Category Archives: the view from here (Pictures!)

Fierce In Pink: a love letter

I’m writing love letters in October. Every Monday, I post one here…

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Dear Impossibly Beautiful Golden Haired Girl in the Pink Leggings and Hello Kitty Top,

Your laughter, adorable and fierce, catches me off guard. I turn to find the source and there you are. Know this: there are few things more dazzling than your wild run across this park’s green expanse, hair catching sunlight, thin legs pumping, arms flung out as you dive onto the Nerf football everyone wants. I can’t help but laugh as your little body covers the ball and your inarticulate squeal declares you the winner, the ruler, the 4-year-old master of your daycare world.

I want to tell you to not to surrender your victory to that dark-haired boy, the one who couldn’t catch you in the race to the prize, but threw himself on you when he finally did arrive, wrestled the ball away, stood and waved it in the air as though being second and a bully were just as magnificent as being brave and wild and first.

I watch you get up, staring after him, wiping your palms on your pink leggings. He runs the ball over to the 20-something in charge, who accepts it, half paying attention as he talks to another 20-something in charge. The two of them, a boy and a girl, look like kids to me, but I know it’s all perspective. They’re a lot older than you. All the preschoolers gather into a loose huddle, waiting, watching as the 20-something tosses the ball up and down. They dance in nervous anticipation until finally he lobs the football high above their heads.

In unison, everyone turns, runs, shouts. I want to tell you don’t worry about it. It’s a stupid game. The dark-haired boy’s a stupid boy. You don’t have to prove yourself to him or anyone else. I want to tell you how perfect and amazing you are, tell you a hundred truths chosen specifically for you, to make you believe in yourself, to make you unafraid, unintimidated by the bullies of this world.

But when my eyes break away from the football hurling through the air, they find you, breaking away from the pack again, wild, joyous… absolutely certain. The ball lands, and you land on top of it, and in the instant before the crowd of kids descends upon you, I know you don’t need my speech at all.

It was I who needed you today.

Love,
j

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I’m so honored to have been invited by Julia Fehrenbacher to write about fearless love on her blog, Painted Path. I hope you’ll go read me there and then check out all that Julia has to offer. Her blog is like a little sanctuary, beautifully written and disarmingly honest. I’ve never actually met Julia in person, but I suspect that description would apply to her too.

Unplugged

This is me. Sitting on a big rock half way down Mount Diablo, enjoying a Sunday plugged into my physical world – sunshine, trees, a big blue sky. Some sweet graffiti love…

What I’m not doing is writing the Monday post I had planned for today, which is exciting and love-packed and will now be seen on Tuesday.

I hope you are all out loving your world.

xox

We’re Human Things… a Friday List

My favorite quote this week…

“We are here to learn to endure the beams of love.” ~ William Blake

(…who was quoted by Anne Lamott in her gorgeous, kickass essay about becoming who you are meant to be.)

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THIS broke me open in a million ways. I tweeted that it was the most beautiful thing you’ll read today. If you missed it, go now. Read this amazing post from Robyn Elfie Olson. You won’t be sorry.

And “This is my Calcutta. Go. Find. Yours.” from Hannah Katy is whimsical and bold and utterly inspiring.

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Driving in the car with The Boy…

Me: I wish I could tell Ian (my GPS) to take me somewhere pretty.

The Boy: Of course, you’d never be able to trust him. He’d be leading you to that cute computer in the library downtown and telling you, “She can plug into my USB port any time.”

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I love this song.

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Not too long ago I got an email from Varun Kothamachu asking me what I thought of his idea to create a blog which features a different writer every week. “We aspire to create a mosaic of interlinked stories from people around the world. and the lives that they live for one full year,” he said “At the end of the year, 52 writers will have recorded their lives, each for one week.”

I told him I thought that sounded very cool.

Varun is fast. Here’s the blog. Stories begin September 5th.

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Sometimes, I have these unworkable pockets of time – too short to get into something, too long to do nothing… Yesterday, in an unworkable pocket of time, I took out my camera.

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Another week where all of you have left me breathless and grateful. Thank you so much, and have a love-filled weekend. xo

We give birth to ourselves…

When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens… we give birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded on our soul, our daimon, our genius.

~Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Crazy Beautiful

I lost a batch of pictures from my vacation – all from the first day. I suspect something went wrong in the upload and, without realizing that, I deleted them from the camera. They’re the least painful ones to lose – pictures of our CRV holding all it can, bikes strapped to the back, boxes on top; snapshots taken on the drive up to Humboldt; our arrival.

