going backwards, going forwards

Looking for inspiration. Earbuds in, Bjork playing. That kind of mood, "Big Time Sensuality". The bedroom window in front of me with curtains open, it's almost dark outside. That Fall dark-blue sky, some rain. 

I miss blogging. I miss writing daily, or nearly daily. I miss blogging before it was a massive vehicle, a rumbling SUV of a thing, a way to make a living, constrained by rules about pretty photos. I mean, I get it. We like pretty things. And I'm glad in a way that it's become what it has. But I also miss the days of just opening a new post and typing your thoughts and hitting Publish.

I want to bring that back, at least to my own life. 

So tonight I'm writing out some ideas for "who I am now" and what I want to write about, put out there into the world. 

Writer. Worker with people with disabilities (this one has been a huge learning curve this year!). Graphic designer. Wannabe veggie gardener (really didn't do much with it this year, but still, I got excited about the raspberries I found on the vine today - which reminded me that even when things feel fallow, they can and do grow back). Friend. Retreat planner. Mama-in-waiting. Girlfriend. Daughter. I still love local stuff but I am shy to revive the Dream Big brand and blog... so how to incorporate that? We'll see. I want to be more outspoken about the things that matter to me, social justice issues and all that. But I also want to share (some of) my life. I want my blog to be an interesting read. 

What comes to my mind is the idea of flexing muscles that I haven't used in a while. 

What does that look like?
Ask the question first, I guess. 

What I'm excited about for Fall

September 1st has come and with it, the cooler weather - at least here in Cape Breton it's cooler. This date on the calendar and this time of year makes me reminisce about all the years past at this time, and where I was, what I was doing. Going off to university at 21... or travelling across Canada at 18...or going back to school at 27... and all the other times in between, when I was working a job, or unemployed, but the turn of the air still means harvesting vegetables, and cooler nights, and frosty mornings. 

I love it. It's bittersweet but I do love it. 

This Fall, maybe because I'm pregnant, it feels especially heightened, this excitement for this Fall to come. So I made a little moodboard and list of all I'm excited about, for the next couple of months. From left to right, top to bottom:

• Chicago! We're travelling there in late October for a wedding, and will visit a bunch of Adam's friends while we're there. I've only ever been there in the summer, so visiting in Autumn will be neat, I think. It's such a big and beautiful city, and I love finding something new about it each time we go. (My partner lived there from age 13 to age 27, so it's his home, basically. Even though he's still Canadian and all.) I'm excited especially for: our annual visit to "the Bean", eating a Chicago-style hot dog, and finding a Chicago map by an artist to bring home and frame. 
• BlogJam: I'm a "Jambassador" this year, which means you'll be hearing more about this event from me in the months to come, as I do my part to spread the word about this fantastic blogging conference in Halifax, November 5th. 
• Book Club: A friend hosts a book club in her home, and I joined last year. We've all picked our books for the coming year and it's a fantastic line-up of books I've been wanting to read! The local library provides the books and we provide the book chat... and the life chat. My GoodReads account is here if you're interested. I also post books I read on my Instagram. 
• New season of Outlander! I love love love this show. It's so cozy, and exciting. Bring on the drama, bring on the reunion of Jamie and Claire! I'm still trying to figure out how to get it on-demand in Canada, and I'm willing to pay a subscription fee, so if you know something I don't, let me know. 
• Creative Soul Weekend - this is a retreat for creative women that I co-host with my friend Emily. It's coming up soon - just two more weeks. This year we're going to try wire-wrapped jewelry and archery for our workshops, and there is also lots of time for beach exploring, journalling, talking and laughing. It's the best. 
• New season of Broad City! Trailer is here. I can't wait to see what those crazy queens get up to next.
• The Magic Flute opera: Last opera season I went a couple of times to the "Live in HD" events at the local movie theatre, which is where the Met Opera gets streamed live to cinemas all over the world. It was awesome and I loved it. This season I'm going to try to get to a few before the baby comes, and the one I'm especially excited about is "Die Zauberflote", or in English, The Magic Flute. When I was a kid we had the Classical Kids' cassette of this (hear the first track here) and I loved it so much. I cannot WAIT to see the actual opera and hear the music I knew so well as a kid. 
• Last but not least! I'm really excited to create a nursery for the little one I'm cooking up. (Image in moodboard is from Elise Blaha Cripe's blog, here.) This month I'm moving all my office stuff out of the guest bedroom I've been using as an office these last five years. Then next month my father-in-law will put in new flooring (apparently carpet isn't great for baby puke and poop? Haha), paint the walls, put in a new window and a new light. Then when that's done we'll start setting up the nursery. Hopefully it will be all together in time for Baby's February 8th due date! 

