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.

New Year, New Superpower

I was a scrooge on 12-12-12.

That special day, that once in a lifetime, that creative convergence when it seemed like everyone I know had a project going, fell on a day when I was busy being ground into fine dust between the mortar and pestle of work deadlines. I was in a bad mood about not being able to participate in the project that much of my creative community had devoted themselves to that day. I felt sorry for myself, and I grumbled well, it's just numbers. It's not any day that's more special than any other day. I could just pick another day to document.

And I was right, I could.

This week I've been walking in the snow. Last winter we dutifully came to the mountains because we love it here, but it rarely snowed. This winter on December 9 the snow started to fall like it's supposed to and everything is blanketed in a beautiful downy white.  There are igloos to build, snowshoe trails to break, the lightest powder to ski through. The tracks of each day's adventures are covered by the time we emerge in the morning.  

I've also been making lists this week, scraps of reflection on what went right in 2012, what didn't go so well, and what I hope for 2013.  What will I accomplish?  How will I be better?  But in the midst of the lists I hear a small voice in my ear, telling me that this New Year's Day is just one day, and every day is a new day.  Every day brings with it the possibility of renewal.

So this I intend for myself, my superpower of 2013: to make it snow in my head at will. In the moments when I need a fresh start, to camouflage my tracks, to cover the blemishes in my path, may I find the peace within me to bring down a psychic snow that covers everything and gives me a chance to start again, anew, with the understanding that every day is a special day.  Every day is once in a lifetime and every day holds infinite possibilities for growth, love, and creation.

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Happiest of New Years to all of you.  I hope 2013 allows each of you to tap into wells of strength and power within you that you didn't even know you possessed.

Where I've Been

There are days when I look and everything around me seems so fragile.  The dried veins of fallen leaves browning, crackling under my feet.  Everything changing rapidly and not for the easier.  This is the season, it seems, of white knuckling and holding on tight and praying please please please let me get through this one alright.  With any shred of grace, dear Universe, please and thank you please and thank you please and thank you.

Work is consuming in a way that is as predictable as the calendar, and yet here I am wondering how I will make it through and if past success is any guarantee of future performance.  Some of my most sacred relationships seem on the brink of disintegrating like the autumn leaves and I don't know how to stay present to that when running away or lashing out seem more satisfying.  This season of thanksgiving and richness leaves me feeling scared and humbled.

I have been gone from here partly because time has been scarce and partly because I couldn't think of anything nice, or at least well-put, to say.  This is a loss for me, this space sitting dormant, and more broadly the connections I share here and the satisfaction of putting words together in a way that pleases me.  I trust the path to my computer and this place will open again and I will find my way back.

In the meantime I give myself one gift, even though it doesn't always feel like one: I'm back to a picture a day.  I promised myself that I wouldn't put pressure to blog it, so you can find it here if you're so inclined.  In this season of scarce light and attention I try not to get hung up on the questions that plague me, like what do I shoot? and is that good enough? and can't you think of anything besides Ezra to take a picture of?  I hope that when this time of scarcity and transition passes I'll have more space to address these questions.  In the meantime, I shoot, and not always artfully.  But I know that owning this practice will ultimately help me move through this hard part.  If there is to be a shred of grace on the other side of this, I know the practice is what will help me maintain contact.

Shameless

The Scots flew home on Saturday and when Ezra's naptime rolled around on Sunday I found myself surprised to be alone.  I had an assignment for the portrait class I am taking to shoot a portrait of someone I know using a flash. 

Assignment + solitude = selfie.

Self portraits give you an opportunity to see yourself as you are.  But by Sunday afternoon I had an idea about creating an image of myself as I'd like to be: shameless. 

This word has been bubbling up in me for the past several days, a call to cultivate this trait in myself.  But then the little voice that's a sucker for precision in language piped up, saying, but shamelessness is a bad thing!  I checked with the dictionary to confirm, and it turns out the little voice was right.  Merriam-Webster defines shameless as:

1: having no  shame : insensible to disgrace <a shameless braggart>

2: showing lack of shame <the shameless exploitation of the natives>

I watched Brene Brown's newest TED talk (you should clear 20 minutes out of your schedule RIGHT NOW to watch if you haven't yet, and if you haven't seen her first one on vulnerability, you should clear out another 20 minutes and watch that first) in which she describes shame as the voice in your head that says you're not good enough.

And then, if you manage to resist that one, it says who do you think you are?

You're not good enough.  Who do you think you are?

I have never thought of shame as my issue.  What do I have to be ashamed of, after all?  But this?  This you're not good enough, who do you think you are?  This is my loop.  So if this loop is what shame generates, I want out. 

I want to be able to bare myself to myself, the dreams, the fears, the lines in my skin.  I want to look myself in the eye.  I want to say to myself, to believe on a molecular level, I am enough.

Never mind the dictionary.  I want to be shameless.

Fruity Shots and Other Bad Habits

Let the record reflect that I did my taxes last night, February 22, 2012.  And since a tree doesn't make a sound in the year 2012 if it isn't recorded in social media, I mentioned it on Twitter.  To which my oldest friend replied, I'm surprised you didn't wait until April 15.

Last weekend I was complaining to Sarah about how behind I am at work.  Sarah, who signed up for the 8:30 section of Communications Law with me our senior year of college and then proceeded to spend most of the semester next to my empty chair.  Sarah, who invariably watched me sweat out a term paper in the waning hours before a deadline, if I couldn't charm my way into an extension.  Sarah, who regularly witnessed my propensity to put my boobs on the bar and bat my eyelashes just in time for free shots.  (Somewhere in Syracuse, a bartender is weeping at the realization that both I and the stale beer-smelling bar I haunted have moved on.)

The point is, I outgrew the fruity shots.  I outgrew the coquettish shtick.  I outgrew Communications Law (though probably by the skin of my teeth). 

But I'm still sporting this lamest of all lame character traits: procrastination.

You can't stand in line at the grocery story without a litany of suggestions about how to improve yourself.  Bikini Body In 10 Days!  5 Tips for a Flat Belly!  Never Have the "Bra...No-Bra?" Internal Debate Again!

But where is the Get Your Shit Together And Get It Done On Time headline?

Where is the Yeah, You're 38 and Every Cute Part of You Has Fallen or Grayed So Let's Dispense With The Game of Chicken?

Honestly I would rather share my weight or my debt-to-credit ratio here than this little nugget of shame, but I'm hoping that admitting I have a problem will help move me past it.

My name is Corinna, and I have a problem with self-discipline and procrastination.

Of course Ezra was up all night with an apparent ear infection and a bloody nose that left me looking like a mom out of a Stephen King novel.  So, um, yeah.  This whole productivity thing is probably going to have to wait until tomorrow.