Katrina Kenison's Blog, page 11

Celebrating Valentine’s Day (stories, music, & two irresistible cookie recipes)

“And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”   ~ Paul McCartney

Hearts:

When my sons were young, we always made Valentines.  It was a joy for me to join my boys at our old Formica table in the playroom and, for a few February afternoons each year, devote ourselves to frilly matters of the heart.

Of course, we went all out. Our supplies were bountiful: stacks of construction paper, doilies, paper hearts, pink ribbons, lace, glue sticks and lots of sparkly stuff.  And the lavish creations borne of our efforts pleased us greatly.  Valentine’s Day was easy to celebrate: cozy, hands-on, messy fun.  Love made visible.

I still have our old box of Valentine paraphernalia in the basement, though it’s been over a decade since the three of us made cards together and the glue sticks have no doubt turned rock-hard.  I considered the box briefly the other day: should I carry it all upstairs?  Sit down by myself and cut up a few red doilies for old times’ sake?  No, I realized, that would just feel weird.

Instead, I satisfied my hands-on urge by making some grown-up Valentines for the  people I carry closest to my heart.  Baking these cookies turned out to be as pleasurably messy as the arts and crafts productions of old – and even more gratifying:  the results were edible.

So, a new tradition is born, I think,  thanks to two recipes that are most definitely keepers. (Scroll down for my recipes for Chocolate-Dipped Espresso Hearts and Dark Chocolate Espresso Hearts.)

A Valentine’s Day story:

My husband and I mark Valentine’s Day as the anniversary of our falling in love nearly thirty years ago, over the course of a long-planned weekend alone at my parents’ house on the coast of Maine.  We’d been dating on and off for a couple of years by then, though not seriously or, on his part, exclusively. I was living in New York City and he was in Cambridge.  He was ten years older, we were different in every way (as he liked to remind me) and, although I was crazy about him, our prospects for long-term togetherness seemed discouraging at best.

As we drove north from Logan, Steve took his eyes from the road for a moment, glanced my way, handed me a small tin of chocolates and said something like, “I’ve been thinking about you this week. And I finally just said to myself, ‘this girl is a peach.’”

It was the closest he’d come to acknowledging any serious feelings for me; perhaps it was even a declaration of sorts from this guy who’d been insisting since we met that although he liked me well enough, I just wasn’t his type.  I was a peach?   That seemed to me a positive sign: don’t give up all hope, but proceed with caution.

We arrived at my parent’s vacation house after dark, to discover that we’d been booby trapped. My mom and her friend had spend the previous weekend at the house,  “decorating” on our behalf.

There were hearts and flowers on every surface.  Cupids taped to the windows.  Candles strategically placed.  A book of love poetry open on the table, which was set for two with red cloth napkins and champagne glasses and a scattering of heart confetti.  There were new sheets on the bed, hearts balloons dangling from the light fixtures, Brie and champagne in the fridge.

I was mortified.

Having guarded my own smitten heart so carefully, lest it be broken by this man who seemed certain we weren’t meant to last, I’d  just had my cover totally blown – by my own mother.  Not funny.

Steve laughed.

Shaking, heart pounding in my chest, I went through the house without even taking off my coat, gathering up all the offending knick-knacks and cupids, my face redder than any Valentine.  By the time I got back to the kitchen, Steve had opened the champagne and lit the candles.  I don’t remember exactly what he said then, but the gist of it was:  “Well, I guess we could fight this, or we could just give in.”

Three months later, he asked me to marry him.   (I still have the little heart-shaped candy tin he gave me all those years ago; it’s near the washing machine, full of extra shirt buttons.)

Music:

What would Valentine’s Day be without a love song?  This is the one I’ve been playing all week (although I still can’t seem to listen to it without tears in my eyes).

“You Don’t Need to Love Me,”  (click on the title to listen) is from the forthcoming Broadway Musical If/Then, which just happens to be rehearsing in the same building where Henry’s been working on Aladdin.  (For more about the show, which is about middle age, and love and life, and roads not taken, click here.)

 Flowers:

(My heart-felt thanks to Amy VanEchaute for introducing me to Flower Story and for sending me this lovely virtual Valentines Day bouquet of my  favorite flowers.)

Wishing you and yours a Happy Valentine’s Day. Tell me, how are you making love visible today?

 Two very special cookie recipes:

Dark Chocolate Espresso Hearts 

(adapted from a recipe at Easybaked.com )

INGREDIENTS: (makes 36 medium cookies)

2 sticks (1 cup) butter, softened
1 1/2cups sugar
2 eggs
3 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 teaspoons instant espresso powder
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

DIRECTIONS:


Cream together butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl.
Mix in eggs and then cocoa.
Place vanilla and espresso powder together in a small cup until coffee dissolves. Add this mixture to the batter and mix until completely incorporated.
Gradually add dry ingredients and mix until smooth (use clean hands at the end, to knead into a soft ball of dough)
Wrap in plastic and chill for at least one hour.
Allow cookie dough to soften a little at room temperature
Preheat oven to 350F degrees.
Roll out cookie dough on floured counter.
Cut into hearts and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet.
Bake for 8 to 11 minutes until the edges are firm.
Gently slide parchment paper off of cookie sheet and onto a flat surface. Cool completely before removing cookies from paper.You can serve the hearts plain, or with a little cocoa powder sprinkled on top, or you can ice them. I embellished mine with a glaze made of 1 C. confectioners sugar, 2 tsp. milk, 2 tsp. strong cold coffee, mixed well. Scoop the icing into a plastic bag, snip a corner, and decorate cooled cookies as desired.

Chocolate Dipped Espresso Hearts

(adapted from FineCooking.com)

FOR THE COOKIES

preheat oven to 300F degrees.

