Envisioning

Greetings Dear Ones!

Last week I celebrated the very first anniversary of owning my own business!  Woo hoo! Yay me! What a powerful, self-reliant, feminist capitalist I am—preying on those with busted zippers to earn a crust. Though, to be fair, it’s been a year of more crumbs than crusts.   Due to the Covid-19 (by which I mean the 19 pounds I have gained during captivity) I decided against partying with a sheet cake to celebrate. Instead, I just bought a sheet.  If nothing else, I can wear it until my clothing fits again. (Don’t say it!)

A party was out of the question; I can barely have customers, never mind a party in a shop this size.  Since it’s Lent, I decided to “offer it up” on behalf of some poor schmuck waiting patiently in Purgatory for a middle-aged-woman who cannot get in and out of her own jeans to repent her life choices and embrace the abstinence of sugar and booze.  There you go, poor schmuck! You’re welcome!  There’s probably lots of cake in heaven, if I ever get there… save me a piece.

Instead, I vacuumed and finished knitting another shawl.   Shawls are my favorite item of clothing right now—they fit no matter what.  I cannot believe the heat that comes off this thing! My own body warmth echoes back and forth against it like summer lightening at midnight.   I wonder if I piled a bunch in the center of a room if we could warm our hands over them, or use them to dry out socks or melt buckets of ice… That’s the magic of pure wool.  If only we could have slip-covered our suffering Texans in the stuff during the recent ice storm.

This shawl was years in the making. Literally. It came to be as a result of dreams I did not even know I was dreaming at the time.  Several years ago, I was invited to be a featured artist, telling stories and spinning yarn at a “Spring Festival of Baby Farm Animals” being hosted by the Strawberry Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH.  The director asked me if I knew where he could get two bottle-fed Shetland lambs for the exhibit.  I said I would ask my vet.  She directed me to a local Shetland breeder who was grateful to give me two orphaned lambs.  They had been rejected by their mothers and, with eighty sheep on her property, bottle-feeding was a lot of extra work for her to take on.  As it turned out—the exhibit refused to take the lambs in the end because one had a patent uracus and the other lamb was having epileptic fits.  The director wanted “normal” lambs, not one that was peeing out of his umbilicus while the other was flopping and twitching in an alarming way.  So guess who got stuck with these lambs…

Little “Flip” and “Drip” took up residence in my bathtub until I could build a pen for them.  I got up through the nights to feed them. I smuggled them to work with me in my car so that they would not have to skip feedings.  With full tummies, they slept in the careful circle of my arms like the babies they were. Despite heroic efforts on the part of my vet, they only lived a summer, due to their significant health issues.  I grieved hard as one by one they died and my tears made mud on their graves.  Meanwhile, the shepherdess who had given them to me had become a dear friend.  She gave me two more bummer lambs the next year. These have thrived.   The little wether makes eye contact with my soul like an old man scanning the sky for clouds.  “Maaa!  Maaa!” he yells in a happy voice, rushing to me for cuddles and scratches as soon as he sees me.  (He’s still very insulted at having to live in a barn, instead of in the house with me.) He turned one last spring and I sheared him for the first time on a golden day—both of us dripping with honeyed sweat and lanolin.  His wool came off in long, damp, crimpy waves of black and silver—slick and silky. Since then, I have been processing, carding, spinning and preparing his fleece and those of the rest of the flock.  By January, I had a beautiful two-ply yarn that I could knit into something special.  Secretly, I suffer from the separation anxiety as much as he does—now I can take part of him with me wherever I go.   

I am learning that there is a big difference between envisioning and visualizing—though most dictionaries would have you believe these words are interchangeable. To visualize is to form a mental picture, make something “visible” to the mind’s eye, to imagine even the tiny details, like chalk and thread rippers and those doo-dads one needs to stop a zipper from running off the track at the end.  To visualize is to count the stitches.  To make a shop or a shawl, one must visualize with at least a decent amount of accuracy.

