Dear Somebody: Absorbing the magic.

Pencil sketches of my girls (2023)

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

MONDAY 

Since I last wrote, all and nothing has happened—and at a pace that shows little chance of change. The days linger the way absence does; each full of popsicles, bike rides, and small conversations about death. 

Laying down in her new big kid bed, N surprises me with her thoughts. When I’m all grown, I’ll have the magic, she says. Kid, you’ve already got the magic, I tell her, but she shakes her head and brushes me away. You have magic and dad has magic, and it’s okay because you’re big. But magic comes from the ground and goes up into your feet and if you get it when you’re little, you’ll be dead.

She pauses and then adds, like Jack, as she does often these days, his name smushed against dead on her tongue. 

N, you are the magic, I want to say, mesmerized by her brain, but instead, I try to understand what she means and in trying, I almost do. I am disappointed by the deep chasm between young and old, by the misunderstanding that ripens when an adult spends too much time in worry and not enough in imagination. My thoughts aren’t as flexible as hers—they don’t stretch in directions beyond what I can see. 

When you are old, you will be dead, N informs me, in words so plain and true there’s nothing for me to do but nod. It is dusk and I am startled, not by my own impending death, but by the inevitable separation of me and my child. She is only three, but already, it feels close. One day, she will live without me—and if I am lucky, it will be only because my body is no longer here. 

N doesn’t appear concerned, but I reassure her because I think I’m supposed to. That won’t be for a long time, I say, and she agrees. Yeah, like five days, she says, and I’m stricken by her understanding of time, which feels truer than mine. With the recognition of my own mortality, time is finite. For her, time is mind-independent: a river that streams on and on, regardless of whether anyone sees or hears it.

Again, I am met with the unsettling realization that there is a gap keeping me from my child—that I will always fall short of giving her what she needs. The gap feels large, already, and it’s potential for growth is even greater. There is a magic in N that keeps her mind moving in unexpected ways. She holds room for surprise. I want to absorb her magic—just enough to keep us connected, to make her feel understood—but I’m not sure I can.

When you’re dead, what will I do without you? N asks, her sweet voice void of fear or sadness. She’s only curious, wanting to know. 

In the dark, I reach for her. We are on opposite sides of a river; I try to build a bridge. I want to be where she is, but a gap is a gap, and sometimes it doesn’t close for any amount of dedication, or effort—or even, love. 

TUESDAY

I’m smitten with the work of John and Faith Hubley, and in particular, Windy Day, which I’ve watched several times over the past few weeks. 

I’m in the middle of early concept sketches for a book I’m working on, and the loose lightness of this animated film captures the feeling of childhood’s core, like learning to whistle, simmering in summer languish, and staring at endless skies dotted with clouds that run your imagination. 

WEDNESDAY

“As it happened, my relationship with my kids has been as philosophically, spiritually, or intellectually vital as anything else I’ve done, leading to the kind of realizations we’ve long wanted to seek elsewhere, away from the home, away from the family. Through them, I’ve cultivated a healthy relationship with uncertainty, with attention, with  feeling closer to the source of life, whatever it is, with all its wonder and fragility—all moments of revelation that came by way of a mix of stress, rupture, wholeness, and ease. If I had let motherhood stay small, confined to the sidelines, then those stressful moments would have felt like forces holding me back on my way to an interesting and meaningful life. But by letting motherhood become big, those challenges…became part of a larger narrative arc.”

—from Elissa Strauss’ essay, It’s Weird Times to Be a Happy Mother. I don’t agree with everything in her essay, but this passage resonated sweetly.

THURSDAY

I am reading: Cass McCombs on songwriting, The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, the 1984 archive, and A Million Kites. 

FRIDAY

At night, Freud says, we hide things from ourselves:
dreams wear disguises. All right. But also there's
an intimacy and acceptance there: we take
it all as it comes. We don't explain away
or correct the irrational, we believe the real
terror, the horror, the sweet tenderness.  

—Night and Day by William Bronk

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: The things I'll miss.