Whew! That's a lot of good stuff. Things I wanted to include but didn't: apples, cool air, socks, and (this may sound weird) everything in the garden dying back. I didn't get much time to garden this year so my garden is overgrown with weeds. I can't wait for everything to die back so it's easier to prune and manage again. It feels a bit like a refresh. 

So yeah, Fall. While I like some things about summer, more and more as I get older the heat of summer really takes the stuffing out of me, so this cooler weather feels like it wakes me up, gets my energy going. I like it. 

one of my favourite poems

This Body Is Growing a Person

By Sheree Fitch

Why say: I'm going to have a baby?

You give birth.

But you never own.

You never have.
 

To say baby is to say cherub cheeks and dimpled wrists 

warm snuggle bunny baby bundle.

Sure there's a faint echo of crying and smell of baby shit

but both are sweet to ear and nose in conception.

Say instead:

This body is growing a person.

Picture that chalky fish on the ultrasound screen as

infant, toddler, child, adolescent

a grown person with a mortgage

no job, child support to pay.

Picture inside you a temper tantrum

a three-year-old scribbling on the walls

a face full of acne

a lip being stitched

a weeping teenager broken-hearted for the first time

a door-smashing wall-pounding adolescent

a runaway

an addict

a crackpot conservative, a lunatic lefty

a vegan

a vegetable

a prostitute

a convict

a schizophrenic

a tightrope walker, a high-rise window washer

a human trying to be.

Picture yourself inside yourself.

(Now there's a terrifying thought.)

For nine months see baby

an old person with false teeth, pleated face

halitosis, osteoporosis, a bruised heart.

Say:

This body is growing a person.

Be prepared

when baby stands before you

framed in the arch of a doorway

waving goodbye with a promise to call

a baby you can no longer hold

                            no longer rock

                            no longer kiss and make it better for.

Just watch:

as he goes out

into a world

that most days

is just not              good           enough

for any baby you might dare to call your own.

---

1993, Sheree Fitch. In the collection "In this house are many women, and other poems", Goose Lane Editions. 

Sheree's website is here. 

So I'm pregnant!

I found out on June 21 and ever since have been keeping it mostly a secret. I say "mostly" because I told my close friends, and our immediate family (parents, siblings) right away, but have been waiting to hit that magical 12-week mark before I let it be public (and then, Adam had to call his friends in Chicago, and then I went on a trip to Toronto, so it's taken a little longer than I expected to announce to the world). I'm at 14 weeks now. Due February 8th, 2018. A wee Noble-Elliott concoction! Woo hoo! 

I gotta say, it has been hard not to say anything on social media relating to pregnancy, and instead pretend life is just ticking along as it was before. So I've mainly just not said anything at all.

As well, I've been really tired and nauseous, so that other than going to work and then coming home every day, and sleeping, and then waking up and sometimes making supper before going back to bed, there hasn't been a lot to post to Instagram or blog about, really. (Except for my trip to Toronto last week, which, thank goodness I wasn't super tired for.) And I didn't want to just post the same naps, dishes and office pics over and over, and come across as super boring. ("Doesn't she ever get her ass up off the couch anymore?" -- I imagined people thinking.) But I also didn't have the energy to "look for inspiration and beauty in the everyday!" or anything along those lines - I was actually quite happy to just take time to chill. 