It’s okay that I don’t have them. I’ll remember the subjects of those shots. I wrote about them – our little apartment above Arcata’s Plaza, the sign on the bedroom dresser inviting us to call the police if the noise from revelers below our window prevented us from sleeping. I spent a lot of time chilling (and writing) on the rooftop patio. I’ll remember all that.

But there’s one picture I’m really sad I don’t have. I took it on the way up, in a little redwood park just past Leggett, California, where we stopped for lunch. At the edge of a clearing, a trail wound down to a canyon where families were camped out for the day. The river that flowed through it looked festive, decorated with children, brightly colored rafts; parents, umbrellas and toys scattered along its edge like jewels.

In the middle of a wide river bend was a giant boulder. Kids swam around and scrambled over it. Some boys with water guns stood on top and shot at other boys splashing in the water below. There was something intensely nostalgic about the scene, right down to the fingers of sunlight reaching through the trees that rimmed the canyon. It looked like a postcard sent to me from my past, like if I looked closely, I’d see my own ten-year-old self playing with my brothers in a Santa Cruz creek behind a rustic old cabin: red hair, crooked smile, freckled, sunburned shoulders. The summers in my youth looked just like this.

As I watched, a boy, maybe eight years old, caught my eye. From the top of the boulder, he looked down at his friends in the river below. He had a giant squirt gun in his hand, which he turned and handed to a little girl who’d followed him to the boulder’s edge. His friends, noticing him finally, began yelling up. He didn’t yell back. He just stood there, poised, tense, unmoving, as high as the balcony of a two-story building.

I felt nervous. I knew he was going to jump and I knew exactly how he felt there on the edge of his moment, looking down. No doubt, many kids had jumped before, but not him. Not until now. He stood so still, knees slightly bent, staring. I put the camera to my eye, watched the little girl say something, the boy turn to her, turn back. I felt my pulse quicken, my stomach dance.

I whispered encouragement.

Several moments passed and I began to doubt he’d be able to overcome his fear. I lowered the camera, until I saw one of his friends climbing out of the water, clambering up the giant rock behind the boy, yelling something I couldn’t hear. I knew then that it was now or never. Jump or get pushed, I figured, and I put the camera back to my eye, focused on the boy, held my breath like it was me. It was just as his friend reached the top of the boulder that the boy leapt, and I snapped his picture – suspended between earth and sky, legs bent, arms up, so crazy beautiful I whooped in giddy recognition.

A few seconds later, his friend jumped too. I’d lost track of which splashing boy was “my boy,” the one I knew so well, the one who’d stood there thinking how different it looked from the top of the boulder, how much higher. The one whose stomach was leaping long before he did, whose limbs felt uncertain and infinitely breakable. The one who told himself, fiercely, that other people had jumped; he’d be fine, just like they were. (Even though it doesn’t matter in the moment of hesitation how many people went before, and it matters even less after the fact, when you’re so alive you think you might burst right out of your merely mortal skin.) That boy who sucked in his breath and jumped – on his own, because that was better (so much more triumphant-badass-rock-star-amazing) than being pushed.

I lost the pictures from that day, but I wanted to write this post to make sure I never lose him.

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And speaking of beautiful leaps, according to the Love Project’s Big Fat Master Plan, August is the month of grand gestures. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but I think it’s about leaping when you’re scared, loving big, loving more, showing your heart in spectacularly real and enormous ways. I think it’s whatever you say it is, because not everyone’s “grand” looks the same, and thank goodness for that.

I think August is going to be amazing.

xo

While I was gone…

I know what you’re thinking. Has it been a week already?

Yes, it has! I’m back. I missed you. I have stuff to share. I took over 425 pictures while I was gone, so we better get started if you want to get through this post today.

I’m kidding, of course. But I am going to share a picture from each place I went and also some times when I surprised myself because that’s what I said I’d do. I’m hoping you did something you normally wouldn’t while I was gone, something that made you feel wild, or daring, or happy, or gorgeous. Something wonderful.

Here’s what I did…

Day 1:

Chad and I hooked up with a group of seasoned bike riders for their regular Sunday ride. We rode from Arcata to Trinidad and back, about 35 miles. That I said yes to the ride, despite the fact that I haven’t ridden my bike seriously since breaking my wrist in a spectacular crash a couple of summers ago, didn’t surprise me. I do stuff like that. (The wrist-breaking incident itself happened when I very ungracefully hurtled myself down the side of a mountain on my first serious mountain bike outing ever.)

