Creative Every Day Weekly Check In (#CED2010) Life changing week...

To refer to the past few months as "hectic" is sort of fitting but not entirely.

I get tired of saying "busy" because it is more than busy.

It has been life-changing and full. Perhaps that is a more apt way to view my life - creative life, artistic life, and otherwise.


Last week I went to Massachusetts with my daughters in order to get the elder daughter, Katherine, settled into her new home at the Hubbard House at Smith College. It also meant I would be coming home, to Bakersfield, with only one of my daughters in tow. Much of my poetry for the past few weeks has been about transitions and loss and excitement and longing and ache. Life has changed.

I couldn't find any large body of writing on this subject so I wrote. And I wrote. And I wrote.


I also noticed my photography has fallen by the wayside. This week, on Saturday, I went with Cameron to one of the LA Artcore Galleries because he had to finish one of his pieces for his current show there. I was grateful I was inspired to click some photos.

My other main creative endeavor - theater - has continued. Last night "The Blue Room" closed and I have to admit something that feels weird to admit. Last night after the show, people repeatedly came up to me and said, "Wow. Julie, you were very good." and "You were incredible." and "Julie. Loved watching you." I have gotten compliments like this before, but to feel their compliments in the space between my eyes: this is different. Doing this show was challenging. I stepped completely out of my comfort zone with it and apparently from what people are saying, I stepped out of my comfort zone well.  Now I am at an impasse theater wise.

   

I want to do another show and I am willing to wait if there isn't anything that stretches me.

I want to settle in with my writing more so I will close with a poem and a very short piece I wrote Friday when the urge to write was so strong I could no longer bear NOT writing.

(I wrote this short, 160 character poem last Sunday after standing in the Special Services line for Delta Airlines at LAX. I like it, a lot, and for once I wasn't writing relentlessly about my family situation.)

Brown eyes hold worry

her diamond bands can't deflect

saints around her wrist

hush the baby in her womb

Plaid shirt wearing husband's

comfort doesn't calm her

The first morning my daughter woke up three thousand miles away from me, my womb started to bleed in that common, once-each-lunar-cycle sort of way. I cried at the timing, the symbolism of the shedding of my blood each month as the natural order of life. A woman's body prepares for life each month - our wombs wait, anticipate, hold their arms up in the hugs-to-be and when you are a mother of another woman who is at the age to start college, the biological clock may still be ticking and it may still be timely but it is more out of habit, it seems, than any chance of reproductivity.

Before I conceived Katherine, I had a hope chest I filled with new items each month when my womb started bleeding.

I anticipated her arrival for such a long time. I longed for her for what felt like an eternity. Her older sister also came after much waiting, but her with her arrival came death so Katherine's birth was something like a royal birth. It was perfect she made her arrival on Christmas.

Three days ago I woke up in Northampton and wrote in my journal, "Today is the day Kathie stays and I go. I don't like the sound of that. I woke up to the smell of bacon and the sound of Emma sleeping. She surprised herself and slept well. I feel this morning's sleepiness in the bridge of my nose.... I need to start showing my face to the world. I have to agree to this day, whether I like it or not."

Tonight Sam declared, "We have one less person in our family now."

I corrected him. "Katherine is still in our family!" to which he said, "Yeah, I know." He paused and breathed out, "She lives in Massachusetts now."

For some reason I feel the compulsion to begin filling up a hope chest again. For what, I am not sure.

I just know that for some reason, I need a hope chest again.

It has been a while since I have checked in with Creative Every Day and even in typing this now, I feel ambivalent and think "this is such dull stuff! Who wants to read this?!" and yet I know that is just indicative of what I am going through now. Nothing less.

Thank you for reading.