Staking My Claim: Swimming in Happy

If you’re not getting happier as you’re getting older… then you’re fucking up.
– Ani Difranco, If Yr Not

Randomly, one afternoon last week, I experienced that heart-swollen feeling of looking at the image of a child that you love so much you have nearly no words for it, not the right ones anyway.  Words are not enough for that kind of love, for the way the sight of them almost hurts, makes you ache with what it is that bursts open inside of you.

I was looking at a lovely picture that my sister-in-law took of her middle son – a simulated superman pose in goofy goggles and cowboy boots, a boy on the ground who appears to be floating above a chalk and asphalt skyline.  I literally felt the pressure of my chest swelling, pushing out.  I almost wanted to cry for how perfect I think he is without missing, ever, all of his peculiar traits and inevitable imperfections.  He is my happiness, incarnate, as are his brothers.

Abstractly, I know they bring me joy – real, pure joy.  But it is these tiny moments that resonate, that ring through my bones, prove to me that love is tangible and real.  And my life is full of these moments.  Of my littlest nephew’s heavy head against my shoulder as his almost-too-long-to-be-on-my-lap body twitches and writhes and fights sleep as we sit in the sun on a gloriously sunny day at the end of January.  The way I feel when his body relaxes and his breathing steadies and he gives in to sleep, right there on my chest and in my arms.  My arms are sore, I am sweating everywhere he is on me, but I can’t move.  I won’t.  Because he will be too long for my lap soon.  And this is heaven, this precise moment, the particular feel of his weight gone fully slack against me.

The way the oldest nephew slumps his shoulders when I say the words he hates to hear me say: I have to go.  His reluctant hug as I squeeze him tighter and tighter until he complains.  The smell of his sweaty hair after he’s been rolling in the grass all day long playing football.  The rock on sign he flashes me as I walk away.

My heart swells.  All of the time.

Toward the end of 2010, I was haunted by the image of me standing on the bank of a river, readying for the kind of leap I feared most – one that meant leaving love behind, making one of life’s most painful choices.  I knew I was making the leap, would have to, but I was planted firmly in the dirt, unable and not ready to jump, for so many reasons.

Throughout 2011 I used the term treading often.  I was treading constantly: no permanent home, no steady work yet, no idea what to do with a love I still have trouble containing that is neither here nor there and all over the place.  I was emotionally stationary while in constant motion in the middle of the deep blue sea, feet kicking, arms circling, neck muscles tense and stiff and elongated, water lapping at my chin.  Every muscle in my body working to keep my mouth and nose above water. I dreamed about floating as though it were a fantastical place only elves and gnomes could find, longed for it with every fiber of my body.

By the opening of 2012 I had crossed over, fully, but I was still gazing back at the other side of that river.  Necessarily.  To feel it all, completely. Then I bid it all farewell.  And I’ve spent the first handful of weeks of 2012 remembering how to float, reacquainting myself with that calm, lovely place that is once again right here with me.

Through it all, I’ve never lost sight of the happy in my life – there are so many happys in my life – but the happy was overwhelmed, overshadowed by the treading, the settling, the mourning.  What I have done in the last year and a half is absolutely right – for me.  Where I am now is exactly where I should be.  And there is so much that makes me smile and laugh and gasp with the best kinds of surprise.  There is so much happy to be had.

Photo Courtesy of Jen Neitzel

A friend of mine, Jen Neitzel, posted a New Year’s project in January to help focus on the happy in your life.  She shared a picture of herself holding her own list of directions for naming thirty things that make you authentically happy.  Such an essentially simple idea.  Such an amazingly powerful idea.

I made a mental card and slipped it into my brain’s card catalog (yes, I am that old).  I saved that idea for a future date. This week something triggered a thought that reminded me of her post, reminded me that I wanted to take her idea and make something out of it – make a board of some sort where I could pin or tape or velcro words or pictures or memories of things that make me happy, that fill my bones, that expand my ribs with love.  Something I could keep up year round, for years to come, something I could edit and adjust and keep as an evolving depiction of all the things that make my heart swell.

So I did.

The same afternoon that I saw my nephew in superhero pose, I also read My Girl Thursday’s post about Sarah Rooftop’s 3 Things February.  She challenges us to end our day with writing down three things that made us smile or laugh that day.  Three happy things.  As MGT says, you don’t have to worry about the pressure and weight of gratitude – you simply remember three things that brought you happiness in a day.  I have started this and am going to continue at least through February.

So far, in only a handful of days, I have been brought to hysterical tears while sitting in a charming new restaurant only blocks from my house and felt the warmth of that first thick, sweet sip of a small batch American whiskey and shared it with my father, comparing notes, toasting to all of this time we now have together.

I have stood outside in the cold after midnight on a ‘school’ night having a serious conversation with a hysterically funny and rambunctious new friend after spending an evening being ridiculous together at an SF dance club.  I have laughed, a deep belly burst of laughter, after seeing a stranger’s face when I told him to take it easy with my friend because I have brass knuckles implanted under my skin.

I have lost my train of thought while my eyes scrunched and I nearly snort laughed as my sister’s nine-months-pregnant-belly jiggled dramatically from a tiny little laugh that escaped her mouth.

I have walked, for hours, in the winter sun, around this island I love to call home and walked out of the hardware store and went across the street to the beach where I could take off my shoes and sink my toes in the sun-warmed sand.  I felt the deep-chest-love of seeing the world seem to disappear on the horizon, water trailing off into nothingness, that feeling of being right at the edge of it all.