8 oz. cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1/2 C. granulated sugar

1/2 tsp. salt

2 1/4 cups flour (measure carefully; or weigh to get exactly 10 oz. of flour)

3 Tablespoons finely ground espresso coffee beans

Combine butter, sugar, and salt in bowl of electric mixer.  Mix on low speed until butter is combined with sugar but not completely smooth (1 – 2 min.)  Add the flour and ground espresso and mix on low till dough comes together, about 3 min.  Warning: this is a crumbly, dry dough.  You will have to gather it into a ball in your hands, and press it together.  On lightly floured surface, roll dough to 1/4″ thick. Cut hearts as close together as possible, arrange cookies on two parchment lined baking sheets, refrigerate for 20 minutes.  Bake cookies until golden on the bottom and edges and pale to golden on top — in my oven, this took about 40 minutes.

FOR GLAZE:  Melt 3 oz. dark bittersweet chocolate with 1 tsp shortening in a small bowl over boiling water, stirring — don’t let it get hot.  Set a sheet of parchment paper on your work surface.  Dip edge of each cooled cookie in warm chocolate and cool on parchment till chocolate is “set,” about two hours.  Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Celebrating Valentine’s Day (stories, music, & two irresistible cookie recipes) appeared first on Katrina Kenison.

Tender

As I type these words, the world beyond my window is blanketed by snow.  There is silence in the house, save for the hum of the refrigerator, the whisper of warm air rising from the grates in the floor.  I’ve laid in groceries, mopped the salt and grit from the entryway, put tulips in a vase on the table.  The shoveling and snow-clearing can wait. There is no place to go, nothing to do but chop and roast some vegetables later for dinner.  Time slows. Edges soften. I feel a weight in my heart slowly begin to lift, my breath settle back into a deeper rhythm, my own sense of myself returning.

For a week I’ve been struggling with some old, familiar demons.  The fear of not being enough.  The need to protect my tenderest, most vulnerable feelings from the harsh light of day.  Self-doubt.  Regret for things said and unsaid in a relationship I cherish.  The wish that I could feel less, hurt less, and slough off more.   A piercing disappointment that try as I might to shape my life, there is and will always be so much that’s beyond my control or understanding.  The realization that I’m not quite as good at non-attachment as I like to think I am.

“The root of all suffering,” the Buddhists say, “is the desire for things to be different than they are.”

So simple.  So true.  But knowing it is so doesn’t make the wanting and the wishing go away.  And an intellectual understanding of melancholy does little to ease the sadness that is, I suspect, simply part of being alive, an essential ingredient of our muddling, hopeful humanness.

Yet, if growing older is teaching me anything – anything that makes me feel a bit more at home in my  emotionally porous and decidedly solitary soul – it’s that I can survive my own feelings.  Instead of numbing them, I can allow them the full measure of their power — dark and chaotic as that power sometimes is.  Instead of turning tail and running in the direction of busyness or distraction, I can remind myself to be still, uncomfortable as stillness may be.  Instead of masking sadness with anger and pretending I’m mad, I can let tears fall and acknowledge that I hurt.  Instead of pasting on a stiff upper lip and insisting that I’m fine, I can gather up my courage, invite a trusted friend into my murky corner and concede that, for the moment anyway, I’m not fine at all.

And slowly, the emotional weather changes.  I know better, finally, than to think I can make myself stop feeling a certain way, any more than I can wish the snow to stop or the sun to shine.  But eventually the sky does clear.  Always. Sadness gives way to equanimity.  Hopelessness is nudged aside by quiet, unexpected joy.  Gratitude turns grief a different color.  Feelings go away because others come along.  The trick, perhaps, is simply to keep the flow going.  To watch and feel and wait and trust.  To judge myself less harshly and to welcome all my feelings as reminders that I’m still alive — alive and fully engaged in the endlessly challenging task of being human.  Which is to say:  I’m doing the best I can, and giving myself permission, again and again and again, to love and receive love in return.

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Glitter and Glue

I was sitting at my kitchen table answering email last Monday when a note from Kelly Corrigan popped into my inbox.  I don’t know Kelly personally, but somewhere along the way I must have signed up to be on her mailing list.

The note was casual, hastily typed, without so much as a capital letter – the kind of quickie email I’d expect to get from a close friend:

22 years ago i started writing a book about a family i lived with in australia and how that radically upended many opinions i held of my mother. 

Below, there was a link to a reading Kelly had done the week before, in a friend’s living room in California — an essay that serves (quite brilliantly) as a trailer to her new book, Glitter and Glue.

And so it happened that I was one of the first 100 or so people last Monday to click over to YouTube and watch Kelly talk about how her goal coming out of college was to become Interesting, with a capital “I.”

Convinced that “things happen when you leave the house,” Kelly sets off with her college roommate to travel around the world.  But it’s not long before she runs out of money, her dream of being a hippie explorer derailed by lack of funds by the time she hits Australia.  Instead of trekking in Tasmania, she winds up caring for two newly motherless children in a suburb north of Sydney.

It’s a coming-of-age story with pictures, condensed into five minutes, and it makes for great video. I was still wiping away tears as I shared the link on Facebook.  And then, without really thinking about it, I sent Kelly an email in return.  “Love the video,” I wrote. “And we share some territory.”

A reply flew back within a minute: “Of course I know you!”  Two days later, two books arrived from her publisher.  One for me to read and keep, and another for me to give away to one of you.

And here’s the amazing thing.  As I sat down on my sofa and began to read Glitter and Glue, it actually did feel as if I were settling in for a good long talk with my best friend.

Such is the magic of Kelly Corrigan.  The spell she casts – an irresistible  mix of vulnerability, heart, humor, bad-girl charm, racy language, and hard-won wisdom – draws you in close and holds you tight.  Her words weave an invisible inner circle, and there’s no place you’d rather be than right at the center of it with her, sharing a second cup of coffee, leaning in close so you won’t miss a word, getting down to the heart of the stuff that really matters.

So, I should warn you now: You will not read the first pages of Glitter and Glue and then set it down to go off and tend to other things.  That would be like cutting off your best friend while she’s in the middle of telling you the most compelling story any of us have to share:  the story of how we become who we are.

Glitter and Glue is on one level a self-deprecating, poignant tale of an impulsive, self-absorbed young woman who drinks too much, smokes too much, lies a little, kisses a gazillion boys, and fancies herself a carefree rebel – only to find herself broke, far from home, and forced to come face to face with herself and the hard truths of real life.

