blogging

11 Questions, 11 Answers

This blogging world has brought me so many gifts.  One of the richest has been The Tribe, a group of creative women who have (foolishly, and I’m still waiting for them to realize their error) included me in their number.  One of these years I will be able to join the annual retreat on the coast of Oregon.  Elizabeth Grant Thomas is one of the Tribe, and if you don’t know her luminous, thoughtful writing, you should.  She writes about many of the same themes that haunt my work (and my life): impermanence and what endures, relationships and family, the fallibility and brilliance of memory.

Last week Elizabeth shared 11 questions and her answers.  I loved reading her stories, about the adorable way her husband proposed, her favorite historical period, and what day in her life she’d go back and re-live.  Then she tagged me in the meme, and I so enjoyed reading her answers that I was excited about answering with my own.

This is how it works:

  • Post the rules
  • Answer 11 questions the tagger posted for you
  • Create 11 new questions to ask the people you tag
  • Tag 11 people
  • Let them know you’ve tagged them

So herewith, my answers to Elizabeth’s wonderful questions, my own set of new questions, and the 11 people I would love to hear answer them!

1. What book has moved you the most in recent history?

I was tremendously moved by Stephanie Saldana’s The Bread of Angels.

2. What’s your favorite way to spend idle time?

Sitting in my bed, with my daughter next to me, reading (separately).

3. Share a silly photo of yourself.  What’s the story?

This was in high school, when my dear friend C and I were in the Dance Concert together.  We also ran cross-country together, and part of why I love this photograph so is that we are teaming up to run a 10K Mud Run in May together.  20 years and 5 children later, we’re back to running in the woods side by side.  I can’t wait.

4. What astrological sign are you?  Do you believe in astrology, or think it’s a bunch of hooey?

I’m a Leo.  I oscillate between believing and thinking it’s hooey.  Fun fact: my father and my husband are both twins and Geminis.  When I was growing up, I thought being a twin was a requirement of being a Gemini, since my father was both.

5.  What is the most memorable meal you’ve ever had?

Several dinners, cooked over a campfire, out in the African bush when Matt and I were on safari in the summer of 1998.  Somehow they conjured the most extraordinary meals out of nothing, and the setting sure helped.

6. Do you believe in fate, or that we’re masters of our own destinies?

This is a tough one for me.  I’m really not sure.  I lean towards the former, because I often sense the hand of something large and ineffable at work, but I also believe adamantly in the power of hard work and good decisions to shape our lives.

7. What is one of your favorite memories from childhood?

Singing Circle Game with my sister and our “four family” siblings, the extended family we grew up with.  We wore white, we stood in line by height, and all eight of our parents watched us with tears in their eyes.  There are also many special memories from my summers at sleep-away camp.

8. If you know it, what is your Myers-Briggs type?  If you don’t know it, would you characterize yourself as an extrovert or an introvert?

I am an INFJ.  100% F, 100% J, closer to the middle on the other two.  I am a big believer in the Myers-Briggs as a framework for understanding ourselves and others in our lives.

9. What is your favorite flower?

Peonies, hands down.  Ranunculus after that.

10. No one can ever believe that I’ve never seen The Princess Bride.  What movie have you never seen that everyone else seemingly has?

Silence of the Lambs.  I’m too scared.

11. What quote or motto best describes how you endeavor to live your life?

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.  (Erdrich)

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work. And when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.  The mind that is not baffled is not employed.  The impeded stream is the one that sings. (Berry)

To miss the joy is to miss all.  (Stevenson)

Did you really think I could pick one?

And so, here are those I “tag”:

Aidan of Ivy League Insecurities
Christa of Carry It Forward
Denise of Universal Grit
Pamela of Walking On My Hands
Lisa Bonchek Adams
Kathryn of Good Life Road
Hilary from A Year On
MK Countryman from My Suburban Life
Katie Gibson from cakes, teas, and dreams
Rebecca from June Carol Claire
Erin from Elements of Style

And these are my questions:

1. What is your favorite book?  Why?

2. What song brings you back most viscerally to a moment in your history?  Where does it take you?

3. Who is your favorite character in fiction?

4. What is your favorite food?  What about foods you abhor?

5. Are you a morning or a night person?

6. What is your default font when you write on your computer?

7. How many siblings do you have?  How many children do you have (as of now)?

8. What season do you like best?

9. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

10. If you practice yoga (even sporadically) what is your favorite pose?

11. When was the last time you cried?

Social networks

I’ve established, to a painfully detailed degree I imagine, that I lean towards introversion.  Also, I work pretty much full time, so I spend a lot of time at my desk in front of my computer.  I also spend a large part of the day on the telephone for work, which means I don’t often talk to friends.  All of these factors surely contribute to the fact that for a long time email has been my preferred way to communicate with most people.

It’s not a surprise, then, that I’ve followed the explosion of social media in the last several years.  I was late to join Facebook, though I’m there now.  I love Twitter, and for years it has been my primary news source.  I visit Pinterest and Instagram (name: lemead) regularly.  I would love to connect with any of you in any of those places.

Part of why I’m eager to connect with people on Facebook, Twitter, and beyond is that I’ve made very real friendships in this virtual space.  Some of my relationships that began in the ether have become an important and sustaining friendship, including time together in the real world.  Aidan, Denise, and others (so many others!) have transitioned from twitter icon on my screen to people I’ve spent in-person time with.  In some cases these virtureal (hat tip: Aidan) friends have met my children, and I have met theirs.