This has resulted in me taking a kind of social media hermitage for the last month, which has been nice in some ways, and irritating in others. 

What's Been Nice:

• For Adam and I to just enjoy the knowledge that we're cooking a little baby up, and things are relatively chill for now... I'm not showing, not everyone knows, it's just us and our little Strawberry/Plum/whatever fruit size it is that week. Before long my bump will grow, and everyone will know, and life will probably never be this quiet again.
• To take a little break from social media, because really, that's always good for creativity and ideas, even if I resist it at the time.
• To prioritize rest. For several weeks there I would get home from work and be so exhausted I could not do anything else but crawl into bed and sleep for two hours. It didn't matter that the dishes weren't done, that the clothes were in piles on the floor, that the book I ached to read was right there, that there were projects I wanted to work on. None of it mattered because my body was growing a human and it was effing tired and needed to rest. 

What's Been Irritating:

• Dangit but I just want to talk publicly about what I'm going through! And share All the Feelings - the excitement, the fear, the fact that a human being is growing inside my body, which continually blows my mind. 
• I hate not explaining things. I know, I know, everyone has the right to take breaks and not say why, and I would never begrudge anyone else that right, ever. But I also just like to say "Here's what's going on with me!" rather than some vague "Oh I'm a little worn out right now". I like honesty, I like to share. I guess that's why I like blogging? LOL.

ANYway. So yeah! I took a little break, somewhat. Because I'm pregnant! Main takeaway: I've been sleeping a lot. My nausea has now subsided. And the baby, which started out Blueberry-sized the week I found out I was pregnant, is now the size of a Peach. 

So hurray! I can't wait to share more of my pregnancy as it progresses. In the meantime - here are two fun board books I bought already... you know this kiddo is going to have a massive library before it's even born!

I do not want to forget

From my trip to Toronto last week:

1. The buildings. So many buildings, some so tall you have to tip your head wayyyyy back to see the tops. So many houses, all side by side, sharing a wall or an alley. Street after street after street of them.
2. People, people, people. Not just white people. Brown, black, Asian, Indigenous, so many different kinds of people. (It's easy to forget in mostly-white Cape Breton how many different kinds of people there are.) Subway cars full of people, sidewalks walked over hundreds of times an hour. People crossing the street in droves. People, so many, each with their own life, their own plans for the day, none of which I'll ever know. I delight in this and also am a fish out of water in this. I can pass, I can play along and pretend I am a city girl, enough to navigate the Subway. But it is also unnerving, it is not my normal. Still, I like it.
3. A city so big and sprawling. One neighbourhood of it is the size of my town. Subways, street cars, taxis, Ubers, cars, bikes, people walking. Homes and stores and highways spooling out and out and out into the farmland beyond. Clouds overhead, grey-blue and ominous, threatening thunder later. A humid summer.
4. Gardens, to match all the houses. Lush, spilling onto the sidewalk. Some manicured and tidy, little postage stamp lawns. Some unruly and moist. A little space is enough. People live with it, this is their life. A house ten feet wide and 50 feet long. I come home to my house in Cape Breton and feel the space of it, luxurious all of a sudden. Wide. 
5. The way Aleena looked like a Queen in her dresses, the way all the women at the functions sparkled. Literally sparkled, from all the jewels and shiny threads on their clothes. The way each lenhga or garment had a different colour scheme and it all worked beautifully. 
6. Niagara Falls and the mist like rain, pouring down on my and Laura's heads. I had the red poncho hood pulled down to my eyebrows and my sunglasses pulled down just enough that I could see out, but barely. My sunglasses were covered with water and there was water everywhere. The sunscreen on my face was running into my eyes. The boat was in the middle of the horseshoe of the falls and I have no idea how the Captain could see in the white froth and churning water and the mist that was not mist but pouring rain. The roar of the water, and the excited cries of all the tourists on the boat, all in red ponchos, exclaiming over being drenched, exclaiming over being right in the heart of a huge cataract of water pouring four million cubic feet of water every second. The rush of it, the energy. 
7. How I feel when I take myself out of my normal and plop myself down in someone else's normal for a week: like anything is possible. Like all the little excuses I tell myself in the run of a day about why I do a certain thing a certain way, or why life is the way it is in Cape Breton, or about what I want to do with my life - are just that, excuses. That I can change it at any time, if I put in the effort. Sometimes the effort isn't physical, it's mental - just working to see something differently. Seeing excuses for what they are and choosing what to keep, what to let go of, what to try to change into something else. 
8. A special dinner out with two women I have known for thirteen years, at a fancy-ass restaurant where we laughed and laughed and joked with the waiter and caught up on each other's lives and ate fancy-ass onion rings and they split a truffle.
9. Sour candies, two couches side by side, "Insecure" and "Mistresses", laughter spilling out of us.
10. A furry, soft, excitable, delightful dog named Harriet. 