“This is not what I left home for,” Kelly whines, feeling sorry for herself on her first day on the job, “I’m a nanny, a fucking nanny.”

But as she soon discovers, she is also something more:  she is her mother’s daughter.  Half-way around the world from the home she couldn’t wait to escape, she has no choice but to step up to the plate in this somber household still reeling from tragedy.  There is no hope whatsoever of filling the shoes of the lovely young woman who died too soon.  But as she packs lunches and braids hair and dispenses hugs and kisses away tears, Kelly begins to realize she does know what to do.  And that she’s not all alone after all.

On the contrary.  She hears her own mother’s voice everywhere – nudging and advising, cautioning and directing, guiding her through this unknown landscape called raising children — territory  that proves to be as challenging and rich and rewarding as any trek through a foreign land.

Day by day, the brash young woman who defines herself with words like “Intrepid,” is transformed by the humble work of showing up and doing what needs to be done for a family numb with grief.  Her heart opens and softens. She falls in love with exuberant five-year-old Martin and his more reserved and resistant big sister Millie and, in different way, with the reclusive, wounded half-brother who lives alone in the garage.  She wonders about the pretty young woman in the photographs who didn’t live to see her children grow up.  It occurs to her she’s growing “less smitten with world travelers and their ripping yarns, and more awed by people who have thrown themselves into the one gig that really matters: parenthood.”

And she finds herself thinking of her own mother in a whole new light.

For the first time, it dawns on Kelly that things happen inside the house, too — hard things that require more strength and resilience and courage than bungee jumping off bridges or deep sea diving in caves.

“Maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time,” Kelly muses,  “wasn’t because she was doing so much, but because she was feeling so much.”

And this is what Glitter and Glue is really about.  It’s about the birth of empathy.  It’s about what it means to have a mother and what it means to be one and how it feels to lose one.  It’s about the difference between skimming along like a tourist on the surface of your own life and digging in deep.  It’s about grief and loss and growing up, and the realization that our main job here on earth isn’t to change or turn away from the people we love but to learn to do a better job of seeing them as they are and loving them as best we can for as long as they are here. It’s about the mysterious, ineffable bond between mothers and daughters and how that bond is transformed by time and experience and compassion.

“If you had asked me, after I graduated from college, whose voice I would hear in my head for the rest of my life,” Kelly writes in the prologue, “I’d have said some combination of my dad’s and my roommate Tracy’s and Jackson Browne’s.  I would have continued with ten or twenty or two hundred others before I got to my mom.”

Yet it is Mary Corrigan, the quiet hero of 168 Wooded Lane, with her inviolable rules and her proud stoicism and her serious approach to the serious work of motherhood, whose no-nonsense voice harmonizes with her daughter’s more exuberant one on every page of this funny, tender, and ultimately very moving book.

“Your father’s the glitter and I’m the glue,” Kelly’s mom told her when she was in high school, by way of explaining the family dynamic.  He was the star of the show; she, resigned to forever remain his less compelling, less interesting understudy.

Fortunately for us, Kelly Corrigan draws her complex, demanding, passionately devoted mother out to join her on center stage in Glitter and Glue.  And then she illuminates her for all time in the golden glow of love.  In the process, she reminds us — as if we could ever really forget — that the great adventure isn’t the one we have to cross an ocean to find.  It’s the one we’re living right here, right now, in the midst of the people who know us best and love us anyway.

I have one copy of Glitter and Glue to give away!

To enter to win, you must be subscribed to my blog.  Then, leave a comment below.  I’d love to know, when you hear your own mother’s voice in your head, what is she saying? Of course, you can also just say, “Count me in!”

I’ll draw one winner at random after entries close at midnight on Tuesday Feb. 18.

Don’t want to wait?  You can order Kelly’s book now by clicking here. (I put the small commission I receive from this affiliate link toward buying more books to share here.)

The post Glitter and Glue appeared first on Katrina Kenison.

How to savor (another) freezing February morning

“If your daily life seems of no account, don’t blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its treasures.”  ~ Rilke 

O

pen your eyes in darkness.

Listen to the heat kick on.

Snuggle more deeply into flannel sheets.

Say a prayer of thanks for the roof over your head, your warm house, the hot shower that awaits.

Turn your gaze toward the feathery frost on the window pane.

Allow moonlight to wash away sleep.

Watch stars wink out, the sky lighten by degrees, a scrim of rose etch itself across the mountain.

Rise with the sun.

C

heck the weather: – 8 on your New Hampshire hilltop, 7 for the son working in New York City, a balmy 22 for the one in school in Atlanta,   -15 for your husband visiting his sister in Minnesota.

Realize: everyone in your family is waking up in a cold place.

Send each one a “Brrr-good-morning-I-love-you” text signed with x’s and o’s.

Brew your Peet’s coffee with two extra scoops, the way you like it.

Drink slowly from the small blue mug that fits your hand just right, while the silent kitchen floods with sunlight.

E

at your oatmeal with everything on it: sea salt, brown sugar, raisins, walnuts, a sliced pear, a handful of half-thawed blueberries you picked last August, yogurt from the farm on the other side of the mountain.

Read from the book of letters that arrived in the mail yesterday, a gift from your friend Margaret, who knows the workings of your heart. Allow the words, written over sixty winters ago between two other dear friends, both long dead now, to wend their way into your own here and now, startling your imagination to life:

“Yes, there is something to be said for living  in this climate.  Don’t you notice a special kind of warmth between the folks who stick it out? Who wants to go pick oranges and grapefruit, we ask? A winter sunset is worth all the gold in the Indies. And shoveling tons of snow is fine exercise, just as good as water skiing!”

W

ash your bowl, spoon, mug.  Turn up the music till it fills the rafters. Notice how gratitude gives rise to joy.

