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Alignment

Granola + Goddesses

My little house smells like cardamom and almonds and coconut oil and maple syrup and oats because I just baked a pan of granola. It’s the first time I’ve baked granola since I moved out of my other house, which was also a bed and breakfast– which is to say since I left my marriage and set out into a hopeful and nearly blank new world less than eleven months ago.

Making granola feels important, because it is. I still know the recipe by heart. A recipe I came across or came up with ten years ago when my much younger family lived in India, and I had the biggest opportunity of my then-twenty-nine-year-old life to say, “This is not working for me; it’s time; I’m done.” For all I know, I might have used the very same Pyrex measuring cup today as I did then– we brought one with us to Mussoorie and back, and I moved one out with me when we divided up the kitchen things last year.

Baking and cooking feel important, because they are. Because, as the brilliant tent maker and kindred spirit Kurt Buetow said to me once, “food and shelter are our most basic instincts,” when I expressed some sheepish confusion at my love of forts and cozy spaces.

I spent seven years making granola and muffins and coffee cake and popovers for guests who stayed at the business I ran with my then-husband. I brought extras around town and dropped them off at the library, the folk school, the art colony, and I learned how to give from excess, not from my essential stores.

I think I learned, and am learning, the same thing with attention and love: giving from the excess, the overflow, the magically multiplying and abundant loaves and fishes, rather than in a way that drains the water table dry or leaves an afteraste of resentment when what’s left for me is not enough..

Earlier this fall, when I baked my first pie in a year, my first pie in my house that I bought with my aunt, I felt sad at first: this rolling pin, this pie plate– they were part of another life. But then I thought about how I have been making pies since I was very, very young. How I stood at my mother’s mother’s kitchen table dozens of times and she talked me through each step. It makes me miss her fiercely now, but as I rolled the crust out it was a comfort: this act reached much farther back than my marriage, farther back than my own lifetime, even. And I felt peace and the sureness of my knowing and my skill, and my love for the women in my family line in spite of all their wounds and human failings.

I didn’t feel sad at all to make granola. I felt peaceful. I’d just had a beautiful, normal, present, easy time with my son and his dad– and I felt so mixed already: to feel rightness and loss at the same time. But the baking was easy. The knowing and sureness and ease carried over into this life, this world.

“Is this the easiest path…? Of course not. But it’s the truest one.”

-Glennon Doyle, Untamed

So I drank my tea and I felt my feelings. I read about Ereshkigal, the unbeautiful Goddess of the underworld, killing the innocent and beautiful Inanna. I think Glennon Doyle is writing the same thing, that we do know the things that need to be killed, not as punishment but as transformation:

“I will not stay, not ever again… When my body tells me the truth, I’ll believe it.”

I made a second cup of tea, and when the timer rang I turned off the oven, stirred and stirred, and served myself a bowl of still-hot granola for lunch.

Closing the Summer Market

I’m being cozy with myself. Curious, and gentle. Quiet, on this day without work or much for obligations.

I dropped my son off at school. (He was wearing a double-breasted coat, gray wool with a brilliant fuscia lining. It was a lost-and-found offering from a friend. I love that he loves it, and that I am able, in spite of all my acculturation, to let it be irrelevant that the coat was designed, tailored, and sold with a female market in mind, not a nearly 12-year-old boy).

I’m wearing a mismatch of clothes myself– only half-changed out of pajamas for the two mile drive into town and back. Clothes are a funny thing– so expressive and particular and important, and so absolutely not at the same time.

I made some tea– a pastel rainbow palette grown in Wisconsin that I’d forgotten I had. I drew, but digitally, and yet it still felt present and connected. I answered an email– and thought about the ways to say “no” that are both true and likely not to be interpreted as unkind by the recipient. I was asked to sing for a local event, and didn’t want to in the least! Not because it’s not a good cause, but just because I don’t want to.

I don’t want to do the work– and I don’t want it to be work. I made my income out of creative pursuits for almost twenty years, and I’m glad I did, and, when I’m not afraid I’ll be punished by some petulant diety for it, I don’t want to anymore– or, rather, I don’t want to right now.

I want to prod, as with a stick in dirt, not push as with a plow through a field.
I want to scatter seeds just by walking through the tall grass and the trees, not plan and plant straight rows of things to harvest, preserve, hawk.

That’s not to say being a “working artist” is only that: selling your wares. But it looks like that right now, and I don’t want to set up a stall in the village square and wait to see who wants what I’m selling.

I’m not actually resentful of the market. The resentment is wanting, despite how right I feel living my life a different way right now, to want to go to market. Because I haven’t reconciled that I wanted something before, and now I want something else.

Neither wanting is more right (or less right) than the other. Summer’s not more right than Winter– and I like both… and I’d choose Summer every time.

Isn’t it good that I don’t have a choice? That I don’t get to decide everything? That the way I want to live my life means I get to practice loving something as it is, something that I would not pick?

The next thing to learn is this: I’m not “making it through” Winter so that I can be better at Summer when Summer returns. I’m not “making it through” what Shopkeeper Rose might label as a dry spell, a period of contrariness, a time out, in order to have more exciting wares to bring to market when I re-emerge.

Because there is no such thing as “re-emerging.” There is no disappearing. There’s just a common way of noticing we’ve been told is the only way, and it is about crops and yeilds and profit margins and hours of daylight and wordcount and bank balances.

