all in

May 20, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

“What does it mean to be all in?”

I made a list last autumn of the qualities I am seeking in a partner.

Sitting by the big fireplace at Lake Crescent Lodge with a glass of wine and a blanket wrapped around my feet, it was the first Monday night in November. I had scrambled alone up 2,000 feet of steep switchbacks to summit Mount Storm King that morning before breakfast and spent the rest of the day adjusting to the clarity that comes from listening to the pounding of one's own heart for a ninety-minute hard climb before finally stopping to rest atop a craggy, precarious ledge of a mountaintop with a view of, well, everything. Something shifted inside me and I had to write it down. 

My notes on a partner are four journal pages long. They begin with "sexy as hell" and end with the words "ALL IN" in capital letters, underlined twice. I wrote it with the sort of emphasis that would imply knowing exactly what these two words mean. The truth is I do not. 

What does it mean to be all in? How does it look? How does it feel? What do you do when you are? How do you invite and hold space for someone else to be "all in" with you? That was November and this is May, and I am still exploring this question. 

Aside from romance, I have been simmering on the meaning of commitment as it relates to Lucia. One year ago this month, we introduced Lucia to the world and today I am discovering the real work has only just begun. I made the decision to be "all in" with this magazine before I fully understood what it would entail and how much I would have to learn about what it really takes to create a successful business publishing.

"Being all in means not giving up," a friend of mine said. "It doesn't mean that you have to have it all figured out."

Last night I stopped by Anthropologie to buy two coffee mugs. From day one, I have envisioned Lucia being on the shelves in this store. It would be a perfect fit. We are not carried here yet, but I think the right buyer simply has not discovered us. It is only a matter of time.

I was buying these mugs because tomorrow morning I am hosting the first small Lucia Circle. I only own three coffee mugs that are not chipped or broken and there will be four women drinking coffee in my home.

Lucia Circles are a new experiment. How else can we explore the meaningful questions and curious themes in our creative lives? How else can Lucia's mission, to inspire and enlighten the world by giving voice to the heart and celebrating true beauty, be brought to life?

To begin, I've invited a few brilliant women I know to come over for a couple of hours, sit in a circle in my spacious light-filled living room, have a juicy conversation, and do a little journaling. I'm hosting four circles this summer and if they go well, I may continue them or move toward something larger like a retreat.

Our theme for tomorrow is commitment. I stood in my kitchen this morning asking myself, "Why on earth did I pick this theme? It's so unwieldy and uncomfortable and odd and constrictive. What if no one can relate?"

Then I picked up my journal, flipped through the pages, and saw the words I had written back in November: ALL IN. 

Maybe the words we place in all caps and underline twice are important not because they are answers, but because they hold questions. Maybe the answers do not come to us in words. Maybe they must be lived.

xo
laura

rooted

Photo by Dana Dralle

Because May is for mothers and gardens, a story in two parts about those things and other things too. This is part two. Find part one here.

“Tending a garden is fundamentally creating a place...”

— The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide

 

Rooted by Sarah Anne Childers

Two years into my time gardening at Laura's she retired and moved to a small town in the Cascades. She rented out her city home, and I continued to garden in the backyard. The summer Laura retired, her daughter moved back to Seattle, perhaps to stay Laura told me, hopeful. Laura asked if I minded if her daughter visited the garden to pick raspberries. I did not mind. In fact, I hoped to meet her. 

Ever since finding Little’s stone I had imagined Laura’s daughter as a girl in the garden puttering beside Laura as my daughter did now with me, as I had with my mother in her sprawling garden in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. Laura liked that there was a little girl playing in her garden again. She even lent us the tools her daughter had once used - sturdy pint-sized rake, shovel and hoe, the last my daughter's favorite because it was so excellent for whacking the soil, and the poor lilac hedge too when she thought I wasn’t looking.

I didn’t see Laura’s daughter in the garden that summer. At the time I wondered if she came when I wasn't there to nibble raspberries and perhaps search for Little’s stone, which I made sure not to disturb. I wonder now if she knew already what I have come to know in my bones and hands that seek dirt, and that is this: a mother’s garden is more than a garden. I wonder now if that knowledge drew Laura's daughter back or kept her away or perhaps both simultaneously, a push-pull I can appreciate.

My first spring in Laura's garden, I hauled in bags of musky compost to dig into the beds. And then, after whispering a little prayer to whatever deity looked after seed packets, I planted. I had a tentative plan, a fuzzy vision of the possibilities plus a mandate from my daughter that “we grow strawberries and juice and granola bars, mama!” But mostly I made it up as I went, guided by the fantastical whims of a novice and a child (this explains the root beer mint and dragon's tongue beans).