And there’s more.  A lot more.  In only the first five days of this month.

I am lucky.  Truly.

Being on this side of the river is returning me to myself.  If 2011 was that river that needed crossing – tumultuous, choppy, crucial – then 2012 is the far bank, the one I was aiming for, the one I needed to get to, come hell or high water.  And I’m here.  I made it through the swim, I survived the climb back up and the view is pretty fucking stunning no matter where I turn, even when the sky splits open and churns the air at a dangerous speed.  I am here.  Where I was going.

Here.  Me.

I finally have the kind of time and energy and focus to do what I do best: Do. Make. Create. Laugh.  Even when life is hard.  Especially when life is hard.  I spent one quiet evening with myself, making this board that brings to life the moments that light through my veins and swell my heart.

Because life isn’t what happens when you’re not looking. Life is what happens in every moment – in all of the good and the bad and all of the in-betweens –  and you best look, best see it and know it and smell it and try to get it down, however you can.  Life is better when more of those moments are remembered for making you smile, for making your eyes sore with laughter, for falling over from the funny of it, for the way your heart will grow, grinch-style, with every beautiful thing surrounding you. For remembering the things that hurt in the best of ways, that make you ache at the sight of them, the beauty that’s always there no matter how much shit life hands you.

Here is my Swollen Heart Board (and here is how I made it, with only things I had in the house).  I will change it out regularly to keep myself focused on the moments we all live for, the ones that get us through, the ones we earn with every hard choice, with every devastating scene or decision or fact of life.  The stuff that is always worth it.  Bliss, micro or otherwise.

Step by Step: Swollen Heart Board

I had first envisioned my version of Jen Neitzel’s Authentic Happiness list as a fabric-covered bulletin board divided into thirty squares where I could pin or velcro small squares of paper.  I wanted to be able to have a ‘permanent’ board where I could change out old things for new things as the mood struck.

When I decided to work on it this last weekend, I started to think of what I had around the house that I could make the board out of.  I have so many ideas and start so many projects, that if I don’t first think of what I have on hand, I end up with an avalanche of craft supplies, half-used and waiting to be finished off.

As I took inventory, I nearly tripped over the backing board and glass from a rectangular three-part wall frame that had fallen apart almost as soon as it was given to me as a gift.  I had already crafted the wood frame (along with some wide cloth ribbon leftover from a gift-wrapped birthday present) into an earring holder that hangs in my room. I’ve literally been moving this glass and board from one corner to another as I put my house together, slowly, after moving in last summer. I was sure, as all crafty packrats are, that I would find the perfect use for this.  No throwing it out – that’s sacrilege.

My packrat tendencies did not let me down. Bam.  Here it was: the perfect use.  I decided to paint some sort of skeletal/line design on the glass and keep the scraps of paper wedged between the board and the glass, allowing me to change it out while keeping the paper from curling or falling off or disintegrating.  Almost like my happy things were little pressed flowers tucked behind transparent images.

So I set out to put it all together.  It took me one evening from start to finish and here’s what I needed:

• backing board and glass from disassembled frame
• acrylic paint and small brush
• image to lay under glass (I needed this as I can paint with precision but lack organic drawing skills – if you can freehand, more power to you).  I chose a graphic set of lungs and a line drawing of an anatomical heart.
• Mod Podge and brush or foam applicator
• Paper (I used old scraps of construction paper as well as some scrapbook paper I had in my stash)
• Four small/medium binder clips (this is what I had on hand, you can also use picture clips if you want it to look more official)

Step 1:

The first thing I did was clean the glass and set out to paint it.  I used acrylic paint instead of glass paint so that I can wash or scrape it off in the future if I change my mind about or get tired of those images.  I placed the image under the glass and painted.  I chose to paint on the top (as opposed to the backside of the glass) so that it would add texture and also to avoid it rubbing or scraping off as I change out the scraps of paper underneath.

Step 2:

I used Mod Podge to glue the scrapbook paper to the board so that there was a subtle background design.  I weighted the paper down as it dried with whatever I had on hand. Once dry, I coated the top of the paper with Mod Podge.  This is optional, but I wanted to be sure that as I pull papers off and attach new ones, that I don’t tear the background image. (You can definitely skip this step and leave the chipboard background as is.)

Step 3:

I cut scraps of paper to write on and cut out small photos or stickers that represent the things that make me smile, the things that bring me joy. I used museum putty to attach them so that I can simply pull them off and reuse that putty for the new scraps of paper.  (I had this on hand, but if you don’t, it costs only a few dollars for a deceptively large amount and can be used for all sorts of things – I also used it this weekend to attach wallpaper samples to my wall so I can decide which pattern I like without damaging the paint.)

Step Four:

I placed two binder clips on the bottom of the glass and board to keep the glass from succumbing to gravity and then I placed two on the sides very close to the stop.  This is more than secure enough to keep it all together and allows me to easily un-clip and change out whatever I want.

Step Five:

Hang it.  Wherever you want.  I put mine in my dining room which is really my sewing/crafting/painting/game room.  I see it every time I walk through that room to get to the kitchen. It is a constant reminder of the happy things in my life.  I see it first thing in the morning and right before bed and numerous times in between.  I loved Jen’s idea and that it inspired me to make my very own version while holding to the core of her idea.  It also makes me incredibly happy to make a project with things I already have on hand – it’s like a puzzle and a money-saver all wrapped in one.

