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: A baby sister's tiny feet.

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

MONDAY 

When N comes home from school each day, she runs towards me screaming. Mama!she yells, though we are only a few inches apart. I’m here to see my sister.

She walks over to the couch where I sit cradling F, who is either smiling or sleeping or spitting up, and pulls off the knit blanket that covers her. She pokes around to find F’s hands and then her feet, peering closely. They are so tiny, she says, and lifts each hand before dropping it flippantly, reaching for the feet next. She handles her baby sister carelessly, as though each hand and foot exists independently, as though they aren’t all four attached to their respective limbs, and as if the limbs aren’t attached to a body, also living and breathing, or at least trying to. 

They are so tiny, N says, lifting the left hand, examining more closely now, marveling at each set of fingernails—perfectly shaped, a smudge of moon on each finger. Fingernails that patiently wait, existing only to do their job: to keep each little finger protected, safe. 

They are so tiny, she says, investigating F’s small toes, ensuring that a proper set of five belongs to each foot. She runs her fingers over the heels—first the left one, then the right—heels that are more small buttons than they are heels, heels that could fit in your pocket if you needed, if you wanted them to. She puts a sock back on each doll’s foot and sighs. She has satisfied her daily inspection. It is time to move on.

Mom, she says seriously, in a voice that becomes more and more like a teenager’s each day. But, Mom. Did you remember to make my snack?

TUESDAY

“When our two sons were going to Hebrew school, preparing for their Bar Mitzvahs, one of them asked the Rabbi, “What if I’m not sure that I believe in god?” To which the Rabbi replied, “It’s unimportant that you believe in god. What matters is that you search for god, look for the sacred, and learn to recognize what is holy.” And with those simple words, my kids were not only liberated from their fear of trying to maintain a lifelong devotion to a single, abstract, static “belief,” but they were also given permission to put their faith into their own actions and efforts to be kind. Free to marvel at the strangeness of it all and stand unafraid of their “not-knowing.” To focus on the undeniable beauty as it unfolds in front of them. To watch and wait for wisdom.”

—from Jeff Tweedy’s newsletter, along with his cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s America(no, I do not listen to anything besides Paul Simon)

WEDNESDAY

Thank you for your warm words, comments, re-shares, and pre-orders for my forthcoming journal, Go Your Own Way. 

This is the fourth (!) journal I’ve made and it amazes me to know that soon, it will stop being a book that I made and instead become a place where you see yourself a little more clearly. Maybe it will be a place where you rediscover a part of yourself you hid away a long time ago, and you can’t remember why. Maybe you’ll resurface in these pages. Maybe you’ll swim to shore.

All books, I think, have the possibility of doubling as a mirror: in them—or maybe because of them—you see yourself as you are. I hope this book will fulfill that purpose for some of you, too.

If you’d like, you can pre-order Go Your Own Way: A Journal for Building Self-Confidence. It comes out October 24th!

THURSDAY

I opened my mail this week to find a boxful of my new 2024 planners and calendars! 

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

FRIDAY

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

—The Mower by Philip Larkin

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: The gaps of life.

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

MONDAY

My collaboration with Mead Cambridge was released a few weeks ago, and I wanted to share it here. Over the last year, I worked on dozens of iterations before these three designs were greenlit for production, and although we are well into January, I hope these will be of use to those of you who, like me, enjoy mapping out their days.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

A handful of planners are available in my shop as well as on Amazon. You can also enter the giveaway I’m hosting on Instagram (virtually no one has seen this post, so there is a very large chance you will win!). 

TUESDAY

When I confided to a friend recently that paring down my interests felt like I was making my work, business, and impact smaller, she invited me to realign my perspective, sending me the following passage:

“If you take objects out of a room, one by one, two things will happen. The first is obvious. You will miss some of the things you have taken away. The second is that you will notice the things that remain more than ever. Your attention will focus. You will become more likely to read the books that are left on the shelves. You will appreciate the remaining chairs more. And if there is a chess board, you are more likely to play chess. When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value. It rises not only in visibility but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.”

