A Woman's Life

Forgive me for not writing. I am trying to forgive myself, as is habit, of all the myriad ways in which I disappoint myself. I am a harsh critic of myself. And although I have had more social interaction outside of the house in the last week and a half than I have in several months—due to pregnancy, newborn Greyson, and not knowing many people after the move—I am furious with myself for the state of the house (a mess), the piling laundry (undone), the piles of laundry (washed but unfolded), and my lengthening to do list, which I have been delinquent in accomplishing. And much like exercise, the longer I went without writing, the harder it was to approach the task. And, whether this was inspired thinking or merely inspired procrastination, I told myself that a space begun to give me freedom should not become stressful. And so I dawdled and backspaced and convinced myself that I wasn’t ready to do it. I’m not sure I am now, but I must write today or I am in danger of leaving this off entirely.

But this is so often the trouble with motherhood—how to keep so many balls in the air without dropping one. I talked to my mom this summer about how difficult it is to cultivate an active mind. How I was worried that until the boys were in school I might never have the chance to be a thinking woman. I told her of all the things I longed to do. About the hours I’d spent in the sun on that silly old queen-anne sofa in the bay window of our San Francisco apartment, gazing out at the street and thinking; allowing my mind to wander, to muse, to go completely blank. I must say this is what I miss most about life before kids. The space to be completely still. And now, U2’s “Running to Stand Still” could be my theme song—where can I snatch 20 minutes to check my email; call that person back; eat lunch; pickup; shower. My life happens in tiny broken spaces of minutes scattered throughout the day. And the stillness doesn’t happen. I’m too busy, in the time I have, trying to accomplish everything I need to do before one boy or the other wakes up.

At the time of our conversation, my mom read to me from a book that she had picked up when she was a new mom. She had been, back in the 70s, surprised by the relevancy of a book published in 1955. Gift from the Sea was written by Charles Lindbergh’s wife. No, I shouldn’t do that to her. It was written by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Even in the inclusion of her own name you see her wanting her own life aside from motherhood and being a wife. Here’s an excerpt that sums up exactly how I feel about my position in the world.


…the problem is specifically and essentially woman’s. Distraction is, always has been, and probably always will be, inherent in woman’s life.

For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of the wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider’s web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of attainment is that steadiness preached in all rules for holy living. How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist, or saint—the inner inviolable core, the single eye.

With new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls—woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman-and-Career, Woman-and-the-Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.


And even now, rereading these words, I feel encouraged. I feel understood and justified somehow in the frustration I sometimes feel. I am absolutely in love with my life. I have the most spectacular of husbands—kind, compassionate, wonderfully communicative—and my beautiful boys are just delicious in their temperaments. Yet, inside there is apart of me that longs for expression, for strength. There is a part of me that needs to be taken out to the pasture and allowed to run and also to be put through its paces. There is the inner woman that longs for success and challenge.

Last night Gordon tried to get me interested in some sort of new telescope NASA put up in space, or is about to, I wasn’t listening very well. Finally I said, truly curious, “do you find it unbelievable that I’m just not interested in something you find so fascinating?” To which he responded, “Sort of, but I can’t understand how you can read Real Simple each month. You want to read about housekeeping?” I admit I got just a tad heated as I explained how nice it was to read something about what I do; about how to shave a couple minutes off of a task to buy some for myself, how to clean better, cook better and more quickly, save money, save face, save myself from drowning in a sea of the mundane. Eventually I hit the nail on the head and said “The fact that people sit around and think about all of this stuff which actually is mundane and distracting from the meat of life, the fact that they devote time to it and publish an entire magazine about it each month that hundreds of thousands of women read each day makes me feel less alone in what I’ve chosen for my life. And most of all, on some level, it valorizes the sticky details of running a house. It means that it’s worth thinking about too, even though it’s so ultimately stupid.”

I’m so far away from what Anne Morrow (Lindbergh) seeks—balance. The contemplative life. But the fact that there are so many of us out there vying with the same everydayness and distractions makes me just slightly more able to forgive myself for not having achieved it. For failing, most days, to even try.

