Ännä White's Blog, page 3

5 Great Books for Grown Ups: What I’m Reading

The Art Forger
by B.A. Shapiro




I have always been fascinated by forgeries and heists. I came across this book at Target, and I’m glad, because when I got it from the library it had a mystery sticker on the spine and I knew I probably wouldn’t have picked it. I wouldn’t call it a mystery, really, not in the way I normally think of them. This is a great story, based on some truths, a combination which I always enjoy. No spoilers here, but it was a quick read and much enjoyed.


The Artist’s Way for Parents
by Julia Cameron




This is a follow up to the The Artist’s Way and covers ways to grow and encourage creativity in your children and in your whole family. Creativity is discussed not as the creation of a particular art, but as a way of looking at life that flows from God, the greatest and first creator. My favorite passage:

“We are not used to thinking that God’s will for us and our own inner dreams coincide. We often assume that God’s will for us and our will for us are at opposite ends of the table. We believe the message of our culture: Life is hard. Be virtuous. In fact, the opposite is true. Life is beautiful. Life bountifully. We are never alone and our children are never alone. We cannot be everything to our children, yet we can trust that good will come to them.”



1000 White Women
by Jim Fergus




This book is the fictional journal of May Dodd, a white woman who volunteers to travel West as a bride a member of the Cheyenne tribe. The story is based on a real event that occurred when the Cheyenne chief visited President Grant and requested brides, believing that having children with the white man would help the next generation be accepted by the white society. Although this story is sad (no spoiler here-we know what happened to the Indians, right?) it is full of detail and was a fascinating read.



The Signature of All Things
by Elizabeth Gilbert




I kept seeing this book mentioned in magazines, but I was a skeptical. I love Eat, Pray, Love, and often when I love something everything else is a letdown. This is also a chunky fiction novel, a different genre altogether. I was pleasantly disappointed. This is a very long book that covers an entire life, but it moves along smoothly picking up toward the end. I enjoyed it very much and I even learned a few new words.



The Cuckoo’s Calling
by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)




This novel is like the last one, in that it is by an already loved author. My husband got this from the library for me. It was well written-no doubt that Rowling has awesome writing skills. It was also quite long though, and a crime novel which is not a genre that I normally read. I was hoping for a little more glitter from the glitterati, but there is an overall grittier feel. I was in it for the first 200 pages, but then I skipped to the whodunit.

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Works in Progress

Last week was a hard one. I was so, so tired no matter how much I slept. I know things are going downhill when sleep becomes my absolute favorite thing to do in the whole wide world. When I was awake I wanted to eat, which I’m really trying to cut back on. Comfort eating salmon and quinoa just doesn’t have the same feel as comfort eating pans of enchiladas and brownies, so I did the next best thing which is comfort shop.

Hubby and I went to Michael’s yesterday for canvases, but they just happened to have Project Life materials on sale too, so into my buggy they went. I’ve actually waited over a year to buy them, so I’m not sure where exactly that falls on the impulse spectrum. Ryan said creating art is better than eating, and with that I must agree.

Today is better. I have to keep reminding myself that everything circles back. Nothing is every truly broken or once and for all fixed.

I am working on a new series of necklaces for my etsy shop. They are two sided. The front is stamped with a design-a pattern from a doily or vintage lace or a stamp. On the back of each necklace is a word that completes the sentence ‘I am':

Loved, Forgiven, Safe, Creative, Open, Full, Lucky, Soul. Known.

They only have their first layer of paint so far, with at least four more to go. There is still work to be done. I will turn each one over in my hand many more times before they are ready to sell, but I love them already. I can already see how beautiful they can be. They are works in progress. And so am I.

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What I’ve Learned in Four Weeks at Home

We are still in transition. I am still getting used to not having to leave to go to work. Here’s what I’ve learned in four weeks at home together:

1. I don’t have to dread mornings. My oldest daughter used to have a meltdown almost every day. I would start a countdown as I brushed teeth and wrestled on shoes:  10, 9, 8, 7….get out the door! I knew if I could just hold on they would go to daycare and I could go sit in my beautiful grown up office and listen to the radio. Evenings were the same, a holding on countdown to bedtime. There are fewer meltdowns now, because we are less hurried, but when they do happen things are different. Because we’re all in it together now baby! There’s no running away from each other. They happen, we talk about it, and then we go on. They don’t define the day and they don’t define her.  

