Dear Somebody: Creating joy.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

Still tiny, a small comic about the large joy in tiny things.

Still tiny, a small comic about the large joy in tiny things.

TUESDAY

I graduated with my MFA last May, though it only feels like a few days between then and now.

During my defense, my professors ask me how I’m going to continue my education post-graduation: How will I nurture and encourage my continuous learning? How will I ensure that I wouldn’t lose sight of my pursuit—drawing and writing for children—amidst the chaos of ordinary life? 

Easy, I reply, because I’ve got it all figured out. I’m going to draw a four-panel comic every week. This will solidify a regular drawing practice, improve my ability to draw from life, and ensure that my love for drawing not only remains, but flourishes. I am determined. I think to myself, with certainty: Yes. My love will keep this work alive.

That was five months ago. 

As you’ve probably guessed, I spent those five months relearning an old familiar lesson: that love, alone, can’t keep anything alive—not a burgeoning skillset, not an inspired state of mind, and certainly not a five-month old baby.

I’m not sure if it’s all children, but mine requires regular feeding and rocking, every two hours—still, seven outfit changes a day, and constant mopping. She’s a mess and apparently, also sentient. This little bowl of mush needs serious eye contact, tickling, and someone to giggle with. She likes being read to aloud and often. She likes when her older sister is near, which comes to absolutely no surprise to younger siblings everywhere, across the entire spectrum of humankind, for as long as siblings have existed. She likes having her limbs examined. She does not like when I put her down to draw.

So here I am, five months later, with my first four-panel comic—and it’s only three panels. It took me 10 hours to make, from conception to sketch to final coloring, and several revisions—spread out over seven naps, each ranging from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. If I think about how many days it took me (seven, a full week!) I lament, especially when I compare my speed to my life pre-children. 

But none of that really matters because the entire time I was drawing this comic, I was full of joy. Real joy. The kind I text my friends about because I can’t believe it’s real—that the feeling I’m always chasing is here, right now, swimming inside me. 

I feel joy flood down every avenue. I feel joy because I’m drawing and because I feel joy while I’m drawing. I feel joy because I’m pushing myself to try new things within my work, however slowly, however little by little. I feel joy because I’m getting somewhere. I feel joy because I’m trying. 

I feel joy in drawing my children, in having children who are so sweet and so round, in knowing that someone out there may recognize their own child in these drawings. In knowing that maybe a child will even recognize themselves. 

I feel joy because for a little while, my mind is quiet and my blood is steady—and that although joy is a feeling I am always chasing, it’s also something I know how to find. Joy is something I know how to create. I created it here for me, for my children, for you. 

WEDNESDAY

“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.”

—from Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy

THURSDAY

My new 2024 calendar, still in its plastic wrap, lest I spill something on it before the calendar year turns.

In case you missed it last week, my new 2024 planners and calendars are now available! 

These are now available through Buy Olympia, directly through Amber Lotus Publishing, or in bookstores everywhere. 

FRIDAY

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

—So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: For the love of sisters

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

I was able to speak with the wonderful Margo Tantau on her podcast Windowsill Chatsabout building a life of creativity and purpose. We also discuss living according to your values, being dedicated to your vision, and what I believe most holds us creatives back from success. You can listen to Episode 146 here. 

TUESDAY

My sister and her family visit for a couple days, a trip that comes and goes so quickly that it feels like a blur even while it’s happening. In tow are my two beautiful nephews and my niece, Z, who was born only a handful of weeks before N. The two girls are as different in personality and behavior as they are close in age: where N is cautious and meditative, Z is adventurous and impulsive. Together, though, there is some semblance of balance. 

Different doesn’t always attract. It was more than two decades before my sister and I discovered our own rhythm, mashed somewhere between college graduations, first apartments, and marriages. Each time I reached a life milestone she’d already passed through it brought us closer together. For awhile, we’d swim in the same waters, and then she’d go on ahead again. 

Our personalities follow traditional birth order to a certain degree. As the older child, my sister tends to be a bit of a perfectionist while I enjoy making a good mess with my hands. She’s conscientious and thoughtful, quick to say the right thing and mean it; I have learned how to be less judgmental, more vulnerable. I am confrontational, she likes keeping the peace. We’re both cripplingly self-aware. 

We take the kids to the City Museum, the emerald city of St. Louis. Z bounces off the industrial bridges and steel-roped ladders, climbing as quick as her agile little body allows. N clings to her dad hard. She doesn’t want to climb, she doesn’t want to run, she doesn’t want to try—or she does, but not now. I encourage her, and then fight the urge to continue. How often have I wanted the very same thing my parents have wanted for me, simply in my own time? 

Z and her brothers are out of sight, lost somewhere in the noise of Sabreliner 40 aircrafts and frighteningly oversized slides. Slowly, N begins to open. She walks across a four-foot-wide Slinkie and peers through each square window. She watches. She avoids the vertical tunnels, opting instead for the narrow stairs, and climbs to the top of a castle turret. I ask her what she’s thinking, as I often do, but she doesn’t answer. She watches. Eventually, she lets her dad’s hand go and climbs a half-dome gym on her own. Slowly, I see her unfurl. She’s a lily, blooming—not hesitantly, but with deliberation, the way someone who knows herself well does. 

After awhile, we all meet up and herd the kids inside for lunch. There, surrounded by half-eaten pretzels and hot dogs, ice cream cups and toddler water bottles, N and Z begin to run. They run back and forth across the 1870’s Vault Room, chasing each other with open arms. Z speeds across and N helps her up when she falls. N laughs hysterically, falling on purpose, and Z puts out her hand for the assist. They smile and hug, their faces full of childhood and joy. This is special, I think to myself, as I look at their eyes which are looking into each others’. 

I’ve spent my entire life counting the ways my sister and I are different, as if it matters, as if we’d allow the very things that make us who we are keep us apart. I know, with certainty, that this is driven by the fear that we one day will. 

I note this now, as I watch N and Z fall to the ground still hugging, still laughing, their arms braided together. At my age, it is obvious: the way sisters can fall apart if they’re not too careful, how all friendships—even those bound by blood—need nurturing, like young lilies waiting for bloom. 

To N and Z, it is far less complicated. As it should be. The afternoon sunlight streams through the second-story window. One child’s tiny hand prepares to reach out in anticipation, in knowing—before the other child falls. Slowly, my heart grounds itself. 

WEDNESDAY

On learning how to see in our creative work:

“I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically "see" things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become "old men with snow on their shoulders," or the lake looks like a "giant eye." The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, "the mirror with nothing reflected in it." This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.” 

—The Art of Finding by Linda Gregg

THURSDAY

“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

—George Bernard Shaw

FRIDAY

Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world

—Elegy for a Walnut Tree by W. S. Merwin

xx,

M

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