Rachel getting pregnant

My friend Rachel is pregnant. She and her husband Darren are the first in our immediate group of friends to pass this big milestone, and Rachel is the first close friend whose pregnancy I've gotten to witness in a day-to-day fashion. We used to joke around about who would have kids first, but it was always rather obvious it would be her - my labor phobia combined with our itinerant life plan pretty much guaranteed that. We even once went to an art fair together, and I bought a card especially for her that said in big letters "I'm glad you're having a baby," and in small letters "and I'm not." After the card gathered dust for a few years, I finally got to dig it up a couple of weeks ago, and I had a moment of profound awe as I placed it in the mailbox. I've had a similar feeling every time I see Rachel with her tummy slightly bigger than the week before. While the message of the card still holds true, and I do not feel anywhere close to ready to join in the club, I find it moving and, well yes, sort of epic, that my friend is becoming a part of a story that will reach so far beyond her and be told long after she is gone. To her little baby boy, she will be the first Woman. She will be somebody's mom, that defining figure he will associate with warmth and love; the mysterious force he will one day try to describe to a partner or decipher in therapy like I still try to decipher my parents. Maybe one day he will say to me: You knew my mom before I was born. What was she like back then? And I will answer - yes, I knew her. I saved a card for her for three years before you were born, saw her belly grow each week, and helped paint your baby room in their first house. Let me tell you about the art she made everywhere she turned, from stationery to food. In fact, let me tell you about the time...

I know kids don't usually ask these sorts of questions about their parents, at least until all their parents' friends are dead; I know these sorts of narratives are more common in literature than in real life. Yet I can't help but realize the good fortune of having friends close enough that the birth of their kids is a major event in my own life, inspiring dreamy and tender thoughts about their future as well as my own.

Happiness for Benjamin

My brother is working in the Netherlands for a couple of months, and he feels lonely there all by himself. Today he asked me to send some happiness his way, so here is my best attempt. Dear Benjamin:

Remember the long summer days when we were little kids? Even though mom could hardly get us out of bed on school days, as soon as school was over, we jumped out of bed at first crack of dawn, and we ran down to the back yard to play. Remember how we used to make soup and magic potions out of the berries that grew on the hedge, and soak in the old metal tub when we got hot? Once when you were just a toddler, your sisters and I dressed you in one of our old bathing suits. It was hot pink and very girlie, but you thought it was the greatest thing in the world to look just like your big sisters. We still have a picture somewhere of you in the pink suit, splashing in the tub with a big grin on your face. Those days were nothing but happiness, and it didn't matter that rust was peeling off the old tub or that our family was poor.

Growing up, of course, robs us of the utterly carefree joys of childhood. But its glimmers are still around you in the simple things - the rays of morning sunshine, the satisfaction of a good meal, a hearty laugh with a friend, the way humans still fall in love despite thousands of years of heartbreak. In a way, your ability to feel dissatisfaction or emptiness is the other side of a coin that has a happy face. Until very recently - and in many parts of the world it hasn't changed to this day - all but a few people have experienced heartache and toil as such obvious aspects of daily life that they know little else. You, my brother, feel the loneliness of this season because you have known many other, sunnier ones. The best way I can send you some happiness in this cold time of year is by stating it loud and clear that this too shall pass - so you might as well get out there and earn yourself a better next season. Remembering this is how I survive in this dreadfully frigid place with six-month winters - and you know just how much I hate the cold. Winter is much easier to live through if it's in the shadow of the coming summer. It's not endless, so I might as well enjoy some sledding or snow fights! So think of the warm summer days in our back yard when it gets cold, and I hope they warm you up on the inside so you can put up a snow fight or two before it's all over.

Couch time

Today marked the beginning of a highly unusual week. In fact, I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a week such as this one.

I am not working or going to class, and I don't have any plans for the next seven days.

When I realized this today, it gave me an odd feeling. I couldn't remember the last time this happened! Of course, I remember the last time I was off work for a week: my friend and my sister were visiting, and I was showing them my new home on this side of the Atlantic. The time before that, I took time off to travel to Poland to work at an arts festival. In the last two years, there have been a few week-long research trips or visits with family. But as much as I rack my brain, I can't remember the last time I was home for a week with nothing urgent on my to-do list.

Before I moved to America, week-long periods of rest or mere inactivity seemed a lot more common. It may have had to do with the fact that I lived in the world of academia, but I live in the same kind of world here. It may also have to do with being in a doctoral program now, so perhaps what I say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Yet when people ask me if there is anything that surprised me about life in this country, the pace of life is usually the first thing that comes to mind. Americans work a lot more and take less time off than people in Poland. While I admire the work ethic I see here, I find that it sometimes goes too far - people seem to take pride in always staying busy, never missing a day of work, or giving back paid vacation days, which creates a whole culture of overwork-ness. What gets lost along the way is time to just be, to sit back and reflect on the purpose of all that frantic activity, be silent enough to pray, to remember friends and think new thoughts.

It is perhaps a mark of my advanced acculturation that the first thing I thought of today was making a to-do list for my week off. There is laundry to be done, my heinously messy closet, shelves I got for Christmas last year still waiting to be hung, heaps of unanswered emails, a Christmas letter that is already late... I didn't make a list though. I sat on this couch for most of the day, at times immersed in a novel about nothing academic whatsoever, and at times mildly uncomfortable in the silence. Tomorrow shall worry about itself - today I had the good sense to leave the worrying to the couch.