Call your sister-in-law in Minneapolis, just home from the hospital with a new hip.  Hear the relief in her voice: soon she’ll walk again, and step out into her  backyard and fill her bird feeder with seeds.  Dash outside with a scoop of sunflower seeds for your own hungry chickadees.  Thank your hips for making this possible.

Dress for the weather: wool socks, long underwear, polar fleece pants, down coat, hat, the scarf Margaret sent you made from patched-together old sweaters, the Christmas mittens from your sister-in-law, also stitched from old sweaters.

S

mile: you are an anti-fashion statement swathed in polar fleece and sweater scraps, reclaimed pieces of other lives, other mornings, other peoples old warm clothes.

Lace up your boots, zip your L.L. Bean coat, buckle on your snowshoes.  Go.

E

nter the cathedral of silence. Carve a fresh trail through the woods.  Feel your heart pound in your chest, your own two strong legs carrying you forward, the whoosh of powder in your wake.  Stop and take in everything: the sounds of ice cracking, water running, a drift of sparkling powder cascading from a bough, the creak of tall pine, a cardinal’s sharp call, your own breath rising in plumes around your face.

Study the tracks at your feet and know: you aren’t alone here.  Widen your circle of compassion to embrace these silent winter neighbors:  turkey, deer, hare, coyote, bobcat, shrew.

Lie down in a place no one as been before.  Watch the clouds drift by.

M

ove your arms, your legs. Remember what it felt like to be a child in the snow, making your own private magic, at one with the world.

“May you awaken to the mystery of being here.

May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

May you respond to the call of your gift and find the courage to follow its path.

May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”

~ John O’Donohue

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A Religion of One’s Own

The first thing I did when I found out I was pregnant, twenty-five years ago this winter, was get in my car and drive to Harvard Square to buy a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.  I am a book person, a life-long reader.  And so my first response to anything new or challenging in my life has always been the same: go find a book on the subject.

For a few years, as I became a mother to first one son and then another, I read my way through an entire shelf of parenting titles.  I read books about every age and every stage, about attachment and achievement, discipline and diet.

But the book that finally set me on my own path, both as a mother and as a person, wasn’t a parenting book at all.  It was a book called The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life by a writer named Thomas Moore.

Most of us have a handful of books we consider seminal, books that make such profound, deep, and lasting impressions that we remember, even years later, exactly where we were and how we felt as the words landed in our hearts.

I was in a lawn chair at my parents’ house in Florida, savoring quiet. Our boys, about seven and four at the time, were off somewhere with their dad. So I found myself in that relaxed, open, on-vacation state of mind that’s particularly receptive to new ideas.

And, although I probably didn’t know it then, I was very much in need of a new idea.  With each passing year, as our sons grew out of infancy, through toddlerhood and into early childhood, it seemed our life was moving faster.  The stresses of working and parenting and marriage intensified.  More and more, I felt as if my old idea wasn’t working all that well.

The idea I’d begun with, the one that had led me to read all those books in the first place, was that if I worked really hard at being a mom, and did everything right, and signed our kids up for enough enriching activities, and somehow achieved a perfect balance between my work life and our family life, our two sons would grow up to have the successful, well-adjusted, happy, high-achieving lives we envisioned for them.

We were in the thick of all that — juggling school schedules,  doctors’ appointments, playdates, lessons, and work and birthday parties.  The calendar was full. Everyone was busy.  I was managing.  We were fine. We were also exhausted most of the time.

So this title, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life, captivated me.  “Re-Enchantment” sounded lovely.  It was exactly what I wanted.

In the book’s opening pages, Tom suggests that to “re-enchant” our ordinary, mundane adult lives, we simply need to reconnect with the magical, “enchanted” world most of us knew as children.

As we grow up, he says, we get sophisticated out of enchantment.   We get too busy, too practical, and too smart about the things that cause children to wonder.  It made sense to me.

When I thought of my own leisurely, uneventful childhood in a small New Hampshire town in the early 1960s, the memories were still fresh.  I thought of a musty basement nook under our house, where I once placed a Concord grape on a cobwebbed windowsill and watched, day by day, until it turned into a raisin.  Wonder!  I remembered the scary excitement of sleeping outside in a tent in the back yard, the thrill of skinny-dipping in the middle of the night with my best friend.  I remembered reading Gone With the Wind and crying my way through the last pages of the book — and how, every day for a week, until I finally had to return the book to the library, I picked it up and re-read the ending again, weeping every single time, convinced that Margaret Mitchell’s words held a secret power over me.

There were so many long, empty summer days spent reading books, which always meant entering a world of enchantment.  There were aimless bike rides to the sandpit and, once there, countless secret games and rituals and stories to share with my friends.  There were orange popsicles that cost a dime for the long ride home.

I remembered spending a hot summer afternoon sitting outside a neighbor’s chicken coop watching a sick chicken die.  The mystery of life and death! I remembered believing in ghosts and fairies and haunted places out in the woods. I even recalled a day when I had so little to do that I sat down in the yard and told myself I wouldn’t get up again till I’d found a four-leaf clover.  I stared into the grass for hours, until I’d found three, proof enough for me that the world was a magical place.

No, it wouldn’t be too hard for me to conjure that childlike sense of wonder.

But I also wondered if my own sons, perhaps someday reading this same book as adults themselves, would have any idea what Moore was talking about.  It seemed possible they wouldn’t have a clue.  And that unless we made some changes in the way we were living, our children might grow up with very little experience of either boredom or enchantment.   Sitting in my mom’s lawn chair that day, reading this quietly revolutionary book, I got a glimpse of a different path.  It’s not an overstatement to say it changed my life.

Of course, as Tom often points out, change begins in silence, in the private realm of the imagination.  And suddenly I had a new vision — of a different kind of pace for our family and a different approach to my own task as a parent.  I hadn’t ever thought of motherhood as a spiritual practice before, but now I saw that for me, anyway, it could be.  A practice that would be more about deepening my own faith than following the experts’ advice, more about being than about doing.