But if I don’t push, if I don’t resist, if I am Here… There’s the truth, and telling it or not. It’s the law that extends through everything, Summer and Winter alike.

Order Up!

What if everything we make– Art– is because someone else, thousands of someones, placed their order??

What if nothing is made in a void,

what if nothing is birthed into the world without being called into the world by an audience,

by a tribe,

by its own family?

So literally every Thing we make exists in this world because it has a home in other people’s hearts already waiting for it?

Then artists are in the business of delivering answers to prayers.

The True Self is 11 Years Old

I’ve been thinking about my 11-year-old self a lot lately.

As I planned my 37th birthday party, as she always does, 11-year-old Rose piped up, “No boys allowed! No way!” (Not even my husband or son get invited— they are expected to lavish me with attention earlier in the day, secure in the knowledge that I will save them each a slice of cake).

When a friend texted, “Hey, my birthday is just a few days after yours— some time we should have a joint party!,” 11-year-old Rose laughed out loud. Besides the fact that I insist on having the party on my actual birthday, I assured my well-intentioned friend that, practical though it may be, 11-year-old Rose would definitely not be willing to share. What day besides your birthday gets to be truly, guiltlessly, indulgently about You?

At the party itself, over peach pie, chocolate mousse, and whiskey, someone said “This is so fun! No one ever has birthday parties anymore.”

Why ever not?

I’m pretty sure I’ve thrown myself a party almost every year since I turned 21, when I reserved a couple lanes at the Bryant Lake Bowl and bought a taco bar— surely not a small expense compared to my rent-to-income ratio at the time— and totally worth it.

And just a month after we’d moved to India with a toddler, when I was still getting used to a new culture, checking my child’s shoes for scorpions, and living at 7,000 feet of elevation, I asked the most extroverted person I’d met to organize a ladies-only dinner party. I felt pretty shy, I had no idea who would come, and I had to borrow cash from a motherly near-stranger before going out for the night because my bank card hadn’t arrived yet. But I was turning 29 and that warranted a celebration.

I know I’ve missed a few here and there, but the standard is: It’s my birthday and I’m having a party. There will be delicious desserts (which I will bake) and probably some lake-lounging time, and all my favorite ladies. (And I can invite more than three people because we don’t all have to fit in my mom’s van!)

 

It’s sort of a surprising thing, more than 25 years later, to see how much of my attention and energy goes toward resolving and/or delighting preteen desires. But it also makes total sense: 11 is the age of the true self, a foot in both worlds.

11 is a big transition time. It was the year before 7th grade for me: the era of intense girlfriend drama, my first boyfriend, and, in our little town, the start of high school with 7-12 all in one building.

At 11 I was not yet a teenager or an adult, but I was no longer a little kid. (Though it took another year of pleading with my Mom, and finally an outright boycott at age 13, I was old enough to stay home by myself after school without a babysitter, and even be responsible for my younger sisters.)

I knew at 11 I wanted to be an actress and a writer; and that’s what I’ve done ever since, for fun and for money. I still stand by my fashion sense from 1993 (one distinctive sweater dress comes to mind, and for my birthday this year I wore an extravagantly beaded and sequined top; I also recently bought a 12 color eyeshadow palette, because, why not?).

11 was a quick window between little kid-hood and the angst of crushes and social hierarchies and adult expectations. It was the beginning of being fabulous, the start of choosing to become the person I am today; 11-year-old Rose is the goal, the true north, the notes all ringing clear and in harmony with each other.

 

I wonder what your 11-year-old self has to say to you. What she loves, fears, longs for. Because the upside of being an adult is that it’s all possible. And the fears aren’t as scary as they used to seem: I’m the kid and the mom— I have kept another human alive for 9 whole years, after all; a really nice, thoughtful, funny, clever human, no less, who can cook really good scrambled eggs! I have only rarely fed him cereal for supper. I have faked bravery and held his hand when he got stitches. I have helped him do what interests him even when it doesn’t interest me (Legos, Snap Circuits, Dungeons & Dragons). Without a doubt, I can do that for my younger self, too.

I don’t need anyone else’s permission or money— though I do wish for a windfall now and then, I have saved up and replaced a house’s worth of windows, I have gotten cars repaired, I have paid rent and mortgages, I have researched how to fix a leaky toilet: I can definitely buy a nyckelharpa / get braces/travel to beautiful places / learn to sew my own clothes / get a stray cat fixed / whatever.

I also don’t have to be a Grown-Up about it all. I don’t have to be a 1950’s clock-in-at-9-cocktail-at-5-wax-my-car-on-weekends sort of creature.

Now that my son is out of the I-have-no-skills-to-stay-alive-on-my-own stage, I get to return to my younger self, I get to be playful, I don’t have to focus on survival— my own, as a kid in a grown-ups’ world, or his.

When we move beyond survival, we can thrive, and it turns out I really like the ideas 11-year-old Rose had. She had no mobility, no money, no autonomy other than in her imagination; now I get to have all the resources of adulthood and her wise instincts and dreams.

I hope you do too— I hope all of us return to those younger, wiser, magical selves and bring all the grown-up skills and resources to not only be safe, but to live in delight.

 

Every year at my party I hand out index cards and instruct the guests to write my fortune for the coming year. No one ever writes “Your stocks will go up,” or “Your bathroom will be spotlessly clean.”

Every prediction, every magic wish is one of which 11-year-old Rose would heartily approve.

sparkly birthday selfie