This first day

Postcard poetry

I’ve got a postcard haiku up at the cool site Postal Poetry. You can see my poem here.

Rest days

I’m back from two days away from the family feeling fresh and energized. I filled the well. I took long walks, just me and my camera. I ate soup and sipped coffees. I revised a prose piece. I did hours of market research on-line (doesn’t this journal look gorgeous?) and I have my December writing goals lined up. I’ve got a success in my back pocket now and I know where I want to go next.

I can do this. It will take time, because there is life, after all, but I can do this. I can see the way, I can plan my next step.

When I was a cyclist, my coach always talked about the importance of rest days. Every Sunday night we would have a team meeting at his place and plan the next week’s workouts, and there was always a hard day – spinning drills on Flat Bottom Road or sprinting up Firehouse Hill – and there was always a rest day and every Sunday night he told us not to skip the rest day. It’s not a day off, he’d tell us, it’s a rest day. It’s meant to be active rest. Make it an easy 20 miles, maybe just out to the Causeway and back, don’t climb any hills but you’ve got to get your legs moving on the rest day. The recovery days are as important as the hard ones. They make the hard ones possible.

Sometimes I think the most important things I ever learned about life, I learned on a bike. 

So I rested. Active rest. I took my pictures and did my research and used my muscles in a casual, familiar sort of way. To let them recover. So that I can keep climbing.

Wordless

Sometimes I get tired of words and want only to stroll the streets with my camera searching for the door to another world. I see things differently with the weight of the camera tapping me on the shoulder. (Was it Margaret Bourke-White who said that the camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without one?) Sometimes I get tired of my story. It seems I am always telling the same story. (Was it Maurice Sendak who said that all writers have one essential story and we tell it again and again?) Sometimes I want an image without an explanation, an illustration without a caption. I crave a door, an angle, a color.

Running on empty

This is all I got for you today.

Sunday

It’s been a long week. I don’t even know what to say at this point other than it’s been a long week but I made it through the weekend, which was the melt-down point the last time R was out of the country for two weeks, without anybody losing it.

I’ve even managed to find some of the shiny.

Self-portrait

(click on image for larger view)

Red

Sometimes things just fall in your lap. I was taking a walk today – more accurately put I was taking the Boychen on a walk today in a desperate attempt to force him to fall asleep in the stroller, something I haven’t had to do it quite a while. I was annoyed. I did not want to be taking the Boychen for a stroller nap, I wanted him to nap properly in his bed so that I could try to get some work done on this day when the Small Boy is with the Tagesmutter. But it was not to be, and I was taking the little one for a walk and I was annoyed. It was windy, and whatever direction I turned the wind seemed to blow into Boychen’s face, keeping him awake. Draping a blanket over the stroller as a wind-screen only annoyed him. Finally he started dozing off and the sun came out – ordinarily a cause for cheer but the sun was shining right in his face. I made a quick turn and walked down two shaded blocks I have never walked before in my life. Considering the many miles I walked with the boys during the collicky-baby-post-partum-depression nightmare that was January and February it’s amazing to me that there are two blocks near both the zoo and the river than I’ve never walked.

I turned the corner and saw this. I only had the point-and-shoot with me so the photos don’t begin to do it justice, but I literally stopped in my tracks and said, Wow. So thank you, Boychen, for fussing. Thank you for staying awake and hating the wind-screen. Thank you for driving me down those two blocks, and showing me this.

Bundeshaus (Swiss Parliament)

Snow, fleeting

It snowed last week (before Halloween), wet heavy snow though not much of it. Just enough to introduce the little boy to snow

and to remember how much the big boy loves the snow.

And to make this.