking about and had most likely spent a fair amount of time dangling, themselves.

Youngest stretches me. But somewhere along the line I realized that she is in many ways the girl I always wished to be. She is strong and feisty and outgoing. My social advice to my children is based on my experience as an introvert: be nice, make eye contact and answer people’s questions, and if you can’t manage anything else, a smile will get you a long way. My four year old, on the other hand, will march up to a complete stranger at church and say, “I haven’t seen you here before. What’s your name?” She won’t even blush or stumble all over her words or feel like an idiot like her mom would. She sings and cries loudly, loves being on stage, endears herself to everybody, and asks for what she wants. She is a free spirit, completely comfortable in her own skin, and I have a lot to learn from her.

Two years ago when we finally bought a house, we decided that each child should have their own room. Youngest was barely three, so I helped pick the color for her room. She loved purple, and the day-glo orange she wanted was not an option, so I found what I thought was the perfect purple for her: something light but somehow deep, passionate and mysterious, feminine but not frilly. It was a color that seemed to define everything I love about her.

It turns out she wanted pink, like Middle’s room. Not only that, but within a month of moving in, Middle and Youngest started sharing a bed again, and insisted that they hated being alone in their rooms. For a year and a half, they had sleepovers, alternating between their two rooms. They played together in whatever room they slept in, and the other room was always empty and trashed.

This summer, I did something I’m pretty sure I learned from Youngest: I asked for what I wanted. Not everybody was excited about the idea, but my daughters are sharing a room again. They both have the pink room they wanted, and they have loft beds, so each girl has a top bunk with her own private space underneath. And the purple room—I swear I didn’t choose the color for myself—but it is my space, now. My office. I still stumble over that word “my,” but there you have it.

There were a number of years that I truly believed that to be a mother I had to completely pour myself out, give up all of myself. As my children are getting older, though, I’ve had to rethink that. I feel like I am growing up alongside my kids, trying to help them discover who they are, but also rediscovering who I am. That idealized adult life I thought I wanted—a good portion of it was based on how I thought I would best fit in, how I could look good and feel accepted. But the times in my life where I have felt the most accepted were when I was being myself, doing the things I loved and being the person I was made to be.

I started writing seven years ago, during a time of great hope and great stress. It was something I did a lot of as a child, something I always loved, but I pushed it aside for years simply because I thought I had to. Recently, though, it has become a lifeline. I write to think, to pray, to connect the things in my life that I otherwise don’t know how to connect. To understand, and also to communicate. I refuse to call writing a hobby, but I hesitate to say it is a calling because I don’t know how you determine something like that. But it became clear that I needed to carve out a place for myself in this wonderful family—a physical and emotional space just for writing, and oh, it is the loveliest shade of purple.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-07-06T08:27:00.002-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Family bike ride
2. Bag-full of candy from the parade
3. Sun glittering on waves
4. Scaring up one…two…three great blue herons
5. Glimpse of fish below the surface of the water
6. Late dinner
7. A fountain of fire and sparks
8. Waiting in the dark with friends
9. Thump of fireworks
10. Sparklers

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

Happy 4th of July

2011-07-04T07:15:00.002-05:00

A little music for you today: the New York Philharmonic playing Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man"

And for fun, this seriously funky version.

Enjoy!

Blue

2011-07-01T17:00:00.000-05:00

When we moved into our house two years ago, I took down all the heavy curtains the previous owners had left. Gold lamé, thick satin, heavy florals—they all ended up in the basement, folded unceremoniously and waiting for all the projects I have imagined I can use them for but for which there will probably never be time. The red, white, and blue star curtains on the back porch—those, too, were dealt with quickly. I wanted to be connected to the outside world, not closed off from it. That back porch pretty much embodied the difference in taste between our family and the previous owners. The entire room was painted red to match the patriotic curtains, except for the spot where the chest freezer used to sit, which had been left blue. And as much as I love color on my walls, that room did not work for us. It felt close, oppressive.

My husband has been working on the back porch for most of the past month, fixing the windows that were painted shut, making the old door fit better, and doing various other thankless jobs that will transform this room into something other than a place to keep the vacuum and the recycling. We lifted our ban on white in order to paint the trim, although the color of the beadboard under the windows has not quite been decided (I had no idea, going into marriage, that the color of our walls would require so much negotiating.) The ceiling is blue, now—not quite sky blue, but more of a hazy blue-gray. I love this. I love the blurring of lines between inside and outside, as if when you look up you can see straight through the ceiling into the sky.

