spark

269/365: rust

Seen on the Manchester floodwall walkway along the James River, which spans the gap between natural vibrance and urban decay. 

255/365: bucolic

236/365: antique

Old VEPCO adjustable levee near Brown's Island, looking Southward across the river.  I wish I knew what "more moose" meant.  

230/365: triumphant

Rainy Wednesday, no playground for us.  What could be better than one of those indoor inflatable places (made sweeter by not having visited one in years), complete with air hockey tables?  Kid heaven.

our place

Every family needs a place.

A fun place with a special thing you don't do anywhere else.

An inspiring place that strikes you in ways you can't explain, even to yourself.

A comfort food place where everybody gets just what they want.

A nostalgic place where you can look back and forward at the same time.

This is our place.  What is yours? 

word of the day 205/365: made

My friend Adam after the screening of the film he made for the Richmond 48 Hour Film Project. I acted in last year's production but wasn't available for this year's 48HFP...but my lenses were!  

Links to the films soon!

word of the day 200/365: copious

The very first post I created with the "affirmations" tag is a little watercolor sign I made for myself and that I occasionally share with somebody.  A while back I sent it to a mother expecting her 2nd child.  A few days ago I posted it on Facebook and tagged it for a friend who is feeling stretched thin.  Yesterday I needed to repeat those words: "There is enough of me.  There is enough for me."  Unfortunately, I didn't realize that I needed this mantra until I found myself fighting two two-year-olds for chips.  Yes, I poured chips in a bowl and declared them to be "only for the grown-ups," and as soon as I said it, my inner voice was going, "really? REALLY, Jess?" but at the same time another inner voice was complaining about how the kids were going to eat all the chips and I wouldn't get any at all and I just couldn't deal without having some chips and guacamole! I NEED MY CHIPS AND GUACAMOLE!

You could say that I wasn't feeling terribly abundant in that moment.

There are themes each of us has in our lives, ideas we return to over and over again, and the idea of abundance is one of mine.  Do I feel like I have enough of something (emotional or physical) to share?  How can I get to a place where sharing feels possible for me?  Several times in the past week, I've come back to this theme in conversations with friends, and one thing that is emerging in all of our lives right now is an idea of how the concepts of kindness and empathy are related to abundance.  In order to express kindness or feel empathy, one has to be feeling full of what you're offering before you can give it away.  When Patience and her kids prepare for a kindness mission, they take time first to give themselves the same kindness that they will be giving to others.  When I'm feeling particularly taxed and unable to be empathetic toward my children, I know it's time to give myself some grace and allow myself to be a grumpy human, too.

What if you get stuck in a place of feeling depleted, rather than abundant?  A poverty mindset sets in, a feeling of never having enough of anything.  Not enough space, not enough time, not enough relaxation, not enough of your material goods.    When you feel emotionally impoverished, you do not feel like you have enough of anything to share.  You feel resentful of demands placed on you.  You offer less of yourself, regardless of how much or how little you actually have.  Sometimes this is just a passing stage.  Sometimes we can be entrenched in impoverishment for a long time.  Sometimes that feeling pervades a person's whole life. 

Abundance is similar - it can be a fleeting feeling, an occasional practice, or a lifelong habit.  When you feel abundant, you feel content with who and what and where you are.  You feel free from want and able to pay attention to other people.  Because you're not scrabbling to get what's yours, you have the emotional energy to notice the needs of others and provide these loving acts: meals for friends, child care, simple gifts, a smile, a compliment, a phone call.  

During grad school, a classmate reprimanded me for "not being kind".  While I still disagree with her perception of the "unkind" incident, part of what she was telling me was that social niceties - "being kind" - are important.  While I was not being actively rude, I was not extending myself any farther than I had to.  I was performing the bare minimum of social tact.  I was not freely offering myself.  She was right: I was not kind.  Eventually I felt able to think about how infrequently I was offering more of myself than was expected - how infrequently I was being kind.  Why wasn't I inspired to give more?  Why didn't I even notice the opportunities for giving more?  I now suspect that the answer is in family culture.  Did you grow up in an atmosphere of abundance or of impoverishment?  Again, I'm not talking about material goods or financial affluence.  I'm talking about the attitudes in your family - was there a feeling of having what you needed and being able to share, or was there a sense of lack and stinginess?  I've come to realize that my own family of origin had a "poverty story" - we were not living in actual poverty, but we very much believed that most people had more things, better stuff, greater privileges than we did.  What's more, we frequently attached negative moral value to these "have-mores."  Anybody who looked like they had more than we did was "rich", and to be "rich" was to be snobbish, amoral, selfish.  At the same time, our family was not in the habit of serving others, and we were not (to my memory) surrounded by people for which kind acts were an everyday habit.  We were scrabbling to protect our own interests rather than extending ourselves to others, and, with a childhood steeped in this sense of deprivation, emotional impoverishment became habit for me.  

When we moved back to Virginia six years ago, I was coming from an extra-impoverished place - the isolation of stay-at-home motherhood without a community of other families.  It was critical to me - from a thinking-of-my-family standpoint - to put down community roots in Richmond.  I was fortunate enough to meet some women who belonged to loving communities, and because their community needs were being met, they were able to extend kindness to me and share friendship and support for my family.  In time, through that community, I met other communities, and as time went by, I was better able to define my own needs, and meet them, and then...then! Once I felt secure in these communities, I discovered that that sense of being deprived was leaving me.  And once I felt more abundant, I was able to learn from the kind people around me how to express kindness in my own way.  It's still a work in progress.  I still pitch battles over bowls of chips on bad days.  But now my family belongs to a local culture in which it's customary to bring meals to families when a new baby is born, or somebody is sick, or the family moves to a new house, or some other situation in which it might be useful to spare them the effort of having to prepare or buy a meal themselves.  I also know many people who make an effort to do kind things for both friends and strangers - small uplifting items, good deeds, sharing positive thoughts. Because these acts are happening all around us, we feel full of kindness, knowing that it will be given to us if we need it, knowing that we have enough of it to share with others.  Their good deeds serve as inspiration for our own, and our acts inspire them, and so we go on fueling our community together.  I am so glad that my children have a chance at growing up surrounded by this approach to the world.  What can it mean, to grow to adulthood within a community that knows how copious its emotional resources are and that gladly shares them?

word of the day 179/365: home

Today is about going nowhere, barely lifting a finger (or a camera), wearing pajamas.  Settling back in, enjoying our home, getting back to old rhythms but also recognizing that we've all grown a little bit and figuring out what this summer will be for us. 