To Envision is to create future possibilities—to create in Spirit, what can never be seen by any eye.  To envision is to say Yes to a journey, a process, a Becoming that might not turn out anything like you planned because you cannot really plan this stuff.   You show up. You do the work.  Most days you remember your keys.  And then the magic starts—the people come.   You find your tribe—your fellows and sisters on the Spiral Path, your audience, your customers, your fans and Spirit Family.  You also find a few odd ducks, an epileptic sheep or two and some, um… Characters, some of whom reside within you.   Envisioning helps us open our hearts to the things we cannot see and helps us to witness, to marvel and to wonder. Somewhere along the way, we even find ourselves in the things we were meant to do.  To Envision is to allow a mysterious connection to your own spirit to guide your path.  To visualize is to make a living; to Envision is to create a Life.

Someday, if I live to be a venerated Eldress, I hope to look back on a life of Dignified Service to my community and wear my woolen toga and laurels with pride. No doubt I shall wish to forget about how many times I arrived at the shop without the keys, or bumbled home without the knitting, or went to deliver a customer’s sewing and forgot to bring the sewing.  I might still regret not being able to figure out how to retrieve my phone messages using another phone.  I shall regret not putting things in my calendar and then looking at an empty block and assuming I must have “the day off.”  I especially will regret the time I called a nice young man on shop business and, while I waited through a series of ringtones for him to pick up, the Unthinkable happened.  To my panic, the rumblings of a rogue bean burrito were about to make themselves known to the outside world.  Efforts to hasten the eruption before he answered only made the ensuing blast, which occurred the moment he said “…hello” so much worse. I thought about hanging up immediately but then remembered that everyone has caller ID these days.  What could be worse for my business? We both paused.  For a second, I prayed he hadn’t noticed. Alas, his stunned first words were “what the hell was that??” in a voice that conveyed he knew exactly what it was.

As I write myself my annual performance review, I know I have some things to work on… a pay raise looks doubtful…

Owning my own business has been an amazing adventure.  It’s more like parenthood than I would have thought initially, though with only slightly less frequent poop in the pants. I sit with this shawl around my shoulders and feel emotions rising with the heat.  I finished three other things yesterday: a vest, some work for customers, and aprons I made out of repurposing a pair of jeans I had harvested for their zipper.  I separated the front from the back, cut off the legs, attached them to the waistbands of each and added a pocket to the middle of each leg (which is now the middle of the chest).  A few ties and some trim, and they make great aprons for working in the garden or going to the barn with a lot of things in the pockets.  Lambing season is coming up—pockets are great for syringes, medicines, iodine, etc…

I also did six hand-sewn buttonholes on a woolen vest, which is making my hands ache a bit today.  I got a happy text from a thrilled woman whose work had been coming through a revolving door lately.  Finally, everything is just to her liking.   There is much to celebrate.

I celebrate by cleaning and setting the place to rights.  As a dear soul reminded me just today, “Preparation is Power.”  As I wipe things down, dust and Hoover out all the inner fiber collections in the crevices of the machines, I remember the struggles to get the table in the door, painting all the cupboards, hanging thread racks, and creating the dressing room.  It was all so much effort.   Everything had to be brought up through the old loading elevator at the back of the building—the kind with a cage that comes down around you and, as the platform rises, you see the bare bricks passing by.   Because the lift is at the opposite end of the building, everything had to be dragged on carts and wagons through a maze of hallways redolent of history and mill girl sweat.  I love this building. It talks to me the way a tree or sheep does.

There is so much to celebrate in realization of a dream. There is the surprise element—“wow, this turned out better than expected”—blending with a tiny bit of remorse at completion of a phase that will never come again, like innocence or childhood.  Dream endings leave small hollows where  new dreams must be seeded.  Starting my own business has been Real-ized—made real.  Now the new dream is growing it, maintaining it, giving good service so that friends will take pride in recommending it to other friends.

Opening a service-based business in a new town, twenty-two days before anyone realized a global pandemic was looming, was seriously bad luck.  My little shop has had a rough start, I’ll admit.  It’s like it had a crappy childhood so far but is going to turn out fabulous in the end, just like a lot of amazing people I know.  No matter how things start out, they are bound to transform.  Creativity is that dance we do between what Is and What Could Be. Sometimes, what we are here to do finds us—it calls us into being.  Sometimes it’s the other way around.  Things don’t always go the way we planned or stick to the schedule we wanted. Either way, we are part of a Magnificent Mystery as co-creators and it is a privilege to be a midwife to Beauty, whatever our craft.

