my life in photographs

 It has been thirteen days since I last posted here — which quietly breaks my heart. I found an interview I did years ago and it reminded me of why I began blogging in the first place. It was not for the applause or the very small promise that is sharing your inner world and hoping others like it too.  No, it was an escape shoot from the mundane, a way of finding myself as a girl, as an artist, and beyond all, my own way of figuring out what it meant to be a human being. I could convince you with certainty that I am a better woman for having had this blog. It has been the greatest task I have ever followed through - because of what I have learned, because of who I have met, because of how vulnerable these blog entries turn me and I am so glad to have shared these years with you.

sunlight on the staircase

the good thing about living

 In the belly of a may tree, there is a certain kind of fragrance that feels more like forgiveness and so it drifts from the bough and onto the hair of those who walk beneath it, as if to say "despite it all, you're still something worth holding, worth loving, and worth knowing." I see the garden, I see the cherry tree, I see the little buds where Saskatoon berries are soon to fall, and it is just like the world has put words to a melody you have always wanted to sing but the hum wasn't enough to make a song out of it. I can imagine the cotton dress somebody's mother wore when she walked by trees such as these, rich with the daylight and promise of what places she could one day find herself in.

I wonder how many women have looked at the may tree and said "now, this, this is beautiful" and then went on to pick petals to put into glass jars so they could rise in the morning with something that was theirs and yet, still, like an open window to let sunlight through, belonged to everybody who was there. How many humans have we walked passed on our way to a mailbox, or the grocery store, or the woods who have stood where we stand now with thoughts that look just like ours.

But they don't say it.

----

Yesterday, I had tears in my eyes, they rolled from my face like wet cloth on a clothespin and I couldn't make out which flowers were cherry blossoms and which ones were dandelions. I could hear the ice cream truck merrily going off in the distance, but it has never sounded so sad, so unfamiliar to me. When your vision is blurred from crying eyes, it is a lot like being held together with sticky tape and not glue or muscle. You cannot see what is ahead of you, only the saddest feelings surface. After a certain amount of feeling hopeless, I closed my eyes and the song of every bird in the neighborhood started to mute the sad that was an ice cream truck's attempt to make me realize how I am not a child anymore and yesterday, I was not a child, and tomorrow, I will still be the adult version of me. The neighborhood birds chirped on as if it say "despite it all, you're still something worth holding, worth loving, and worth knowing."

If you are reading this,
let it be known
let yourself
be
It is okay to cry
In fact, it helps build muscle
heart muscle
so when your vision is blurred from crying eyes
you can still see cherry blossoms
and the tall grasses where dandelions grow
you will wonder where the time has gone
when an ice cream truck pulls into your neighborhood
but that is okay too
just because
they tell you you're an adult, now
doesn't mean you cannot have a dance floor
under your bed spring
or
ice cream
on the tip of your tongue

the good thing about living
is not that it ends
but that it has not ended
yet.

outfit details: emily and fin dress, smithbuilt hat, winners shoes

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my life in photographs

Do you ever wake up from underneath the blanket, only to feel a slight tinge of sorrow or regret and there is absolutely no cause for you to feel this way. That is how I met morning — slightly strange, slightly nervous, slightly curious with no need for it, as if I said something wrong the evening before but I know I couldn't have. Honeyed light pours through the kitchen window, a coffee maker makes sounds I can hear, dried snapdragons are in view, dogs who are snoring, what could it possibly be that brings me to a mood that is not a celebration of all that this is? Perhaps, it is not a good time to ask, just a time to go on as I do.

 

 My weapon of choice. The banjo. The reason I ever began singing and ringing out what grows in the bones and the mind and the belly of a human. If it weren't for this moon shaped machine, I could be traveling through this wide unknown world less sure and certainly less satisfied.

When the world looks like roses before you.

I've been thinking of the mountains and how we are nearing the time where wildflowers start to sprout and paint the wild brush that is a mountainside. I grow tired of the city even though it does have good offerings of it's own-- music, people, pipe dreams being born, but I need that wild kind of strangeness and aliveness that seems to only exist when I am not here. 'I am mountain bound' might very well be my favorite sentence in the English language. After, 'I brought you snacks', of course.

Here I am with two dried bouquets, one is bright with snapdragon flowers and the other, made up of leftover plants dried over winter.

Can somebody send a little springtime to my neck of the woods? I want to adventure, catch a glimpse of flowers, toil in the soil, but May begins and although the may tree buds are starting to green, I just want them to bloom because when they do, I'll have more than dried snapdragons and leftover petals to grin upon.