Spider plants and Miracles

Tonight I went out for girl's night with my best friend from high school. This is a friend whom I can only describe as Howard Roark from The Fountainhead if you've read it. She has always been self-sufficient. She has always been the person, when I don’t know who I am or what I’m about, that I feel uncomfortable around. Because, in her sincerity, there was always the implication that I was, in my falsity, insincere, I was perpetually left with a feeling of hollow aching. It was never a judgment. It was never anything other than me knowing, by comparison, what a long way I had still to go. What a pleasure it was to be with her as just me, knowing who I am and not being insincere or insecure.

And so, I am finally an adult. I’m getting used to saying that. I’m a grown up.

I’m sure this is getting old: my self-affirmations. “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone-it, people like me!” But having spent so many years uncomfortable in my own skin, this is always a miracle of evolution and accomplishment.

One of the best books I’ve ever read and reread and reread is The Alphabet of Grace by Frederick Buechner. In it, there is this amazing passage where he speaks of the miracle of sleep followed by awakening. In sleep, he notices, we are divorced from our self, and there is the miracle of traveling through unknown universes and psyches throughout the night, only to return to exactly who we are the next morning; waking up as just the same person and knowing ourselves as we do each dawn. This is a point that feels even more miraculous to me now, having woken up for years and knowing immediately that I was lost and alone. Now, in my present state and understanding, to awaken to a confident and known quantity, it is a blessing and a miracle beyond words.

I remember so clearly, waking up one morning in our apartment in San Francisco, looking over the alabaster shoulder of my sweet now-husband when we were just beginning, to the sunlight reflecting on the hardwood floors. The spider plant had been growing—parachuting new growth on and on towards the floor.

Here’s what I wrote that morning; is this a cop out, pasting a remembered memory? Space and Memory—this is quintessential, so I’ll allow it…


Happiness—waking up in warm, strong arms that surround me for the right reasons—why is this problematic? But the light falls fuzzy on the comforter and makes me anxious as I watch the spider plant descend slowly over a month of warm, perfect sunny mornings. As I watch the lightening sky through the bay window over the arm of chipped mahogany on the threadbare, green, Queen Anne sofa.

But don’t settle me. Don’t make me safe. Don’t make me happy. Make me reach—leave me alone. I want to watch and wonder at your spider plant and the big-leafed tropical one with elephant ear leaves and odd planes of tilt and green and angle. I want to exist mentally in the open space where sunlight is lazy on your wood floor from seven to seven in the spring. This apartment is settled and secure and knows its purpose. It is used to being what it is—but I’m still watching. Learning from these quiet spaces and slow, patient plants and threadbare sofa, to be what I am and to live for the half day of sun crawling warm and pleasant over the open space of me and my planes of being.

And I’m learning too—did I mention that? Learning to be quiet and patient and without myself. I’m stepping out of myself—and I like it. I like it a lot. This quiet sun on my boards—on my threadbare seat and chipped wooden arms, as I slowly descend—grow—reinvent and become sure and know my purpose.


Yesterday a good friend asked me if I figured out how to be enough for myself before I met Gordon or if I learned it through him, through his encouragement and love. I think this snippet of my writing answers that question. It was both. It was being loved totally even when I wasn’t sure who I was. It was Gordon saying “do it girl! Be electric color Lindsay!” It was the safety of knowing I was loved no matter who I encountered in the mirror when I woke in the morning.

Once, Gordon said to me, “You’re like this enormous planet with so much pull, so much mass—you’ve got great gravity, girl.” It was words like this that pushed me. Being with someone who, no matter how loved I felt and how comfortable the relationship was, always drove me on to be more. I was challenged and accepted simultaneously. Magic. I became the spider plant, flourishing and parachuting each moment towards the warm floorboards of quiet and calm. And that is where I find myself now. And that is why the quiet and the contentment are ok. Because they were hard-won. Because I earned the security of where I am now. What I didn’t yet know when I wrote these words is that I could be settled; I could be safe; I could be happy—and still be reaching.

