Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Friendly neighborhood

    Literally and figuratively. Here in Eugene, OR, Friendly Street runs through a neighborhood of ordinary homes, a few fancied up, but many still modest. It’s known as the Friendly neighborhood and I love living here. It’s walkable, with parks and churches and schools and a small grocery and decent restaurants and no homeowners association policing home and yard appearance. People walk by and tell you how nice your yard looks, or ask about your kids, or notice your dog being well behaved. They set out extra produce from vegetable gardens or extra bulbs from flowering plants to share. (We do have our curmudgeons, but everyone is a curmudgeon sometime.) Among the gardens — perfect or tidy or messy or disastrous — there is a fine dose of whimsy. Here’s just one example from our morning walk. I love that I never know what I’m going to see.

  • Almost like being in love

    First there were these occasional side glances. Then full eye-contact. Then a few casual conversations. Then a heart flutter. Then some more chat. A small hit of adrenaline, a few deeply felt moments. After a few months, it’s official. I’ve fallen hard.

    So, please, if you’re talking to me and I’m not quite looking at you, if I’m staring off into the middle distance, I’m thinking about her. And her. And him. And a stretch of beach. Maybe some mountains. Probably a boat. And an airplane? Little two-seater Cessna? Yes! And some bad guys. And big trouble in the wings. And maybe somebody dies.

    A new project is pushing its way out of my brain, through my fingers, onto a page.

    I’m in love. This book will be fabulous. These characters, the best ever. The quest they’re on, genious. I’m consumed by love of it all right now. Later the early choices I make on this project will start constraining what can happen next. And the joy will ease off and the work will ease on. And then it will get really worky. And I’ll get frustrated. Then I’ll be in the horse latitudes of writing.

    But I will remember (although I almost always forget) that being open and curious and in the moment — in my today body and my today brain — and willing to wait and listen, these attributes will ease me through the horse lattitudes. But I’m not there yet. I’m here now. In love.

    Writing. Lord, what a ride!

  • Messy middle

    I began pressing flowers from the garden this summer. Here’s a sample preserved in my notebook for future color reference. The foxglove blossoms washed out colorwise. The pansies — those crazy stalwarts of the garden — popped, as did the penstemon and the nasturtium. The color wasn’t great, but the shape of the fuchsia made me pretty happy. So, this fall as I was making cards with pressed flowers, I played around with that blossom particularly. Here’s the result:

    Crafts, like this and my embroidery practice, remind me that being in the messy middle is the biggest part of living. Finishing, that’s just punctuation. The messy middle really is the stuff of life, and yet it’s the thing how-to TV shows and videos often fast forward through.

    Learning to be patient, to keep going, is its own practice.