been thinking...

"But you will also be wise enough to know that what you know is very rarely important. And you will..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:47:00 -0700

“

But you will also be wise enough to know that what you know is very rarely important. And you will be listening carefully enough to know that this a time to be very, very quiet and very, very open and soft and ready and aware and empty of any agenda or judgment or knowledge or solutions or ideas at all. Because this sister has requested none of that. And so this is simply a time to be a witness. To stand witness to another sister’s pain. To say yes, I see you – yes, I hear you and – yes, I even feel you. Yes, I am witnessing what has happened to you. And yes, it is absolutely incomprehensible and unbelievable and right now even unforgivable and there is no explanation for it on God’s Green Earth. Yes, sister- I feel you. Yes, yes, yes.

She will go on to tell you that her children are all so brave and you will be doing okay until she tells you with a proud smile and watery eyes that her son called her yesterday and said “Happy Father’s day, mama!” at which point you will come close to losing it. But then you will consider how many times this woman has had to ignore her own pain in order to console others, and you will tell yourself with gusto that if anybody’s gonna lose it during this sacred session, it’s gonna be her. So you will tell her that she is a bad ass, because that will be the most profound sentence you can muster at the time…

You will get into the car and sit for a few minutes and marvel about how God can use any idiot anywhere. About how whether we’re with our kids or without our kids or in an office or traffic or a makeup chair we are always RIGHT IN FRONT of somebody who needs love. And how we don’t have to be dramatic about it. Because while it’s a wonderful thing to do – we don’t have to go to a refugee camp to serve others. The whole damn world is a refugee camp. We are misplaced, certainly. Every person I’ve ever met is much too precious for this precarious place.

”

- Via Momastery

This is glorious. This is how we long to be listened to and the statis comfort in which we need to be held.

This is also how I need to learn to listen. So still, so quiet, so soft.

Proud to have this essay featured in the new Bright Wall Dark...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:59:41 -0700

Proud to have this essay featured in the new Bright Wall Dark Room Magazine. Thanks to everyone who has supported this endeavor. And if you haven’t yet, we hope you’ll subscribe today!

brightwalldarkroom:

Editor’s note: As promised, we are making one full essay from our new BW/DR Magazine available to you here on the site. Please enjoy, Erica Cantoni’s thoughts on Mad Men, and consider making our magazine a regular part of your daily reading by subscribing to BW/DR today!

I WON’T HAVE MY HEART BROKEN

by Erica Cantoni

The small tender heart of Mad Men isn’t obvious in the plot lines. It’s not in the divorces or the hasty marriages, the mergers or fledgling reinvented firms—as fun an amuse-bouche as those tasty tangents are.

It’s in this moment:

Ginsberg at his dark office window, typing. Peggy watching him in the reflection of a glass frame, as he chooses ten or fifteen precise words from a coin purse of millions in his mind, and spends them on the Holocaust and outer space. It’s in Peggy listening without breathing or moving or demanding explanation, as he speaks with frustrating, unfulfilling eloquence, of the absurd futility of assimilation. It’s in us glimpsing two percent of Ginsberg and blowing apart in wonder at the unreachable remainder.

It’s in a dozen twilight office conversations like this, patiently garlanded out over five years. So small and telling, you want to lean forward and cup your hands around them. Protect them from the wind and eat them before they blow away.

I’ve never had a good memory. Put less endearingly: I forget almost everything. Not because none of it matters. It’s just that the communal experience does not stitch into me. I value it less than the isolated moments, less than the space I protect in my head for lines of books that call themselves up off a page like an echo and the particular shade of navy blue that a Malaysian mountain sky might be at 3 am. The smell of the feet of cats who have died. (Popcorn, incidentally. That’s what the feet of cats I have put down used to smell like.)