Amazing Craft (That Saves A Wretch Like Me)

Craft:
(transitive verb)
-To make or produce with care, skill, or ingenuity
-To make by hand

(noun)
-Skill in doing or making something, as in the arts; proficiency.
-A boat, ship, or aircraft.

At the beginning of this year, I signed up for two craft classes – a sewing class with my friends That Jolie Girl and Bettie New and a metal clay class with That Jolie Girl. I was super excited about both classes and viewed them as a way to embrace the new, less-busy, less-stressed me. I was devoting 2010 to making the kind of life choices that ensured I was as happy and healthy as I could be – all the better for me to cope with on-going family stress and the unavoidable stresses of daily life (not to mention maintain the baby face of a twenty year old – what? I look twenty, right?). I made a concerted effort to focus on the creative things that are so important to me and that are so easy to put off – so easy to keep forgetting to make time for, to make half-assed plans for, to fail to start a project – any project – before you can find ten more important and pressing things to do with your time. I wanted to get back to learning and also to doing, to making, to spending time creating. What I couldn’t – or maybe wouldn’t let myself – see at the beginning of the year was that my life was about to change dramatically (yet again) and when I would find myself amidst what feels like a world of not-usual and days spent refiguring my whole future, these classes were going to be my weekly refuges.

While anticipating the start of both of these classes, I decided on my next tattoo and moved quickly to get it done. I felt a sense of urgency that was out of character and abandoned my usual one year waiting period. Generally, once I decide on an image I let it sit in my mind for at least a year and if I still love the image and want it on my body, then I trust I won’t regret it in ten years. So far, this has worked. The only tattoo I have that I don’t love is the only one that was decided spur of the moment. As the not-so-original story goes, it was one semi-drunken night . . . .

A group of friends and I were at another friend’s house when two more of our friends showed up with their newest tool: a tattoo machine. These ink and needle toting friends are artists and we all trusted their artistic abilities. While we may have not yet trusted their new medium, we all sat rapt as the machine kicked on and the buzz and hum filled the tiny studio apartment. My two closest friends decided on their astrological symbols and I followed suit, slightly adapting the image of mine, and then we lined up to place them in discrete places (we were, still, smart enough – even if not sober – to hedge our bets). This now two-decades-old glorified tramp-stamp is certainly no jailhouse tattoo – or even close to the cubes or eagle my cousin tattooed on himself with a small motor, a Bic pen casing and a guitar string as a nine-year-old me held his skin taut and watched, both fascinated and repulsed, while drops of blood rose to the surface of his arm – but it is my least interesting, least favorite and least thought-of tattoo.

When I decided, all in one moment, that I would get an image of a portafilter, a sewing machine needle and a pencil, I knew it was right. I could feel it was right. I knew it would be on my forearm. I paused – was I ready to enter the land of below the elbow tattoos – after all, who waits until she is careening toward forty to get her most visible tattoo? Yes, I was ready. It was clear what it would be and where it would go. I just knew. So I set out to make it happen and I did.

As I met with the artist and fine-tuned the image and layout, I knew that this tattoo was all about the things in my life that were coming together – the merging of my passions and hobbies and loves. It was my most personal and loved tools right on the arm that uses them all. I was acknowledging the importance of crafting, coffee and writing in my life, visibly showing the depth of these things in my cells. I was calling it my dork badge – proof that what I love to do is perhaps terminally uncool, but so much a part of who I am and how I maneuver in the world.

The sewing needle was, it was obvious to me, for my literal love of (even if not great ability in) sewing – but also for craft, in the homespun way of handicrafts. I have come to realize in the last few years of my life that I have always engaged in some sort of art or craft that requires your hands: pottery after school in third grade, bead work in high school, painting watercolors while sitting on the floor of my bedroom listening to albums hiss and crackle that fifteenth year of my life when I had to sober up and behave, fusing glass in the basement as an adult to see the change that intense heat can make in a stack of rough cut glass, painting acrylics on a piece of canvas sheared from a 5 foot wide roll and then taped to my kitchen floor in that transition time when I was a drop-out, when I was between stints in college (officially kicked out of the CSU system). It was also partly an acknowledgement of the community I find myself a part of in Portland, from the small circle of my crafting friends to the larger, hip, dorky group of people who make things by hand. Portland attracts what has been dubbed the creative class, young(ish) people who move here because of its art or craft or music community, people who move here without jobs and make do, make things, make lives. It is a place that can both inspire and make you feel completely trumped by the talent all around you.

Doing research for the coffee book project I am working on, I started to connect craft to coffee as well. Writing and thinking about coffee and what it is that I love about it, what it is that fascinates me and draws me in – the word hand-crafted kept circling in my brain. I love the various communities of artisan coffeemakers – the ones who handcraft their roasts, handcraft their shots, handcraft each individual drink as though it is not temporary, who craft a beverage with intention and passion and individuality. What I’ve been thinking of as the rock stars of the coffee world, I started to also see as the blacksmiths of coffee – toiling over heat and fire and steam for the perfect cup, the perfect shot, the hammered out beauty of a latte. When I would see a portafilter or an espresso machine, I would daydream about my tattoo and I began to imagine the word craft hovering above me in big, puffy, cloud-like letters.