It's also about welcoming Dan's parents, who have closed on their new home in Richmond.  Reese is feeling his muscle at the ripe old age of 5 and insisted on helping to move some stored boxes out of our basement for them.  It's a new day for all of us. 

cupcakes & kindness

Ok, so I lied.  I didn't update you on the shoes on Thursday.  Will you ever forgive me?  I'm not sure my readership can stand a hit. 

The reason for all the lack of time for posting yesterday, besides the whole cleaning-smashed-raspberries-off-everything bit, was that a decent-sized chunk of the day was consumed by the ultra-fabulous and super-fantastic first birthday party for GayRVA.  w00t!  And the reason I was there, besides just that its founder, Kevin Clay, throws a hell of a shindig, was that me & my girls Sarah, Sara, and Patience, were being named the first annual Out.Spoken. Richmonders of the Year, for our organization of Pennies in Protest last March.  This was an overwhelming and humbling honor, and really says something about how a spur-of-the-moment decision to do an act of kindness can have major repercussions.  As recipients of this award, we were really not representing just ourselves, but also the thousands of people in Richmond and around the country who participated in this effort.  Every person who forwarded a link, gave a dollar, told a friend, made a poster, came to a counterprotest, discussed the protests over dinner with their kids, ALL of those people made a difference, all of those people were necessary to bring our community together in supporting each other. We're still hearing from people who felt touched by what happened here, and also people who want to know how to organize a PiP effort in their own city. 

We were absolutely honored to join the celebration on Thursday, and also excited to get the chance to dress up and have a great night out!  It was a close race but Kevin was the deciding vote.  His party, after all.  

That's Kevin on the left, in a rather natty tie.  On the right is Miss Magnolia Jackson Pickett Burnside, hostess extraordinaire of Richmond Varietease, who gave us a short show (a teaser, nyuck nyuck) at the party.

I somehow missed getting a photo of Sarah, but did catch Patience and Sara before putting away my camera.  Sometimes you just need to be a part of something instead of documenting it! For more peeks at the festivities, take a gander at the party photos from Jennie Araujo and Tim Wood of Pink Photography. (And it's lovely to read that my acceptance speech was "rousing"! ♥)

There were scrumptious mini cakes with the best icing ever from Two Sweet Cupcakes, and beautiful boys in Skiviez serving them.  Yum. Additional pairs of Skiviez were tucked into swag bags that also contained gifts from Mongrel, Bygones, Secco Wine Bar, and Nicola Flora, who I suspect also made the beautiful corsages which we wore.  Many many thanks to all!

By the way, I picked the polka dots. They were absolutely adorable, so much so that I don't care that I ended up with blisters on my littlest toes. A girl's gotta have cute feet, even, sometimes, a liberal progressive feminist kind of girl.

word of the day 159/365: apparently

I had an errand at Exile today, to find more "wildflower" dye to touch up my hair, and as I approached Grace Street, I was annoyed to see one of those no-left-turn signs that are so ubiquitous in Richmond, but then remembered, oh wait, it's Saturday, so I can turn today, and I did.  Then I was pulling up to the curb to park, and saw the meters, and was about to go for my wallet for some quarters when I remembered, it's Saturday, so that meant not having to feed the meter.  Then after I got out of the car, I was all, no, dummy, it's not Saturday, you goof, and I went into the store.  

Right, so in the store, I asked the clerk for the dye, handed over my purse (so as not to suffer from any of the well-posted curses that will supposedly befall shoplifters), rooted through vintage pins (I've never seen even one sailboat pin before, and they had two, in different sizes)(I didn't buy either), pondered the reasons people paint clowns and the reasons other people are afraid of clowns (FYI: don't go to the back of Exile this week if you're afraid of clowns), wished rotary phones sold for less than $25, searched for tin trays, dreamed up collections of mismatched glassware, picked up glasses, put them down, rifled through polyester shirts, and then went back to the counter to pay for my dye and one googly-eyed fish pin for Griff. 

Back to the car - I realized that post-dispersion-of-Saturday-delusion, I hadn't fed the meter.  No worries, I didn't get a ticket.  Except that I did.

Because, dummy, apparently it is Tuesday, not Saturday, and people actually enforce those rules.

Although, in my defense, I was out shopping alone, in multiple stores, for hours, without my children, which is an awfully Saturdayish thing to be doing.  Dan pointed out that he had worked this morning, but a) that infuses too much logic into the situation and b) working isn't exactly an anti-Saturdayish thing for him to be doing. 

Oh, and later I told a shop clerk about my absent-minded SNAFU and while she seemed to find it charmingly human and amusing, her coworker looked at me as though I might suddenly go postal on the joint.  Because, you know, you never can tell what a woman might do once she has forgotten what day of the week it is.  Although in the coworker's defense, I was buying popsicle molds that look like soft-serve ice cream cones, which is, admittedly, a rather insane thing to be doing.

I would invest in Days of the Week underwear, but I don't think any of us want to know what kind of a disaster that might turn out to be.