I remmber how you used to clean your bathtub for me, when I would come to stay in your studio apartment. And the light that shone down from the open window above the brick wall, above the water where I sat and read while you were at work. But I do not remember the date of our anniversary or all the movies we have seen together. For so long, I kept forgetting your middle name. But I remember the sound of your voice, the first time we spoke, going an octave lower and quieter when I told you your mean joke hurt my feelings. I remember that you were never so casually rough with me again.

At a work retreat, once, we were instructed to write thank you letters to our favorite teachers. Everyone else addressed theirs confidently, but I hid mine in a purse and spent weeks mouthing variations of her possible surname in the middle of the night, on line at the grocery store, browsing rental videos. Trying to recall. Blenquist? Blumkush? I have used up the space that held her name, but I remember that she introduced me to Anne Sexton to bookmark my Plath, and lent me a book of poems from her personal library, which I never gave back—too enthralled with this implication of equality and the last line of a verse about divorce. I recall her blond bob and the clergy husband and that she told me I could write and she was too smart for me not to believe her. But I can’t find her name.

The collective data and synopsis of life is mostly lost to me. People who fling out movie quotes and historic dates like streamers, like something flimsy and whimsical that they’ve not worked at all to retain, amaze me.

If I hadn’t cheated and read episode guides, I would have forgotten that Peggy actually had the baby. That Kinsey had an African-American girlfriend and once dated Joan, and that Pete’s father died in the airplane crash. That he remained so wholly unflapped that they asked him to attend the airline pitch meeting anyway.

I have forgotten all the major stories, and yet I could carve in bone my memory of a dozen tiny, quiet scenes:

Betty, sitting in a late-day Roman glow, her hair whipped and molded into a European chignon. Looking so modern it was as if she alone dragged in the backdrop change, inventing the ’60s. As if she’d finally shed the kids like a dead skin or a fire and emerged, victoriously golden. Reborn. How the Italian men hit on her and insulted Don when he approached, as a stranger. Which was perfect, right? Because how long had it been since they’d known each other at all? I’d etch in how he fell back in love, madly so, with Betty for two days. With this restored, empowered version of her. All cold upper class beauty, all superiority, all linguistic-flexing power. Too good for him, which is the key to everything.

”” “The things they do not tell each other, the fights they don’t finish, the slaps that aren’t delivered.”

I’d etch the repose of Roger’s tired face when he calls Joan late at night, with Jane, the regrettable wife, passed out beside him.

Peggy’s hand on Don’s after Anna dies. This single brief touch a complete swelling orchestra composed to explain the depth of their bond and its tenuousness. How vital and still wildly vulnerable this tie is in the possession of a man so accustomed to scorching any tenderness entrusted to him.

Everything encompassed in the moments Don calls Betty “birdie.” The whole rattling film projection of their courtship and marriage and children and infidelities and lies and second tries and reheated dinners. And the end that Betty pretends comes with the bang of Dick Whitman’s betrayal, and not years of whimpers. Every aching sweetness remains in “birdie,” somehow fossilized and surviving but useless as a mate-less bull.

The moments of elegant non-response and suffocated reaction. The things they do not tell each other, the fights they don’t finish, the slaps that aren’t delivered.

I would like to sit down across from Matthew Weiner and tell him he gets a few thing wrong, just to keep him humble (Don furiously chasing Megan through their apartment to represent “passion” and the embarrassing, unsustainable silliness of Fat Betty), but then declare to him that he may be the world’s greatest master of conveying so much through a nearly wordless dance.

Sometimes, I find myself watching Mad Men through a sort of fantasy lens, as if it were an underwater ballet. A cold, slow-floating drift of Asian dance and sad, silent theater.

It’s hypnotizing.

Leaves me captured and confused, weekly. Not by the chuckle-worthy, antiquated nods to bourbons at noon or unused seatbelts and ashtrays in the boardroom. Not by the adultery or sexism or racism or nepotism or homophobia.

What hooks my mind on a stringer for days is the utter subtlety of the show. The literal restraint of the characters—their buttoned-up loneliness. The moments of elegant non-response and suffocated reaction. The things they do not tell each other, the fights they don’t finish, the slaps that aren’t delivered. The communicative release they never allow themselves (even as it might be their salvation).