Out of the three images, the pencil is closest to my heart. It is not an exaggeration to say that writing has saved my life over and over – whether it was lewd round robin poems in tenth grade biology while the teacher wasn’t looking, or embarrassingly horrible poetry at sixteen, or scripts for a never-actually-made comic horror film set to Gary Glitter’s Rock N’ Roll in high school, or feverishly written and painstakingly edited short stories in college. I understand myself, I understand other people, I understand the world through stories. I make sense of people – why we do things, how we hurt each other, how we can bridge the gaps – through fiction. I make sense of the space around me through the building of worlds – writing to find a place where I like people and can find compassion for them (and myself). I never love (or tolerate) humanity more than when I am writing – in that semi-conscious state of writing fiction, I find a place where all people are understandable and forgivable and redeemable. I write because I can’t not write, but I also believe that it makes me a better person, forces me to look at things through a different lens, with a curiosity and interest in what is working just below the surface of every glance, every hurtful action, every misdeed. Planning my tattoo, imagining that pencil, brought me back to a decade ago, to where I circled in on writing and craft and my own labored understanding of it all.

During my first term of graduate school, the simultaneously brave (for me, for that moment in my life) and unavoidable leap into an MFA program (diving headfirst into student loan debt and an uncertain job future), I took Form and Theory of Fiction as well as a literature course whose focus was the novels of William Faulkner. I have never felt as inept and unintelligent as I did in those first four or five weeks of my first semester of grad school. I trudged and trudged and trudged through the essays and novels and articles and discussions of those first few weeks and kept hearing a voice in the back of my brain telling me to slip out quietly, to just crawl along the floor and out the door before anyone would even be able to notice I had been there at all. It was my own academic version of Stop, Drop and Roll – a chicken-shit survival mantra repeating at low volume in the back of my head throughout the four hour classes. But I trudged and I trudged some more and I ended that semester with a love for the craft of fiction, with a clearer sense of who I was as a writer, as a Crafter of Fiction. When I understood something in those theoretical essays or in a discussion of The Sound and The Fury (however small, however simple), something/anything about time and plot and structure, I felt high – my brain afloat in my skull, a whole world of possibilities unrolling and stretching out.

I finished that first semester knowing, deep in my skin, that I love structure in writing. I love being able to pick it apart and learn from it. I love seeing the armature, just below your first read, placed by hand to give strength and voice and delicacy to a story. I love the steel beams welding together a whole make-believe world, lies (as some are prone to call fiction) that can show us so much more than knotted up, complicated, pushed-into-a-line life can reveal. Or the fisherman’s net of structure, cradling the people and the buildings and the air of a story, barely holding it all afloat – but holding it nonetheless – an elevated, windblown support keeping all of the pieces of story close to each other, touching and jostling and moving. Or the delicate doily of narrative, a writer’s hand making small, measured movements – the work of tradition – honoring the crafters before, careful of every stitch and word.

I love crafting a story – shaping it and forming it and being intentional at the same time that you simply let go, raise your arms and push your feet off the edge and trust that where you land will tell you what to do with the rest of the story. I love looking at the rough structure and reading it like blueprints – a moment to pause, a quiet landing – and knowing that there, right in those moments, I can make the story sing or I can royally fuck it up. Either way, there’s no pretending that my hands are not all over it. The notion of the big C Craft began to fill my head again, began to arc over my world like a sun-shading umbrella, shielding me from the harshness of real life, allowing me the time and shelter to be still and ponder these things, these leisurely, academic, crucial things.

Throughout this process – of starting my classes, of researching the coffee book, of getting this tattoo – I was keeping myself busy, I was keeping myself focused, but I was becoming increasingly aware that my thirteen year relationship was at an end. I had not wanted to hear it or see it or think it. But I had become less and less able to ignore it, my brain knocking more and more loudly against my skull, demanding attention. There was no tense build-up, no dramatic climax, none of the conflict of classic literature, just the (almost) surprising denouement – the sloping down of the end – and then the dealing with it, the structure of splitting up so much – so much future, so many plans, so many things. It is for the best as they (or I) say, but it is still gut-wrenching and heart-breaking and sad. Sad, sad, sad.

I was focusing on writing, I was focusing on crafting, I was flying myself hundreds of miles weekend after weekend and hoping that, as a side effect, I could outrun this inevitability. I was trying to outrun/outsmart/ignore my heart – that traitorous bitch of a muscle. I have been a walking ball of emotion. I am prone to cry at the smallest of gestures or the simplest of things. Yet while everything around me is in flux, as I face the hard choices, make the hard decisions (those bullshit chores of grown-up life) – I have these Crafts and these classes and a place to do these things – space to make and build and put together.

On Monday nights for the last six weeks, my friends and I meet at the Hollywood Senior Center and sew. We are making, of all sleek and hip things, a loose-fitting bathrobe. We show up and plug in our machines, unpack our supplies and sew. We get lost, we ask questions, we misdirect each other, we shoot evil glances at our machines and we sigh out of frustration as we gently throw our robe-in-process back on the table. We shoot each other silent, sideways, smart-ass comments and praise each other and ourselves every time we make it through a this-was-way-harder-than-I-thought-it-would-be-and-way-harder-than-it-shoulda-been moment – but we also laugh at the teacher’s unintentional double entendres and talk about our weeks and plot and plan for the future of our crafty selves.