It occurred to me that my real challenge as a mother wasn’t just to meet my children’s physical needs, but to nurture their inner lives as well.  And that to do that, I’d need to carve out time to simply let my children be children.  Instead of finding things to do and creating experiences for them to have, I could create empty spaces in our days.  Instead of trying to hustle us all toward some kind of future happiness, I could trust that, left a bit more to their own devices, our sons would each bloom in their own ways and in their own time.

And instead of striving to do more and to be better, I would practice simply relaxing down into the here and now, and remind myself that the enchanted world of childhood is a place not to be rushed through but rather a garden of innocence to be appreciated and protected for as long as possible.

The Re-enchantment of our family life, the care of our souls, began right there, right then, with a dawning awareness that my real work wasn’t all about my children, but about me, too.  Because, in order to care for my children’s souls, I also had to care for my own.

I didn’t know Tom Moore when I began to read his work.  But I’m quite certain that, were it not for his writing, I wouldn’t have become a writer myself.  Approaching my own ordinary life as a practice worthy of mindfulness and attention changed the way I did almost everything.

Letting go of my need to be right, of my desire to understand and control, meant cultivating a deeper faith in the rightness of things as they were.  It meant trusting my children’s destinies to unfold according to a plan greater than my own.  It meant resting more and accomplishing less, tuning in to intuition, making beauty a priority, creating rituals around everyday activities like meal time and bed time and story time.  It meant seeing each moment of the day as an opportunity for reverence and gratitude.

Bringing that kind of attention to my everyday tasks, I began to see our family, our life together, in a new light.  And the more awareness I brought to this life, the more deeply meaningful and precious it became.  And so I found not only a spiritual path, but also my subject as a writer.  The gift of an ordinary day.

This, of course, is territory that Tom and I share as fellow travelers — I owe him a debt of gratitude for first pointing the way.  And, though our work is very different in both genre and subject, it does seem that we were neighbors in spirit well before we became friends and neighbors in the world, living for the last few years just a mile from each other.  And yet, how could I have imagined, all those years ago, that the day would come when my spiritual and literary mentor would knock casually on my back door to drop off a galley of his latest book?

(I absolutely attribute this lovely bit of serendipity to the enchantment of everyday life.)

Reading A Religion of One’s Own over the last week or so, I’ve been moved and inspired, as always, by my friend’s deep compassion for our ordinary, everyday struggles to live well, to love well, to care for our planet and ourselves and one another.  A Religion of One’s Own is very much both an expansion and a refinement of the ideas that first inspired me to craft a more contemplative, intimate, soulful life as a young mother.  Reading it, I found myself underlining and scribbling notes in the margin of every page – there is so much to think about here, so much to take in and use and share.

No matter what your faith or religious affiliation, A Religion of One’s Own is an invitation to go both deeper and wider in your learning and in your faith,  a call to keep thinking, seeking, wondering, and celebrating.  I think of this book as a handbook for the spirit.  A reminder that life is both more joyful, and more meaningful, when we allow ourselves time and space to wake up to its magnificence and mystery.  And in that way, this new book, too, is about re-enchantment.  For a true, useful religion is grounded in the details of our ordinary lives  – and, at the same time, it invites us, again and again, to transcend them.  The holy and the ordinary work together. The result, always, is grace.

I know Tom would never consider himself a self-help author.  And yet I’m always grateful for his advice.  “Follow your dreams,” he suggests.  “Speak from your heart, and make a life that is more soulful than practical.”  These strike me as good words to live by.

Leave a comment to enter to win two books

It’s my pleasure to offer a copy of A Religion of One’s Own, signed and personalized by Tom, along with a signed copy of the new paperback edition of Magical Journey.  (Given how often I quote Tom, it seems only fitting to send these books off as a pair.)

To enter to win, simply leave a comment below.  I’d love to know how or where the sacred and the ordinary intersect in your life.  Or, you can simply say “count me in.”

A winner will be chosen after entries close at midnight on February 7.  Good luck to all!

Of course, if you’d like to order Tom’s book right now, you can do that, too.  Just click here.

Many thanks to you all for your wonderful song suggestions — I’ve been listening to music all week.  (Will compile the big list of all your recommendations soon!)

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Pub date! (Music, photos & books to win)

Today is the official paperback release of Magical Journey.

Paperback publications of quiet, mid-list memoirs don’t generally get reviews or ad budgets or press releases or parties.

But I’m pretty excited about today anyway. The fact Magical Journey even made it into a paperback edition is incredibly gratifying.  It means this close-to-my-heart book will find its way to many more readers in the months to come.  (Thanks to some energetic advance footwork by the terrific Magical Journey Team, this is already happening!)  Reason enough to celebrate, right?

So, this morning I thought, Why not mark pub date with an intimate on-line party right here, in the space where we meet each week to converse, connect, and share stories of our lives?

First, some music. . .

Exactly two years ago this week, I was holed up in my mom’s guest room, writing five or six hours a day.  To stay sane, I took long walks.  One afternoon, while listening to a Pandora station through my earbuds, I found myself stopped in my tracks on the sidewalk, tears streaming down my cheeks.

I hadn’t heard Stevie Nicks singing “Landslide” since I was a teenager – when I’d loved the song without having a clue what it was really about.

The version coming through the ether was different, recorded live just six years ago.  Stevie’s voice is older, scratchier, better. It’s a little raw, and full of feeling. And all at once, I knew:

The questions in the song were the very questions I was struggling with in my life and in the pages of my book.

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love? 

Can the child within my heart rise above?

And can I sail through the changing ocean tides 

Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Oh oh I don’t know, oh I don’t know. . . 

The bittersweet ache of children growing up, the truth of change, the idea that growing older can also mean growing stronger – these were my themes.   And they were captured perfectly in these lyrics.

Well, I’ve been afraid of changing

 ’Cause I’ve built my life around you

  But time makes you bolder

  Children get older

  I’m getting older too

  Yes, I’m getting older too.

I must have listened to “Landslide” a hundred more times over the last two years.  I came to think of it as my secret “Magical Journey” anthem.  And it inspired me to go in search of more songs that spoke to all I was feeling, songs about growth and change and living in the moment.