And the writers’ unrivaled ability to tell so many stories while saying so little.

Look at Don Draper. Look at how we understand that the desire that surged in Don for the unbaggaged Betty in Rome is the same spark that went out when Megan quit the ad game years later. Everything we needed to know was never even hinted at, let alone verbalized. It was stuccoed in Don’s disenchanted face when he walked into their Manhattan kitchen and found Megan barefoot and happily cooking.

Mad Men has inherent respect for the intelligence of its audience; no ham-handed narrator barges in to explain that Don loves women masquerading as men. Don himself doesn’t know it—even as he chases an endless line of females with an edge of masculine power. Ambitious, accomplished, smart and clever women who are driven by careers. Midge the bohemian, unrepentant painter. Rachel Menken the retail tycoon. Dr. Faye, triumphant at the top of her innovative industry and mired too deep in the logic of psychology to be beholden to emotions. (Until she isn’t, and then she is cast aside.) Teacher Suzanne, curt and unwanting—a disciplined athlete. Betty, before or away from the kids. Betty, when she is the calculating, educated, un-needing thoroughbred he first bet on. Megan when she aptly finesses and charms Heinz and thinks like Don thinks, before he can. When she is a better version of him. I have known men like this, though it took a therapist to name them. The way Weiner deftly—almost nonchalantly—illustrates Don’s penchant in a dozen separate plot points of light across a five-year sky is extraordinary.

If Weiner is the master of delicacy, his characters are obedient disciples. I could sooner breathe water than relate to their starched self-possession.

Do you remember the scene where Lane Pryce kisses Joan? And she so gently opens the door with her measured movements and perfect posture; as if the cause and effect had no correlation at all. Pivots and resumes their conversation, unacknowledging. Remember Joan—when her fiancé rapes her and she marries him anyway. When Roger disappoints her yet again and she has his baby because it is her own, more so. How she never berates him, how she simply steps right up and over everything he can’t be, and carries on.

If we were establishing a monument to Joan (not the worst idea ever), I’d demand it be two-fold. Half to honor whatever fantastical genetic engineering delivered her impossible physique. And the other half to her strength. There is an inexorable calm and mettle to Joan that makes me want to cry. I am petrified by her unflinching judgment and intoxicated by her ability to graciously deflect everything in which she does not wish to become entangled.

I am confused by her grace, so foreign to my brash, clumsy earnestness. By her ability to lead without recognition and keep afloat on the delicate crust of tactful, unceasingly appropriate professionalism I’ve smashed through always, despite every attempt to be above gossip and provocation and injustice. How she manages the office and the men who pursue her and the women who begrudge her and the husband who fails her and does it all without stooping to tears but once.

For my part, I’ve almost never felt something I did not verbalize. Every emotion has gushed through me in loud roiling riptides and tsunamis. Erupting in howling wails at lovers and tears at work. In depthless anger and longing at parents and in wild, reckless joy at kindred spirits.

And anything I have not yelled, I have written and shared and over-shared. I own absolutely none of Don’s acumen for compartmentalization, none of Joan’s elegant ability to brush aside that which might be uncomfortable to hear. No share of Roger’s almost total irreverence, Anna Draper’s easy forgiveness, Sally’s preternatural calm.

As loudly and plainly as possible, I have presented my laments and talked through them laboriously. After all of which, you can assume: When I am devastated, you will know it. My comfort zone is the cacophony of modern desperation. When we are unhappy—incidentally or profoundly—there are an unbearable number of mediums to broadcast it and no expectation to hide it.

So this is the aspect of Mad Men that scares me most: the implication that every single character is so discreetly and quietly unhappy. Am I the only one that feels almost every last character is (to varying degrees and levels of awareness) desperately, wildly, deeply, paralyzingly unhappy? So unhappy they grapple and tear at and stampede and betray and smother each other in some savage effort to salvage their own lives.