This is me reaching—can you feel it? I can.

To be Known

The western addition. The greatest neighborhood ever. The worst neighborhood ever. I suppose this depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. The WA was like an extended college experience. You’ve heard of Extended Learning? This was extended partying. I’m sure there were some people who lived in the hood who had it together, but I didn’t know them. Clearly we were running in different circles. Different times. I was beginning when they were headed to bed.

I remember. I remember getting dressed up and heading out. In San Francisco, this meant funky, vintage, quirky--not dressy. I might wear a fancy dress, but I’d top it with a vintage hat and some motorcycle boots. Add to that layers and layers of sweaters and scarves and light jackets because SF was always cold at night. And then, when I was ready, out the door I’d go. As the metal security gate on the apartment building clanged shut behind me, I was off—up the steep hill of Golden Gate, crossing the three-lane, one-way street at an angle, my hobo bag bumping lightly against my hip. Hands in pockets, coat collar turned up to the wind. I can still remember that. The ability to leave. To be singular. Freedom. Even then, before I knew what it was like not to have it, that’s what it felt like. Freedom. Clean break of selfish outing. Off to I didn’t know where to meet up with I didn’t know who. Off to bounce around the city any which way I chose and to return or not return at any time. Most of these nights Gordon was off on his own adventure or, more than likely, was out of town for work. And I’d be fresh out of class, philosophy swirling through my mind, twinged with slight guilt over my not yet completed work. But off I’d go wearing a captains hat or a beret or a newsboy. Always over-accessorized. Always over doing it. But always free to the point of abstraction.

It’s so funny that when you have it—that ability to just walk out the door and not look back—you don’t know yet how much you should cherish it. Now, the thought of it makes my insides turn over with excitement, like new love, like a crush. Walk off? No sitter? No worry? No curfew?

I remember the echo and scrape of my boots crossing Golden Gate, bracing for the rush of wind as I turned the corner onto Divisidero. It always made my eyes water, threatened to ruin my eye makeup. Blow off my hat. And so, one hand on my hat, eyes blinking furiously, I’d walk up Divis, past Rommy’s and the Green Earth, down to the corner that was the locus of my world. Café Abir, Tsunami and the Fly. These were like my homes—like my living rooms. I bounced from one to the next, never sure who I’d run into or what I’d end up doing. Well, actually, I always knew who I’d run into. That’s kind of what made it wonderful, and like living on a small college campus.

I remember sitting in the yellow light of early New England evening, the TV glowing before me, an electric blue, and I’d hear the gathering momentum of “sometimes you want to go—where everybody knows your name. And they’re always glad you came…” That always seemed like heaven to me. To be completely accepted and welcomed and known. In the town I grew up in, which was a small town 20 minutes outside of Boston, there were only three restaurants in the town center. One was Butricks—an ice cream parlor. And then there was Ye Olde Cottage and Ye Olde Cottage 2. I don’t think I ever went to Ye Olde Cottage 2 and only remember going to Ye Olde Cottage the first once or twice. But once, when my mom asked me what I wanted in life, or maybe it was even unprompted—I don’t recall, I told her I wanted to have a place where I could go and say “I’ll have the usual” and they’d know just what I meant. I could chalk this up to a lot of things: recognizing in myself, even then, the need for sameness and routine; an overload of musicals and Capra movies that depicted small town Americana in a light that I couldn’t resist; an innate feeling of misplaced identity which would continue to plague me through a dramatic move at 13 and several bad relationships, including one bad marriage. Whatever it was, the concept of being “known” was completely foreign to me. If anything, I would have liked to have sunken into the background and slinked through life without notice. Although my personality constantly pushed me to the front—gregarious and outspoken, I constantly had one foot in my mouth and was seemingly unable to tame the things that came out of my mouth. But known? I could barely pick myself out of a line up let alone be known by anyone.

