{by Mitchell Brown}

(photo source)

It was a familiar spot and a moment like any other. It may have been yesterday. It may have been last year.

My reflection in the window looked old. The light bulb above me and the absence of light outside worked together to show my face drawn and dramatic in the shadows. I hadn’t bothered to pull the curtains yet and I stared at myself for a moment. I laughed without a sound thinking of how much I have aged over the last four years. I barely resemble who I was then. My hair is long now and noticeably grey. The skin around my eyes speaks of late nights and early mornings. Wrinkles born of worries and joys I never before knew trace my mouth. I look old, but I look happy. And I look tired.

I pulled the curtains shut and turned on the water.

An old friend once taught me about reconnecting with myself as I travel through my day. He would stop as he walked through a doorway to be aware of his body. Feel your toes, he would say. Remember they are there. Wiggle them. Think for a moment what your pinky toe feels like. Then move up though your legs, through your hips, through your belly, your chest, your shoulders, your ears. Reconnect. Center. Then move on. I stood at the sink and thought of him, as I often do, and thought of my toes. My poor, neglected toes. Shoved into shoes because barefoot on my feet all day makes my old knees ache. I allowed my awareness to move past my entombed toes and climb through me, feeling every inch of my body. Every weary muscle and sore joint recalled a moment. My hips were open and loose from squatting down to speak with my girls on their terms. My belly felt empty because it was not the one I was focused on filling at the dinner table. My throat was dry from all of the stories and answers and explanations and singing.

I felt my body. It felt tired.

The steam from the water, now hot, felt like a warm cloth as it reached my eyes. I held my head still to let my face absorb the heat. This is my spa, I thought. Each moment is what you make it. The weight of the water gathering on the sink full of dishes caused them to shift and I grabbed the sponge, returning from my little vacation.

Letter from the Editor.

As writers and artists, we often find ourselves tangled in a veil of observation, inadvertently separating ourselves from experiencing the moment we are living as we reframe it in our heads, toying with ways we will translate it. Over time, we may discover a semi-permanent fog settling in between us and our lives. It is a challenge for artists. Agreed.

We have a new challenge for you.

Go outside. Is it still humid and cloying? Are you finally catching and clinging to briefly brisk days? When was the last time you threw your head back, rolled your shoulders loosely behind you, and took a deep breath?

Do it today. And take some little people with you. And, yes, a camera. You are an artist, after all, and our challenge is for you to find the place between joyfully refreshing experience and storytelling.

Story Bleed Magazine is partnering with our sponsor GoGo squeeZ in celebration of World Wide Day of Play this Saturday, September 24. We invite you to join us for a blogging carnival sharing nostalgic stories of play and how you play with your children today (or better yet, this Saturday!). GoGo squeeZ is a squeezable applesauce on-the-go company devoted to making it easier for kids & families to be a little healthier and happier. In keeping with GoGo sqeeZ’s philosphy, we are going to keep our challenge uncomplicated and largely unstructured:

#GoGoDayOfPlay Challenge:

In celebration of World Wide Day of Play, GoGo squeeZ is asking our community to join the GoGo Gang by uploading a photo of your kids at play. When the GoGo Gang is 100,000 members strong, GoGo squeeZ will team up with Action for Healthy Kids to renovate a play space in an under-served community. We want you to help us make these these playground renovations a reality!

Story Bleed invites you to support this effort and join our carnival via one or more of the following:

Definitely:

• • join the GoGo Gang by Liking GoGo squeeZ on Facebook and upload a photo of your kids at play
  (this is key to meeting our playground goals!)

• • share a link to your nostalgic story of play and photo posted on your blog
  (be sure to link back to our #GoGoDayOfPlay writing challenge/ blog carnival!)
• • share a link to a photo posted on Instagram or your favorite photo app (TwitPic, yfrog, Mobypicture, etc) and shared on twitter with the hashtag #GoGoDayOfPlay
  (the actual link you share will be to the specific tweet)

I plan to take an Instagram photo, hashtag it with #GoGoDayOfPlay, and then write a quick blurb on my personal blog about our stories of play featuring my Instagram photo. And I’ll probably add both links to the carnival. Because that? That is the circular creative world we live in!

{by Jenica McKenzie}

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

{by Michelle DeRusha of Graceful}

They sit on beach chairs, on beach towels rumpled and striped, legs splayed, faces to the sun. They sit while their kids splash and mold kingdoms out of cool damp sand. They sit amidst florescent pink and yellow pails and shovels, amidst half-eaten bags of Cheetos and uncapped bottles of Dr. Pepper. They sit with flesh wrinkled, saggy, taut, bronzed, fish-belly white. They sit and gesture and talk in French and English. And is that Portuguese perhaps?

I don’t often get the opportunity to observe the human masses. The airport is a good place for that, but more often I’m riding the moving walkways with exuberant kids or standing in line for McNuggets and fries. The mall is a fine place, too – settled onto a bench to watch shufflers and shoppers – but usually I’m leaning on the metal rail, gazing dizzy at the carousel as my kids spin beneath colored lights or sweeping frenzied past kiosks in search of the perfect birthday gift an hour before the party.

The beach is the perfect people-watching spot, and two months or so ago I did just that. I sat on a fabric chair low to the sand, book propped on my lap, sunhat pulled low on my brow, legs stretched across infinitesimal bits of coral, and I watched.

{by Mollie Green of Fresh Milk Delivered Daily}

bright, white in the sky, the moon bold faced and shining.
far away, a distance i only know in numbers, but clear,
valleys and summits in sharp gleaming gray inside the orb light of it.

here, the white bright moon, open and full overhead.
here, a night that breathes like curtains in open windows, in, out again.
here, a hope of spring in the corners of it, hope riding wings of mercy free, new.

{by Melinda Wentzel from Planet Mom}

(photo credit: wolfgangphoto)

When I was nine or ten, I remember well my enthrallment with my mother’s hands. They were delicate and slender, sweetly scented and rose petal-soft—so completely unlike my own nicked and scraped, callused and chafed boy-like hands that were better suited for wielding a hammer and throwing a fastball than anything else.

Mine were distinctively earthy, too, largely because remnants of dirt and grass simply refused to be removed. Or at least that was the sentiment I held for much of the summer. It was a byproduct of being a kid, I suppose, literally immersed in a world of sod and soil from sunup to sundown. Never mind my fondness of forests and rocky places, which typified a deep and abiding bond with nature—one that I’m not quite sure my mother ever completely understood.

At any rate, my hands told of who I was at the time—a tomboy given to tree climbing, stealing second base and collecting large and unwieldy rocks. Everyone’s hands, I’d daresay, depict them to a certain degree, having a story to tell and a role to play at every time and every place on the continuum of life. Traces of our journey remain there in the folds of our skin—from the flat of our palms and knobs of our knuckles to the very tips of our fingers. As it should be, I suppose.

For better or for worse, our hands are the tools with which we shape the world and to some extent they define us—as sons and daughters, providers and professionals, laborers and learners, movers and shakers. That said, I’m intrigued by people’s hands and the volumes they speak—whether they’re mottled with the tapestry of age, vibrant and fleshy or childlike and impossibly tender. Moreover, I find that which they whisper difficult to ignore.