Or maybe I am projecting. It’s impossible to tell if they’re happy, because they speak of the concept so infrequently it’s as though it has never even occurred to them. But I know I have never burned down a version of my life in which I was actually happy. Dumb and selfish and impulsive and impetuous as I have been in my youth, every single time I did the wrongest thing, it was not in an effort to hurt anyone else but solely to save myself (whether I realized it then or later).

And this crew? They are the most proficient of emotional arsons.

Before our talk is done, I want to beg Matthew Weiner, impulsively, not to stop. To write and plot out a dozen more shows, or continue this one forever. To spy on into the 70’s and 80’s and 90’s so that I can remember it all. See it again from people too destroyed or tired or self-centered to belabor it. I want to know how Kennedy’s assassination is something that happens to you, around you, on a Tuesday afternoon in between your kids being brats and your extramarital affairs.

But like the show’s namesakes, I’d still be greedy for more.

I want to line up every character and demand that they tell me how to be satisfied. Or how to live your whole life without satisfaction. I want to know if what they are doing is working. What their back-up plan is.

Let’s be clear: Though I love it, Mad Men is not a show that makes me feel good. I marvel at the artistry and the foreign oddity. Understand that the numbness of three afternoon cocktails was imperative, not luxurious. I judge and begrudge and find grace, but I hardly ever end the show smiling.

When I was a little kid, I watched all the James Bond movies with my father. It seemed some tricky death was always befalling villains in an under-lit nighttime swimming pool. Sharks, inexplicably. Or a simple gunshot to the chest, the victim spinning and dropping backward into the water. Drifting downward in a watercolor blur of blood.

But the death that stuck in my mind for years was the suffocation of a pool-cover sliding across, trapping and drowning its occupants.

More or less, that’s what we’re gathering to watch every Sunday evening on AMC: a beautiful, terrible, slow-motion, desperate rendering of the things people will do to each other when they realize they are fatally trapped and voiceless.

***

This essay originally appeared in the inaugural issue of BW/DR Magazine. Click here to subscribe to BW/DR Magazine and receive that entire issue for free, as well as full access to our June issue as well.

ecantwell: brightwalldarkroom: IT’S HERE! Ladies and...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 09:45:00 -0700

ecantwell:

brightwalldarkroom:

IT’S HERE!

Ladies and Gentleman, we can now officially present to you Issue #1 of Bright Wall/Dark Room magazine. Click HERE to get the app and a mini-issue (with a Foreword and a trio of essays) entirely for free.

If you like what you read, you can then choose to subscribe for $1.99 per month, at which point you’ll immediately receive Issue #1 as well, with a new issue to follow each and every month.

A whole lot of time, hard work, late nights, and love went into all of this, and we do hope you’ll give it a look some time soon!

Thanks,

The BW/DR Team

I have been editing essays for Bright Wall/Dark Room for YEARS now, and it’s been so exciting to see it (and be a part of helping it) go from Tumblr blog to magazine. If you have an iPad or an iPhone, download the app and start exploring!

And, because we already have most of the content for Issue 2 lined up and ready to go, I can say this with authority: you will not be sorry if you subscribe. There are some pretty amazing writers (including people who are known, you know, outside of Tumblr) talking about some pretty amazing films, and it’s only going to keep getting better.

Download! Read the free preview! Subscribe! Remember what it feels like to love movies and the people who make them!

Friends, neighbors, countrymen and women, movie lovers: I implore you to download the new Bright Wall Dark Room app and subscribe to the $1.99 monthly magazine because it features gorgeous, thoughtful, time-stopping content provided by good people.

Because for all the productivity, money counting, health monitoring, news updating, weather tracking apps we keep on our phones, maybe we’ve neglected to find one that might feed our creative hearts.

And just like that, here it is!

First experiment with raw fennel tonight in a salad with...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 19:58:43 -0700

First experiment with raw fennel tonight in a salad with grapefruit and avocado. Deeply regret the past three decades I have not been eating this.