July 21 - 10 things

1. Taking breaks = so good, so necessary, so right. Going back to the work, or the app, refreshed = feels 100% amazing. SO much better than "powering through" and doing creative work from a place of exhaustion. 
2. I love seeing Elise Blaha Cripe get inspired on a new thing. It inspires me, gets me charged up to cut out the things that no longer serve, to welcome in the new things or the things that are old but are now new again. Thank you, Elise. 
3. The abundance of July in plants in ditches - blue, white, purple, all the plants. Hazy hot days.
4. Those blue plastic bags of recyclables went to the curb last night and are being picked up today. 
5. Swimming yesterday at Groves Point. The water calm, no waves. Liquid cool all over my body, my hands making a path through it. 
6. "Excuse me, where did you get that suit?" Twice yesterday. "A website," I reply. "Swimsuits For All." Are they saying that instead of saying, "Go you! A chubby woman wearing a bikini!" or is it just simply what they are thinking? Either way, I will take it. 
7. "Helloooo babe!" from a client, stopping by my office. "Coffee today," he says, and he pulls a loonie out of his pocket to show me. "Don't lose it," I say, because he is notorious for losing his money. I will probably give him a cup of coffee anyway, even if he does lose it before breaktime. 
8. Next week I am flying away from the ocean, inland to Toronto. I will spend a week there. I will stand in a wedding from a culture different than my own. I will see friends I haven't seen in a while. I'm looking forward to it, but also a little nervous too. The older I get the more I am a creature of habit, of home. 
9. A Friday at work where there isn't anything pressing, where the boss is off for the day, where I can start to feel caught up on my list = precious. 
10. A chocolate chip cookie and a cottage cheese so smooth it's basically yogurt.

i am inspired

1.  I am inspired by Sommersalt's July experiment. (Here.) She is writing a list of 10 observations of the world around her, each day. They are spare and beautiful, striking to the heart of it.
2. I don't think I will do it every day. At least not right now. I am not in the headspace for a daily project. But I am in the headspace for simplicity. And for noticing. So we shall see. 
3. The birch tree I see when I look out the window rustles and tosses like a green pom-pom, gently shaken.
4. There are things I am waiting to tell, waiting to make public. I am both anxious and excited to share. In time. 
5. My partner showers and I can hear the water spilling and running. 
6. There is a card my mother gave me, sitting on my desk beside me. A photo of two women sewing, wearing cloth around their heads, their faces looking up at the photographer, is on the front. Mom used it to wrap a pair of socks she knitted. 
7. My office is packed with things, most glaringly four blue bags filled with recyclables, waiting for next Friday. 
8. I crave tomorrow's freedom to fill my time as I please, and ache to turn my attention to the space I live in. 
9. We are about to drive over to Sydney and get some ribs at RibFest. 
10. Love.