June

On New Year's Day, I took a yoga/art workshop dedicated to setting intentions for the new year. After a yoga flow session, students made collages that depicted goals or hopes for 2011.

Each participant was given a square of poster paper. There were plenty of magazines, markers, crayons, pastels, glue, glitter, feathers, old calendars, postcards, and who knows what else to go around. The room had the feel of an elementary school art classroom, happy with chatter and creation. I, however, had a hard time getting started.

For one thing, I went through a collage phase in college (ha! no near pun intended) and I wasn't in the mood to cut and paste. I had, though, come to the workshop with some vague intentions in mind, as well as a deep belief in the power of setting intentions. In 2009, I went to a similar New Year's Day workshop in DC. In that one, we wrote letters to ourselves, to be mailed to us by the instructor in 6 months, that described our lives 6 months later. The idea was to describe in present tense the life that you wanted to be living 6 months later. That year, Dean and I had just decided to have a baby and I was sending off poems to journals, but so far had only received rejections. In my letter to myself, I was pregnant and holding the journal that held my first published poem. When I found the letter in my mailbox in late June, I was 5 months pregnant. The journal that contained my first published poem was on my bookshelf, within easy reach.

Because of one of 2009's attained set intentions--guess which one--I couldn't make it to a New Year's Day workshop in 2010. But I did in 2011, and I knew I wanted a year of change. First and foremost, I wanted more sleep. I wanted more time for yoga, more time for writing, and more time for myself in general. I knew I was going to wean sometime in 2011, and I knew I was going to think about looking for work in the fall. In general, I was hoping that 2011 would be a year of finding footing in the world of motherhood, of making room in my life for the things that had defined me before Amelia came along and became the center of my universe.

In the weeks before the 2011 workshop, I had been writing a prose poem about Amelia's birth. Some lines from the poem were floating through my head. I decided to write/rewrite the poem on my poster paper. First I cut into into a more oval shape. Think O'Keefe flowers--I was writing about birth here. And then I wrote the poem in the same oval shape. On top of it all, I wrote the a word in large block letters. I colored in some of the letters and pasted paper over others. The word was EVOLVE.

June is a rich month, sun and flowers and early summer harvest. It is the month I was married. It is the sixth month of the year, a halfway point, the perfect time to pause and consider or reconsider intentions for the year.

My plan for June is to write one blog post a day. I don't have any particular theme in mind for the posts--I won't always be writing about setting intentions, although this did seem like a good place to start--it's just that I have finished up some fairly major projects in May, not least of which was finishing my poetry manuscript and sending it off to several contests, and I would like to get back to the blog for awhile.

I have some other goals in mind too. In June, I want to

1. Drink more water. I realized I go through the day feeling thirsty a lot. (A note to Mom: I don't think it's diabetes.) I think I'm just thirsty. Denver is dry and I am busy.

2. Read more. My plan for Amelia's naptimes in June are to write on the blog and then read. I want to read both poetry and fiction. I started a Goodreads account a couple of years ago I would like to get back to too.

3. And with #2 in mind, I am setting a cleaning limit for myself in June. I have been feeling like I fritter away too much time straightening the house. It becomes a creative block, almost, a way for me to avoid sitting down to write. So in June, I am allowed to straighten up after breakfast and to do whatever chores seem most urgent for 10 minutes, and only 10 minutes, after Amelia goes down for her nap. I am going to set the timer. If Amelia happens to be entertaining herself throughout the day, I can do small things then too, but that's pretty hit or miss.

And forth, I would like to exercise more. I have been going to yoga much more often and even running, although that's more sporadic. In June I am going to try to do one or the other every day.

It will be interesting to see how this goes, since I often don't feel like writing until everything is neat. And the truth is I really hate running. On top of all that, we are spending most of June 1st on a plane. So we'll see.

In the manuscript class I just finished, the instructor talked a lot about closure, about the importance of finishing a project, even if it wasn't as perfect as you'd hoped. The great thing about letting something go, he said, is that you get to see what you're going to do next. The month of May was for me a definite time of closure--I sent the manuscript off, I weaned Amelia--so I feel that this summer is a kind of beginning. All this reminds of some lines from a poem by T.S. Eliot:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Beginning or end, I am excited to see what happens next.