Photo

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 17:32:30 -0700

So Chris and I are going to be out of town for a bit of July and...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:05:00 -0700

So Chris and I are going to be out of town for a bit of July and we’re thinking about renting out / subletting our apartment while we’re gone. We aren’t looking to charge a ton, but it seemed like an opportunity to earn something to fuel our travels and maybe give someone we like an affordable vacation (or writing retreat?) in LA.

We thought about Airbnb and jokingly about Craiglist but ultimately decided we’d prefer to go with someone we actually know in real life or a friend from Tumblr. Ideally, we’d like to rent to a couple or individual who are responsible, kind, quiet-ish and clean — though we’re open to talking about three people or two couples if it feels like a good fit.

So, even though this feels super weird, here are the details on what we have available:

- Two bedroom apartment: About 1100 sq feet. Queen size bed in our room and a double air mattress in the office / guest room if needed.

- Full bathroom with shower / tub and lovely hand painted sink and Mexican tile mirror.

- Living room with 46 inch TV, Netflix and Hulu (no cable), Playstation and Xbox, dvd player and a decent collection of movies. Extensive library and great reading chair. Wifi.

- Dining room table for four and Full Kitchen with stove, microwave, dishwasher, fridge, espresso machine and regular coffee maker and grinder. Blender, toaster over and all dishes and cutlery.

- Our condo is in an eight unit building that opens directly outside. We are on the second floor and have a small walk up balcony.

- We live in Culver City in a diverse and quiet residential area that is very centrally located. You’ll definitely need a car, but even with LA traffic, you can get nearly everywhere you’d want to go by backroads or a short highway drive:

5 minutes to great shops, restaurants and theaters in Culver City
10 to 15 minutes to Beverly Hills, LACMA, etc.
15 minutes to great farmers market and flea market
15 minutes to Venice Beach
15 minutes to Downtown
20 minutes to LAX airport
20 minutes to Santa Monica
25 minutes to Silverlake, Echo Park or Hollywood

- There are great bike paths on the beach 15 minutes away and I’m willing to leave my bike out for you.

- Ideally we’d like to find someone who’s interested in a ten to 14 day stay.

If you’re interested in seeing more photos, talking about the rate and dates, and more hearing more details, please email us at justbeenthinkingATgmail.com .

Thanks for bearing with this weirdness — and happy summer!

The rains caught us half way out, just as we cleared the meadow....

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:33:56 -0700

The rains caught us half way out, just as we cleared the meadow. And we ran for the sequoia forest, so happy for the adventure. In the woods, the rain stirred up the composting, loamy leaves, trampled by marmots and the kindling of redwoods and the saplings, so green and sparse and naive I could cry. And it smelled so much like being five. Like we owned these woods. Like no one could ever own these woods. Like what we decompose into and what we grow out of.

The rains kept on and so did we.

#kings canyon

Today, we added a national park to our list. And if they were...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 20:57:30 -0700

Today, we added a national park to our list. And if they were the only hours of the week that are to be gentle and silent and wholly lost and lovely, then I’ll work to remember them most clearly of all.

#Sequoia!

Welcome home dinner at Haru Sushi. Also known as don’t...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 19:50:21 -0700

Welcome home dinner at Haru Sushi. Also known as don’t talk to me while I close my eyes and eat this tuna carpaccio and die a little.

Chris is telling me about Gucci Mane and ended the story with...

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:05:29 -0700

Chris is telling me about Gucci Mane and ended the story with “Anyway, I’m getting a margarita. You can drive home.”

#dream date

#silverlake

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 13:21:15 -0700

#silverlake

File under: things I miss sleeping on my legs when I travel.

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 08:56:51 -0700

File under: things I miss sleeping on my legs when I travel.

Sometimes after a long hard work week, your husband figures out...

Fri, 31 May 2013 19:41:31 -0700

Sometimes after a long hard work week, your husband figures out everything you need.

hollygonightly: wr3n: Bryant-Lake Bowl It’s a place, like a...

