Break Your Own Dumb Rules

Also, why do we make unnecessary rules for ourselves anyway?!) WHY are we like this?

All summer, the month of August hung pinned on the invisible calendar in my mind. It’s a pivotal month for us, holding both our anniversary, and my birthday one week from each other. But this year, in addition to celebrating twenty-five years of marriage, we packed up our second-born son and carted him, and his roomful of things, off to college. Move-in weekend was too full of activities to have time to sit with the weight of this transition, but now that we are home without him, in the quiet, I’ve let myself feel his absence. All summer, I knew this day was coming, but of course, no amount of knowing made me feel any more ready for it to happen. It’s good, I know it’s so good—and it’s hard. I need to acknowledge the layers.

For months, while walking the dog, making the dinner, or weeding the flower beds, I’ve been cataloguing milestones, memories and moments, trying not to forsake any of it, even the hard parts. I take each experience out like a marble, turning it over in my mind. I am willing to look at all its sides and swirls. All of it matters.

Stopping to smell the flowers.

Of all of the months this summer, it would have been easy to skip out on my creative practice on account of the many (unscheduled, read: UNPLANNED FOR) moving parts. When tempted to skip this month, I decided it was more important to work with my actual life to make the cards, than to forsake my progress. We are 8 months into this project. That is significant. So, in between the bumper of days early in the month, I set to work on my Artist’s Deck,