Blue seems to be about clarity. Seeing. It is the deepness of the sky, and all the distance you can imagine in it—eternity over our heads. But blue also reflects, like a glittering lake mirroring the sky, even while it hides a shadowy world underneath. There is something clean and pure about blue, even in its darker shades, yet it seems to increase in power and depth when you add in other colors. Add darkness and a hint of green and you are dabbling in mysticism with midnight blue. Add light and more green and you can have something as cheerful as turquoise.

I have read in home and gardening magazines that cool colors tend to recede, and warm colors advance. I’ve always accepted that statement, but now I find myself peeking at our new blue ceiling and wondering if that is quite true. Is it really receding, or is it drawing me with it as it goes, pulling me up and out?

After the Storm

2011-06-29T08:28:00.002-05:00

Lots of large branches down.

Many trees, like our redbud, lost a large part of themselves.

We found treasures in the mess.

We filled this trailer five times,

but what we added to the city brush pile was barely noticeable.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-06-28T19:56:00.000-05:00

Posting may be sporadic for a while here. We had a strong storm go through early Monday morning, and while everybody came through safely, there was a lot of cleaning up to do. I have pictures to add to this post, but they will have to wait until we have electricity again at our house.

In the meantime, I am

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Coming up safe from the basement
2. Finally falling asleep again
3. Sleeping in, window open to the cool and rain
4. Venturing out to see what happened during the night
5. Finding a leaf the size of your head
6. Comparing stories with neighbors
7. Pitching in to clear each other’s yards
8. The smell of tree sap and sweat on skin
9. Running into friends and neighbors at the city brush pile
10. Going to bed right after sunset

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

Red

2011-06-24T09:45:00.000-05:00

The red crayon was always one of the shortest crayons in my 64-color box of Crayolas. It was my favorite color in first grade, the one I betrayed when my class voted on popular colors by raising my hand for blue at the last moment. I figured blue must be the best color if everybody else loved it so much.

But red is an old friend. It is passion and strength and life, and these things are staples. It is the shining thing flowing through each of us, without which we could not live.

Red is vision, and dreams—the life blood that sustains us through hard times and hard work. That road you follow that for some reason you are sure was meant for you, even if other travelers think you are crazy. Red is full of the energy you get from doing the things you love. It is also perseverance; the thing you keep doing because you know it is good, even when it hurts or drains all your energy away.

Red is not always pretty, and never trifling. You know those things that you hear about happening to other people—the things you know you are not strong enough to bear? They are often soaked in red. I embraced my third pregnancy as a blessing from God. I took it as a sure sign of grace and hope and promise in the middle of a difficult time for our family. And then I began to bleed. I know how common miscarriages are, but I have rarely heard women speak of them. I was not prepared for how hidden, how quiet, how raw, it would be—all the hope and comfort I had attached to this child ending in a toilet while the rest of my family slept.

Red can be overpowering. I mostly like it in small doses, running through everything the way it runs through my veins, strengthening, nourishing, sustaining. Sometimes it is like that—safe and contained, and sometimes it rises up all around you and throbs. But grace is red, too. The days surrounding my miscarriage were wrapped in grace along with the pain. Have you noticed how often those two need to be attached? I let my older two children play. I got out all the glitter and glue and construction paper, even the Play-Doh, and watched them make a huge mess, and for once I didn’t care about cleaning it up. I only wanted to be with them, and have it last forever. Here was my hope and comfort, even—especially—through the hurt.

Imagine the spectrum without any red at all. There would be very little warmth. No heat, no passion, no blood, no grace. I wonder how we would live.

Real and True

2011-06-22T12:31:00.000-05:00

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want your children to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
--Albert Einstein

I was once talking to a young girl about favorite things. “My favorite animal for years was the unicorn,” I told her. She looked at me very seriously. “Unicorns aren’t real.”

I can’t remember how I responded. I knew unicorns weren’t real, but I spent a generous portion of fourth and fifth grade drawing them and dreaming about them anyway.

