I get hung up sometimes, with the writing. Most of the time it’s not writer’s block. I have things to say, it’s just that those things aren’t good enough. They don’t mean something, I can’t weave them into a story that has a moral. They’re just stories; stories without morals, some without endings, random thoughts my inner perfectionist refuses to let me toss into the wind all willy nilly like. I hate her for this. And yet she’s the only authority figure in my life I’ve failed to learn to ignore.

Right now she’s screaming in my head that this post is going nowhere, to quit wasting my time, that no one wants to read such drivel.

Today I’m giving her the finger. She’s spent the better part of the past two weeks ruining every post I’ve started, sabotaging my other work and just generally being a pain in my ass. “That’s too dark and twisty!” she says. “What is the point in writing that?” she jabs. “Oh boy! What trash!” she sneers. “That’s going to piss people off. she taunts.

She is such a bitch.

At BlogHer this year the panelists in the Stoking Creativity writing session gave all sorts of clever ideas for silencing that inner perfectionist — that inner editor, as they called it — visualizing a stop sign, for instance. Over the course of the past two weeks I’ve employed all of them, to no avail. So today I’m just going to write no matter what she says. In one post you’re going to get all the random, imperfect, moral-lacking stories, thoughts and ideas I’ve started writing but haven’t finished. Bear with me.

• I dislike my oldest daughter’s new teacher. Tremendously. – And I’m really disappointed by this. I wanted to like her. With the girls starting classes in a new school this year I really was hoping to get off on the best foot possible. Unfortunately, this woman is rude, self-centered, disorganized, seems very unengaged with her students and the educational process, is resistant to keeping parents informed as to what is going on in the classroom and, while technically sound, her writing style makes me want to stab my eyes out with rusty forks just so I don’t have to read it. Yes, that last bit does matter, thankyouverymuch.
• I adore my youngest daughter’s teacher – She’s upbeat, positive, thorough in communicating with parents, uses a lot of charts (seriously people, charts are underrated! As is, color coding.), stresses personal responsibility, has many opportunities for the kids to make their own decisions and follow through with those decisions. It’s going to be a good school year with her. I can feel it.
• I don’t want to die. Anymore. – Yesterday Shannon posed a question on Facebook that almost spawned an entire post itself, but the inner perfectionist wouldn’t let me, so here it is in a nutshell. She asked; “What did you do religiously in your parents house growing up, but now never do as an adult in your own home?” (I paraphrase here, I’m just trying to get the thoughts out before inner-bitch makes me stop!) And while most people answered with things like “Make the bed.” and “Put milk in a pitcher for breakfast.” My one and only thought was “Hate my life and wish it would end.” Which brought me to two separate but equally important realizations. One, my childhood could have been worse but it really did suck and I’m entitled to owning that. And two, hey! I’m making progress in this life.
• Fall is here. – The temperatures are dropping, but still high, but summer is going, going, gone. The drought we’ve experience this past month (which is nothing compared to the drought some areas have been experiencing for two, three, four months) has expedited the drying of the crops. And the death of everything else. One good wind storm and the corn will be on the ground. The stalks are so thin, brittle looking. The beans didn’t seem to set good pods this year, but they too are turning. Harvest is going to be wonky this year.
• I’m not ready for winter. – The list of things I need to get done before winter is long. And by long I mean long with a capital ‘L’. Wasting time battling my inner perfectionist is not helping me shorten that list any.

But right now, she’s finally quiet. So I’m going to say goodbye and hope tomorrow when I open this window to write again she stays that way. Because I don’t think random bullet points are the way to go, not forever anyway. But I do appreciate you hanging in there with me in the meantime.

Our youngest ate a lot of pickles that summer. The big, refrigerated kind that, when eaten by a toddler her age, take up the whole fist. She was eating one then, sitting in her portable booster seat, strapped to the folding chair inside the screen tent that we never did close the sides on. It was too hot that year, even for the bugs.

Juice dribble down her chin and dropped onto her bare belly. It’s one of the only things I miss about having little ones; the buddha belly. I snapped a picture of her and turned my attention back to my cousin who twirled the eleventy-hundredth strand of her daughter’s tight, ringleted hair around her index finger. She’d been at this task for the better part of an hour.

“I don’t know how you do it.” I commented, shaking my head in awe. Minutes earlier she’d revealed that this was a twice — sometimes thrice — weekly chore. My own daughters hair is stick straight, simple. Wash, towel dry, brush. Toss it in a ponytail if it’s particularly unruly. That’s it.