Photo courtesy of Becca

A Day in the Life

For one day in November, Billy and I had a chance to participate in an amazing art project made possible by our dear friend Becca. It all started a couple of months ago, when I was looking at our wedding pictures and the thought occurred to me that the photos most of us have in our albums are taken on extraordinary occasions that represent a departure from what life is normally like on a daily basis. There are pictures of weddings, vacations, Christmases, graduations - important days that happen just once. Most of our life, meanwhile, happens between those times, monotonous and undocumented. Yet it's those repetitive days full of repetitive activities that constitute most of our lives, and those things often go undocumented. In five years, will I remember the shape of the leaves on the sidewalk on my way to the bus? Will I be able to picture our first apartment, the look of my bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth every morning, the slant of afternoon light through the kitchen window?

Some time later, I was talking with Becca, who is an amazingly talented artist and the owner of a small business called Liminality Photography. She was telling me about a wedding she had shot, and I shared my recent thoughts with her - how it's a great thing to have a record of the grand days, but I'm sad that we don't capture the mundane ones. That conversation was how the idea of a Day in the Life photo shoot was born. For one day in November, Becca followed us around for an entire day - waking up, walking around our neighborhood, going to work, having late night drinks with friends. It is a record of not just one day, but a unique season of life turned into art. We're so grateful to Becca for creating this, and our hope all along was that these photos would inspire others to document the precious details of our daily lives.





































All photographs copyright of Liminality LLC

Samson

Samson is the name of the new raccoon in our backyard. I have seen him twice now hanging out in the bushes near the fence, just staring at me. This time instead of trying to speak his language ( a mix of squirrel and swahili ), I spoke to him in English in hopes that he has picked it up over the years of living among us. I told him that I mean him no harm and will allow him to remain here in peace, provided that he not eat the pumpkins I am trying to grow this fall. It is funny how I just read an article yesterday about how we humans anthropomorphize animals and impose morality upon them. We try to tame them and try to find a kindred spirit within them yet all that is present is the empty and cold eye of nature staring back at us. Killer Whales with cute names turn on their trainers after years of working together, Chimpanzees maul their owners faces after they treat them like sons, and grizzly man's grizzlies eat him and his girlfriend after years of "friendship". We think that sharks are evil and wicked for doing what they are made to do. Yet here I am feeling that same desire within me to talk with our new resident, to connect to the wild as if I had a supernatural power and ability to be understood by the savage beast. I will even name him Samson (It could be a girl for all I know,:) ) And I dream of one day inviting him into our home for tea. Maybe one day I will hear a knock on the door and it will be Samson wanting to come in and talk about relations between our species and the politics of the animals living in the alley. We will wax long and eloquently about the divide between Man and Beast, the prejudices on both sides, the unfair profiling (not all raccoons are thieves of course, they can't help it if they were born with a mask), and of course we will touch on our abuses of the planet, how plastic is causing cancer in so many raccoons these days and how the young ones are getting hooked early, how more and more coons come to the city in search of jobs because their forests are being developed into upscale housing and of course global warming. Yes, we will talk late into the night about the world's problems, decide that there is nothing that we can do about it except live a good and simple life, and then...He will bite my face off.

Human Mirrors

A few months ago, we participated in an art show for our dear friend Jayme . Partly by virtue of our friendship and partly because of the character of her art, it was the most personal and touching experience with art that I am likely to ever have.

Over the period of almost a year, Jayme listened to the stories of eighteen individuals and painted what she heard - abstract portraits of their inward journeys and movements of soul. I walked around the room covered with goose bumps. Many of the people she painted were friends and community members, people with whom I eat, laugh, study, party and generally live life with on a weekly basis. Yet Jayme's art opened a window to their inner worlds that seemed all the more sacred because it involved her own response to what she saw.

Jayme's gift to her subjects was that listened to each person for as long as they chose to talk, and then reflected what she heard through artistic expression. Here is you, she said. Here is what I saw. It was her gift of truly seeing these eighteen unique people that gave me goose bumps. Here is you, she said, and you are beautiful. Not in a rosy, pretty way, but in a messy, sometimes bloody-red, sometimes pitch-black way. Glorious. Magnificent.

Ever since Jayme's show, I've thought a lot about truly seeing people. The bursting life and glory of her paintings surrounds me every day, if I look deep enough. Even without looking deep enough, the glimpses of human beauty regularly cause me to catch my breath. Not only artists see others from more angles and in more colors than those others see themselves. Some may disagree, but I'm inclined to believe that we all construct our mutual identities through the spoken and unspoken messages we communicate to one another. We become what we are seen for - from the kid who flunks out of school because he keeps hearing he is stupid to the woman who radiates from the inside because her lover can't stop saying she's beautiful. You know the saying that behind every successful man is a woman? I'd say that behind every successful, happy, fulfilled person is someone who thinks that person is wonderful - and tells them so. I wonder sometimes if this is a big part of why people crave romantic love and partnership - to be truly seen and well-reflected, to be the hero of someone's narrative, to look into a human mirror and see a character we may want to identify with. So what does it look like to pick up the paintbrush and mix some colors? Could it begin with something as simple as saying not just "thank you" but "I think you are"?