I’m positive my parents didn’t read me fairy tales because they wanted me to believe in fairies. Or unicorns. Or because they thought the stories would give me a good grounding in math, or theology, or science. They read me those books because the stories were good, and because they contained deep truths about life—what it means to be foolish or clever or brave, how important it is to follow good advice and help others in need, and how there is more to life than what you can see and hear and taste.

So I’m curious—what are some of your favorite fairy tales, either as a child or now? I grew up on a lot of Scandinavian folk and fairy tales because of the wonderful books my grandfather, a history professor who specialized in Norwegian-American immigrants, gave as Christmas and birthday gifts. The kids and I have been reading through my old copy of Great Swedish Fairytales, illustrated by John Bauer, recently. I had forgotten just how beautifully-written it is, and I love it now more than ever. Two of my more recent favorites are The Empty Pot, by Demi, and The Wide-Awake Princess, by Katherine Paterson.

How about you?

10 Bits of Magic

2011-06-20T07:52:00.001-05:00

"Please leave us alone 'cause we are studyin'"

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Answering restlessness with a day trip
2. Lunch in the car
3. Goldfinch balanced on a thistle flower
4. Exploring an antique shop like you have all the time in the world
5. Fireflies
6. Great blue heron soaring across the highway
7. Realizing you just learned the whole piece
8. Homemade signs that appear on bedroom doors
9. Getting the back-story
10. Talking about the book you just read (especially over coffee)

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

Pink

2011-06-17T08:40:00.001-05:00

I laughed all the way home from my ultrasound when I was pregnant with Middle. I’m not sure why I thought I would only have boys, but after Oldest was born it just seemed like that was the way things were going. I was fine with that—boys are wonderful, if a little mysterious. So when the ultrasound technician told me I was most certainly carrying a girl, I was surprised. And delighted. I started lingering over impossibly tiny hair bows at the store, and dreaming over racks of frilly dresses. It seemed as if everywhere I turned, I saw pink.

There was a time when I was a girl that I loved pink, although I’m pretty sure that girls’ clothes weren’t so dominated by the color—it was the 70’s, after all. There also came a time that I decided it was way too “girly” a color for me. I stereotyped pink, thought of it as weak, babyish, simpering. But pink is a good color, in all its shades. It can be soft or brash, warm or cool. It makes me happy. I gradually learned that embracing femininity doesn’t make you weak, at all. When I became the mother of a girl, it suddenly became very important to be able to embrace everything that came along with being female. And my life strengthened and flooded with pink.

Pink, it turns out, is full of surprises.

Taekwon-do, for example. It was completely Middle’s idea. All three kids were influenced by way too many viewings of “Kung Fu Panda,” but she was the one who discovered the dojang downtown and convinced her big brother that this was something they needed to do. I am impressed by their interest, and by what all of us have learned since they started classes a year and a half ago. I love watching them do their patterns, I love the discipline the sport requires, and I love the mental aspect of it. Sparring, though, is just plain tough.

At her first tournament, Middle was paired up with a girl who outranked her, and with whom she had made friends while they were waiting their turn. Suddenly this friend was hitting her in the face. The match quickly dissolved into tears, and a forfeit, and more tears. At her second tournament, Middle had decided she was not going to spar. We told her that was fine—we didn’t blame her for a second. Then she changed her mind. Her first match went well and she held her own and won. The second match was a different story. Middle is not an aggressive kid. She is shy, and sensitive, and delicate. I have seen her back down in many situations in order to keep the peace, even when she was in the right. And my beautiful, delicate girl wasn’t keeping her hands up in front of her face and the girl she was sparring with was taking full advantage. I wondered what kind of mother I was, allowing my child to get beat up, whether she was wearing sparring gear or not. When she got hit in the eye, the referee stopped the match and checked her out. “Do you want to keep going?” Her shoulders heaving with sobs, she looked him in the eye and said, “Yes, sir.” And she went back in. At the end of the match, she came straight to me and I gave her a huge hug. I had to remind myself that I hadn’t forced her to come, hadn’t forced her to spar, but I still felt terrible. Then she pulled away from me and grinned. “That was fun!” The tears hadn’t even dried on her cheeks.