“You don’t know me! I’m not like you!” I repeated this over and over until it felt true. At different times in my life, when convicted and confronted by people who loved me and could see how lost and far away I was. “You don’t know me!” I’d shout until it droned out everything. Their voices calling me back and my own small voice that knew they were right. That knew I was an unknown quantity. At times in life, it was easier, less scary, less overwhelming to pretend who I was than to admit I was a variable: a letter standing in for an unknown quantity. “You don’t know me!” I could have shouted at myself. I didn’t know me. It took a long time to strip off the layers of pretension, of personality adopted to fit in, or to define against. To find what I meant when I said who I was or wasn’t. To get down to that small concentrated formula of Lindsay that I essentially was. Maybe during those times what I was most scared of is that if I stripped it all down, I wouldn’t be left with anything at all.

But in San Francisco, I found Me. I encountered me in that city. The first good friend that I made was a French girl names Sarah Fradet, and she lived with a bunch of international roommates and we all sang and played instruments. I remember going out into the city with my guitar case, hailing a cab to go to SOMA where we would gather at their loft and sing and play for hours. I could hear the song from The Sound of Music playing in my head as I sauntered down Fulton street towards Divis, so awkward and self-conscious, “I have confidence in sunshine. I have confidence in rain…besides as you see I have confidence in me.” Maybe if I sang it loud enough to myself and carried my head high enough I’d believe it. And eventually, I did. I believed it.

And finally, at the corner of Divis and Fulton, at the locus of my new world, I found my Ye Olde Cottage—the place where everybody knew my name. I was finally and completely known. But of course, the best part is that I knew myself then.

As usual these posts, once begun, continue on and on and on. In this “space” I’ve created I’m like my first Horse, Greystone, who once let off his lead in the pasture would take off, tail raised, hooves pounding the hard ground, whinny high in his throat. I can picture it exactly, that pause of tensed muscle and motion, body beginning to lean slightly away as I unclipped the lead from the halter—off he’d tear like I was a demon spirit threatening. Like he wanted nothing to do with me. Like I was plague to him. Of course, he was back in a minute or two, but that first lick of freedom, for him, was so delicious, so overwhelming that he’d bolt in a flash of brilliant energy. He was off. Gone. All nervous energy and tension. That’s how I am here. I’m off and away. Running from myself that I’ve been all day, into these fields of white, my fingers pounding, lead swinging loose behind me. Thank you for allowing me the run and being there when I come back.

Living the Choices

It's 8:30 and already I'm so tired I crave bed and warmth and pillows. But Grey isn't down yet and this is my only time for (re)connecting with Gordon. And so it goes that I never get to bed before 11, rise at least once to feed Grey, and am up with Henry by 7. But I cherish these first months with the baby which will be gone before I even blink. But I've promised myself to write each night so I'll delve in and see where I go from here.

To continue from my last post, in the looking around my house and recognizing all these odd assortments of furniture and stones and prints that together make up My Things and wondering how it all happened. And most of all in realizing that this is just what I have and where I am, it is the same with Me. With Who I am. Somewhere, in the last 32 years, I've become what I am. Not so obviously as picking up accidental objects from the streets of San Francisco, but who I am has, in one way or another, just happened on some level. I find myself here, as who I am, and not that I can't change or become, but this person that I see the world through when I open my eyes in the morning, that person is just me. It is the me that I see in the mirror and wonder over; the person that struggles with some things that have plagued me my whole life, and other things which have come up only recently. But no matter what, I am 32 years into this life of mine--the only one I'll ever get--and those 32 years of events and moments and loves and wishes and regrets are irrevocable. They are past. I think this is a difficult thing to come to terms with . Past. Past tense. Memory. Things that cannot be changed.