The result?  A Magical Journey playlist.   These are the songs that kept me writing and walking and thinking and feeling.  I hope they resonate with you on your journey, too.

To access the Magical Journey Playlist, go to the homepage, scroll all the way down, and you’ll see the Grooveshark widget near the bottom of the sidebar, on the left.  Click and listen.  Let me know what you think. (And tell me what songs I’m missing!)

Photos from the journey. . .

I’m not really a photographer.  But I love to capture the small, revelatory details that give life its texture and color. Although I didn’t deliberately set out to take pictures of my Magical Journey year, I did end up with a collection of  photos that evoke or capture some of the moments I wrote about.  Just for fun, I’ve gathered up a few of them here to share with you. (My husband took the photo above early on a rainy morning, moments before I stood on this stool in a pond near our house, where he shot the picture for the book jacket — yes, a family project.)

“Deep beneath the frozen earth, new life waits, patiently biding time until the blessing of sun and benediction of rain call it forth.  Sitting here alone in my slowly brightening kitchen, I wonder if my early morning restlessness could be preparing me for an awakening of my own.”

 ”And meanwhile, unnoticed and and unremarked on, there was the exquisite, empty sky, the golden trees, the pure light of the sun at dusk, the sharp transparent air.”

“Growth begins in silence, evolution with a heartbeat,  journeys from where we are: standing in one place and daring to imagine a new horizon.”

“Do I have the courage to be ‘home alone’ with myself, to enter into the deeper rhythm of my own being? The question leads me back, again and again, to my yoga mat.”

“There is just space for two pairs of metal bunk beds, a single twin (already taken) in the middle, a sink, a wastebasket, and three small dressers to be shared for a month with four other women.” 

“In a way, teacher training is like kindergarten.  We begin the day singing.  We have circle time and sharing time. Our teachers tell us stories.”

“I am home, but the journey will clearly be ongoing; a journey that turns out to be more about accepting the person I am now than striving to become someone else.”  

“Our sons may be grown and gone, but Gracie, loyal companion of their boyhoods, is still here. Still here and, though decades older than all of us in dog years, still exuberantly herself, reminding us that to live well is to honor both the beauty of routine and the enchantment of the moment that is right now.”  

“Which books have gone mute? Which ones are speaking up, demanding to be returned to the shelves?”

“On the sill: a couple of crystals, a black heart-shaped rock picked up on a walk many years ago, a glass egg that catches the sunlight. . . .”  

“Writing has helped me figure out what I know for sure and, more important, it has given me a way to grapple with those questions that seem to have no answers.”

“What would I have thought on the eve of my graduation, if someone could have flashed me forward thirty years to this mild spring midnight, this room full of exuberant fifty-plus-year-old women dropping their butts to the party anthem of our era?”

           ”And so we show up where we can and we give what we do have to offer: ourselves.”

“Perhaps our paths crossed randomly, but somehow I think not, choosing to believe instead that there is invisible magic at work in all our lives, magic that sets us down on the routes we’re meant to walk, magic that leads us to one another. . .”

“Move with the current, not against it.  Resist nothing. Let life carry you.”

enter to win a signed paperback copy of  Magical Journey

My heartfelt thanks to all of you who visit here week after week, read my writing, and write to me in return.   I love your “voices” and am always honored to hear your stories.  Today it’s my pleasure to offer two signed copies of the new paperback of Magical Journey.  

To enter to win a book,  leave a comment below. Tell me what song is on re-play in your car or inspiring you in your own life these days.  Or, just say hello and “count me in.”  Winners will be chosen at random after entries close at midnight on January 29. Good luck to all!

Want to order the paperback today?  Click here. 

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Dear Older (Love, Old)

This is the first in a series of letters between me and my friend, Margaret Roach, on the challenges (and joys!) of aging. I’m Old (just 55) and she’s Older (facing 60 this year). Who knows where it’s going, but since the subject keeps coming up, and we’re both writers…well, you get the idea. Listen in.

Dear Old(er),

Yesterday afternoon, I spritzed on a bit of Sonata, and then I drove downtown to the lawyer’s office and signed my last will and testament.

I can tell you, seeing those words next to my own name at the top of the page was pretty strange – about as stark a reminder as I’ve had that, yes, the day will come when I won’t be here.

It’s funny how I can get so caught up in the minutiae of  my everyday life – the emails that need answers, the dishes in the sink, the bills on the desk, my annoyance at someone I can’t change or at something beyond my control – that I lose sight of the big things.

Such as the fact that although time and space are infinite, I am not.  No matter how I spend it, my own time will run out. There aren’t too many absolute truths in life, but this is one: nothing lasts, not even me.

Which is why I got up this morning and helped myself to another generous spray of Sonata, the nicest perfume I’ve ever owned (handcrafted at a tiny perfumery in Maine using all natural ingredients) and the only one I’ve ever loved.

The perfume was a Christmas gift from my dad.  Five years ago.  As you can see from the photo, the bottle is still full.  Yup. In five years, I’ve allowed myself to use my favorite perfume exactly twice.  Both occasions were formal weddings, so I felt they justified a bit of extravagance:  dressy necklace, expensive perfume.

My husband is all about “getting things done” and I’m pretty good at tackling essential stuff myself.  But the two of us have had “get a will” on our marital to-do list for years, one of those multi-step tasks that neither of us ever quite got a grip on.

Finally (inspired by you, my dear, after that scolding you gave me over dinner the last time I came to visit), I said, “Ok, I’ll do it.”

I found a lawyer in town, we filled out a questionnaire, added up the assets, had a meeting, considered who we’d like to appoint to say “pull the plug” if we’re both near death or incapacitated, read various drafts of all the bits and pieces, and signed pages of documents.

Getting this project wrapped up was a good way to begin the new year. There’s some relief in knowing if we go down in a plane crash we won’t leave a mess behind. And it pleases me to think we’ll have something to pass on to our boys. But the whole process has started me thinking.

In a funny way, confronting the inescapable truth of my own future death makes me see how silly and pointless it is hold on to anything.  The old cliché is true: you can’t take it with you.