From my illustrated version of William Bronk’s The Tell

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

MONDAY 

I wake up before dawn and listen to the smooth, velvet call of darkness. I wake up before the rest of my family and it feels like waking up before the rest of the world—there is only me and in the morning I see, quite clearly, myself as someone to love. I wake up to write, I wake up to ponder, I wake up from all the people I’m not. I wake up. 

My lower back cracks first, then my knees, then my neck. I see the bridge between ankle to leg, I see each weathered toe—evidence of a body that continues to show up, that does what’s asked of it and does not ask for much in return. These are the sounds of loyalty; these are the sounds of my oldest friendship. The mourning doves chatter outside my window and our tired 100-year old house invites their conversation in. I listen and I am lucky to listen and I feel the luck well deep inside me like a river. I wonder who these birds were before they were birds, I wonder who I was before I knew I was someone worth knowing. The radiators come to life, abruptly. They clang and hiss. The dog bristles in his sleep and occasionally, a car drives by.

Cutting the fruit, buttering the toast, making the lunches—even these chores are sweeter in the morning stillness. The creak of the stairs as T comes down, earlier these past few days, with all of his teeth and a smile. I put Tea for the Tillerman on and Stevens’ familiar voice washes through the kitchen and hovers above the island with mine. 

N turns away when I wake her, her body longing for more silence, more rest, more; the light streams into her bedroom in strings, beguiling. F’s generous smile—immediate upon waking, the way she finds me as soon as I leave the room, her small hands clinging to my knees. N singing along to the Frozen soundtrack, hoping she didn’t miss any let it go’s. I clean the floor, the walls, the cabinets after F eats, my hands and knees satisfied from use.

The first deep breath outside, the cold air rushing into my lungs; the crack of twig or tree branch, everything growing, everything going. The first sip of coffee, well-earned and deeply wanted, the changing light on my child’s tiny face, the agony of push and pull between too-much and never-enough: these are the things I’ll miss when they are gone. 

TUESDAY

“What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission. Oh, it's very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her needs, and so on—it's what I've always demanded myself—but as a child, no, the truth is it's a war of attrition, rationality doesn't come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over. She has to lay down arms and come to you. And if she doesn't do it, then it's really a war, and it was a war between my mother and me. Only as an adult did I come to truly admire her—especially in the last, painful years of her life—for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself.”

—from Swing Time by Zadie Smith

WEDNESDAY

I spent the last couple of weeks working on a new welcome illustration for Dear Somebody. I was inspired to do this by Adam Rex’s header, which I’ve loved ever since I saw it. This newsletter has been through several evolutions over the past few years, and I haven’t felt like it visually reflects where I am in my work, and who I am as a person, for awhile now. 

Mine’s not perfect but it does feel a lot more like me (perhaps for that very reason!). Also: I was able to experiment using mixed media (my dream is to work more like N—”a little bit of everything”), I learned a few things, and I showed myself, again, that doing something for no reason (other than I want to) is usually worth the effort—which is just plain ol’ nice. 

THURSDAY

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As a longtime fan of Cal Newport’s work, I was pleased to provide a few words for his latest book, Slow Productivity. Here’s what I had to say about it:

The belief that the process of creating art should, and can, be completed quickly is the artist’s greatest source of discontent. It is the reason many artists develop imposter syndrome and become disillusioned with their work and their own abilities. Often, it is why artists stop creating work at all. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport effectively charts the birth and growth of productivity culture, and explains how it led to the removal of personal values, deep focus, and deliberate care in our work and communities. His book is an opportunity to understand why we so often feel frustrated with the demands of the world we live in—and what we can do if we choose to turn inward, once again.

Slow Productivity was published this week and is available everywhere books are sold.

FRIDAY

Poetry is not made of words.
I can say it’s January when
it’s August. I can say, “The scent
of wisteria on the second floor
of my grandmother’s house
with the door open onto the porch
in Petaluma,” while I’m living
an hour’s drive from the Mexican
border town of Ojinaga.
It is possible to be with someone
who is gone. Like the silence which
continues here in the desert while
the night train passes through Marfa
louder and louder, like the dogs whining
and barking after the train is gone.

