Five Minute Friday is on break until the New Year. To catch it’s breath. To reflect. To listen more than write. To rest. We’ll start fresh in January. And then we’ll write our fingers off together again in five minutes flat every Friday. It’ll be the beginning of our third year together. Incredible.

I mother and I write and often the two are all beautifully tangled up in one another. My writing happens in the middle of my life. My desk sits in a corner of the kids’ small room for playing. In this house there is no “room of my own” – rather everything is shared. My body, my space, my time, my energy, my creativity. As much as I might hope to cup corners of my days into neatly tied pockets of time, children spill into everything.

It’s taken me years to get over resenting that.

If a Pottery Barn catalog sneaks its way into the mail pile, I might still daydream about a soothing space of my own. Maybe it’s waiting for me in the future. I will surely relish it then. But now this desk that’s made major moves with us is friendly. The 4×4 cube shelving unit that used to hold beautiful crystal vases houses toy boxes and Micah has his own desk on the wall opposite mine. They know I write for a living. Both online and off.

And I have made peace with the chaos – this is my living, every day art. These children that I raise and these words that I lay down in between gingerbread houses and the covers of what is becoming my first book.

My friend Annie said it best when she said:

Some artists, they dream of a small studio: exposed brick walls and a view of the river in four equally glorious seasons … and hours of uninterrupted painting. I imagine it’s quiet there.

I set up shop at the Lego-littered dining room table, right in the center of our daily commotion…

It seems fitting to make art in the midst of life. After all, it’s the living that’s making art out of me.

She put my life into a paragraph so beautiful I could almost taste it.

And it made me want to visit you – to see each of your own, in between-the-every-day, spaces of creativity.

So I asked on Facebook and I got close to 60 photographs.

{To be sure you see my Facebook updates, try hovering over the “liked” button for the page and selecting “show in news feed”}.

They’re wonderful and real and true. They’re the nooks and crannies of where your words come from.

It’s a beautiful, brilliant, broken, every day Hallelujah.

with love.

{If you’re reading in an email just click here to watch the video with us.}