Thu, 30 May 2013 10:11:00 -0700

hollygonightly:

wr3n:

Bryant-Lake Bowl

It’s a place, like a song, that takes you back to a memory and a moment. Pint glasses of cold beer sweat against the lingering humidity. A menagerie of bus exhaust, cooking oil and cigarette smoke sinks into your skin. A breeze from the lake sneaks through the glowing stoplights and parked cars. Tension and apprehension bends to nervous laughter; heavy sighs settle into relief. An alliance is formed, faith is restored and a friendship takes root.

This humble bar-meets-bowling-alley is the heart of my Lyndale.

When I was young, I had this motley, ever evolving collection of tapes and cds I loved so much. So deeply and belligerently and fiercely; more than I loved most people. Albums that defined whole years. Seasons of crushes and summers of leaving. The music you listened to in an aging 1987 Chevy Caprice Classic, driving with the window down not just because the a/c didn’t work but because it made you free. Listening and looping a little town, waiting for the lap that was your exit ramp. Cds for college and for first jobs and the late night drive home proud and exhausted then ashamed and exhausted. For new apartments and new jobs and first loves, for poor choices and messy nights and bike rides. For trips alone; the music you listened to in empty hostel beds, alone on a single scratchy cotton sheet. The songs just kindling versions of themselves, calling out through tiny headphones.

And sometimes it seems all my favorite cds are gone. Stepped on by clumsy ex boyfriends or lost in moves or scratched beyond repair. The things we love best, we wear out.

Everything is instantaneous these days and The Kids don’t even know what it’s like to wait and wait for a favorite song to come on the radio so you can rush to tape and trap it. Clumsily. Missing the intro, the DJ’s voice tripping over the best last notes. They don’t know about waiting weeks or months until you can drive or be driven to a store large enough, in a town large enough to actually sell the music you need. It’s all downloads and torrents and itunes now. Everything is too accessible.

The longer I live apart from my tribe (and aren’t they almost all women?), the more they become this music. The music I miss. The songs that filled up years. That still make me leap to my feet when they come on the radio, unexpectedly. The songs I break down and buy again because losing them would be unthinkable.

A long weekend of rebellious eating calls for a redemptive start...

Tue, 28 May 2013 12:02:00 -0700

A long weekend of rebellious eating calls for a redemptive start to the week.

wanderlusting

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:13:00 -0700

A block off the fury of La Brea traffic, I paid the Thai lady to massage me. To roll out my knots like bubble wrap cracked, drive elbows between shoulder blades and dive finger tips into scalp. Soothe me, lose me, somehow leech the stress and insecurity and breeding suspicion that while I’ve been busy running the control room from my treehouse, the world has run away.

I was there for her. But all I could think of was you. Buoyant in the idea of you, which saves me. I always come back. Back to there, floating and drifting, all slow motion blue, sandy salty limbs entwined with yours. Under water. Indian Ocean. Goa. A pool in Cartagena. A cove in the Caribbean. (There must be something more than salt in the water that holds us. Weren’t we weightless? But for the occasional tip of a doubting toe down to silt or stone or sand or shell or seaweed, wasn’t it more levitation than swimming?)

Before we were married, we married ourselves, half drunk on piña coladas and the tide, 30 yards out in the shallows of the south of India. So far from the brothers and small brown girls and cows on the beach they looked tilt shifted. Playmobiled. And we were lost, Tangled Up and done for. Sanctified by the ocean. That was the real start; if we’d never had a wedding at all, I would have belonged to you still.

Back here, the world is too much with us. I dream of you. Even beside me, I miss you in the waves. Miss the heat of the sun baked into your shoulders. How your skin grows warm and tight as fruit. The tang of a drop of saltwater. Sweat or sea, falling from your hair down to my mouth. I would have every minute of you.

And I need it, very far from here.

What I know of You.

