Each year for Christmas, I look for a glass ornament that represents a bit of our life. A few years ago, it was a corn dog in honor of our first compromise. And now we have...bacon & eggs! Our winter weekend breakfast of choice.
Here's to the little things (especially the ones involving bacon).
Merry, merry & happy, happy!
Though I didn’t grow up observing the tradition of Advent, I became more aware of it while attending graduate school at the turn of the millennium. My Catholic neighbor—also in the poetry program—told me she liked to engage a reading project for the December days leading up to Christmas. She inspired me to read the 24 books of Homer’s Odyssey.
I enjoyed that practice so much, I’ve been celebrating Advent in some way ever since. Some years, it’s a reading project. Other years a painting or writing project. For one particularly hard year, I simply committed to walking a minimum of four miles, 24 days in a row, to keep my spirit, mind, and body focused on the goodness I chose to believe was coming. (It was.)
In our commercialized world, Advent has largely been reduced to a cardboard calendar with chocolates hidden behind little, numbered doors. But Advent is so much richer than even the finest chocolates.
The word Advent comes from the Latin adventus, which means coming. And Advent shares a root with adventure, too. (Which, come to think of it, made my first Advent project of reading Homer’s adventures a good fit!)
Advent is a time of expectation. And it’s also time to ask ourselves questions in anticipation of the goodness we wait for. Last December, I painted a watercolor and wrote a poem-question each day of Advent.
And…I combined them all into a little booklet, Questions for Advent. My first limited-edition writing project.
The details:
If you’d like a copy of Questions for Advent (or three!):
The price covers shipping within continental US. (Apologies to folks elsewhere! The mailing cost is more than the booklet.)
To order, email me with your desired quantity, and I’ll send you payment info. I’ll fill orders as they come in until the booklets have found homes. [*Update: the booklets have all found their homes.]
I hope you enjoy these paintings and poem-questions, and I hope this little booklet will be something you enjoy for many Advents to come.
May your quest and adventure be good.
Love,
Anna
O autumn berry,
growing on and on,
you are a small
but sweet taste
of the possible.
For our annual autumn road trip, my husband and I drove north to Canada. I’d long wanted to visit Lake Louise (note: that’s not it in the photo). It was gorgeous, but the experience of its beauty was a bit dampened by the hordes of fellow tourists also wanting to see it.
Earlier that day, we had stopped by Bow Lake. That is it in the photo. It was gorgeous, too, but relatively uncrowded. And so much more peaceful.
The contrast reminded me to keep looking past my expectations. To be open to things and places and ideas I’ve never even heard about. And to cultivate peace every chance I get—it comes in handy in hordes of people or circumstances. Or anything!
For the last few years, my survive-August strategy has been to paint a small watercolor daily. A week or so into this month, and I started painting tiny eggs.
This one is barely an inch tall. These little things bring me great, big joy! And they remind me of all the goodness waiting to enter this world.
May our creative work hatch forth in every season.
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| O exposed roots— gnarled beauty above ground above water above all we could hope to cling to— hold on. |
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To embody a body of water— |
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Where leaves reach |
Until my husband got me a battery-operated chainsaw, I only knew the word “bucking” in the context of “bucking a trend.” Apparently, one also bucks fallen tree limbs—as in, cuts them into chunks. Which is weirdly fun. The photo shows the first logs I bucked.
Mucking, I knew. Before the chainsaw, I spent late winter mucking around in the gully that becomes our second, seasonal creek after heavy rains. This year, it ran with white water, turning the field into a floody-muddy mess, because previous owners had once laid weed barrier down there for some reason. The nasty plastic stuff had blocked clumps of earth from moving with the water. (Ironically, oodles of weeds had grown through the barrier, effectively anchoring it even more securely into the soil.) I forgot to take a photo of all the woven black goop I pulled from the earth. Probably just as well: I’m happy to forget it.
Spring finds me with less poetry of words and more poetry of earth—of paying attention to wood grain and water flow. Yet always with a bit of etymology….
Bucking means to oppose or resist. It’s literally and metaphorically going against the grain. Mucking, as a transitive verb, basically means to move mud: mud is the object. But as an intransitive verb—with no object—it means to hang around, to engage in a useless activity.
So, technically, my object-less title implies resistance and useless activity! Ah, but the creative life needs both. Paying attention to our resistance helps us know where to press in. And what can look a waste of time is often the necessary tilling of our spirit-fields. Maybe we’d be wise to do some bucking and mucking inside as well as out. Also, maybe we can let more “weeds” be. The dandelions of life are rich in vitamins…and rich in that most vital of life lessons: that we can’t control everything!
Here’s to knowing what to buck & muck, and what to leave be.
Happy Spring,
Anna
And now I am delighted to announce my first hardback book: The Bliss of Is.
Inside this book, you’ll find little poems and paintings. The poems mostly emerged over several years of writing daily for National Poetry Month. I selected thirty favorites and—in keeping with the quick-spirited writing—painted one watercolor a day for a month for each poem. All in celebration of the daily practice of presence.
I invite you to that practice. Take a moment to meditate on a poem-painting each day for thirty days, or read them all in thirty minutes, or both! May you enjoy playing in the realm of art + word + spirit.
Here’s one of the poems:
I spot a scrap of fallen paper,
& as I bend to pick it up, I see
it is not trash but a square of light.
I pick it up anyway.
If you’d like to enjoy the full gathering of meditative poems & paintings, you can order yourself a copy here. Do note that this particular book has very long ship times; think of it as a surprise when it finally arrives—a gift to your future self in time for this year’s National Poetry Month!
If you'd like a copy sooner, I still have a few left of a limited run of signed books. More info in my newsletter. Contact me if interested.
May we know the bliss of is—of being right here, right now.
Love,
Anna
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…
—Dylan Thomas
The first month of the year makes for great hibernation—for hunkering down into the soil of the creative work. For me, January is like the Monday of the year; it gets the “green fuse” going. This month, I sent out a big project into the world (here’s hoping!) and prepared to announce a little one (soon!).
Big or small, all the work happens day by day until one day, what was the bud of an idea finally blossoms. Not unlike the amaryllis above. Though I took the second photo only two weeks after the first, this can be what a year looks like. Or a decade. Or a life.
O—all the planting and tending that precede the beauty of bloom!
Blessings on all the things flowering in your life this year.
Love,
Anna