“You would.” She smiled. “If you had to.” She strung another tiny ringlet around her finger, and then another. “It’s what we do.” She nodded towards me and another of our cousins — another woman — who was at the table, applying her royal we to the gender shared among us. ” We just do it. Because it has to be done.”

I have never forgotten those words; that scene.

While I was in New York City earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking with the ladies of LoveFeast Table. We talked about — or rather I spouted off about — agriculture big and small, humane treatment of livestock, the evils of supermarket meat, and generally everything I’m passionate about. And the more I talked the more they asked me about, well, me. As I told them more about what I do, my family, my fledgling farm — my life, basically — one of the ladies, I don’t remember which, broke out that all too common question: How do you do it? And for the first time in the conversation I stammered. Ultimately, I shrugged and brushed the question aside with a half-hearted answer, “I don’t know. I just do.” Because that answer, half-hearted as it may be, is the truth.

Sure, I could have told them all the tangible ways in which I do it. I could have told them that we still use Summer Vacation the way it was originally intended, that the kids have their fair share of chores to do “in the fields” when they’re home. I could have told them that I’m obnoxiously dependent on lists, that I have a wonderful and wholly helpful husband, that I have become a master at prioritization and that some things just never do get done if they’re not deemed important enough. I could have told them all that I’ve learned over the years about delegation. I could have revealed in detail the spreadsheets, the systems that make the everyday, the routine run smoothly, like a well-oiled machine. I could have told them exactly, minute by minute, how I do it. Every bit of it. But that would not have been the honest truth; that would have been to mislead them; that, I’m not sure I could have been comfortable with.

The truth isn’t in the tangible logistics of any given task. The truth is, I just do it because it needs to be done. And so do they, so do you. We all just do it for the same reason; because someone has to. Because it needs to be done, because to not do it is to lie down, to accept defeat, to die figuratively, literally. And as much as there are days when that seems preferable, we know it’s not, we carry on. We do it. Because. And the how doesn’t matter, not really.

In their political beliefs, their religious convictions, their personalities, their lifestyles; my best friends are a beautifully varied group. From atheist socialists to devout — some might say radical — Christian conservatives; and everywhere in between. Which is exactly why I love them. Because they are varied and so are their perspectives on the world. There are few things I love more than sitting at a table over a good meal and listening to one or another of them expounding on their beliefs. There are few things more satisfying than a person who is so comfortable in their Self and in their relationship with you that they will answer any question, explain any given position.

This same diversity is the reason I love attending events like BlogHer, where the sharing of ideas is encouraged and valued. I find so many very diverse women sharing their thoughts about everything from the conference food to the topics discussed incredibly interesting. I love being reminded of the way our perceptions shape our reality.

On the first day of the conference I waited while my roommates, Shannon and Kendra, used the women’s restroom just outside the main ballroom, where all the keynotes were given and the meals served. Standing there I watched as many of the conference attendees were ushered in for lunch. There was one wide alley set up for entrance to the area and in front of it stood a man — a hilton employee, I assume. Every few minutes he would step just to the side and let a small group of women in, much like a bouncer letting people into an exclusive club at capacity.

When Shannon, Kendra and I made our way into the lunch area Shannon made a comment that made me laugh. I don’t remember her exact words, but in a nutshell she admired aloud the way they were handling the crowd. I laughed because as I had watched just moments earlier I had stood there and grumbled to my authority-issue-ridden self, because I’ll be damned if I will ever approve of shepherding humans about like cattle. Especially when I am one of those humans. And here a woman I adore and admire was loving it.

And then I got home — we all got home — and slowly accounts of the BlogHer experience started cropping up around the blogosphere. There were people who loved the sessions, people who didn’t; people who loved the food, and those who felt it was lacking; there were accounts of moments during the conference that I, too, found notable but that were archived in a way that was completely opposite to the way my own mind had preserved them.

There were — there are — daily reminders of the inherent beauty in the diversity of our perceptions, our realities. And, that, I love.

:: :: ::

Today’s photo is from the archives, taken in the early spring of 2010.

The Break Dancer wasn’t the only thing I captured during Amie’s first annual (you hear that, Amie? Annual! I’m counting on it!) BlogHer Nighttime Photowalk. And, as promised, the rest of my favorites are here for your voyeuristic pleasure.

We begin, appropriately enough, with Kat — whose blog I would love to link to, so if you know who she is, leave me a comment — giving lessons before we ever left the hotel. Kat talks about photography like I talk about agriculture; with a light in her eye and a passion that’s unmistakeable. I loved watching her teach this particular woman — again whose blog I would love to link to, so leave me a comment if you know her — who was new to her camera, and I think photography above point and shoot as well.