Wrap a blanket (or shawl, or toga) of Kindness around all you do today and keep doing it! Let the Mending continue!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Burned out...

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. —Jack London

Greetings Dear ones!

Grundalina Thunderpants did not want to get up today.  She does not love these mornings when The Writer, who is a last-minute crammer, decides we must rise before dawn and think of “something” to write about for a blog that needs to be published by lunchtime, which she interprets loosely as “lunchtime anywhere in the world…” Prudence is shrill—“Do you think Tom Brady hits snooze on his goals?? NO. Get UP.” You find it interesting that Prudence is a fan of Tom Brady. It’s not so much that she loves football as she loves to hold up “Winners Who Work Hard” to make the rest of us feel crummy.  We all agree to ignore her and hit snooze; we are ok with hating ourselves (and Tom Brady too for that matter) just a little bit. In this moment, we do not love blogs as much as we love soft pillows.  Prudence grabs her rosary beads and begins to mutter.  Within moments, the angels have come to her aid in the form of an elderly incontinent dog in the early stages of renal failure.  He has left his little nest at the foot of the bed and begun tottering towards the door.  I grab him and race to the bottom of the stairs and deposit him at the edge of a snow bank in the nick of time.

The sharp blades of air scraping at cheeks and lung, combined with the soft loveliness of the fog rising up from the distant river, and the slim skewer of light poking through the crystalline trees the way one uses a sliver of wood to check if a cake is done, are enough to make going back to sleep an impossibility.  In any case, it’s time to get my ash to the barn.  On these morning voyages after fresh snow, I walk backwards, grateful for the gift of cleats on my muck boots, and sprinkle ash as I go.  I gaze at the gritty greyness hitting the white ice with revulsion, as if I am soiling a child’s forehead.  I am making a dirty mess—ruining something so pristine and lovely, though secretly lethal.  I remind myself that the ash is to help me get back up the hill I have to climb to the House.  And so it is.

Wood ashes are jolly useful things on a homestead.  A complex heterogeneous mixture of all the non-flammable, non-volatile minerals which remain after the wood and charcoal have burned away, I use them to amend compost, sweeten the earth in lettuce and asparagus beds, and to keep the icy path to the barn well-cindered so that I don’t slip. They keep harmful bugs away in the garden and one can even make soap with them, though I have not yet tried this. The wood stove in the kitchen is constantly producing them, though I never seem to have enough.  

Similar to how baking soda works, sprinkling wood ash on the coop floor and in the chicken run can help to neutralize odors. The chickens will even use the ashes as a dust bath to smother parasites like fleas or mites.  They get in and roll around in the ashes and then shake off the excess.  Because the wood ash contains calcium and potassium, it’s not a bad thing if they ingest some.  It might even be a good thing… Hmmm, calcium and potassium, you say? I begin to wonder how wood ash might affect menopausal symptoms in middle-aged women.  Should I put them in a smoothie? Sprinkle them on salads? Or just roll around in them in my pajamas, like the chickens do? 

When I bring the rest of the ashes to the hen house, I find the ladies jubilant but confused. They have killed a mouse and don’t know what to do with him.  They don’t seem to want to eat him, which is a relief.  (Who wants mouse-flavored eggs?) I take him out and throw him on the roof so that a local scavenger can make a meal of him.  The mouse slides down the icy slope of the roof and smacks me in the head.  I toss him up again.  This time, I dodge the dead mouse. But a small avalanche of snow finds the back of my neck.  After several attempts, I finally leave the mouse on a fence post. Of dust he hath been made but to a crow he shall return.  