What surprised me was that I finished. At the end of 35 miles, where body connects to seat, I was not happy, but everywhere else, I was ecstatic. Unprepared, underfueled and utterly out of my league, but happy in that way that only pushing yourself past your edges can make you.

Oh! And for part of the trip, I rode the shoulder of Hwy 101. Riding my bike on a freeway is something I’ve never done. I felt very badass. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures. It was really all about the need to keep pedaling.

Day 2:

I woke up feeling alive, the previous day’s bike ride part of my (ahem) muscle memory. I had this epiphany in the morning (which counts as a surprise, I think), and I visited the (surprisingly) pretty Arcata marshes in the afternoon.

Day 3:

I sort of stumbled into Fern Canyon, located in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. It is more beautiful than my pictures can show you. A creek winds through the center of the canyon, and the fern-covered walls tower over you on both sides. (The second picture has a person in it to give you a size reference). I surprised myself on Day 3 too, but it would take me a long time to explain it. Suffice it to say that sometimes, in an attempt to assuage our own disappointments, we manage to tap into our better selves.

Day 4:

I spent the day with The Boy who isn’t much of a hiker. He’s more of a wander-around-town kind of guy, in and out of interesting buildings, picking up interesting stuff, listening in on interesting conversations. So, in the spirit of compromise we spent the morning wandering around Arcata (where I saw this cutie pie waiting for his people to finish drinking coffee)…

… and the afternoon hiking Patrick’s Point State Park, where I caught The Boy in the midst of amazing (click this one to get the full effect).

Day 5:

We hiked Skunk Cabbage Creek trail, which is more remote and wild than the other trails I’d been on. It is stunningly gorgeous, weirdly prehistoric, and full of frogs. (I love frogs.) We hiked two and half miles to the top of a hill that overlooked the ocean. That’s where we had lunch, and also where The Boy gave me some invaluable tips for surviving the zombie apocalypse.

I know, I said just one picture from each place, but look at this guy!

That night we went here, where they showed two entirely different movies than the ones listed (because that’s how they roll, baby), and I ate popcorn, french fries, pizza and beer for dinner. (Anyone who knows me knows THAT is surprising.)

Day 6:

The Boy’s and my footprints on Moonstone Beach, where we climbed rocks and crawled into sea caves and talked about how vast the ocean is… and also what kind of house we’d live in if we lived in medieval times. (I had some great conversations with The Boy this week.)

Day 7:

Spent the morning in Mendocino, checking out the unique shops. Some, like the kaleidoscope store, were ridiculously cool. Still… I didn’t really get excited until we wandered down to the beach and found the tide pools. Look at this heart-shaped sea anemone!

I had a soul-filling vacation; I needed an inner adjustment and I got it. It left me feeling clearer, more certain of myself and my direction, a step or two closer to balanced. I’m going to try hard to hang onto that.

So now it’s your turn. Did you surprise yourself? What did you do while I was gone?

What did you fall in love with this week?

I fell in love more than once this week. Come see…

I’m crazy about this bit of graffiti love sent to me by Kerri Morin who took the shot in Austin Texas. And, seriously, I absolutely love being the person she thought to send it to.

I fell hard for this beautiful girl and her totally awesome rain boots.

Hannah Katy does a lot of wonderful, inspiring things, but the thing that makes me most giddy? She writes love letters. A LOT.

This piece, “Tremors” by Michael Lockhart is heartbreaking (and beautiful, and profound and achingly human). And… it’s all about love.

After a rough start, I fell in love with the 3rd of July, I went to the beach with Chad and The Boy. I didn’t decide until noon, which was when I thought, “I MUST get out of this house. Right. Now.” It took us 4 hours to get there (with a short lunch break) because, it would seem, everyone who lives between me and Capitola also decided to go the beach. We had every reason to be cranky. Four hours of driving in 90+ weather. Instead, we spent what remained of the day laughing, ducking in and out of shops, getting scared by a mannequin, slurping ice cream cones, chatting with men who were having no luck fishing off a pier. We sat in the sand and watched the waves. Well, I watched the waves (and quoted lines from JAWS). The Boy watched the girls.

Oh, and I found this. <3

What did you fall in love with this week?