Photo by Sarah Anne Childers

I did begin with the demanded strawberries of course, taking my mother’s advice to seek out bare root crowns. My mother visited me at Laura’s garden. I told her about a space in the back bed that I didn't know how to fill, and she came with a carpet of black-eyed susans from her garden wrapped in damp newspaper. A year later she took back to her garden shovels full of soil with calendula starts that had self-sown from seeds I scattered at Laura’s the previous summer, and I felt part of a web that is big and old. Along with flowers and tools and essential props, my mother brought wisdom and faith too. She knew how to grow things - plants and people. She had faith that I could grow a garden, raise a daughter.

I gardened at Laura’s for several years. Sometimes it was exhilarating and sometimes it was tedium, but always the garden was a place to create in ways that were blessedly simple and tangible. Always the garden was a place to feel rooted, solid in the spin. The delicious yield of those five raised beds seemed the point of gardening at the start but in the end they were the bonus round. (But what astonishing bonuses! Sugar pie pumpkins in the fall and snap peas in the spring. Swaths of bitter persian cress that bolted dainty yellow buds. And sprouting from every once bare nook clusters of borage with its star-shaped periwinkle flowers that delighted the bees and fuzzy leaves that tasted like cucumber.) 

Life sped up and filled out, and I relinquished Laura’s garden. It was someone else's turn. I went for a time without my hands in the dirt. This spring I feel the longing again. It is an itch in my hands, fingernails too clean. I long to root. I look west from the balcony of my box in the sky, past the rooftops of my city neighborhood to the Olympic Mountains. I look to my mother’s garden that is more than a garden.

---

Sarah Anne Childers is the online editor at luciajournal.com where she happily toggles between curating creatives as an editor and creatively curating ideas and the words they live in as a writer. 

sarah@luciajournal.com

a slow transition

May 13, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor

“Things take longer than we think”

— a friend said this. She is older than me, and I believe her.

What I often fail to account for are the transitions. The time it takes to move from one state of being to another is not inconsequential, nor is it swift; especially when one is moving from her thinking brain down into the wiser space of her heart.

Earning a living as a public relations consultant for innovative companies while working toward creating this dream of Lucia, I encounter transition on a daily basis. My day timer has slots for every thirty minute period of the day, and I learned long ago that organization is not as simple as fitting my list of tasks neatly inside those lines. It is difficult to move back and forth between thinking-tasks and feeling-tasks more than once a day. It takes time to drop into the heart space.

Transitions often require more time and energy than the tasks that lie between them.

On a slow day, I send 60-75 emails. I receive more than 150 (not counting email for Lucia). Each one is a decision. Keep? Delete? Read? Respond? If so, how quickly? Is it urgent? What to say? How do I convey what I mean efficiently, effectively, professionally? Anyone who makes a living communicating on email will understand what I mean at the end of the day when I sigh, "My brain is so tired."

Someone I love recently said, "I'm not very good at multi-tasking." Oh, baby, none of us are. It is the stuff of crazy-making. Yet we go around pretending like it is possible and we allow those who claim it as a mark of their superiority to convince us they have more intelligence, more drive, more talent than we do. But the truth is they do not. No one can be fully present in two places at once. Our brains and our hearts are connected, yes. They are also different locations with different functions. Getting back to the heart takes time, but it is the more powerful place to inhabit.

The roses are blooming now. 

Outside my office and living room windows they make the gentlest slow-motion explosion. It started as a mass of tiny buds. Now, soft pink blooms climb this sweet farmhouse like something straight out of a fairytale. 

Today is Friday, and I marked the moment of transition from week to weekend by stopping to stand beneath them. I smelled every one I could reach, noticing how its own scent was slightly different from the others. I whispered, "I love you," because I do. I closed my eyes and touched the leaves and petals. I breathed.

Thoughts slid slowly from my brain downward into the well of my moving heart. It slowed. I listened to the beats and for a moment could not tell if the rhythm belonged to me, or to the rosebush. Maybe it was a two-part harmony.

An hour later I am back at my desk, still transitioning. If all goes well, this shift from week-brain to weekend-heart will only take about twelve more hours. Quiet music from Patty Griffin on Pandora soothes my psyche, coaxing the progression downward with an easy rhythm that entrains with my pulse, just like the roses did.

These things take time: Making a living. Loving another person. Creating a new magazine. Building a team. Cultivating a tribe. Helping raise a child. Composing a life. Everything does, really.

Whatever you are working toward, know this: It will take longer than you think. There will be transitions. And they, as much as any other passage on your life's journey, are where beauty and meaning and vitality are waiting. Breathe in. Drop down. Stop thinking. Start feeling. Smell the roses.

Happy Friday.

xo
laura