I feel anchored in these few hours in a way that all of the rest of the hours in a day just can’t offer me right now. My brain is put on a leash, muzzled and left to shove most of its noisy, pushy self into a small corner of the room. I put my foot on the pedal and hold the fabric, my fingers guiding the fabric gently under the presser foot. I hold my right hand down and use my left fingertips to keep the fabric straight and steady, pausing to readjust, watching the presser foot and the way the fabric moves across the feed dog, careful to keep it from pulling unevenly, my eyes at attention for the tug to the left that will create a wandering seam, a puckered edge, a messy line. I tick off stitches like rosary beads, the whirring motors of our machines making music whose irregular rhythm soothes me. The three tables that are butted up against each other form our own sewing island, our own version of a quilting circle – small and silly and fun, but a salve for my fragile, worn down, fraying sanity. I am in my own fluorescent lit, linoleum floored church of Craft.

There is a blue neon sign in the front window of the center that spells out Hollywood Senior Center in loopy, curving script. When we leave class, it’s dark outside and the blue glow of the neon against the dark glass of the front window gives me the sensation that we are leaving some Vegas-inspired chapel run by an Elvis impersonator. I can imagine our even-tempered, smooth-voiced teacher in a pompador wig and bedazzled white pant suit waving us out the door, reminding us to bring interfacing next week and to press our seams, saying thank you, thank you very much. I am calmed by the blue glow and the way that moving out of the fluorescent light of the evening, walking through the radiant blue of the neon and then out to the dim street lights of 40th Avenue transitions me back to the real world. When we leave, I am always ready to go – tired from a long day at work and then class, creatively tapped out and relaxed. That blue glow is like a guidepost back into my real, non-crafting life – a clear mark between here and there.

On Tuesday nights, That Jolie Girl and I spend our evening at the Multnomah Arts Center – where we took our first class together learning to fuse glass and where our fledgling friendship took deeper hold many years ago. We are learning how to make silver jewelry out of metal clay. We make pendants and rings and earrings out of a mix of silver and water and paper pulp. Each week, we feel like we make a little bit of magic. Every time I roll out the clay that seems to dry out and crack in only an instant, I feel like an alchemist conjuring trickery out of thin air, like I am stealing a little bit of joy from the world each time something works out, comes together, doesn’t crack.

My hands get covered in what at first is wet, slimy clay and turns, quickly, into a thin coating of muddy silver dust. I focus on rolling out the clay evenly, on watching for small cracks at the edges and then dip my finger tip in water and smooth the cracks out before rolling it out some more. I check that my cuts and my folds are even and smooth. I focus my eyeballs on my hands and make things. It is like being able to be outside of myself and right next to myself at the same time. I am able to balance the water and air of the perfect texture and be in a rare place – hovering somewhere outside of my own messy head.

I have been wearing the first ring I made in class and it has become my talisman. I turn it around my finger when I am concentrating at work. I pull it on and off in the midst of one of the many difficult discussions (external or internal) that currently make up my days. It is as though touching that ring, moving it around, reminds my brain that I can make something solid and I can do it again and again if need be. Looking down at that ring brings me comfort and pride – with all of its imperfections and unevenness – I still know that I formed it into this wide band from a damp lump of elemental material. It reminds me of the dusty smell of our classroom and the odor of the paper pulp burning off in the kiln, of the steps and steps it takes to hand polish fired silver clay – the monotonous, tedious chore of moving through four grits of sand paper after using a steel brush and before actually polishing the piece. Seeing that ring – and liking it, loving the way it looks on my hand – reminds me of the payoff, the reward of Craft.

These two friends and I have also been planning and scheming and plotting for a new web adventure that is about to finally happen – Handmade Portland, a resource for and a blog about the amazing, awe-inspiring handmade community in Portland. It is, as our tagline states, all about building community through craft. For us, craft is more than doilies and hair ribbons and lacy curtains. There is an amazing community here of people who make things by hand and seek out handmade things as politics, as lifestyle, as a way to connect with their neighborhood and their people. Spending time crafting, even spending time talking about/dreaming about/brainstorming about crafting with these two women has been saving my sanity one moment at a time – a barometer adjusting weather station, a buoy when I am treading my life. I have these women who also know (even if not to the same extreme, even if not as fanatically, as melodramatically) that making things – with clay, with wood, with film, with words – is not just hobby or extra or frivolous, but vital. In these moments, craft becomes something else entirely – a vehicle, a traveling vessel, an escape hatch for my road weary heart and mind.  I can imagine a small boat – a hand-carved wooden craft (of course) – with only my arm crooked over the edge, my elbow bent exactly at the lip of the boat, my fingers grazing the water, not-visible-me resting, face up to the sky, held afloat and blissfully stranded in my own life-saving Craft. 

I can not speak for the other ladies, but I have come to realize that I worship Craft – not as god or deity or idol, but as reverence, as prayer, as chant and ritual. I see my forearm and am beginning to understand what I knew in my bones and in my wretched heart before my brain caught up. I may not be able to craft myself an easier life right now. I may not be able to craft a new way to view this sadness or a way to speed up the grieving process of a life I will no longer live. I can’t force my heart and brain to agree, I can’t edit or revise this into three weeks from now, three months from now, three years from now when I will be past the hardest of it. I may not be able to shape this into anything beautiful or admirable or understandable right now.

But I can form a small ball of clay in between my palms and roll it out on the table and shape it. I can make a small square bezel and push a small square stone into it, settling it gently and evenly and cleaning and sanding it all. I can take an almost-ring and handle it carefully while I sand the inside, swirl it rhythmical in a figure-eight shape over sand paper to make perfectly smooth edges. If I break it in my hand – so fragile until fired, so delicate in my clumsy hands – I can reconstitute it, make it differently useful and pull out another small hunk of clay to work with. I can take two flat pieces of fabric and guide them through needle and thread, clip the excess thread and see the small straight stitches that appear before my eyes like magic. I can pay attention to what the teacher says and listen – make sure I use my fingertips and not my whole hand to guide the fabric, make sure I press the seam closed and then open, I can work slowly and intentionally and see the difference it makes. I can sit with people I know and we can not talk, we can work in unison and compare our imperfections and laugh. I can string a sentence and build a world where things are not pretty, things are not simple, but they begin to make sense.