I slept in until 11 am for the first time in years. Then, I was greeted by a warm plate of food made by a kindhearted woman I call my mum. Feeling lucky to be living today. Feeling well enough to take up singing and dancing through these halls.

When I entered the storyhive competition, I was rattled with shakes and uncertainty if it was something I could do - asking for help, asking for votes, talking about myself and my dreams for one week straight. I mean it when I say, I don't want to be a mosquito buzzing my way into your feeds, taking you away from your day, putting a microscope on me, but I now know that the weight of dreams is lifted and softened when you let others help you, confide in you, and love you. I have lived my entire life with the back of a turtle shell, always hiding, always believing that I was unfit to be loved, but the truth is as true as the sky can be blue, there are people in this world who want to lift you up.

From where I sit, I can hear the black capped chickadees parading from treetop to treetop as if the whole world is theirs and something in me says that it is and I am just here visiting. Before I could truly know the beauty that is birds singing on a warm weather day, I had to hear the crows echo through the chimney as I shivered and sighed at the length of a winter. We earn our seasons here, so every drop of sunlight counts. Like memories do. Like life does. Like seconds appearing and disappearing. Like remembering your mother's voice. Or that time you stayed out on the hillside until morning. It is seeing the geese finally return or letting lemonade sit on your tongue. It is the way dust shows on the window and the sight that is dandelions growing from the ground. In you, there is a certain kind of knowing and if you listen to it, you might one day hear it say "you're just visiting, so sit slowly with that which one day you will live without."

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my life in photographs

I often dream of having a giant field where I am free to garden and play my banjo. Here, there is a home where the snow never shows uninvited and the kitchen stove is always brewing something for the bellies of anyone who lives or visits. I grow snapdragons in every color, they live like they're beanstalks and ladders, beginning as baby seeds in earth and stretching well above my head, even on my tallest day. The garden grows wide with so many flowers, if one is pulled by wind or weather, I don't feel like I am losing much. When all has been tended to and the dusk draws near, I find my chair that looks out into the country and I let my banjo ring. This is my often dream, and often dream of it, I do.
 

I'd rather be growing snapdragons in the yard and watching the bees.

This is how to leave your head or the winter or the nagging that comes on Mondays. Decorating my house with flowers and knowing there is a certain kind of satisfaction in doing these things I want to do, instead of just thinking of them and spending my days begrudging the energy required to do so. Tiny victories, that is all I am after today.

I do not know how I survived a bad day or a bruised self before I played guitar. It is in these strings where I begin again and again and again. This is our gretsch resonator, the guitar which plays best wearing a slide and used as a tool for letting your worries slide along with it. I could have found other ways to spend my time, but playing this silver stringed machine in open D makes me feel like it's a good thing life came to be the way it did.
 

I have been counting down the hours, the minutes, the seconds until the first sign of spring arrives. Seems to be the only poems or stories I write in the winter appear like I have no mind and only half get written, none are finished, but when the birds begin to sing again, when the day drops light onto the skin, when the berries break through the bough and the dirt of a broken garden begins to show, I know I am seeing through my own eyes again, instead of the rust colored specs of what was a gloomy winter. 
 

We had two kittens visiting us, one with grey lines like a wild cat and one wearing what looked like a black mask. Their fur was soft like only a newborn knows softness and their heartbeats sounded like a tiny orchestra. I watched them skirt across the carpet and climb onto high couches as their tails curved and swayed. They clawed at my hair as I knelt to get closer. They made what was routinely known as a dog person laugh and grow with joy and surrender to their sweetness. Imagine a ladder and escaping out of a grey day just by holding a kitten in your arms. 

Do not let these photographs mislead you - we are still waiting for the clouds to part so we can remember what it was like to have the sun on our side. We do what we can by living in a house plenty with dried flowers and cuttings from last year's garden. I title these 'my life in photographs' and I'm not entirely sure why, considering, they only reveal parts of my life, not the whole, but I cannot imagine anybody preferring to see me in my pajamas to a bouquet of bright flowers!

How has your life been lately? Tell me, what is on your mind?

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winter braids and boredom

I sit here with my continual longing for springtime. At least, we have the Chinook arches that blow through the city, allowing us to have a day or two of spring-like warmth. I know, I know, I'm prone to crying out for the season where flowers grow. I mean, more than half of my blog posts talk about the weather, but it is more than the weather which I call out for. 