I remember, walking back from Falleti's pushing Henry in the Stroller, seeing those young people in San Francisco. Hipsters and twenty-somethings with not a care in the world and enormous pulsing potential. And I was envious. Or nostalgic. Or perhaps only whimsically remembering that total utter freedom. That selfishness. Being able to do whatever I wanted. Because with security, with responsibility, with the absolute joy of motherhood comes permanency. And this also brings great, earth-shaking love. Last night, after he had made a little cry, I went to check on Henry and seeing him asleep, I kissed that part of his neck right where it meets his shoulder. And this boy, I realized, this curly haired angel, was mine. He was something I created, something that belonged to me for now. Something that was mine to kiss and snuggle and touch. And that soon, sooner than I will want, the territory of his body will become his own and will be off limits to me. And that he will become his own person with secrets and resentments and issues. He will no longer be mine. But for now, for that magical moment by the yellow hush of the nightlight, he was my most tender, sweetest love. And that, moments like that, make the hipsters life seem empty.

I've gotten off track here. I didn't mean to wax poetic over what I miss, over what I've lost. I meant instead to talk of how interesting it is that I am who I am. That I'm an adult. And this person that I am is the person that Henry and Greyson will remember as their mom. I am their idea of a grown up. And that means that who I am is already complete. That sounds odd--it's not that I won't be growing and changing for my whole life, but that most of my major choices have already been made. And I know this is just part of growing up. I think of my parents, who have lived such a wonderful life, and I yearn for the security they have in looking back over a life well-lived. I hope I will be able to do that as well. But this shift just happened for me. The shift between wondering what my life will be and having the freedom to make it however I choose, and having made my choices already and living them well. The looking back comes later--that's the next stage. This isn't news to me, I knew conceptually that it would come. My mom told me when I was only a child about how disillusioned she'd been to discover that there was no plateau of adulthood, no point at which she would ever feel grown up. I think the biggest let down is that there is certainly no plateau of self-sufficiency, self-understanding or self-confidence. There is only who you are at each different stage of life wondering how to make the best of who you are and of each day.

Today was a good day. Full of connections with old friends through email and new friends in person. I managed to clean the house, all but the dishes, and run my errands. But mostly, thanks to the space I've created in this blog, it was a day in which I had room for contemplation. For feeling the inner workings of my mind as it began to chug slowly back to life. Chug--chug--ch--ch--chug. Like the watch I just got from my mom that needs to be wound each day, I need the daily act of mental exercise to work correctly. I've laid dormant and to suddenly begin again there is the joy of movement and the surprise of work that writing gives me. I am thankful for this. That I'm writing, that I wrote yesterday and the day before, it is all seeping into my life, coloring it and exciting me and making me think harder and longer. No poetry during diaper changes yet, but words are beginning to form in my mind and thoughts are rising slowly like bread. I am encouraged. I am finding the Me in the Mom.

A Stone's Throw Away from Sanity

Rainy day, after 5pm, which means I've popped a beer and am counting minutes until the boys are down and I have some space. Calm is at a premium in a household with a newborn and a two-year old. I've barely finished the housework--the daily run of dishes and laundry and picking up that happens everyday and seems to be complete only minutes before it has all piled up again. I remember a time when I was just me, or just me and Gordon and I couldn't seem to find time to clean my house. I lived in perpetual mess. And now, I clean everything every day and yet it still seems to slip entropically into havoc.

Some days I am the merriest of homemakers. I feel energized and proud of how clean the house is, what I've made for dinner, the number of loads I have washed, folded and put away. Other days I find it difficult to do more than catch up on old episodes of Lost. And most days I just lose myself in the shuffle of everydayness. I let it seep into me and take over. I am only the mechanics of going through motions: chipper voice to engage Henry, accented motherese to make Greyson smile, dishes half-heartedly completed and for dinner--rice, and easy chicken dish and maybe broccoli--the go-to of ease that satisfies hunger with absolutely no creativity. But behind these actions, I am numb, lost, asleep perhaps. Some days I'm annoyed that my mind is so full of these details that hold no import. I resent that I am stressed about not having met my quota of daily tasks. I am desperate for something to fill my mind--or rather to expand it, ignite it, challenge it.