Now, I know the other day I said that I didn’t like New York City and that I was happy to be home. And this is true. But I won’t lie, either. Once outside and walking it was hard not to admire the pulse of the city through the lens of my camera.

Or to get pulled into the mysteriousness that is the quiet little pockets tucked everywhere within that pulse. Pockets like this stairway. It was completely deserted, but as I crouched on the sidewalk above to snap this shot the sidewalk traffic whirled around me.

And then there were the people. I love candid photography perhaps more than any other kind. There’s something about freezing time with the click of a shutter. Something that sends an exhilarating rush through my very core. It’s a little taste of playing god, of recording history, of being able to tell a story as I see it… without a single word.

There were ugly things, like the trash that lined the sidewalks everywhere we went, begging to be made more beautiful. Who would I have been not to oblige?

There were street vendors selling t-shirts at two-thirty in the morning. In the city that truly never sleeps.

There were surprising little architectural touches that lent themselves perfectly to shooting.

There was a man on the other side of this grill who was terribly angry that I photographed his meat.

And as both morning and our hotel approached there was — if only for a moment — an eery quiet on what are normally deafeningly loud streets. There was a calm before a storm; a momentary pause in an otherwise rushed existence. And I froze it, preserved it, brought it home. Maybe, one day, it’ll convince me to go back; to give the city a second chance.

As parents go, I’m a hard ass. I have rules and those rules are enforced, black and white. If you don’t perform at an “A” level in school, work and personal behavior you won’t be living an “A” level lifestyle. I am not my daughters’ friend. I am their mother. I am not raising cute little girls with big eyes, long lashes and a knack for manipulating people — though both are just that. I am raising ladies, adult members of society who will need to hold jobs, make money, manage their finances and engage in relationships; ladies who will need to determine and uphold their personal ethics. I am raising the future of the world and I take that seriously. There is no whining, no attitude, no pestering. Ever. Period. There is hard work and a system to earn what you get. Always.

Even I however, have my soft spots. And this morning as I lifted one such of those soft spots off their bathroom counter to wipe beneath it — an expensive bar of handmade goat’s milk soap from a local dairy, bought for my oldest at a farmer’s market earlier in the summer — I couldn’t help but pause to wonder if my kids know why I’m such a pushover on some occasions much more than others.

Not all soft spots are a bad thing. If caving doesn’t interfere with producing productive members of society, doesn’t undermine any lessons you’re trying to teach, or in my case actually furthers the lessons you teach there is no shame in giving in, indulging your children. Of that I am whole heartedly very sure. But as I held that bar of soap to my nose this morning to take in the scent — a delicious pumpkin pie aroma that makes me lust for the impending autumn season — I am ashamed to admit what I realized. That, while my passion for supporting local farmers and artisans is evident to my children in our actions and attitudes, I don’t think I’ve ever made it blatantly clear to them that that conviction is why they can get me to buy them just about anything that catches their eye on Saturday mornings.

Needless to say we’ll be talking about it this weekend on the way to, or from, the farmer’s market, but now I’m curious. Do you have an ethics-based soft spot? Do your kids know why that is?

At BlogHer, on Friday night, after the sessions had closed up shop and most of the parties had followed suit Amie hosted a small, nighttime photo walk for bloggers who love photography. There will be more about that walk (and many more of the pictures I took during it) to come; in the meantime I owe a man some pictures.

That man, whose name I regret not getting, stopped me at one point during the walk and asked what we were doing. When I explained that we were in town for a conference and were out on a photo walk he asked if I’d take his picture. Well, actually, I asked if I could take his picture and he said he wanted to “do something”. After I gave him the look of a lifetime, I’m sure, he clarified that what he wanted to do was dance.

Break Dance. These are a few of my favorite shots of him doing just that. I only wish I’d had a better lens to work with.

While my 24-70 f 2.8 is my favorite, I’m afraid I’ve worn it out and pushed it beyond its limits one — or ten — too many times over the years.

Anybody want to donate a couple grand for some new lenses for me? I’ll take your picture.

No? Damn.

If there were any one thing I could be famous for at this point in my life my knack for having identity crises like clockwork could very well be that thing. Has it been more than twelve to twenty-four months since I’ve upset my entire schedule; turned my structure, my very being upside down? Chances are I’m overdue and you can expect to find me doing just that soon; very, very soon.