2. Even though we are together all day, I feel like my life is more spacious. I am more generous with my time. Right now, as I am writing this post, my youngest is pressed up against my knee playing with a dollhouse. The oldest is on her belly in front of the dog kennel sketching. We are together, all doing our own type of work. I’ve stopped trying to find uninterrupted moments. I sit in the living room or in the kitchen, and I let myself be interrupted. I listen to the questions and the singing and the wall bumping. I work out of the middle.

3. I love being outside every day. Going out for at least 15 minutes a day has been on my to-do list for years, but there would be literal weeks where the only time I was outside was when I was walking from a building to my car. A black and blue butterfly and a crimson headed woodpecker and a family of insane squirrels live in my yard. They are my outdoor friends. I pulled up all my vegetables and planted wildflowers.

4. I want my girls to draw and sing and dance. I want them to plant flowers and wait for them to grow. I want them to love books and to learn to sit quietly. They do all of these things, because I do them. It is a heavy responsibility and a gift to be who I want them to be. It is weight and it is freedom. It is a call to self-care. I want them to have free, life-loving spirits. I want that too.

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Staying Married

Creative Commons, Neil Lathwood

I have been reading Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. Towards the end of the book, Cheryl aka Sugar shares three letters from women who are thinking about leaving their husbands. She puts these letters together, because she believes that together they tell a complete picture. In her answer, Sugar describes her own first marriage, and how she made the decision to leave it for no definable reason except that she felt she must.

“Go!” she encourages the letter writers. “Go!”

Here, I must disagree with Sugar. I got married when I was 20, to a lovely, normal man. He was many things that I was not, including mature and emotionally stable. Before the wedding, and immediately after, my mind shouted at me to RUN RUN RUN! I sweated through the nights and cried through the days because every twitching fiber of my being wanted me to go, but there was one small corner of  logical thought that kept talking me down.

There are lots of real reasons to decide to leave something or someone, but there are lots of other reasons too that are less valid and less real and less about a relationship than our own minds: Fear (of screwing up, of being left, of not being good enough), restlessness,  resistance to growing up, PMS, not knowing how to live without drama, fearing that you’re getting happy, and happiness is boring.

The thing that scared me the most was the knowledge that if I stayed, something was going to change, and that something was probably me. I didn’t know what changed me would look like, or if I would like her more or less than I already did. Would I still recognize myself? Would I still be myself?

None of these were good reasons for going, because if the reason is my own crazymaking self, then, as the saying goes, “Wherever I go, there I am.” I will find myself and my crazymaking ways thinking exactly the same things a month or six months or a year later and have the same choice to make again. Stay or Go?

I could be going forever, which at some point looks a lot like running away.

He had reasons to go too. Getting married to a beautiful depressed person who, while not exactly in love with someone else is not entirely over them either, seemed like a big mistake. He told me later that being married was so horribly different than he expected he wondered if he had ruined his life.

And yet, here we are. Neither of us chose to go, despite our heart’s whispers, and somewhere along the way we learned to love each other well. The past eleven years have brought us happiness and suffering, but these have not defined us. We have chosen to fall together and not apart.

I am thankful for the years, and for the examples we have in a long marriage. Not only my parents and his, but also our grandparents and aunts and uncles . This is a beautiful rarity in the world today. I am fortunate to be surrounded by living pictures of what it looks like to stay. 

Society tells us leaving is the stuff, exciting and daring and fresh. Sometimes it is. But it is staying that goes deep and carves Grand Canyons out of the plains of our lives. The waters run and run and run, and they are always the same and somehow always different. We lose parts of ourselves to the staying, get rounder and smoother, and in spite of all that we have lost, bigger too. Each season turns and flows past, every experience leading to the same place: to the end, and then out into the deep wide sea.

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Free Printable: Make Your Life Your Most Beautiful Art

I’m taking a vacation this week lovies. Actually I am going to visit family, so not sure it counts as a vacation? Still, I am going from my home to elsewhere. I’ll be back next week. Here’s a little sweetness until then. I was at a friend’s house yesterday and her daughter picked and brought this flower over to me. “A resurrection flower,” my friend said.

It is perfect. I believe we are each resurrected each day, dying into the darkness of sleep each night, and choosing to rise again each morning. Hopefully we rise to our better natures, our truest selves.

All of us are always falling and resurrecting into new ways: new dawn, new hopes.
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Life, all God-tangled.

Get a free printable in 4×6 format by clicking here.

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