I want to feel that eternal hope, you know the one — where daylight hours are long with so many wonderful things to do, like sitting underneath the sun and hearing pebbles be whisked away by the creek bed or knowing that the skin of a banjo can be sweetly nourished with bird chatter and dirt from the gardener's hands. I want to take my socks off and feel the soft blades of grass spring about my feet. I don't want to walk into the forest with fear that I may fall on patches of ice or hear the absolute silence that exists only when snow covers the sound. I exist to be more than the lazy bones I wear during winter, I am so much more than who I have been lately.

Before anything else, I am human and although there is so much to see, to read, to know, and to do, boredom has been drifting in and out of the rooms I walk into as if there is a fly buzzing around my ears. I don't know if you get like this too, but I am looking for something I do not yet have. Could it be time spent away? A lifestyle change? Roots planted in something new? What could bring me to this place where boredom does not begin? Sometimes, I wonder if winter always had a way of saying the time is now and yet, I have spent the whole of my life thinking it was springtime and winter was just in the way of my growth — flowers, flowers, warm air, flowers, green grass leading home. I am so content when the garden is growing that I hardly notice how little I may do in the day and I cannot possibly come to think about boredom when the sun is shining and I'm wandering barefoot through the splendor.

The garden is a bright and bountiful thing, but if you cannot have a physical emblem of happiness, you must learn to create it in your own head. I have learned through the years to be really good at making my own happiness without any need for others or what the world expects from me, but as of this winter we're wading through, my skill in the art has diminished so greatly that I'm not sure what to do. Perhaps, for the first time, I have learned to be so busy with music that I have forgotten how to be when there are no gigs nearing. I lived a life before music, and yet a year has passed since I last spent a month without it, so I am rediscovering how I once felt when I was making little money and overthinking what to do with art and life.

It is not yet spring — the time where life seems to flutter like the wings of a butterfly and I am once again who I know myself to be, but a person does grow tired of waiting, so let it be known, tomorrow is a new day and I am going to pause my longing so I can relish in the strange discovery that is being with breath. After all, the banjo strings still ring and the heart still does beat like a tiny but tough drummer rented a home within. The dust circles the windowpane as if to be a reminder of how these rooms will go on when I no longer gather my thoughts here, when I no longer have hands for the holding, or a tongue for the tasting of good things like toasted bread and honey.  

Boredom may furrow a mean brow towards me, but is it really boredom that chases me now?

outfit details: Good Looking Objects earrings, winners blouse, asos butterfly necktie, Montana tack shop boots, oasap skirt

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a letter to you from me

I followed you down to the snow covered hillside and we came here as a peace offering to the caverns in our heart that desperately needed to be filled with softness. I knew you were feeling the same way as I was — when the world doesn't feel like your world. Instead, it feels like a mirror in which you don't even recognize your own reflection. A month ago, you were decorating a tree and drinking hot cider, but now, January says something unaware like playing a card game and life is always throwing you a new deck. We wanted to be reminded that although we skate across the January pavement with shaky shivering palms, this is still our world and springtime will be made all the more sweet because we've known and sang so loudly to the blues of winters beast.

My voice spoke to you with no uncertainty as I told you to listen to the birds who seemed to not notice we weren't birds too. In fact, we were so human in that moment and it is also what lead us to each other and onto this hillside. Being human after all means exactly this; to weep, to wonder, to ricochet between needing this world and wanting to run away from it. I told you that I loved you and like every other time I said it, I meant every word. All the stutters, all the ache, all the togetherness and separation that comes with saying it. Some people don't mean it like I do. They say it to you because you are so worthy of love, but they don't see the compass that turns my eyes towards you when somebody asks where is my home.

I know there is a dying light every time I part from you, and every time we part from places like the hillside. I know when you are distant from me, it is only because you have been losing sleep or because you are longing to watch the hollyhocks grow. I know winter brings with it a caravan of sleepiness and sometimes, your hands cannot mend what is expressed in your heart. More than this, I am utterly incomplete without you.

You are my bones, my belly, my mind, my feet and all of those feelings which exist in separate and strange parts. There is only one you. You are me. I am you. There is no ordinary in your vocabulary and that is why the blues bite you like you're a trout swimming through cold water. You notice things, little things where other people move on from. Sometimes, I wish I could detach from you momentarily just so I could break from thinking this much or thinking at all, but then I wouldn't be me anymore. I could survive winter, but I couldn't survive without my head.

When I rise from the bed where we both sleep, you will open the shutters to see that winter is still here. You will tell me, I will cry for a moment, but then I will make a recipe that calls for cold hands, something to warm us, something to say that the winter still has a heart for the living.

outfit details: chicwish dress, thriftstore shawl, winners tights, free people boots

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