Don’t forget where pink comes from. Yes, it is tender—vulnerable even—but the surprise of pink is that it has red running through its veins, and its power isn’t as diluted as one might think. Pink is filled with passion and joy along with all that delicacy. The strength Middle drew on to keep fighting, to go back in and keep at it despite the difficulty—I hope she never forgets how to do that. She is my delicate, sensitive vulnerable girl, and I hope she never forgets how to be that, either. But when I think of the pain of this life, it seems good that she should learn how to fight, how to keep going, how to defend herself and the people around her. I can only hope to be half as strong as she is.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-06-13T08:25:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. The possibility of hundreds of colors
2. Collecting paint chips
3. Imagining
4. Finding the perfect shade
5. A full can of fresh paint
6. The first brush stroke
7. The sound of a roller laying down color
8. Chatting-while-working
9. Fresh walls, anything but white
10. The power to change your environment, even just a little

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

What Inspired You?

2011-06-10T12:19:00.001-05:00

I fell in love with Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata for Solo Violin, Op. 27, No. 3 (“Ballade”) the first time I heard it. I had heard a lot of violin music up to that point, but nothing quite like this—it was one of those moments where you feel yourself expanding with the newness of it, even while you are sure you always knew something like this was out there. Maybe I can do that, too! I knew then and there that I had to play it, even if it was over my head. It was a challenge, but totally worth it, and I eventually played it on a recital. It is a moment I am still proud of. (This performance is worlds better, and if you haven’t ever heard the piece, I highly recommend taking a listen.)

Then there’s the book that made me want to write: Sketches of Home, by Suzanne Clark. I started reading it Christmas Day, 2003. The way it spoke to me, the way she wrote about her life, made me want to write back, or at least join in.

I’m curious about your experiences—was there a piece of music, or artwork, or literature, or anything, that was completely new to you but somehow recognizable? Something that set you on a different course? What was it? How did it affect you? Did it change your life?

Silver

2011-06-08T13:21:00.002-05:00

The air is heavy right now. Heavy with humidity that reminds me of August, and heavy with the trilling of cicadas. About two weeks ago a brood of periodical cicadas began crawling out of the earth after a thirteen-year infancy underground to shed their skins, take to the trees, and find mates.

It is noisy. There are some parts of town where you barely notice the sound, but around our house it is cacophonous—like a million tiny beads spilling onto the floor, endless waves of spilling all day long. Above that sound is a higher-pitched whirring, a silvery trill between “e” and “f” that hangs in the air like a humid haze. The effect is surreal, unearthly—until I remind myself that it is exactly earthly. I am entranced.

I understand why people get annoyed. The cicadas are intrusive. The sound doesn’t stop, and can exceed 90 decibels if you are standing under a tree full of them. They fly into me once in a while. They land on my arm or my neck, prompting a little zing of adrenaline before I remember I’m not afraid of them. (They don’t bite or sting, but they are rather large, and if insects creep you out, this is not a particularly happy place to be right now.) Our lawn is littered with empty bronze skins. Remnants cling to flowers, branches, and leaves, and congregate around the roots of trees. Everywhere you look or step it seems there is a cicada flying or crawling or lying dead, its short life span already complete.

These times when the natural world interferes with normal life—I truly enjoy them. I like being forced to see or hear or move differently. Are you paying attention? Look! Do you see? Can you hear? Two weeks saturated with this electric sound is like two weeks edged with silver. How can you not pay attention? This is wonder, and yes, it has an edge to it. It is decidedly not greeting-card wonder; it is the kind of wonder that takes hold of you even while you feel the urge to turn away. But it is wonder-ful, because for a few weeks this summer, the air itself is silver.

Silver is an ornament, a glaze, a lining for something the artist or craftsman wants to highlight. Earrings direct the eyes to a face, a bracelet draws attention to the hand or arm. Tinsel on a Christmas tree, a silver place setting, tremolo violins in a Bruckner symphony. Silver is precious, but the things we adorn with silver, they are more so.

Do you see? Do you hear? These days you are walking through are lined with silver.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-06-06T08:20:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Lime popsicles
2. A downpour that lasts exactly as long as the car ride
3. Saying what you meant to say
4. Cool breeze through the window at night
5. Wearing something you made
6. That extra little bit of insight into a person
7. Chocolate that gets too soft in the cupboard
8. Harmonizing
9. Starting a new book, knowing it's going to be good
10. Anonymous old postcard, found in a book

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

Excess

2011-06-04T10:25:00.000-05:00

Just a sampling

Our family gets a little excessive when it comes to the library. Librarians tend to know us by name. I’m terrible at keeping track of when things are due, but I’ve learned to think of my constant fines for overdue books as charitable giving—it helps with the guilt. And as much as I try to keep things under control when we walk into a library, we always check out more books than we can comfortably carry, and overestimate what we can read in a week. I admit it, I indulge my children at the library.

