It’s nearly impossible not to feel homesickness for this place; for the way the ocean made everything right, tousling hair, salt-slicking shoulders, lulling us to sleep at night. It’s hard not to long for the way the trade winds blew, the way our became curly, and there was always the ocean to watch and fruit to cut, sweeter than from the mainland, with fingers to lick afterwards.

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I’ve been missing you! And I’ve been enjoying some quiet time offline. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve had a peak at my adventures in Hawaii. I’ll share more about that here in the coming days perhaps, but for now I wanted to say that I’ll be back soon. I’m taking this month–the first month of the new year, which also happens to be my birthday month, to dwell and reflect and hibernate a bit.

xo / Christina

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I have so much to say. And yet so little. Words don’t measure up. They take flight, like birds lifting off a wire; the score of their song like a smudge of ink, a blur of notes across the treble clef of lines.
 
Here is what I know: I was deeply, personally affected by the tragedy in Sandy Hook. I was affected in ways I can hardly put words around. As I heard the news, I was there, body memory replaying detail (look back through the archives; it’s all there). And also: I interviewed at Sandy Hook the year I graduated from college. It was my first job offer in fact, though I passed it up, eager to work in a charter school with inner city kids. Still, I remember the art on the walls. The freckled face of a red-headed boy; the blonde pigtails of a small girl.

And then I found that one of my friends (one of the first of my friends to have children after I did) lost her nephew in the tragedy. A chubby, bright-faced boy with a smile so infectious I’d catch myself often grinning back at him, in the photos she would post on Facebook, of her son and his cousin: arm wrestling, jumping in the pool, tucking in to candy on Easter, or sitting together on the back stoop.

It’s been so personal, so utterly heartbreaking, that I’ve been unable to gather words in any adequate way. I’ve been moved by so many posts flitting around the Internt. And I have so much compassion, and so much simultaneous rage. Mental health. Hours of brutal video games. Gun control. There are dots, like terrible constellations to connect.

I saw first hand the way the system fails: the way the boys (and sometimes the girls too) who need the most help, are almost always met with isolation and medication and discipline that is reactive and restrictive instead of healing and supportive. Families fragment. Things fall apart. The center doesn’t hold.

Here we are.

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I am breathing. I am looking out at the rain soaked grass and letting the raindrops and the grass blades and the dozens of wind-tossed birds be my prayer. I am letting my prayer be the familiarity of ordinary things, and the way these things reclaim us, every one: pulling on socks, fart jokes, the dishes, sticky lollypops. The prayer of ordinary things. That is what I am holding in the quiet of my heart for the families who lost their loved ones; their children, their sweet babes, their mentors, teachers, friends, lovers, daughters, wives.

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I’ve been gathering this quiet, and holding it, while trying to still hold close my commitment to self care: to cultivating habits that hold, even when things fall apart.

I’ve been running daily, and writing morning pages scribbled in script with a ball point pen.

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Oh hello there… I’m sorry I’ve been so incommunicado of late.

It’s just… it’s gradually hitting me: how cumulatively exhausted I am after finishing my book, and finishing graduate school, and starting my new job, all in the span of ten months or so. Followed by juggling new schedules, and preK for Sprout, and long daily commutes, and book promotion stuff (which while totally wonderful, has also been completely draining.)
 
{{ In case you missed it, this week I was featured on Balancing the Tide. And on Lesley Riley’s Art & Soul Radio Show. }}

 
And so, the year winds down, I’ve been feeling compelled to really listen to the whispers at the back of my heart that are telling me to explore what self care means.

And what I’m learning is that while I know how to put myself first–career and work-wise, I’m not nearly so good at at putting my soul first… and what my soul and body crave isn’t always in line what my mind pushes for, compelled by self-discipline and productivity inspired momentum.

What I’m learning is that I’m not so great at saying no. Or disappointing. Or redrawing boundaries to give space for the tender, soft, quiet parts of my soul to flourish again.

So I’ve been trying to do a little bit of that over the past handful of days. I’ve been…

- unsubscribing from e-newsletters
- deleting rss feeds I no longer follow or find joy in
- tying up loose ends and threads for various projects
- dancing in the kitchen with T.
- saying no more that I’m saying yes
- Going to bed earlier and trying consistently to get more sleep
- spending a lot of time giggling on the couch with my boys
- relishing the little rituals that preparing for the holidays offer

I’ve also been focusing on returning to the two things I know always balance me: Running and morning pages. Waking up early and bleary eyed, and curling in a robe in the big white chair in my studio as the sky turns to pink. I’m still not in the habit of either, but already things feel closer to balance.

I’m curious: how do you nurture yourself when your reserves are over-drawn?

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California was rain. At turns soft and steady and other times torrential, filling the concave places curbside with wide lakes the color of coffee, to be splashed at unsuspecting passer-by as cars churned passed.California was palm trees and bougainvilleas and trumpet flowers and a wild abundance of deciduous trees still with golden leaves even in early December, the sidewalks strewn with flecks of yellow like so many fallen stars. It was a trip on the tail-end of the stomach flu; it was dizziness at the airports and sleeping in uncomfortable positions on the plane, and all of it was worth it to see my dearest friends with new babies, and to do a reading in a beautiful loft, celebrating my book with the people who knew me when I was who I was then: a California girl, back in high school, with windy hair and a crooked-toothed smile.
 
I hadn’t seen some of them in 16 years, but seeing them again felt familiar in the way riding a bike is familiar after not riding for years. You just know. You remember. There is body memory to the hugs; and a timber and depth to the laughter. It was the first time, really, that I felt myself reveling, a little bit, in the accomplishment of writing a book. It was a lovely way to wind the season down: seeing my book in the hands of friends and loved ones.
 
And now I’m back, with rain here too at the end of this dirt road. The warmest winter we’ve had here in my memory; the ground still soft and the air sweet with decomposing leaves and ozone as the wind blows in and the clouds lift, revealing the cerulean bowl above. In the morning, the boys run down the hall to find what the Advent Fairy has brought. She slips into our house on fairy wings, bringing special notes and tiny gifts; and after dinner the boys write loving notes to her: Bean, with uneven printing and phonetically spelling and a zillion questions about her wings and adventures and magical names; and Sprout, who has just learned to write the letters of his name, practices them gleefully on snippets of colored construction paper that he carefully cuts.
 
There are just a handful of days really; two weeks exactly before we slip away again for a holiday adventure as a family. And between now and then a hundred things, the least of which is laundry–though it’s taking over our lives. I can’t remember the last time it was all folded and put away; still every night we have dinner together and over shrimp tacos with lime and mango, T and I laugh and listen and map our future–here, and then somewhere beyond here–and then the laundry doesn’t really matter at all. Instead what matters is going to bed early, the warm coffee-colored fur of the dog against my hand, silverware standing like soldiers in tidy rows in the dishwasher to be cleaned, and plotting creative collaborations with friends. Here’s a peak at some new work. Nothing makes me happier lately than having a brush in my hand.
 
How have you been? What does this time of year look like for you?

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