So why, I wonder, would I keep a bottle of perfume I love on my dresser for half a decade, rather than allow myself the simple pleasure of wearing it?

(I’m remembering my grandmother here, who kept her lampshades wrapped in the plastic they arrived in, and her couch swathed in plastic, too, and her candles wrapped and unused in their candlesticks  – where they remained, never lit, until the day she had to leave her house and most of her possessions and move into a nursing home.)

Well, I’ve just had a little tour of my own house, taking stock.

And if I don’t change my ways, I could follow in my grandmother’s footsteps. There are a couple of bottles of good wine in the pantry (gifts — too expensive to drink).  There’s the china espresso cup my mom gave me –lovely and delicate; too fragile to use.  There are $5o worth of L.L. Bean coupons about to expire on my desk, and a credit for some ancient, long-forgotten return at Pottery Barn.  Every time I think of using them, I convince myself I should save them, for something I might need someday.

I have a seven-year-old gift certificate for a pedicure at a spa that may or may not be in business anymore, and a two-year-old gift certificate for a facial at another (too busy to use them; and I don’t need a pedicure or a facial.) In my closet:  the jeans I rarely wear, though they fit perfectly, because they are too nice for everyday. Sweaters I take out of storage each fall and put back in boxes in the spring – because they’re too dressy for around the house.  Bras and underpants too pretty for an ordinary weekday. (So, each morning I pull on the old frayed ones instead.) Earrings and necklaces and shoes for “going out,” which I hardly ever do.

In the kitchen:  the “good” glasses, which gather dust in the cupboard; the silver from Steve’s mom, neatly packed away; the tablecloth that’s too nice to put on the table, the cloth napkins that are only for company.  (I keep washing and folding the old, stained napkins.  .  .)

Do you do this, too, or is it just me?

I wonder if I save the best things because I’m afraid there won’t ever be any more of them coming my way?  Or (even more unsettling to consider): because I think my everyday life isn’t special enough — that I’m not special enough — to really deserve them.

Well, my friend, I’m ready to use them all.

So, I’m wondering: could we make a little pact, you and I — to help each other keep our saving-for-a-rainy-day tendencies in check?

Instead of  squirreling away all the best nuts for some imagined, better or needier future, how about if we agree, together, to celebrate the glorious beauty of a fully appreciated now?

Let’s make 2014 the year we light the candles, spray the perfume, wear the pretty underwear, and get the facials, okay? Let’s say “yes” to what we love, whatever it is, and clear away the stuff that holds us down or holds us back.  Let’s inhabit our own lives as generously and joyously as we can for as long as we can.

Of course, what I’m talking about here isn’t just perfume and candles.

For me, it’s also about awakening each morning with an awareness of how precious life is, how fragile, how magnificent.  It’s about remembering to turn off the computer and pick up the book of poetry I really want to read.  It’s about leaving the dishes for later and taking a walk in the snow as it falls, about easing up on the to-do list and stepping into the spaciousness of a quiet moment.  It’s about noticing what’s good in people, and cherishing that. It’s about giving myself permission to be silly or lazy or vulnerable. It’s about holding on to hope and showing love and cultivating gratitude — and letting go of so much else that I cling to for no good reason.

It’s about remembering that my true work isn’t always on the desk in front of me, or at the kitchen sink, or in my in-box.  My true work has to do with softening my heart and strengthening my faith that what is, is meant to be.  Which means accepting myself as I am (wrinkles and all) and embracing my life — right here, right now — as the lovely gift it is.

And that’s as good a reason as any to light some candles.  To smell delicious.  To toss out the old, ratty underwear.  To wear my favorite jeans.  To give thanks for our friendship. And to keep sharing what’s in our hearts.  (I knew, when you gave me that tube of fancy under-eye concealer for my birthday that you wouldn’t steer me wrong on this path through the afternoon of life. And then, when you gave me another one two weeks later, I knew I better start USING it!)

I’m so glad you’re there, my friend!  And thank goodness you’re a few steps ahead of me on this journey, lighting the way forward.

Love, K

P.S.   Speaking of “being there”: here’s a little something for you, the old “Friends” theme song as revisited by three young Irish lads.  Click on the lyric: “I”ll be there for you, ‘cuz you’re there for me, too.”  That does just about say it all!  xo

P.P.S. Readers: I’m curious! Do you use your special things, or save them?  Want to join us in making this a year of simple pleasures?

Paperback News . . .

Pub date for Magical Journey in paperback is this Tuesday, January 21.   Because of you, and the amazing Magical Journey Team, there’s already a bit of a paperback “buzz” —  from readers, from book groups, even from Book Festivals.  My heartfelt thanks! Together, we’re giving this book a send-off!

There’s also an audio version of Magical Journey, which I recorded last November.  Weird as it is to hear my own voice, I listened to a sample of it the other day.  (Lots of memories there. But not so strange after all.) To hear it yourself, click here. 

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The Journey continues — in paperback (and I want you on my team)!

Exactly one year ago today, Magical Journey, was published. I remember taking many deep breaths, trying (mostly in vain) to quell the butterflies in my stomach.

Watching my memoir arrive in bookstores across the land, waiting for the first readers to find it, wondering if my midlife “coming-of-age” story would resonate with anyone else, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to celebrate the birth of my new book or hide under the bedclothes and wait for it all to blow over.

What a difference a year makes!

Thanks to YOU, my dear readers — and to the heartfelt, eloquent, profoundly moving letters and comments you’ve written me over the past twelve months — I feel nothing but excitement and joy this week, as I await the first paperback copies of Magical Journey. (Official pub. date: January 21.)

These days, making the leap from hardcover original to paperback is not a given, as it once was.  It requires sturdy hardcover sales, a track record, and a commitment from both author and publisher.

So, I’m not taking this moment for granted.  In fact, I want to do all I can to fulfill my publisher’s faith in me, and to prove right their hope that this quiet little book of mine will now find its way in paperback.

Magical Journey owes its (admittedly) modest success in hardcover to you, and to good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth.