I can Craft a place in the world where two things can be bound together and pulled apart with only a seam ripper and some thread. I can Craft a place where I show up and my only job is to make, to create, to learn. I can show up with only my hands and my eyes and my willingness to slow the world down. I can kneel down, figuratively, at the temple of Craft and say thank you. Thank you for even a moment’s respite. Thank you for all of the times that making something, making anything – alone or in a group – has made me feel useful, capable, alive. Thank you for saving my life over and over and over again – for giving me the calm of, even if only for an hour, my fears relieved.

*Hipstamatic Photos courtesy of That Jolie Girl

Balloon & Tether

Owning and operating a small business meant always moving at close to 100 mph.  When I closed my cafe in December, it took only a month for my speed to trickle all the way down to a leisurely 15mph – with a little effort spent looking for a job, a little effort spent organizing the house and a lot of time spent doing whatever moved me at any particular moment.  It was a lovely February, even if it came with moments of abject fear that this listlessness would hang on longer than I could realistically afford for it to loiter.

March, though, did in fact come in like a lion, shaking its over-blown mane in the air like a romance novel manly man . . . staring at me with those come hither eyes.  I found a job and enrolled in two craft classes that make me giddy with excitement.  I will be learning to really, really sew – I will minimize the lopsidedness of my creations and will be taking this class with two fabulous friends.  In addition, as though I wouldn’t be happy enough with that, That Jolie Girl and I are also taking a metal clay class – something we have talked about for years — and when I think of ten whole weeks of instruction about how to form solid metal jewelry out of sheets and tubes and hunks of clay, I start to feel myself levitate away from the worries of everyday life, as though carving tiny little artichoke pendants can really change the heart of the matter.  Like a true craft nerd, I swoon at the thought of how busy and invigorated and inspired these two classes will make me.  Layered in with the classes, my friends Becoming Bettie and That Jolie Girl and I have a soon-to-be-revealed project in the works that brings together so many things that we all three love both individually and as a crafty crew.

And then magically, this book project has shoved its way into the mix – nudging and jostling and cajoling its way into my heart.  My reluctant self-sell has resulted in this project that  I was too anxious before to admit, even to myself, I really wanted.  My mind is racing.  My calendar is full.  My brain is at risk of becoming dangerously, perilously imbalanced – a surge of creativity taking over where stress and work and worry have vacated the building.  I feel, as cliched as the image is, much like a balloon swirling and careening up into the sky – moving in stops and starts as the helium orb is pushed mindlessly by the wind.  I also feel like I have turned off of a quiet residential street to suddenly find myself again on the freeway – thankfully, this time, with brakes and in the slow lane.  I am again balancing multiple responsibilities that go beyond whether I will make dinner or clean out the basement.

And then there is my job.  Yes, my job.  It is of the ordinary office variety.  It is in alternative health – acupuncture and massage and chiropractic – and so true to my nature (which I was recently reminded is a Briggs-Meyer INFP), I have a deep-rooted respect and passion for what this ‘company’ is doing (a necessity for the happiness of an INFP like me) – but nonetheless I am an Office Manager.  My days (as gloriously part-time as they are) are filled with spreadsheets and payroll and Quickbooks and tutorials for a new scheduling program and meetings with advertising reps who assure me that they are the ones who will bring in the highest number of human pincushions.

I was once – I am not ashamed to admit – a math major.  I found a welcomed comfort in the predictability of numbers, the sheer logic of them, the stacks and stacks of them that behave just as you expect them to behave.  Then I reached third semester calculus and realized what I thought was a happily-forever-after love affair was only a fling.  Sure, I liked numbers when they were sleek and coy and winked at me in just the way I wanted them to – when they were still trying to win me over, dressing up and smelling nice and never getting pissy.  But then we moved in together and the sheen was gone.  These upper calculus numbers were moody and philosophical and started to leave the toilet seat up.  I got out before it got really ugly (not before I failed the class twice because I couldn’t bring myself to keep going but also couldn’t bring myself to drop the class and admit defeat).  I did the equivalent of packing my suitcase while calculus was at work and drove far, far away – back into the arms of my true love, English.  My fling with math, though, has shaped my job choices for much of my adult life.  I still find a reprieve in worlds where numbers rule and find that these kinds of jobs leave the other parts of my brain alone enough to allow for daydreams and plots and ways to run wild.

As I settled the business of closing a business, I knew what I really wanted was a job (not a career).  I knew that what I needed to step away from the heavy weight of owning a business was to be a cog – a meaningful cog, I hoped, but a cog nonetheless.  When I was first starting my business, seeing businesses closed hurt me in a very physical way.  My chest would ache and I would feel pinched from all sides.  Once I was done with selling off all of our equipment and did my final walk through with the landlord, I found that I felt freed.  I was sad, sure, but not nearly as much as I thought I’d be. I felt closer to weightless than I had in a while.  I knew that what I needed next – needed in a very primal and instinctive way – was to be responsible for tasks, but not for the welfare of employees, not for whether the doors would open, not for every single odd aspect of what makes the day to day.  I wanted to be less solid, more translucent: a ghost-like apparatus working while no one was looking, a single thread in a window shade, a glistening piece of a well-made spider web.