I do have a few guidelines:

1. We are not buying these books. Middle, when she was two, used to follow me through the children’s section, grabbing books and saying, “Can we buy this one? Can we buy this one? Mommy, let’s buy this one!” I really felt that for the sake of her future financial security she would need to learn early that we do not spend money in the same irresponsible, decadent manner that we use a library card.

2. A library card is not a credit card. See above. Youngest is under the impression right now that her brand new library card is a credit card, and while this is an understandable mistake, I’m afraid it’s one that needs to be cleared up quickly.

3. If we are at the library for the second time in one week and there are already 40 or 50 books at home waiting to be read, we’re not bringing home another 40 or 50. Period.

4. Just like I limit how much junk food my kids eat, I limit junk books, too. Movie and television series merchandise masquerading as picture books make me nuts. Considering how much amazing stuff is out there, I’m afraid I’m pretty intolerant of books that don’t even bother to list the author and/or illustrator on the front cover.

This book excess is important. It is vital. It is an enormous factor in my kids’ education, not to mention my own. It’s hard to even quantify the things my kids pick up, just because of our frequent library visits. Our local library’s summer reading program started up this week, and the first big event was a visit from storyteller Bobby Norfolk. He had a whole roomful of kids and adults completely captivated, and besides doing some awesome storytelling, he put in a plug for his favorite section of the library: Call No. 398.2 (fairy tales and folklore). Later that evening, as I was starting in on a new story from our current read-aloud, Youngest just about flew out of bed. “Wait! Wait! IS THAT A FAIRY TALE?” When I told her it was, she laid back in bed happily. “Oh, good! Because Bobby Norfolk says they’re THE BEST!!” I couldn’t have asked for better support.

Brown

2011-06-01T10:25:00.002-05:00

I thought I was a blond for years. My mom single-handedly contributed to this belief, always commenting on the gold highlights she could see in my hair in the sunlight. And I was blond for a while, as a toddler and through my preschool years. My hair was light enough to draw a lot of attention when my parents were traveling with me in Japan. Who can really say when I passed from blond to brown? It happened gradually, and the moment I accepted it and moved on was probably a quiet one, fueled by my desire to avoid a well-meaning friend telling me (again) that if I was a blond, I was a dirty-dishwater-blond, at best. Brown seemed more appealing.

I learned how to embrace the color. Pale and golden was lovely, but brown had depth. I still find blond strands sometimes, but also black, auburn, caramel, and increasingly these days, white. Nobody ever accused me of being the fun girl, anyway. I was the one who went to the Sting concert and sat and listened. (I had a fabulous time, too.)

And I find I like that quality in brown—it might not reach out and grab you, but if you stop and pay attention, you will always find something there. It is warmth, depth, richness all around. Imagine desert without the color brown, a world without chocolate, butterscotch, or hazelnut. Consider life without all the brown spices—ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cumin. Brown is soil and tree bark and sleek forest creatures you almost didn’t see. Hardwood floors. Rembrandt, Stickley, sepia-toned photographs. Every shade of skin imaginable. The stuff of the earth.

Then there’s coffee. I decided to start drinking coffee when I was in college—partly because I wanted to seem more mature, and partly because I really wanted to appreciate the flavor. I loved the smell of coffee, and learning to enjoy it seemed like a good challenge. Did it have something to do with being able to drink bitterness and say it was good? I’m not entirely sure. But I love it now, the darker the roast the better, rich and hot in a generous white porcelain mug, the perfect companion for reading a book, talking with a friend, writing at my desk before anyone else is awake. Perfect for probing the depths of my connection to this world.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-05-30T06:54:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Flash of bluebird
2. Wind chimes tinkling
3. Nighthawk squawking
4. Counting to 100 for the very first time
5. Baby grasshoppers
6. Squirrel on an impossibly slender branch
7. PB&J, generously spread
8. My kids’ cheeks
9. Reaching out
10. Ghostly cicada, rearing back out of its skin

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

Just for Fun

2011-05-27T08:31:00.000-05:00

For you this morning, some fabulous music:

Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica playing “Spring in Buenos Aires” from Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons Suite

Orange

2011-05-25T06:41:00.002-05:00

I neglected orange for years. In my mind, it was relegated to out-of-date kitchens and highway construction zones. No matter that my favorite soft drink for years was Orange Crush, or that when offered a choice of suckers, orange was my go-to choice—until an older friend informed me that cherry was actually the best flavor. I always loved color, but orange fell in with brown—a necessary hue, but a last choice.