Back in the 60s when she was beginning her path, my mom was asked by someone why she was getting a college degree if she was only going to be a mom and a homemaker. And she said that she'd be able to think about poetry while she changed diapers. What a beautiful thought. On my good days I am poetry in action, keeping a lovely house. Most days it's a trudge through the mundane.

Interestingly, I'm not unhappy. Perhaps I am not effusively spouting with joy, but I love my husband and my dear dear boys. I love my life and my position in it. I am currently, madly in love with the house we're just settling into, it's a much greater joy keeping house in an actual house. But there is a Lindsay within the Mrs. Saint Clair, that runs deeper than mommy or wife. And the Lindsay yearns for growth and for learning and for the opportunity to excel. I'm hoping that this blog can create a space for contemplation. I used to fancy myself a writer. (I've imagined myself many different things at different moments--a singer, a writer, a professor--but I always knew I was made to be a mom and a wife first and foremost). But when I was in the habit of writing--daily exercises and working on several pieces of fiction--I saw life like a writer. Everything I encountered was poetic--fringed with magic and clarity. This is part of the me that I've lost and that I long for. Maybe, at this stage in life, it's just about picking up the discarded pieces, creating the united state of Lindsay from the best bits of what I've put down or left unfinished.


And so, now that I'm writing again, here on this electric gleam of white, I look for the magic at the edges--for the extraordinary in the ordinary. I begin by looking at the space where I find myself. and what I'm struck by is the stuff. The things that have amassed around me and followed me from San Francisco to Atlanta--like satellites that, once in orbit, are forever caught in their runs--the miscellany of items and furniture that found its way into my home is still surrounding me here in this new space. It's interesting to me that these are now My Things. These are the decorations and furnishings that my boys will grow up with and remember as part of their childhood home. I didn't think this through when I found the marble Chinese dragon statue sitting by my car on Golden Gate Ave and brought it home to roost by my hearth. I didn't understand the permanence behind the scuffed regulation bowling pin that sat on top of a fence post on Fulton street outside my first San Francisco apartment. Or that the many stones, large and small, that have accumulated in our house are part of us--part of our adult existence. It's so interesting that this all happened by accident. I never sat down and thought "my main design scheme will center around piles of stones spread throughout my house." And yet, there is the candy dish full of small interesting stones on the sideboard in the dining room; the wire urn by the fireplace containing smooth, unnaturally (although natural) round light grey stones that Gordon had collected before my time; the two larger rocks I took from a trip to the Russian River because they seemed so much like small mountains, craggy and rough that sit atop my mantle. And even more--stones everywhere, scattered like forgotten thoughts about the house.

"I want to play stones mommy," Henry says. And we line them up, stack them, discuss which are our favorites and why. Make (very poor) guesses as to what type of stone they might be. It is completely normal to Henry that there are stones lying on every conceivable surface, cluttering empty spaces like dust. Collecting in the corners. Picking up inertia.

This all goes to say that I am now an adult. And this space that I find myself in, this house, filled with these things--this is my life. It's gone passed the point of conscious choosing and is simply where I am. Who I am. Here's where I am. I'm surrounded by rocks, rich in their rough natural beauty, and little boys (to whom rocks might as well be covered in fairy dust and magic). So maybe, when I can't seem to find it in me to see beauty in the mundane, I should just ask Henry to describe it to me, because he sees it everywhere.

I apologize to those of you following that this entry is so scattered. So rough-hewn and unpolished. It's the pressure of needing to write everyday. I wish I had the time to fix it up, salvage the parts that are rich and dispose of the empty phrases--the mundane. But I've promised myself that I will post each day. And that I will allow it to not be perfect. And most of all, this is a space for me to run free--unhindered by expectations (my own and even yours, reader). And like a run, it is not about where I'm going but the exercise of the run that I'm in it for. Please excuse these first attempts, so like the awkward stretching and jogging before exercise actually begins. This is my gathering of momentum. This is *I hope* muscle memory kicking in. Me remembering how to be the best of me that I've left behind and the moving towards the good parts I haven't yet discovered. Here's to the freedom of the run!