I didn’t go on Oprah or Good Morning America.  I didn’t get reviewed in the New York Times (though receiving a rave in People was quite a thrill).  There was no ad budget.  But I went to lots bookstores – and I loved meeting you there.  I answered every letter I received from every reader.  And I kept on writing to you all here each week.

I heard from many of you that you’d not only read my book, but you’d also bought copies for others.  You shared it with your friends.  You gave it as a gift.  You suggested it to your book group.  (Some of you even sent photos of your book groups!) You took a leap and said to someone else, “Here’s a book that speaks to me. I think you’ll like it, too.”

For all of this and more, I’m  deeply grateful! In fact, you’ve given me an idea.

Today, I’m boldly reaching out to ask all of you, my reading friends, to help create a buzz for Magical Journey in paperback.  My hope is that with your word-of-mouth and social media assistance, we will create a ripple that moves through our own close circles of friends and beyond.

 Here’s how:

1.  Say yes and email me HERE to join my “team.”  Please be sure to include your mailing address! ( To show my gratitude I’ll soon be sending  you a special “thank-you” package in return:  a signed, personalized copy of an original manuscript page from Magical Journey, a signed bookplate, and a hand-made Magical Journey bookmark, created just for you by my dear, crafty mom).

2.  Once you’ve joined my team, I’ll personally e-mail you, 6 times only,  with a weekly request.  (Don’t worry, no heavy lifting!) I’ll send you simple, one-or two-minute suggestions, such as posts to share on Facebook and/or Twitter — book news, quotes, bits of inspiration. I may ask you to share my blog with a few friends, to rate the book on Amazon, to recommend it on Goodreads, or to suggest Magical Journey to your book group.  Every single request is optional –  you simply do the things that feel comfortable to you.

Of course, feel free to come up with your own ways to help spread the word, the more creative the better!

3.  The final “team” email will go out on February 26th.  By then, with all our shared efforts, I hope Magical Journey will be launched — with plenty of wind in its sails! To celebrate, there will be a special gift drawing for everyone who participated. (Details on this to follow.)

And now, for a bit of early good news!

The words “Book of the Month” are a thrill for any author to hear.  So, it was exciting indeed to learn that Magical Journey has been chosen as the “Book of the Month” for January at BookMovement.com, THE go-to website for book groups.  (35,000 book groups, to be exact.)

I love the way the folks at BookMovement came up with so many great ideas for book groups reading Magical Journey. They even feature my own beloved book group in their newsletter — complete with a photo of our our field trip to Ann Patchett’s Parnassus Bookshop in Nashville last winter.   They also provide menu suggestions, activities, and a music playlist.  Fun and inspiring!  To read the newsletter, CLICK HERE.  (And, of course, do please share it with YOUR book group.)

Thanks in advance to you all. I am blessed to have such devoted readers —  real friends and fellow travelers with whom to share this journey through books and life.  Together, we can make good things happen!

P.S.  Want to pre-order a paperback copy today?  You can do that here.

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Goodreads Book GiveawayMagical Journeyby Katrina K...

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Magical Journey
by Katrina Kenison

Giveaway ends January 14, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

 

The post appeared first on Katrina Kenison.

Full circle

Times Square, New York City, early on a Sunday morning, summer 1996.  The day before, we’d taken our son Henry, age six, to see his first musical, Beauty & the Beast, on Broadway.  A friend working on the show had reserved our seats, front and center, and had arranged a backstage tour after the final curtain.  Henry had been allowed to walk around on the set.  He’d touched the teacups and candlesticks and glimpsed the piano gleaming in the orchestra pit.  He’d shaken hands with the Beast himself, who had been kind and friendly to this scrawny little kid who knew every song in the show by heart.  And now, the next morning, all Henry wanted was to go back and do it all over again.

My husband snapped the photo because it was so not like our shy, mild-mannered son to be demanding.  And it was so not like me to ever speak sternly to him.  And yet, there we were, facing off in the first (and pretty much the only) argument we’ve ever had. (There is another photo in this series, in which I’m actually shaking a finger, in vain.)

I think the whole scene cracked Steve up — while the rest of Manhattan slept, the three of us were out on a street corner trying to explain to our star-struck child that  Broadway shows aren’t like videos, and that you can’t just wander in and watch them whenever you want to.

What we didn’t quite realize, as Henry stood his ground, insisting he would  go back to Broadway, was that a dream was taking shape in his six-year-old mind.  Now that he knew this magical place existed, where musicals came to life every night in darkened theaters, he suddenly had a vision of his own future, an answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The dream stuck.  He’s twenty-four now, and he’s stayed the course.  Played a lot of piano.  Applied for a lot of jobs.  Gotten a few.  Come in second too many times.  But late on Monday night, the call he’s been waiting for all his life finally came.  And since I’m his mom, and therefore have never doubted, I wasn’t all that surprised.  But I am incredibly proud to say our son has finally come full circle.  Next job:  music production assistant for Aladdin on Broadway.

Tonight, as I was making dinner, Henry sat at the piano in our living room, playing Gershwin.  It’s been snowing all day, and the snow is still coming down, closing us in here with one another.  Jack, recovering from the removal of two wisdom teeth first thing this morning, is laying low, applying ice, reading a Stephen King novel.  We watched a movie this afternoon, drank a lot of tea, looked at all our old photo albums, hung out and did a lot of nothing.  As I type these words, the guys are watching basketball in the other room with a friend, eating ice cream and making a racket.  Soon our sons will leave, and it will be just the two of us here again.  I know I’ll miss the noise, the crowd around the dinner table, the lovely sense of security and connectedness I  feel only when we are all gathered together under one roof.

And yet, knowing that the house will soon be quiet again, and too empty, I also think of a line I’ve always loved:  ”There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: one is roots; the other, wings.”  And I am here to say, there is nothing more thrilling than bearing witness to their flight.

(I had planned to write something this week about the forthcoming paperback of Magical Journey – pub date: January 21.  But, well, Henry’s news is more exciting than mine.  Lots to tell you about next time, though.)

 

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