we're building a cathedral

staying present on the paths of art-making and motherhood

First things: In anticipation of the total solar eclipse on April 8th, I’m putting together an offering of recommended reading, reflections, and prompts called Writing the Eclipse. Subscribe to this newsletter for free for more information as it becomes available and to learn how to participate.

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, John Constable, 1831

When I was an acting student, I played a character called Tillie in The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. I carried her anxieties about space and time in my body. Onstage, I made myself smaller. Even after the show ended, I found myself sinking, almost imperceptibly, inward and down.

One of my professors, an instructor of the Alexander Technique, offered me an image that helped return me to myself. She gently touched my chest and told me to imagine that I was a cathedral filling with light. I imagined stained glass and height and the passing of centuries.  My head lifted. When I spoke next, my voice was clear and resonant, such a marked change that we both laughed.

Then, she told me to imagine I was a meadow. Suddenly, inside me, sunlight and blossoms stretched beyond some internal horizon. She placed a hand between my shoulder blades and asked me to release the tension there, inviting expansion. Be still, trust your feet, do less, up and out, she said.   

She asked me to find spaciousness from inside myself. If she felt my spine collapsing during our hands-on sessions, my professor would say, Go to your cathedral. And I did. And if she saw my shoulders dropping, Go to your meadow. 

I clung to these images, these places, and loved that they existed within me, waiting for me to arrive if I ever needed them. I’d whisper these directives to myself: cathedral mind, meadow heart. They were reminders about what I was after in my art-making and life—longevity, openness, rootedness, and receptivity.

I was in my early twenties then. For the most part, time felt inconsequential. It would pass, I knew, but not in any serious way. I could (and often did) imagine the children I would later mother. I met with them in secret moments before sleep and learned their names and faces.

But I could not imagine that time would become a pressing concern or that the nature of it would change entirely once the babies were placed in my arms. Now, time is everything. 

Every six months or so, my children and I make a huge painting together. We pick a Friday night and haul out a massive roll of Kraft paper, cut a piece of it that’s longer than I am tall, and tack it to the wall of the small apartment we share.

Recently, I found myself in desperate need of the cathedral and meadow. In my mind and work and body, I’ve been having trouble finding them. So I made a projector from a cardboard box and a flashlight, drew something resembling stained glass onto a plastic bag, cast the image onto the wall, and sketched it out in the dark.

My son painted in the sky and trees. My daughter took care of the flowers and water. We stayed up too late painting faux stained glass and covered the quilt with little flecks of acrylic paint that I will treasure for as long as they’re stuck there. 

As we painted, I thought of a

Maggie Smith

poem I read in The Rumpus when I was pregnant with my daughter. The poem opens like this:

You’re the kind who looks at a painting

& wonders what’s happening beyond

the stretched canvas, where it wraps

around the wood frame—as if

it were a detail from a larger work

or, like a photograph, one small scene

inside a wider one, curated by the eye.

 

And I thought of what was beyond the imagined scene of our painting—more trees, more water, more sky.

And maybe there was also a version of myself who wasn’t so afraid—afraid that the wants of my life (please dear god, let me finish this book) are wholly incompatible with the facts of my life (full-time work, two small children, no family nearby). Sometimes, I’m afraid I’ll never finish it, that the body of work I envision for myself as a writer will exist only in my head because there isn’t enough time.

The book and the children—caring for them is quiet work, private tending, most of it unseen. I am soothing fears in the early morning dark. I am brushing and braiding hair. I am helping with homework, matching tiny socks, wiping down countertops, and guiding small arms into small coats. Zip, wipe, fold, kiss. It is this way, too, with words. I sit with my book in the dark and care for it before the workday begins, before the children wake up, wondering what it will become.

I try to remember the hand on my back, the hand on my chest, and the invitation to expand. The book will take the time it takes. Caring for the children will take the time it takes. I simply have to present with my care—and patient.

There’s a parable about three bricklayers. “I’m laying bricks,” says the first. “I’m building a wall,” says the second. And the third, “I’m building a cathedral.” There is so much more than what I can see in this hour, so much beyond the frame of the painting.

I return to these images—the cathedral and the meadow. They remind me that there is a larger vision I can’t yet fully grasp. And they remind me to root myself to what is in front of me right now, here in the dark this very morning, the words arriving slowly as the cat yawns in my lap and the children sleep in the next room. 

I imagine a cathedral with a rose window, medieval stained glass, Cobalt blue, an emphasis on verticality, and I think of the intersection of space and time and care I inhabit as a writer and mother.

And I imagine a meadow, a place of incredible seasonal change, bloom and wilt. Here are aster, milkweed, and sweet fern, taxonomy like a hymn. Here are flowers rooting deep, reaching past the shallow root systems of grasses, demanding wild presence.

We lay the stones and admire what is in bloom—word by word, morning by morning. We have only glimpses of what we’re building together—a childhood, intersecting lives, stories, a body of work. Writing books and caring for children are endeavors of time, attention, and great care. I return to the cathedral and the meadow to remind myself of how I should be—making my body a space for resonance, befriending time, holding a wider scope and deeper vision while rooting myself down, extending up and out, filling with light.