When Oldest was born, though, orange was reborn. When I wanted a change from all the blue and green outfits, orange was suddenly the perfect color. It fit him—bright, sunny, fresh, sweet-but-not-saccharine. Orange has character. It has the power to leap up and surprise you with its strength. Orange introduces itself and smiles broadly. In fact, orange introduces you to strangers.

Orange is the fact that boys are mysterious beings—sweet, grumpy, loving, tenacious arguers. Orange is a drum set, Korean, Hawaiian shirts, and Taekwon-do instead of cello, Latin, plaid shirts, and soccer. Orange is a surprise, an opening-up, a stretching, a realization that any dearly-held, preconceived notions are pale in comparison to what could actually be. Orange is color where I didn't know I wanted it, all the good stuff I never imagined was out there.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-05-23T08:36:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I'm willing to see it:

1. Green hills
2. Raindrops snaking across the windshield
3. Field polka-dotted with seedlings
4. Purple iris growing in a ditch
5. Swaths of grass left wild
6. Wet trees
7. Relaxing into the drive
8. Companionship of headlights
9. Ripple of glowing clouds
10. Watching the world slide into blue, then dark

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

List Lovers: Music for a Day when the Only Cure for it is a Good Romp Outside

2011-05-19T09:14:00.002-05:00

I'm joing The Little List again today with some music links. I don't know about you, but sometimes spring fever hits me really hard. I've felt super restless recently, and the cold and rain we've had over the last few weeks seems to only augment that feeling. Some days all I really want to do is run around outside, forgeting anything that bears any resemblance to responsibility. So here's some music I love that is perfect for joining the kids outside:

1. Beethoven Symphony No. 7 in A Major, 4th mvt.
2. 3rd movement, Mendelssohn violin concerto in e minor
3. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, from Holst’s “the Planets”
4. “Tanz” from Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff
5. Glazunov violin concerto in A Minor, 3rd movement (the 2nd and 3rd movements in this piece are connected; the actual romping starts right around the 4” mark)

East of the Sun and West of the Moon

2011-05-18T09:21:00.001-05:00

There’s been a dangerous development of sorts at our house. Not that we haven’t been on the cusp of it for years, but recently some of my husband’s and my individual passions have become very much intertwined. I’m worried we won’t be able to balance each other out.

I don’t mean to make it sound like we’ve never shared interests, before. Not at all—I married another musician, for one thing—one who, like me, actually read books for pleasure while pursuing a graduate degree in music. When we go to a bookstore together we will invariably meet up in the children’s section, wherever else each of us happens to wander in the meantime. We have similar or at least complementary opinions about family, music, art, education, and lifestyle. But we’ve always kept little niches to ourselves, too. It gets dangerous, otherwise—nobody to keep us from going overboard.

In terms of books, we agree that owning them and reading them is good. But he gets a lot more excited about rare books than I do. I am happy to have an ex-library edition of something if it is a good book. The more worn and dog-eared it is, the more I figure it has been loved and has proved its worth. To him, the writing is still supremely important, but a book is only enhanced by being old, leather-bound, gilt-edged, and rare. I appreciate those things, but the fact remains that I am stingy, and always less likely to buy the fancy version. Thus—balance.

Recently, though, my husband discovered Calla Editions, distributed by Dover Books. These good people have a short list of books (they’ve only been around since 2008), but many of them are reprints of classics: Grimm's Fairy Tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham, The Arabian Nights illustrated by René Bull, Stories from Hans Christian Andersen illustrated by Edmund Dulac, The Knave of Hearts illustrated by Maxfield Parrish, and maybe one of my all-time favorite books, East of the Sun and West of the Moon illustrated by Kay Nielsen. They are beautiful, hardcover books, and they are priced like nice hardcovers, not like rare antiques.

