JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Ted told me the other day that he misses my posts when I don’t have time to blog. I found his comment curious. We spend hours together each day, including time every night set aside for our relationship. Yet there is some aspect of me expressed on this blog that he misses.

I’ve been ill again, another head cold, my second one in the past three weeks. This sickness, combined with seasonal festivities and my husband’s travels, has immobilized me. The past week has been a blur of Christmas frenzy, assembling cards and packages into the night, before collapsing into bed, head angled awkwardly atop stacks of pillows to aid respiration. (see Beth’s description of their family’s hack week!)

Today I found a babysitter to watch the girls so I could go outside and take a walk by myself. My first exercise in a week was illuminated by vivid colors: blue sky, green salal, bronze bark of madrone tree, warm sun on my back, the joy of stretching legs, the feeling of freedom from the heaviness of perpetual house and headache. I took the camera with me as companion and compensated for my lack of photos earlier in the week, enjoying the opportunity to create pictures (see flickr page). Art makes you alive. Or perhaps it is art that reveals you are alive.

I miss Ted when he’s not here. Or at least I’m finally beginning to miss him, after seven days. It’s been a strange week in the absecne of appetites. Head aching with congestion, all I could consider was survival. What do I need to do next to take care of the kids? And how can I make it through the next moment? Although I was wrapping aromatic Christmas gifts – so strongly scented Ted had asked me to move them out of our room – the objects had no odor to my nose. Food had no appeal to me either. I’m embarrassed to admit what meals the girls have been eating, in the absence of Ted and my own interest and energy. But slowly my senses are returning.

And I hope to be returning here. As I’ve said in my Making Masks presentation (Gnomedex version now on-line!) we reveal different aspects of ourselves in different situations. In survival mode, I think only of the next minute. Typing seems tiresome. Naps are what I need. But as I begin to enter into health again, I find desire. I find dreams. I find creativity. I find the pieces of me that are here. And I find the ways I connect with others that don’t happen in any other aspect of daily life, perhaps even with the person who knows me most intimately.

is available on my flickr page. We are doing well, caught up in the whirlwind of holiday fun, scribbling Christmas cards, tossing snow balls for an afternoon, making gifts and visiting with friends, in addition to our usual schedule of explorations and lessons. I’ll try to describe more soon. Hope you are well and warm, enjoying this season.

A few friends and I went to make wreaths at Bainbridge Gardens one Saturday afternoon this month. As an experiment, I took a bucket of clippings from the rosemary bush in the garden. The branches made an aromatic wreath that brings holiday spirit to our kitchen. It’s fun to put a candle in the middle. As I joked with my friends, working with rosemary made me want to come home and cook! This was my second year using the machines at Bainbridge Gardens and I recommend taking a group of friends and spending an afternoon together crafting wreaths and relationships.

Still fighting off a cold…will write more as soon as I can…hope your holidays are filled with warmth and beauty…and memorable aromas! 🙂

Opening a door can mean making a discovery.

Last Monday I opened the door to an antique shop and discovered new things inside myself.

After visiting downtown Poulsbo, over the bridge from the island, I decided, at last, to peek into the antique shops beside the parking lot. From the outside, their wares had looked less than desirable, stacks of overpriced garage sale goods in need of paint and repair.

But inside the stores we saw treasures. Old cash registers, for sale for thousands. I found items I’d only seen in museums or books. Powder horns. After all her Chronicles of Narnia reading, Abigail was amazed to see a bow and arrows – and to realize how large they are. Kodak Brownie cameras. Coins.

There were also items I recognized from my childhood: toys, stacks of 45’s, kitchen patterns and clothes.

So many objects and so many stories. I wondered what tales they could tell if they could talk. What kind of lives they had lived. Who had loved them. Held them. Abandoned them. Fascinated, I nearly forgot the camera until we were almost finished with the store.

An old scale promised to provide “Your Wate and Fate”

An old globe. Based on Yugoslavia and Germany, I’d guess it is from 1930s – 1950s.

Any one (European readers, history students) able to help?

On the way home, we stopped at the new Rotary park that now welcomes visitors to the island. It had opened only two days earlier. There we marveled over the mosaic glass map of Bainbridge. The artists and students who assembled it poured attention into details, creating colorful and thoughtful portrait of this place we call home, using the little things to make a big picture.

Here are the girls standing on the map, for perspective.

Our beloved Frog Rock and sidekick Ladybug

The ferry terminal at Eagle Harbor

It was a sunny afternoon, a treat in this Northwest November. Maple leaves glowed gold, in the sky and on the ground. The kids ran around on the grass while cars passed on the freeway. If it hadn’t been time for lunch, I would have stayed there at the park. We had sunshine. We had happiness.

It was a memorable Monday, for many reasons. We explored the mysterious antique stores. We also enjoyed a new piece of public art on the island.

I realized I liked discoveries. I like going into the unknown and finding the new. I like opening a door and walking inside an adventure.

I was glad to find treasures in our community. I now know more about this place where we live. And I also know more about myself. I discovered that I like discoveries. I like adventures on sunny afternoons. I like explorations.

And I realized that I like taking pictures of the places we see. Sometimes I use a camera and sometimes I use words to share these images. This too is a part of me, who I am, what I love, what makes me feel alive. In an antique store and in a mosaic by the side of a freeway, I found a piece of my fate.

While reading the Third Age Carnival hosted by Evelyn Rodriguez earlier this month I saw that my neighbor Jennifer Louden now has a blog. I can still remember when I met her and her husband, soon after they had moved into their house. Jen amazes me. She’s a best-selling author, personal coach, and someone you want to have in your community. Here’s a paragraph from her bio:

Jennifer Louden is the best-selling author of The Woman’s Comfort Book, The Couple’s Comfort Book, The Pregnant Woman’s Comfort Book, The Woman’s Retreat Book, and Comfort Secrets for Busy Women. She is both a personal coach and social commentator, who has taken the concept of “comfort” and self-care, and made these essential concepts irresistible and essential to women around the world. Jennifer is a cultural visionary, harnessing her extraordinary ability to recognize women’s comfort as both a fundamental need and an innate desire.

She’s been on Oprah and many other tv shows, and now has a radio show on Sirius.

I’m enjoying learning more about her by reading her blog. She writes with honesty about her struggles with creativity and life in general, including the blahs:

I’ve been in the blah blah blah zone… it swamps me every few months… a day or two into my period, I go blank. Dumb.  Depressed isn’t the right word, at least it doesn’t describe this state well enough for me.  Under rock, peering up. Inside Jesus’ tomb only he’s gone and I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.  I can’t remember why I thought I could make art or finish my novel.  Raw.

Years of witnessing the blahs have taught me it is really not a rock or a cave but an ocean and a big bed of kelp.. swaying, full of light and fascinating ever shifting patterns and if I navigate with self-care and kind self-talk and rest and walks- for rushing about only gets me tangled in the long strands of suddenly menacing kelp, I lessen my suffering and hey, it even starts to feel good here, in the blah place.  It is both blah and not blah, light and dark, creative and not creative.

Thanks, Jennifer, for inspiring me! I look forward to this curious dynamic of building an online relationship combined with being neighbors in the physical world.

Bonus link for local blogs:

Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council now has a blog.