My job now is just that.  I feel appreciated, already.  I feel trusted.  And I feel only important in the way of one woman among five.  Part, not whole. I don’t always love the tasks I am responsible for, but I always love leaving work on a Thursday and knowing I don’t need to be there until Monday.  Knowing that someone else unlocks the door, someone else sweeps the floor, someone else sets the alarm at night, knowing I won’t get a 3am call from the alarm company.  I love the relationship we have, like dating someone when you know you could just hang out for years and that will be enough – no u-haul, no vows, no arguing over who did the dishes last . . . just the time you spend together and you make the most of it.

What I did not expect from this job – the unplanned consequence – is the way, in this time of creative abundance, that it keeps me rooted, tethers me to the real world.  There is something very grounding about staring at online tutorials for an hour and then realizing you need to eat some carrots in order to, literally, snap you out of the fog.  There is something rewarding in a mouse-gets-the-cheese sort of way about sludging your way through a particularly puzzling payroll of fifteen different people who get paid using four different complicated calculations. There is an earthiness to being pulled back to the day to day when you have spent the day before daydreaming about silver baubles and melting glass and turning raw materials into something familiar and when hours of your time are spent being fascinated by and deciphering and writing about a group of people who make the most mundane part of their day sound like magic.

I am thankful to this job for being reality, for keeping me from spiraling so far out that I forget to brush my teeth or wash my hair or think about more than myself and the joy I can choose to seek or ignore. It is the anchor to my sail-heavy ship.  I will remember that as my eyes cross and my feet fall asleep.  As I walk the length of the building – at least once every hour of my shift – to remind myself what it is to move your whole body, I will remember the side of balance that can sometimes feel heavy – the tugging side that pulls us back to the middle, so that we can careen out to the edge and know, always know, that we will return.

Tilting at Bowling Pins: Imperfectly Handmade

In between bouts of Looking for a Job, I have taken advantage of the Luxury of Time to make stuff.  I have sewn a couple of pieces, limping through two commercial patterns before I start a sewing class the beginning of April.  The last one was going just super until close to the end – I was so proud of myself making neck and arm bindings and stitching them on without drama or seam ripping.  But I stumbled over a cryptic instruction and ended up with a cute-enough top – until you put it on.  Then it becomes glaringly obvious that the arm holes are uneven.  No amount of leaning to one side will hide it.  I tried.  Over and over in the mirror. I even tried it on backward to see if it made a difference. I put it on my beheaded self and altered it, trying to talk it into evening out with a little slip stitching and soft talk.  No luck.  Less uneven, but still even more uneven than my ears.  My sweetie said, ‘well, you can wear it at the beach’ – to which I replied, ‘beaches are symmetry-free zones?’  The conversation (humorously) devolved from there.  For now I am treating it like a grade school painting or freshman term paper – useful in the act of making it, but a little embarrassing to look at later.  My sewing class can not start soon enough . . . .

This last weekend, I made bowling pin cupcakes for my sweetie’s birthday.  Bowling is a birthday tradition (for at least the last twenty years) and a couple of months ago I happened upon a small photo in a magazine of cupcakes made to look just like pins.  I found the book, Hello, Cupcake, on sale at Powell’s and set out to secretly gather the supplies.  This was no easy task, as we share one car – and being between jobs, I have few legitimate excuses for needing the car.  But anyone who knows me even fairly well should know that I adore cupcakes.  I have loved them since I can remember, before every major city had cupcake-only bakeries churning out drool-worthy, picture perfect miniature cakes.  In my house, growing up, the cupcake reigned supreme over the traditional cake and I am eternally grateful to Saint Cupcake for having delectable, dream-inducing red velvet cupcakes most days of the week.

I rarely make cupcakes, however, because I will eat them for breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner and dessert — with or without frosting, mini or full-size or falling apart.  The bowling pin cupcakes, though, called to me – the picture in the book was of perfection — frosting so smooth I originally thought it must be fondant and so I set out to find easy fondant recipes online.  But no, it’s warmed up frosting and the chilled cupcakes are dipped into it and left to sit while it sets into a smooth, white coating worthy of any alley.  The stripes are fruit roll-ups cut into strips and triangles.  Colored sugar and chocolate chips make the perfect bowling ball cupcake. I fantasized about how striking (ha!) the final product would be — I would create a base that looked like an alley and the pins would be set up in proper form with the lone bowling pin cupcake at the start of the lane.

After I abandoned my fantasy of cutting and staining and painting a piece of wood, I settled on a butcher’s block cutting board and laid two photos of our wood floor on top of it.  I baked the cupcakes early the day before the birthday.  I waited an overage of time to make sure they were cooled down and nothing would mess me up.  And then I started the decorating.  You take a regular sized cupcake and place a mini cupcake upside down on it.  Then, with frosting, you affix a donut hole on top of the mini cupcake. While the cakes and the frosting were store bought (I was afraid to try too much on that one day), I was determined that the donut holes would be fresh and local.  A friend drove me to more than one donut shop before we found the last bag of ten donut holes Coco Donuts had for that day.  The thing about them, though, is that they are handmade.  And not actually very round. They looked more like large pebbles or small rocks.  Very un-globe-like. Combined with the imperfection of my mini cupcakes, it made for some seriously lopsided bowling pin infrastructure.