And so we have come to own, among others, a reprint of East of the Sun and West of the Moon. I hardly know what to say about this book, it is so close to me. I grew up on a shortened version, with only six of the fifteen original stories, published by Doubleday & Co., Inc. in 1977. (The original book came out in 1914; the Calla Edition is a reproduction of that.) It is a collection of Scandinavian fairy tales culled from Asbjörnsen and Moe’s “Norske Folkeeventyr,” Asbjörnsen and Moe being to Norway what the Brothers Grimm were to Germany. The stories are wonderful—spare, mysterious, full of trolls and princesses and impoverished young men who make their way in the world through their own cunning and the help of magical creatures they have aided along the way. But the artwork—that is the book’s magnificence. I believe the illustrations have single-handedly defined what my Scandinavian heritage means to me—well, maybe along with the Norwegian desserts we always ate at Christmastime and multiple readings of D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths. But really—the artwork is amazing. Kay Nielsen was a Danish artist whose name was linked with “the golden age of illustration” along with artists like Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. His work has distinct Art Nouveau and Japanese influences. It is stylized, graceful, and full of magic. The color illustrations in this book are drenched with color and detail, and the black and white illustrations are equally detailed, but more austere. I am at a loss to tell you today if I love gnarled weeping trees, stylized flowers, rocky terrains, and a particular sort of play of light against dark because I was born with that aesthetic or because of this book. Follow this link to see what I'm talking about.

Honestly, this book and the others like it qualify as fine art as much as literature.

And so passions have collided. “But see, it’s not dangerous,” my husband told me yesterday. “Because we can actually afford these editions.” Which in my mind is precisely where the danger lies.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-05-16T07:17:00.001-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. Fresh mint
2. Gold-flecked chrysalis
3. Silvery slug trail
4. Cool air after rain
5. Inhaling the scent of coffee beans
6. Exploring a dry creek bed
7. Shy flowers: wild ginger and mayapple
8. Blanket of baby ferns
9. Tiny speckled bird egg
10. Watching a four year-old play “Memory”

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

Green

2011-05-14T14:01:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I feel like this picture. Peaceful, alive, reaching for the light. Silent and contained, like for this brief period now at the end of the school year, when I realize we have all, in fact, survived. That many things were good.

My students gave their spring recital last night. There was a moment, when all 14 were playing, filling the little church stage, where I really couldn’t believe we were all doing this together—making music. Not perfectly, but with intent, with purpose, with seriousness and joy all mixed together.

I suppose we are green, all of us. My students are young, inexperienced, but learning. As for myself, the more I go through this life the more I realize that I still don’t know exactly how to live it—at least not the way I envisioned it when I was a teenager looking at adults in their mysterious-but-boring middle years. And here I am, knowing what I want to be about, but realizing that every day is an experiment, and that I am constantly in new territory.

Green is “I still feel new at this but I’ve learned to believe in growth and I’m going to keep sending these tender, imperfect shoots out into the world.” Green is hope.

Sometimes green is going through the whole party feeling pretty satisfied with yourself—slightly glamorous, even—until you discover the great big gob of spinach stuck between your front teeth.

Green is new life, tender feet, everything-old-is-made-new-again. Green is coolness and good, the backdrop to the flower, the fluttering grace on the tree. Green is all things thriving, welcoming the light.

Green is fantasy—an Emerald City, a miniature landscape carved out of jade behind glass in a museum. Green is the light, driving down a tree-lined road in summer. Green is an idea taking shape.

On Raising Dreamers

2011-05-11T10:39:00.000-05:00

Mommy, how can I keep my feet on the ground and my head in the clouds? I wrote those words in high school, as part of an assignment to write a group of poems about my body. It was a wonderful, challenging assignment, but when I got to my feet, all I could think about was the tension I felt between imagination and practicality.

My parents understood. They teased me a little about being a dreamer, but it was something they cultivated. At the same time, though, they carried a big burden for teaching me things like responsibility, practicality, and looking where I was going. My mother likes to tell the story of when I was three and discovered my first ladybug—how I watched it endlessly, examining it, exclaiming over it, completely absorbed in this tiny detail. She also likes to tell about when I was four and in the hospital because of an asthma attack—how when the doctor asked me if I was having trouble breathing I answered, between gasps for air, “No.” Some things I notice well, other things—one of which is apparently breathing—can completely escape me.

