Irresistible

Made of Stars

Fear, Invitations, and a Little Film

This is what summer on Jen's block looks like.

The truth is, I am terrified to create.  Also I'm terrified not to. 

In the tension between these two things lives a little voice that says it would be so much easier if someone would just ask me to make something.  I know that art springs from a place of granting yourself permission, or maybe of a compulsion too strong to resist.  But there's still a part of me too timid to claim this for myself.

A year ago, Jen Lemen said, come here for a weekend and let's make some art.

And as I was boarding the plane I thought well, I couldn't ask for a more direct invitation than that.

I landed in the midst of a whirlwind of emotion and I watched through my camera, wondering if it was rude, or voyeuristic, or crazy, to record this stuff.  I decided to sit in the discomfort, and also in the love, just witnessing it.  I thought maybe the camera could hold space for all of us to process our own moment.  Mostly I wanted to be part of creating something that was both beautiful and true.  I hope we did that.

Today over at Hopeful World, Jen is releasing our little project to the light.  I am so grateful for the invitation to create with Jen and for the nights that I sat side-by-side with my friend Dustin editing. Let's make more things that are beautiful and true.

Fluid Dynamics

I came home from the airport to discover a for-sale sign in the neighbors' yard.  They moved in when their first-born and Ezra were both infants and since then we've spent countless summer afternoons on the sidewalk in front of our houses watching them crawl, then toddle, then bike back and forth.  They have a million good reasons to move and I understand them all.  But I still feel short of breath thinking of them going.

This week Ezra and I will walk into the school where he will start Kindergarten for our first family meet-and-greet.  Will and I agonized over whether to move him from the school he's attended since he was 8 months old but determined that he is ready for the challenge of a new environment.  I get weak in the knees when I think of school supplies and new sneakers and the rhythm of the school year.

Whispers in the halls at the office, growing in volume over weeks to a deafening white noise that underlies everything else, about mergers and acqusitions.  We were a smallish business when I started here but no more.  If we have fattened into the kind of tasty morsel that looks irresistible to a deep-pocketed corporate investor, that's a win I suppose, but not without attendant anxiety. 

Suddenly it seems currents of change swirl around me, and I wonder if I can park myself in an eddy and wait it out.  It's strange, because for some time I've felt the tension of a powerful surge growing up behind the dam of my life's predictability.  Feeling it would break and unleash some kind of furious shift in the world as I know it.  Now I suffocate in the unknowing. 

I am deeply unsettled.  I hone to a razor's edge my hardest questions about whether I've made the right choices and hold them to the light.  It's strange that even these predictable things - neighbors move, children grow, businesses do business - trigger shifts that feel seismic.  My wish: to befriend the unknowing, to call in synchronicity, to breathe.

Still Life