Except maybe this last time when the crisis seemed more productive than crises past. Except perhaps this last one; one that just felt different. It accomplished something, I think. And not just the dying of my hair to a shade it’d never seen before or the purchasing of a killer red lipstick by a woman who rarely wears lip gloss — even in a naked, barely-there shade — either. Something important, substantial. Something that I can’t quite put my finger on.

It also, unlike its predecessors, isn’t a time I look back on and cringe. It has been the topic of conversation a lot lately and I find myself not dreading the reliving of that time, though a dark time it was, but smiling and reveling in it instead.

In New York earlier this month Jenny asked Shannon and I if we’d help her with a video she was producing; if we’d talk about something that had helped us be successful, even in small ways, recently. And I found myself just blurting it out. “Someone has to die!” Because if I’m honest that’s what happened. Right in the middle of an already crisis-laden time in my regularly crisis-laden life someone died. Someone important. And suddenly that crisis, unlike any other before it, became wholly productive.

And you know, ‘Someone has to die’ may not have been the best way to articulate exactly what I meant, but at the time I’m not sure even I knew what I meant so, articulation be damned, it was a start. And then I thought about and talked about it some more.

Last week as I rode home with my best friend — eating and chatting and drinking and winding down from our last belly dancing class until fall — it came up again. And she asked the question that wouldn’t lead to an immediate answer but that would lead me to it eventually; to exactly why this last one was productive; to why someone doesn’t have to die literally, but figuratively that’s exactly the case.

“What was different about this time?” She probed. She herself going through a trying, self-clarifying time right now.

And at the time I didn’t know. “I just feel more…” I paused, searching for a word, any word “… settled.” I wasn’t happy with that choice but it would have to work. “Zen?” I added. “Something.”

And it’s true. I feel more settled, zen, something. And she agreed, “You do seem more… calm.” She nodded. But that’s the effect not the cause; the equal and opposite reaction to the writhing, convulsing action that set it all in motion last fall. And that is what I wanted to understand, the action. What was different about the crisis itself. And as it turns out the answer was the very first one I blurted out, half because my mouth doesn’t have a filter and half because I didn’t understand it enough myself to articulate it in any better way. Someone has to die!

Lucky for you, someone doesn’t have to be a person. Or an animal. It can be something. What I realized is, in crises past I had wanted so badly to resolve whatever it was that plagued me, to come to a conclusion, to settle into something more meaningful, but I also did not want to let go of anything I’d already held dear. I wanted change, but only change that could come in addition to what already was. I had a death grip on everything that which I knew. When someone died I was forced to let go of something, many things — perhaps even everything — that I knew for sure. I was forced to let full, revolutionary change take place in every aspect of my life, my being. I was strong-armed into questioning the very reality I lived in. Nothing I knew was true any longer, every thing, every space in my mind was free for the taking, the reshaping, the accepting of new truths.

Mourn the reality you know. Bury the notions you’ve preconceived. Symbolically bring to a close the life span of those things to which you cling. Voluntarily allow something to die, do not wait to be forced into it as I was. The productivity will follow, the revelations can then take shape. These are the lessons I learned, these are the reasons for my smallest successes in the past year. These things are powerful and productive. These things I wish others could learn without the pain, the death, the force. But I’m just not sure.

In one of the sessions I attended at BlogHer ‘10 last week an audience member took the mic and uttered some of the simplest, yet most profound words I would hear all weekend. I didn’t write that quote down word-for-word so I’ll have to paraphrase here, but it still bears repeating. The topic had been how to silence one’s inner-critic and this is what she had to say:

“I embrace my superiority!”

As the room erupted in laughter and applause she paused before explaining her rationale.

“The truth is, my crappy writing is better than most people’s good writing.”

And right there, right at that moment, I was struck by a bolt of lightening. Because the truth is, she’s right. My crappy writing is better than most people’s good writing. Ten times so. And yet I struggle to embrace that day in and day out. I recoil from compliments, blush, brush them aside with “Oh, you’re too kind.” or “Oh, my! Thank you, but…” I always have and I’m not the only woman who does. If I were those words wouldn’t have been met with such a strong response in a room of incredibly talented women; a response of being able to relate to the need to do such a thing, of understanding, of wistful longing to be in that place, to do just that: embrace superiority.

So why don’t we? If we want to so badly, if we understand, if we know we should and could, why don’t we? Why don’t we embrace our superiority? Why don’t we accept compliments without trying to undermine the giver’s genuine intentions? Why don’t we proudly admit that we are powerful?

Because it’s not polite.