—The Presence in Absence by Linda Gregg

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Where has all the time gone?

In the sixth month, a collage illustration for Ilya Kaminsky's We Lived Happily During the War

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

MONDAY

“Probably the best thing my parents did—two simple things that don’t seem to occur to many people—was to give me my own desk just for art and to let me use professional (or at least good) art supplies from a very young age. My father was a printmaker in the 1980s, so he had all of his stuff lying around and was very generous about it. Other than that, I did not have after-school art classes or trips to museums or things that people assume are key to inspiration. In the 1980s, art was seen as an optional thing in the sidelines of life, so you got to make “creative stuff” at school if you happened to get a teacher who was personally into it. That was about once every three years. I would say that, instead, boredom was the key to inspiration. My family didn’t have any money to spare, didn’t go many places, and therefore my brothers and I had loads of unstructured time, our own desks, and a backyard with plants and dirt. We didn’t have vacations, other than driving to a river or a beach once in a while, so I figured that exploring ideas in the far reaches of one’s imagination was perhaps the best way to travel.”

–from Elizabeth Haidle's interview with Haley Laningham in Southeast Review

P.S. Elizabeth (who is as lovely on the phone as she is on the internet) has a new needle felting course out that I'm excited to take this summer. Maybe you'd like it, too!

TUESDAY

Today marks the last day of my first year of graduate school. It feels anticlimactic; I knew it would. Significant days have a way of doing that: feeling like a terrific storm that took a wrong turn somewhere, forgetting to arrive. The body fills with an anticipation so large that there is very little room left for the prospect of satiety.

In preparation for my final review, I finished illustrating Ilya Kaminsky's We Lived Happily During the War, and bound my illustrations for William Bronk's The Tell into a neat little book. I thought about how much I love poetry, and how poetry has always loved me back, the way only books or paintings or music can, without reason or knowing how.

This summer, I'll write and illustrate some of my own poems. I want them to be good. I want them to be so good, so badly, that I often think about not writing them at all. The one thing graduate school has taught me is the one thing I already knew. In life and love and art and parenting, you can't really plan on it being good. The only thing you can plan on––all you can really count on––is trying.

WEDNESDAY

"The Ama divers of Japan are all-women divers. The women dive tankless making them free divers, and while they also collect seafood and seaweed, their main focus is pearls. Ama means ‘woman of the sea’ or ‘sea women.’

The world of the ama is one marked by duty and superstition. One traditional article of clothing that has stood the test of time is their headscarf. The headscarves are adorned with symbols such as the seiman and the douman, which bring luck to the diver and ward off evil. The ama are also known to create small shrines near their diving location, where they will visit after diving in order to thank the gods for their safe return."

–on the Ama divers of Japan, from Erin Austen Abott's newsletter, Field Trip

THURSDAY

It's 6:45 am and we are downstairs in the kitchen, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppersplaying on the stereo, N shoveling fistfuls of granola into her face. Her head hinges at the neck like an L-shaped bracket and she moves corpse-like to the beat. She is, by far, the best dancer under this roof.

I laugh aloud and the future flashes behind my eyes: N at 14 slamming the door in my face, N at 3 giving me a soaking wet post-bath hug, N at 22 calling me on the phone, I hope, just to say hello. I laugh aloud and her voice fills the space between my ears like crickets' song, beautiful against the early morning stillness.

It's 6:48 am and I'm back downstairs, standing in the kitchen while she bops along to Kendrick Lamar. “MA-ma!" she shouts, beckoning me to dance, but I feel exhausted, having traveled to the future and back. She's only 18 months, I know, but it was yesterday that I brought her home from the hospital.

Where has all the time gone, I wonder.

FRIDAY

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger,

after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!

But mainly, let’s be honest, I like

that they’re ladies. As if this big

dangerous animal is also a part of me,

that somewhere inside the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps

an 8-pound female horse heart,

giant with power, heavy with blood.

Don’t you want to believe it?

Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

the huge beating genius machine

that thinks, no, it knows,

it’s going to come in first.

–from Ada Limón's How to Triumph Like a Girl

xo,

M

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