How do you raise a dreamer? Here I am, raising three of them, and I don’t entirely know. A lot of what I’m doing here with this blog is trying to figure that out. I’m not sure any of us in this family were entirely made for practicality, but there are survival issues, aren’t there? I remember watching my oldest put on his socks when he was five or six. The task was made especially challenging by the fact that he was busy hitting all the notes to “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” at the same time. (The version he was familiar with, by the way, was a bit less scary than the one in the link, but the singing wasn't nearly as amazing.) Which of those two skills do you think I end up focusing on when we’re trying to get out the door to get someplace on time? I struggle with patience, quite often right at the points where dreaminess and practicality meet. It seems like I most often fall short at the point where I should be the most understanding.

I recently finished reading The Dreamer, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, illustrated by Peter Sís. I connected with it both as a dreamer and as a parent. It is a beautifully-written, fictionalized account of Pablo Neruda’s childhood. His childhood name is Neftalí Reyes, and he is a quiet, fragile boy full of dreams and entranced with words. He collects words on slips of paper in his dresser drawer. He collects objects, too: pinecones, stones, shells. He has a gift for writing, but stutters when he tries to speak. And he has a father who wants to drive all the dreaminess out of him so he can be strong, and become a doctor or successful businessman. With the nurturing of his stepmother, his uncle, and a librarian in a small seaside town, however, he finds his strength within his dreams, and the ground is laid for his future work.

Stories with parents like Neftalí’s father distress me, partly because he is so harsh in dealing with his artistic son, and partly because I recognize the fear that drives his harshness. Do I dare admit how many mistakes I’ve made, myself, that were driven by fear? How often I can swing from feeling like everything’s going beautifully to being sure that I’m not good enough, my kids aren’t good enough, that we are all, in fact, headed for disaster due to the fact that we are all of us too busy pondering life, or singing, or thinking poetic thoughts to put on our socks quickly enough to get someplace on time?

Author Pam Muñoz Ryan poses the question, in the middle of the chapter titled, “Forest,” “Which is sharper? The hatchet that cuts down dreams? Or the scythe that clears a path for another?” Neftalí’s brother Rodolfo wants to be a singer, but their father stands in opposition to this dream, as well. Rodolfo eventually bends to his father’s will, but Neftalí grows stronger—partly in opposition to his father and partly because he cannot seem to deny who he is. As the reader, my heart was with Neftalí all the way, but the father touched me, too, strengthening my resolve about the kind of parent I aspire to be. I was glad for this book. It was truly beautiful, even as (or maybe because) it brought to the surface some all-too-familiar struggles.

10 Bits of Magic

2011-05-09T07:13:00.000-05:00

Remembering that grace and wonder abound if I’m willing to see it:

1. House wren’s song
2. Stumbling upon a glass of yard-treasure
3. Purple potatoes
4. Dreams in which you know how to fly
5. A rope swing
6. Being transparent with each other
7. Painted lady caterpillars
8. Driving alone, hazy morning sky
9. Spicy caramel corn
10. Handmade Mother’s Day cards

What bits of magic have you seen or experienced recently?

Today

2011-05-08T14:59:00.000-05:00

I’m thinking today of my mom, how she still shares books with me, reads what I write, calls regularly. How becoming a grandmother seized her even more strongly than she thought it would.

I’m thinking today of her mom, who died Mother’s Day weekend last year. Who loved to sing and draw and swing and flirt and ride horses. Who was strong even as she lay dying.

I’m thinking today of her mom—my maternal great grandmother. Of how my mom says I make her think of her. The one who married a photographer and dreamed of being a writer, but was busy raising three young children in a time when laundry was all done by hand.

I’m thinking today of my other grandmother, the one I never knew. The one who died too young, before her sons were grown, but who I know through stories as an artist, a musician, a queenly woman.

I’m thinking today of her mother—my father’s grandmother. Not only an organist but someone who was always creating, always doing. The one who was so tiny and strong that when she fell into a heating duct while cleaning she was able to hang there by her elbows until her husband got home from work and pulled her out.

All these women are a part of me somehow, and I am humbled by and thankful for that heritage.

Happy Mother’s Day to you.