I forged ahead, hopeful that the final product would be as close to the perfection of the photographed images as possible.  I made only six pins – I was afraid I didn’t get enough frosting to dip all ten (and there would only be the two of us to eat them in all their tall, decadent, glory).  I filled the chocolate cupcakes with caramel and that, with the frosting and donut holes, made super-sugar-bombs.  I spackled the infrastructure, placed them in the freezer for the twenty minutes prescribed and then warmed up the frosting.  I gingerly held each one by the wrapper and dipped them into the warm, thin frosting.   What came out of all of this was a hodge-podge of leaning pins.  I gave up, little by little, on the perfect pins of my ambitions and attached the fruit roll-up stripes and triangles, embracing the humor of what I was now dubbing my retired-bowling-pin cupcakes.  Handmade — that’s what counted, right?  I know of several wonderful local bakeries where I could have found picture perfect cupcakes or cakes.  But I wanted to make the cupcakes and I did.

I’m sure that next time the pins will be at least slightly improved over this first batch, but I am still proud of the cupcakes.  They were loved – in the making, in the giving, and in the eating.  I make things.  I make many, many imperfect things.  In fact, that’s all I make.  I was reminded in this process that it is the imperfection of handmade that I truly love.  I may buy factory-made, grocery store donut holes next time to achieve a more uniform look, but I know they will still be lopsided, unevenly covered and gloriously imperfect.  Perhaps I will wear my off-kilter top to eat one of my dangerously tilted bowling pins and imagine my next project – one whose flaws I can never see coming, I can only see as they happen – and I will still love the making of it, creating by hand what no factory can achieve: the lovely, pock-marked, lumpy, rough-edged imperfection of the handmade.

Staring at Myself Beheaded

I have recently been reacquainting myself with sewing. After taking sewing my senior year in high school (it was a shocking discovery to realize my high school even had a sewing class), I graduated and left the skills far, far behind me.

I took a very basic sewing class a few years ago and then my life was swallowed up by work. Being that I’m, ahem, between jobs, it is now the perfect time to find my inner seamstress. One of the up-sides to having closed my business is that I can devote time to the things that make me happiest.

I want to be able to sew a broad range of the basics and learn how to navigate the foreign language of patterns (that cryptic cartography of fibers) . . . but what I dream of doing and what I drool after when I see it depicted on my guilty pleasures of reality television is the art of draping and pattern making using a dress form. Perhaps it hearkens back to my early childhood declaration that I would be a fashion designer and the endless drawings of puff sleeved, bubble skirted, sweetheart neck-lined regurgitations of those 80’s fashions from my wonder years (that career dream abandoned in my late teens when I realized I didn’t really care enough about Fashion). Perhaps it is just some innate tactile yearning that really has no rational explanation.

Where some may dream of humongous high definition television sets or princess cut diamonds or the newest gadget from Apple, I gaze longingly at dress forms, those spendy little headless ladies at the craft store. However, it is not only the cost that has deterred me from seriously entertaining the purchase of one. It is also that they don’t look like me, so the cost to benefit ratio is all wrong — her utlity will be so limited if I cannot make the clothes fit me. Even expanded, they are perfect hour glass ladies and I want clothes for me.

And yet, it seems (somehow) I am nearly 40 (gasp) and I still have not morphed into the shape of a standard dress form.

Months ago, I purchased the book The Subversive Seamster. The first project in the book is making a duct tape bust of yourself to use as a dress form. I was instantly in love with the project and this weekend, we made it happen. With the help of my partner, we followed all of the instructions and after a few hours of being (tightly) swaddled in duct tape, cut out of my adhesive tourniquet, and then stuffing my own “body” with just the right amount of batting — I could stare at my own imperfect torso as it leaned against the wall in a corner of the living room.

Light reflects off of black duct tape in a very particular way and the finished product, admittedly lumpier and even less symmetrical than the actual human body, is a study of my own flaws. She looks nothing like the proportional goddesses of wood and canvas I see in catalogs or at the store.
I put her on a stick so I can stand her up and dress her in a more accurate representation of my own height and she looks like a Popsicle interpretation of my body. She is tall enough now that if she had eyes, I could look into them and perhaps read my own thoughts. I have dressed her — and she has already helped me alter two shirts and a dress that is on its way to being a new favorite of mine. She works well and is just what I wanted, but still . . . .

As new as she is, I am struck by how multi-layered my emotions are about her. It’s me, to be sure, but it is not me exactly. I have had, as I would venture all women of this time and place have had, a complicated relationship with my body. I struggle always to love it, to accept it, and yet to recognize what could be healthier without being overcome by guilt over continually not making the choices that will flatten my stomach or shrink my back or bring my upper arms into chiseled submission. So staring at myself, overlapped and stuck together and stuffed into a close approximation of my living breathing body, is an act of negotiation between who I am and who I will never have been.

She is my gateway into an art and skill I long for and so we will struggle to get along. I will drape her with fabric and pin her over and over. I will struggle with her stiff, stuffed arms as I pull a shirt on and off of her, gently off, always gently off to keep the pins in place. And I will accept that for now, this is who I am, this is how I look, without the sheen and texture of duct tape, but with the lumps and curves of this form. Together, we will create the clothes that my nine-year-old self would never have drawn because they are too boring and missing crucial puffs and ruffles. I will stare at my own beheaded torso and imagine her as my retired superhero self, a shadow in my sewing room, a canvas waiting.

And I will sew.