—The gaps of life from Matt Haig’s The Comfort Book

WEDNESDAY

Today I read Still This Love Goes On, a beautiful picture book by Buffy Sainte-Marieand Julie Flett that celebrates seasons, Indigenous traditions, and community. When I finish, I turn to the back of the book to read the note that Buffy and Julie have written to readers. 

In hers, Julie writes: The lyrics represent a Cree worldview, one in which we don’t really have a word for goodbye, but say kithwam ka-wapamitonaw, which means “we’ll see each other again.”

I think about how much is lost in translation—between separate languages, of course, but also in the simplest of glances, or when transforming sheet music into sound, or when inviting the sentences from a book into our brains. I think about how often words fail us, even the ones we believe to most precisely describe how we feel. Mostly, I think about how beautiful it is that in Cree philosophy there is little reason for the word goodbye to exist. 

THURSDAY

It’s a cold January day but we go for our usual morning walk anyway. For the first time, N wears her dinosaur hat, a hand-me-down from her 3 cousins.

“Are you a dinosaur?” I ask her, smiling.

“No, mama,” N tells me solemnly. “Daddy is a dinosaur. I just have a dinosaur hat.”

I trail behind her and her dinosaur dad sheepishly, wondering how I could’ve let myself ask such a daft question. As she bounces along, I think about how many heads the dinosaur hat has called home: first A, who is now 9; then S, who is 7; and Z, who, at 2, is only a month older than N. 

I love that N wears so much of her cousins’ clothing. As I watch her collect sticks and pinecones, memories float along the river of my mind and down to my heart, where A carved out his own little nook nine years ago. I was still a lost kid in my mid-twenties when A came into the world prematurely, a tiny riot of iron will and too-fast-everything. 

Almost a decade before I had my own child, it was A who first introduced me to parenting—and that learning to parent is a long road towards becoming the person you always wanted to be, but never actually practiced being. With A, I learned what patience truly is. I didn’t know how to hold a baby, but I practiced with his little limbs. I felt my heart irrationally flare with anger when another toddler stole his pail at the playground; I practiced calming myself. I learned what it meant to be protective of another’s mind and heart through my conversations with him. I learned how to love my sibling more closely by observing how he loves his. Even today, I feel my heart well each time I experience the sensitivity and empathy he carries with him daily. It is far too big for his frame. As a person, I have always been slightly closed. It was A who taught me how to open my heart—who taught me how to love unconditionally. 

I think about A all day. Later, my sister tells me that the dinosaur hat never belonged to A—she bought it for S when he was little. Not only is my memory flawed, but the immediate flood of recollection I experienced was summoned by a truth that never even existed. At first, I feel cheated, as if the love in my heart is a lie. But then A’s face fills my mind and my eyes are quick to fill with tears. I feel overwhelmed by my love for him. Nothing about this love is a lie. 

FRIDAY

You simply go out and shut the door
without thinking. And when you look back
at what you’ve done
it’s too late. If this sounds
like the story of life, okay.

It was raining. The neighbors who had
a key were away. I tried and tried
the lower windows. Stared
inside at the sofa, plants, the table
and chairs, the stereo set-up.
My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me
on the glass-topped table, and my heart
went out to them. I said, Hello, friends,
or something like that. After all,
this wasn’t so bad.

Worst things had happened. This
was even a little funny. I found the ladder.
Took that and leaned it against the house.
Then climbed in the rain to the deck,
swung myself over the railing
and tried the door. Which was locked,
of course. But I looked in just the same
at my desk, some papers, and my chair.
This was the window on the other side
of the desk where I’d raise my eyes
and stare out when I sat at that desk.
This is not like downstairs, I thought.
This is something else.

And it was something to look in like that, unseen,
from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.
I don’t even think I can talk about it.
I brought my face close to the glass
and imagined myself inside,
sitting at the desk. Looking up
from my work now and again.
Thinking about some other place
and some other time.
The people I had loved then.

I stood there for a minute in the rain.
Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.
Even though a wave of grief passed through me.
Even though I felt violently ashamed
of the injury I’d done back then.
I bashed that beautiful window.
And stepped back in.

—Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In by Raymond Carver

xx,

M

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