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:41:00 -0700

The thing I love about you (ok, it’s one thing. one stone in a rock yard of things) is that you have this dream and you don’t let it deflate and stagnate like I do. You don’t lift your skirt and step over it to the petty, self-inflated demands of the day, like I do. You don’t keep it precious and shelved and preserved, like I do. Your thing is smoothed out in front of you, constantly, like a map of the battles you intend to wage by night. And win by daybreak. We are here, because you are fearless. Because you consider nothing impossible. Because you show up, and work and stay the course and steady the ship and keep watch on the horizon, unsleeping. And whether dry land appears or not, you prepare for it as if it lies under the next swell.

Because one day, it will lie under the next swell.

Here is what I know: Your day is coming and when it arrives, you will have earned it. You will be the man to equal your chance. And no one will begrudge you anything. They will nod and admire and say this is how you win the battle. This is how you chart the moon and then fly there.

I love You.

"…She has only worked for this company for less than a year, she only has two weeks of vacation..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:56:59 -0700

“

…She has only worked for this company for less than a year, she only has two weeks of vacation time and six days of paid time off, of which she has already used 4 days. Further, due to her company being so small, she does not qualify for FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act.) If her employers have a change of heart, she faces even more difficult times, as her insurance is covered through her work.

And, the bills have already started to mount. To date, she has received almost $6,000 in bills out-of-pocket— and she’s only 4 weeks into treatment.

To know Andrea is know her love of life, her husband and 6 year old son Kaylon. She is devoted to her extended family as well, her faith, and the work she does as a Doctor of Audiology. She’s a people person. She loves people and they love her. She’s incredibly smart and funny and quirky and endearing and loving and giving. She has a smile to light up a room, can quote a movie to fit any given situation, can recall a memory from childhood to last week with extraordinary detail, can make you laugh until your sides hurt, and she can hug you until you’re out of breath. She has given so much to everyone who has had the pleasure of knowing her.

Now we have an opportunity to give back to her.

”

- headingtowardsimplicity:

My dear cousin was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. A total shock to us all. Even more shocking was the fact that her bills are mounting. Fast. I had no idea that out-of-pocket expenses accumulated so quickly…even for someone who has health insurance.

But seeing her sister faced with this debt, my other dear cousin has started a number of different fundraisers. One that she’s working on are these dolls she is hand-making. So sweet and they actually look like my cousin! I just think something like this is a great little reminder to pray for someone who is going through such a daily, hourly, minutely challenge.

My cousin’s faith and determination in this time is incredible. I watch her and am amazed by the way she keeps smiling. The way she encourages people around her. She told us that people in the chemo clinic are annoyed by her joking manner. That’s Andrea - beautiful and bright, through and through.

Just thought I would share in case anyone is interested in helping out.

http://www.zibbet.com/handicraftsforhope

.

Both of my cousins make me cry.

Andrea who is waging her own war against breast cancer, for her determination and honesty and spirit — her buoyancy and commitment to rage and rage and somehow, unbelievably, keep her resilience and faith and joy despite it all.

And her sister Megan for how she loves Andrea with this violence that crushes you, that makes you think What would you do if it was your beloved sister who had her life kicked out from under her by this disease? A thought you almost can’t bear.

Megan is making the above dolls as a fundraiser for Andrea’s overwhelming medical bills and related expenses. Maybe if breast cancer is a cause close to your heart — or the heart of someone you know and love — you might consider buying one of her adorable dolls on Etsy in solidarity for Andrea’s fight, in memory of those who didn’t win and honor of those who did.

Thanks for thinking about it. We’ll be offering our financial support too, but this felt like a time to open up the opportunity to my tribe.

Love,

Erica

BBQ dinner with my favorite five. During which the three year...

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:51:24 -0700

BBQ dinner with my favorite five. During which the three year old told us that if anyone touched her brother in the bathroom, he would poop at their face. And the six year old informed me that if you hold on to your anger, your anger will hold on to you. A lot of wisdom happening tonight.

#BestKids

I don’t remember the last time I watched this.

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:33:13 -0700

I don’t remember the last time I watched this.