among the thousands

There we are, second row down, eighth from left

Etsy did a call for sellers to come out for a photo shoot back in the Winter, and so the girl and I went out to the city for an adventure.  We had fun waiting our turn and having our picture taken in a light-filled loft in midtown, but then I forgot about it and it only just now occurred to me to look for the magazine. Turns out that we made the cut! And we (yes, Magnolia is there too....looks like the youngest Etsy seller of the bunch!) made our way into the April issue of Inc. magazine. Seeing as how I'm just one of 400,000 Etsy sellers, hundreds of whom were photographed that day, and dozens of whom ended up in a feature spread in the magazine, I'm not surprised that I never received official notification that I had made it to print. My Etsy jewelry shop has not received any spikes in sales (though on Halflight I did sell 7 paintings to one person the other day, what a lovely treat!), so I can't say that this form of press was effective for me personally, but the adventure in the loft was worth doing!  See pictures for evidence of one of NYC's hidden treasures, Gary's Loft.  And here's a link to the article itself.

Wanna hear angel music

Rember the snow?

It's 1.11.11.  You are two, and the snow has returned. 

Let me tell you somepin. 

Now that you're two, Noli girl, I'm going to play the special Angel Music.  It's Múm.  It's floaty and scratchy and must have been recorded during another era.  Look at the angels in the cemetery.  Remember when we saw them?  It was October, the light was coming through the trees.  We were walking.  Angels were everywhere.  The ladies were singing "Somewhere over the rainbow" from behind the vines.  You watched and you listened.  You held an acorn. You didn't know that song yet, but now you do.

 

Emme hold you a minute?

Why, just because I was looking the other way?  Did you think I forgot you?  OK, I will hold you.

 

In the hollow tree.

That's where Nicholas the Bunny lives. 

Emme feed you? 

Sure, I'll feed you.  You means me and me means you.  That's right.

Let me hink about it.  

You are two.  You sing Jesus loves me under your breath, on your exhale.  You breathe by singing.  That one, and Jesus loves the little children.  Did I really sing those enough that you could learn to breathe them?  Or were you born knowing these things?  

I feeled my heart beep.

Every time I saw you.  It beeped.  I've felt your heart beep, and it beeps fast.  Faster than any human I know.  I suppose because you're a miniature human.  But that's always relative.

 

Emme see My-yo-ya.

Yes I know, you kids and technology. 

 Love you so.  Don't forget it.

hold out two hands to catch the light

Some pieces from Sean's new What Are Defenders series were featured in a show at Kidd Yellin Gallery (curated by Work Gallery) that opened on September 11, 2010. Yes, that was the date (that one's just out of place). We were so happy to see friends and family including Liz, Mike and company, Jeremy, Shariffa, Masa and Maggie, Damijan and the illustrious Monique, who graced us with her presence on the very week her amazing new novel came out.

We took Magnolia for the first hour and she was immediately drawn into Richard Oliver Wilson's bubble machine, perched atop Yellin's hulking yet elegant old printing press in the doorway of the warehouse, that was sending larger-than life-size bubbles out into the sinking sun at the edge of Red Hook. As she wobbled and skidded to and fro, chasing, popping, jumping at and into shiny orbs, following ponderous glowy globes as they morphed one into another and alighted on the floor, turning to half-moons, as they increasingly took on a supernatural outline from the falling sunlight, I noticed a beautiful thing: she would every so often turn in the direction of the bubble contraption, and stand still and wait. Then she would reach out both hands, turn palms up to the sky, and wait for the bubbles to come. The upturned palms would then cup the air and the fingers would beckon, gimme...come here, those so-sweet fingers we've watched grow from fetus to baby to girl. "Come over here, bubbles, I'mmonna getchyou," the fingers said. "But I'll wait patiently," the stillness of her body said. I was struck by the quiet and mournful and spiritual nature of the pose, and considered the phenomenon of a 20-month-old child raising hands as if praising something or Someone. I whipped out my phone and started snapping a painful amount of pictures, telling myself the whole time, "how ridiculous, to need to document this much, to take so many pictures of my child," but all along never coming close to capturing the bubbles or the golden light or the otherworldly joy on the face of my daughter. The phone camera simply wouldn't do justice to this unbelievably lovely scene in our lives. Dalton, a talented photographer, offered some solutions to this problem. I chatted away with him and others, but all the while I kept doing what I consider pretty rude (even to photographers?): snapping pictures. Was that as bad as texting while having a conversation? Worse? All I could process was that my daughter was tasting heaven and I was trying my best to see through her eyes and behold just a touch of the glory she was feeling. I knew Sean had brought his Real Camera and I tried to get his attention to find out where it was. Later I found it in the bottom of the stroller . . . it stayed there all along, never used by either of us, even throughout this insane display of light and joy, never even then. I kept seeing her body go still with palms upturned, fingers curling sweetly, back and forth. I was riveted--this looked not only beautiful and amazing, but very much like something that I knew well but could not place. When I asked MaryAnne, she said The Red Balloon. Yes yes of course, that wonderful film that is over and under and through everything I ever do, that one, yes. But that wasn't it. That body, prone, straight, not moving, but waiting, standing, looking. Those hands, upturned. I couldn't place it.

Until I was riding home on my bike (every time I ride my bike at night in Red Hook I ask myself why I haven't done this every single night of the five years I've lived in this lost and broken land by the sea). That's when I discovered what it was. My daughter was re-enacting her father's animated film that he made about his father. She stood still, waiting for those bubbles, exactly as Sean had stood when those bubble-like dots came out of his hands and heart, and floated up toward the sky, toward the ghost of his father, toward the future and the past, in his film Father/Son. I've posted both images so you can see for yourself. If you'd like to see Sean's film, I guess you'll have to ask him.

bew-fuls

My daughter is teaching me how to speak, and by extension, how to see and to feel (abilities I have all but lost).



















"Bew-fuls, bew-fuls," she says, while looking at the shells we collected at the beach in NC last week. Does she really say beautiful, now? I can't even believe this. "Water comin," she says, when the ocean is roaring toward us, and there is no way to convey how absolutely perfect that word "comin" sounds when she says it. It is the sweetest thing. "Rainbow fall down" she says while reading and re-reading the Noah story, with which she has become sincerely fascinated. For that matter, "Animals comin" and "Fire comin" also feature prominently in the Noah readings.



















Which brings me to the "deep fire," or dehumidifier, which was required when I flooded the bathroom at the beach house (oh no, no, no, but all too true). "Petties, petties (pretties)," she says of the small stones we collected on Martha's Vineyard earlier this summer.



















"Rainin, poh-in" she sings, then, "ah, moh-nin, ah, moh-nin." Sean and I can't figure out if this is some song abut Morning that we don't know where she learned, or if she's simply singing in her own language, as sometimes when we say "I love you," and she responds, "Ah Mohnin," and then starts singing this poetic phrase over and over. It's what she sings when feeling happy or comforted, and more than anything, it comforts us. It tells us that it's all going to be alright--really Mommy, really Daddy, really it is.

from snow to snow

2009 came and ended with a snow, and a new life. We'll never be the same.

summer in red hook