I believe it goes the other way too, by which I mean when a dear in-real-life friend (made in the days before – gasp – the internet) moves, say, to China, you can continue your closeness through virtual channels for a very long time.  This applies also when your only, beloved sibling moves, say, to Jerusalem.

Have you met people in this virtual world who have become in-real-life friends?  What is your favorite social network?  Please let me know and I’ll pop over and follow you!

 

Magic

That’s the magic. We have no idea. Ever. We have no idea until the storm passes and we are on our backs in a field ten miles away from home….
Surprise is where the magic lives, between the margins of to-do lists, the aftermath of the eviction notice, the tiny movements on the ultrasound machine….
Or maybe, somewhere, deep within us, sits a pocket of magic. And once in a while, we are given the option to tap into it, to watch from the audience as the rabbit comes bounding out of the hat, free and fearless and full-speed ahead, surprising even the man with the wand.

I’ve been a big Rebecca Woolf fan for years, and I think you should all be reading her blog if you’re not already.  But this most recent post, Magic, struck me even more than her words usually do.  I read it weeping, smiling, realizing that yes, yes, and yes, she was saying all the things I knew but hadn’t been able to put into words before.  She writes about exactly a year ago, the day she found out the third child she and her husband conceived after much deliberation was actually twins.  That was not the plan.  And it was, in the end, magic.  Absolute, utter magic.

And she is right.  There is sheer magic in those surprises, those shocks, those startling moments when we wake up and see life itself shining like foil being shaken in our eyes (shook foil is one of my favorite images for awareness).  However they come – with a thunderclap or a quiet whisper – these moments of magic all remind us that we are not in charge.  We are not pulling the strings.  Instead we are gazing up at a star-speckled night sky, believing in the design even if it is so vast that we can’t see it from where we stand.  That belief – that all this randomness, good and bad and painful and beautiful, adds up to some kind of whole whose meaning is much larger than its individual parts – is magic.

Maybe children see this better than we do.  When Rebecca writes about her son, Archer, it reminds me of my Grace.  He has an uncanny ability to see, and express, truths that far exceed the reaches of most logical human minds.  When I read Rebecca’s poetic musings on magic I thought of something Grace said, just last summer.  I was putting her to bed the last night before she went to sleepover camp for 10 days.  As I kissed her goodnight I could literally sense the churning river of time flowing through the room.  I told Grace I’d miss her, enormously, and that while I knew she’d miss me she should remember that she was having an enormous adventure, and I would be living my ordinary life, which would remain unchanged when she returned.  She leaned back, looked me right in the eye, and pronounced with undeniable intensity:

“Your life is not ordinary.  Your life is full of magic.”

Her words startled me, took my breath away by pointing out something right in front of me that I had forgotten to admire.  By reminding me of the surprise, and the magic, that exists in both the littlest moments and the lightning storms of life.

Being conscious of all of life

I loved Mariam Gates’ post last weekend, Brave Heart, about her son’s broken arm.  Mariam’s recounting of her conversation with her son – when he tells her he was not brave because he scared and was cried – is heartfelt, and the reflections she shares about what bravery really means are stirring and thought-provoking.  She writes that she is “not interested in bravery that is synonymous with fearlessness” and while I’ve never thought of it so clearly and compellingly, I find myself nodding.  Yes, yes, yes.  Fearlessness seems like a defense mechanism, doesn’t it?  An over-simplification of this life?  Mariam calls it disconnection, and I think that’s right.  I’ve never been fearless; if anything, I’m often consumed with fears.  Fears run through my veins along with hope and wonder and memory, sometimes making my heart skip a beat, sometimes clouding my vision so I can’t see anything other than that which I dread.

So maybe fear is not fearlessness.  But then what is it? Well, I like Mariam’s definition:

I think bravery is about being conscious of all of life.

Why yes.  Yes, that’s it.  Isn’t she utterly right?  Isn’t true bravery about remaining open to the fear, about letting the fear permeate you, even, and not running away from it?  Of course you could call this a self-interested response, since I think one of the central themes of this blog is being aware of everything, of all of life.  But truthfully I hadn’t thought of it this way before, and when I read Mariam’s post I found myself agreeing absolutely.

Bravery is staring into the sun, even when the brightness of life – and the brightness is precisely because life’s minutes are burning in front of us – is painful.  Bravery is not flinching and not looking away, even when the emotion of a moment overwhelms us.  Bravery is not hiding, in a thousand ways little and big, from our own lives.  Bravery is letting heartbreak gouge your spirit, because you know that that leaves a deeper well for joy.

Bravery is about being conscious of all of life.

Thank you, Mariam, for putting it so beautifully.

 

My subject chose me

I am honored to have my essay, My Subject Chose Me, published at Literary Mama.  I love so much of what Literary Mama stands for, most of all the power that is contained in commingling motherhood and writing.  The work that I’ve read there is without exception both beautifully-written and thought-provoking, intelligent and honest, suffused with love of both the written word and the small, noisy people who populate our days.

Please click over to read my piece and spend some time on the site.  You won’t be disappointed.  I’d love to hear what you think.