(What follows is some writing I'm remembering now, written 8 years ago, when I was the me that saw poetry in every moment. To be fair, it's hard to find poetry when life is so full of details, which is why I so desperately need this Space. And I laud my mom for being able to do while changing diapers--more proof of her beautiful, vibrant spirit--and that it isn't hereditary!)

I want to grab a dragon by its tail, get a good handhold. Whipped red and gold scales of oriental green-blue angles—wide surprised eyes of Chinese New Years and curling paper lanterns. Run down streets of uneven paving and hear the echo and I’d wish there was rain—to see the paper dragons, paper lanterns, melt in wet, goopy piles of brilliant colors and ink clouding puddles of swirling jeweled light.

Run—run down alleys and boulevards, in crowds—in loneliness, in brightest day and dreary clouded new-moon nights, when the air is clear and thin and cold and sound pierces and travels—hollow echo and sharp skinny cry—like a quartet of me and the run that is free and fine and clear—that is like one black straight line on white paper. A run with no implications—no fine writing or sticky noisy complaints. A run with no need for destination—no time and no beginning.

And the clip clop of heel on pavement , the rush of wind rings when I stop in crowded thoroughfare of empty street, and look up to see whatever is before me and to know that I can go on or change direction because limits are only these pullings in my legs and cramps in my sides and these, I know, I am capable of overcoming-of pushing through. And suddenly I am capable and totally limitless—as long as I push through, as long as I run: I am free.

Inhabitable imaginary

I've started this blog selfishly. It's not for anyone but me. In fact, and maybe this is just the essence of blogging, it's all about me. And maybe that's why I'm doing it--to carve out a little space. A place, in my life of chaos and noise that's just for me to be quiet and still and try to think. A space for me to remember.

There are so many things I want to remember. And this speaks, more than anything, to what I've lost. We don't need to remember things that are still with us. Memory is the habitat of the lost. It is the frontier of longing and regretting and wishing. Partly because the trail of our past is responsible for our present. Partly because we long for time to stop and in memory, if only for a moment, we can inhabit the past. The time before time moved on.

Memory. In a word, this is what interests me more than anything. Memory recalls what has happened. Yet, it is not static but dynamic in nature. It can change. It can be wrong. It can become more complete later. It is three dimensional. Maybe four dimensional. When we remember something as we experienced it, that is one thing. That is as if what we experienced was filmed as through our eyes. We are limited by that viewpoint. Then, perhaps, someone else tells us what they remember of the same event, and suddenly we have greater dimension. We see more clearly--we can be outside of ourselves.

I remembered so clearly my wedding. It was beautiful and tender and intimate and we followed it with a five week honeymoon in Europe. And the whole time we had such fun remembering the moments and the beauty and talking about what we had loved. And then we arrived home and we received the wedding photos. And suddenly, my memory of the wedding was replaced with a third person narrative of what it had looked like. I now can't remember any of it except what was photographed. So that my memory of our vows is no longer what I saw at the moment--the blinding nimbus of sun haloing Gordon's face--but an image of him and me standing aglow in the late afternoon sun. My memory now includes me--an image of me. Surreal.

And so memory--changing, grappling, rethinking the past--is important to me. Conceptually I'm intrigued by it. Emotionally I am pulled by it. Romantically I am moved by it. And it is even more interesting when connected to space. Every memory is clearly tied to the place of it's inception. Yet it is also connected to the physical space of each place it has been remembered from. So that as I type this now, I am both in the place where I first realized this, as well as walking along the path at Alamo Square park where I often thought about it, and also sitting at my computer in our old apartment in San Francisco where I first began writing about memory. In fact, we are transported to the space of memory. It is inhabitable. It is imaginary.

It is the purpose of this blog to be a total freedom for me. A space to write, and to be, and to relax without strictures. It is my own inhabitable imagined space.