Doodle Magic

Since stumbling onto doodle therapy last November, I’ve become a doodle zealot. I’ve always idly scribbled away during meetings and phone calls and arguments with my muse, but since November, I’ve committed myself. I doodle with glee, watching my unedited thoughts drop on to the page in visual form. It’s trippy. And fun. And, yes, therapeutic.

I asked you all to join me and in your usual completely awesome (I have the best readers EVER) way, you did. Here is our second magnificent, super awesome, incredible doodle extravaganza!

Pam, trying out her new pens. (This one is hanging above my desk!)

Cynthia, Trees!

Jeffrey - A poet, and he doodles too!

Chris, doodled in the wax remains of a candle. (Bonus... see the heart?)

Dillon, doodled in class.

Estrella, making boredom pretty.

Graham, doodled on his phone.

Haley (via Amy at Very Culinary). Love this: Rock Girl.

j, doodled over the course of March.

jb, dream tree.

Kellie sent me a doodle!!!

Milli, doodled with right and left hands, simultaneously.

Walker, hand doodle.

Xaidread, line doodle.

Jeffrey, doodling life.

Pam, doodling in February.

j, doodling the love project.

What are you in love with right now?

On Saturday we drove home from Humboldt along Hwy 1, which is coastal and gorgeous and quite definitely the scenic route. With a stop to eat sandwiches overlooking a rocky bluff below the Point Arena lighthouse (and about 137 stops to jump out and take pictures), it took us more than eight hours to get home.

Last night, I uploaded over 300 pictures, and, subsequently, the Love Project Scenes page. Wow. Scrolling through the page, I realized that what I love most about it is that it’s not just my story, it’s yours too. Thank you so much to everyone who has sent me pictures so far.

I’ll continue to update the page because, as you know, April is the month for capturing love in photographs, and hopefully you’re all working on that too. (“Working” is the wrong word. I mean “playing” at it.) Please keep sending me what you find. I love getting your emails more than I can express.

Looking at all our photos got me thinking about the things we love – the people, places, objects, memories, activities. And writing this post for you has me thinking about what I love right this second. Here’s my list, right off the top of my head, no overthinking… I’m giving myself one minute…

I love my dogs, both of whom are lying at my feet; my morning coffee; my boys; Humboldt; writing; yoga; hiking; used bookstores; sunshine; connection; creative, expansive, energized souls; semicolons.

Whew. That’s hard to do in a minute. But fun.

Your turn. What are you in love with right now?

I love that I live near this coast.

Wish you were here…

I’m in Humboldt. Chad had to come here for work, and the timing was just right for me to be able to jump in his suitcase and come too. During the day, I wander by myself, and I swear I can feel the planet feeding  my soul.

I’ve spent two days exploring. I first went to downtown Arcata (which is where we’re staying, 280 miles north of San Francisco). Just as I’d been told, all the shops are either funky or quaint, and there’s a sweet grassy square at the center of everything, like a lush green heart. (I forgot to take a picture of the square, but here’s a sample of the shops that surround it.)

I browsed The People’s Music, and looked in the windows of a dozen other very cool stores , but I felt out of place. I’m not a shopper even in funky-quaint surroundings. Truth be told, I felt done within minutes of having started…

And then I found the used bookstore.

I didn’t know I was a feeling tense until I stepped inside and felt the tingle of all those books around me, floor to ceiling, row after tiny, cramped row. There’s something about used books, the ones that have already been read, already been creased and worn and slightly frayed, their new-used price penciled on their inside covers. These books come with an extra story. They’ve been around. They are scarred and beautiful. I felt the tension flow right out of me. It was like coming home.

My next stop was the Arcata Community Forest. I don’t know that I’ve ever been anywhere more beautiful. I took 41 pictures! Don’t worry, I won’t show you all of them. Here are my favorites.

Gah! Okay, stopping. That was just Day 1!

Day 2, I visited the Samoa Beach dunes. They are weirdly beautiful, soft and curving, like sweet sloping hips and smooth, round shoulders. Their grass sways in the wind like hair. I laid on one for a little while and I could feel the sand blowing over me (it was VERY windy) and I thought how it would be if I came back tomorrow, how the dunes would be different, flat where today they were swollen, rippled where today they were smooth.

Across from the dunes, Arcata Bay…

And, because I knew I’d be posting all this for you, I wrote a love note to you in the Arcata sand. xoxo