And because, even those of us who are only marginally concerned with what is polite have been brought up to subconsciously follow at least some of the rules, this one included. Good girls don’t shout their superiority from the rooftops. Good girls do not stand in a room full of other women and announce that their work is better than someone else’s. Good girls are humble. And to risk sounding cliche, good girls rarely make history; this is exactly why.

It has taken me the better part of a decade to figure out how to internally embrace who I am and what I want. I don’t expect to be able to publicly announce how great I am overnight, but I do intend to start practicing. I hope you will too.

I am not against organizations being partisan. Partisanship makes the world turn, even if sometimes in reverse. What I am opposed to is claiming to be non-partisan while clearly acting in a partisan manner. What I am opposed to are thinly-veiled attempts to trick women into supporting a cause that, under the terms of the solution offered, is clearly partisan by prefacing the roll-out of that solution with disclaimers of it being a “non-partisan issue”.

A non-partisan issue does not automatically a non-partisan cause make. I assure you.

And frankly I don’t appreciate the insinuation that the mis-use of such a disclaimer makes; that women cannot think for themselves. Do these people, these organizations think we won’t notice that they’ve come up with a partisan solution to a non-partisan issue? And if they do are they really pro-woman? Do they really have a place championing the advancement of women over the course of the coming decades? If they don’t think we’re even capable of seeing through such blatant lies as these can they be trusted to play a part in convincing the public at large that we deserve a seat in the boardroom, the Senate, the Oval Office?

Work Life Balance is a non-partisan issue. Solving it with government mandates and federal policy is as partisan as a solution gets.

Increasing representation by women in boardrooms, governmental agencies and elected public positions is a non-partisan issue. Legislating quotas to make that happen is partisan. Yes, even if we call them “quo-tah-s.

Call me what you will, but I have a dream that one day women will be united not via twisted campaigns veiled by lies and deceit but by the true issues at their core. I have a dream not that non-partisan issues can be solved in partisan ways but that partisan women can work together in non-partisan cooperation. I have a dream that organizations and individuals who claim to champion women will, one day, do just that — without undermining their own ethics in an effort to get the job done now instead of right.

But if you put her in New York City chances are she won’t like it.

Having spent the past four days in The Big Apple for BlogHer ‘10 I can assure you the above is true. At least for me. I really wanted to like New York City. If, for no other reason, on principle. It’s the finance and fashion hub of the US. It’s full of diversity; of hustle and bustle. It’s the city that never sleeps.

Unfortunately, while all of the above is true — and sounds so very romantic — I found much more to be true about the city as well. Allow me to offer a few alternative taglines.

New York City: Loud, Filthy, Over-Crowded.

New York City: Home of Diversity. *Disclaimer: We Never Said Those Diverse People Like Each Other. At All.

The Big Apple: We Had to Have a Nickname That Makes The City Sound Less Dead.

New York City: What Do You Mean The Grass in Central Park is Supposed to be Green?

New York City: Importing Oxygen, Exporting Carbon Dioxide. Since 1925.

New York City: Home of the Two-Speed Car; 45 miles per hour and Stop.

And My Personal Favorite

New York City: We Can Show You What Urine, Cigarette Smoke and Filth Smells Like All Rolled Into One!

I am so glad to be home; where plants are green, the air is clean, and people know that there is supposed to be a period of acceleration before their vehicles hit top speed.

All sarcasm, joking and below-the-belt sucker punches to NYC aside, I was truly very disappointed in the city. Perhaps I was expecting too much, what I found to be true was anything but what I had hoped, imagined, looked forward to. The city embodies everything that is wrong with this country and, while I have no problem facing those things, it’s hard to see them all at once; in your face, screaming to be noticed.

The filth and stench of the streets contrasted against the extravagance of the shiny marble of 5th avenue boutiques; the dirty, sweaty lower class working the streets contrasted with the cool and well-dressed upper class that shopped there.

The diversity of the population is so beautiful in a snapshot in time, still, unmoving; but fully conflicted in real time. A reminder that diversity must breed conflict, hatred, feuds before those things can be overcome with love, acceptance, understanding — and that the conflict here is far from being overcome even now in the year 2010.

The consumption, destruction; a turkey sandwich with more meat on it than my family of four eats in two weeks. A park that is supposed to be a sanctuary from the city that is just as dead as the concrete that surrounds it; brown, leaves hanging from trees looking too much like an over-worked, poverty-stricken mother of four, begging for a break lest life itself breaks her.

And perhaps, worst of all, no one seems to notice. They go on, driving fast, pushing their way through overcrowded sidewalks and eating giant sandwiches while the world crumbles, dies around them. And that? Makes me sad and angry and motivated and lost and unsure all at once.