Prudence is excited about the start of Lent.  Ash Wednesday this week marked the beginning of the penitential Lenten season that culminates with Easter, roughly ninety months from now. (Thanks to my catholic upbringing, dust and bunnies are inextricably linked.)  She thinks we could all do with a good stint of Penance.  Forty days might not be enough.   Growing up, Ash Wednesday was the day our parish school would process next door to the church and we would have ashes crossed on our foreheads as a solemn reminder of our human mortality and our need for reconciliation with God.  We were given many other solemn reminders too—such as not letting our bare thighs under our plaid kilts stick to the pews where they might accidentally scrape and make noises embarrassingly similar to flatulence that would make certain weak-minded children giggle uncontrollably and earn themselves a trip to the principal’s office.   Ladies, preserve your virtue and everyone else’s.  (Lead them not into temptation!) Sit on your skirts quietly.  (I might just be the reason the girls of St. Joe’s are allowed to wear long pants now…) 

Secretly, I love Ash Wednesday.  It’s time to take stock, ask myself where I am going, and why most days I seem to find myself in a hand-basket. It’s in keeping with my philosophy that “If things are pretty bad already, why not go ahead and make them worse? Some Good may come of it.” It’s this kind of boldness that makes me take a hideous table cloth and transform it into a skirt. (Or vice versa.) As one who seems to be making a career of starting over, it’s yet another chance to trade some vice for the growth of my soul.  It takes great ugliness to grow beauty. And frankly, it’s the only way to deal with things like February.  

As a child, I was always somewhat confused about the ritual surrounding the ashes. The phrase “remember man that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return”—makes it sound like the dust is the beginning and the end.  I get it that we come full circle, by and by, like pumpkins who go to seed and get reduced to our essence only to begin again.  We begin with an ending; we end with a beginning—sort of like that poem about Michael Finnegan, “who went out and then went in again.” Ash is the ultimate symbol of Essence.  It is all that remains when the heat and light have gone.  Completion, yet Potential. A nesting ground for Pheonixes. But the bible has no mention of Ash Wednesday.  Instead, it says “In the beginning is the word…” Why do we believe it is ashes to ashes and not words to words?  Could it be that words are so much more slippery? Don’t ask me to use words to climb the slope by the barn—even the saltiest are no good.  

Receiving ashes on the head as a reminder of mortality and a sign of sorrow for sin was not part of the early church but became a practice of the Anglo-Saxon church in the 10th century.  Before the Synod of Benevento in 1091, wearing sackcloth (rough cloth used to transport turnips, grain, or Christian rumps) and smearing oneself with ashes was a mostly private affair for mourners and those who had left a hot iron too long on a silk blouse.   

Ash, we are told, is the symbol of repentance.  To Repent, as we know, is “to pent again.”  Actually, it means to make a complete change of direction.  We don’t just keep going in the same way, round and round the circle like a visiting motorist in Massachusetts who has never encountered a round-about.  We reform (form again), regret (gret again), and atone.  I think this means tone up.  (Lenten fasting was, after all, the way medieval Christians prepared for bikini season.)  The word regret  actually has ancient Germanic roots in the word “greet,”  which makes its way into Old French as regreter: “to bewail the dead.” To this day, Scots use the word greet to mean “weep.”  

I sprinkle the grief of mighty oaks upon the snow and reflect on all these things.  I think of my friend, suffering from Covid, who discovered her house full of smoke.  She had been unable to smell her grilled cheese sandwich burning on the stove.  When I asked her what she did, she said blew it out like a candle and ate it anyway.  She couldn’t taste it either, so why waste it?   

Ash comes for us all but the grass will be greener for it in the spring.    

One of my favorite folk songs of all time is Walt Aldridge’s “Aint no ash will burn…”  For someone born in Alabama, you’d think he was singing about Vermont: 

I have seen snow that fell in May (yep, that sounds about right)

And I have seen rain on cloudless days (true again)

Some things are always bound to change (always)

There ain’t no ash will burn.

Love is a precious thing, I’m told

Burns just like West Virginia coal

But when the fire dies down, it’s cold

And there ain’t no ash will burn 

Having never played with fire before, some of us got burned down to ashes on the first try.  From those ashes rose a hope—a Wishing that the fire would return just so we could prove we would never burn that way again.  But fires move on and leave us the ash as a gift.  The grass will be greener come Spring… 

As a seamstress, I am well associated with the cycles of destruction needed for creation. Certain projects, owned by The Unsatisfiable, return again and again to haunt me—a pair of velour pants, a tweed waistcoat—and bite me in the ash.  Anger sparks.  One likes to finish things once and for all and move on. But sometimes the cycle goes around and around. Each time, I must destroy the work I did last time and start over. Sometimes I do this gracefully, sometimes I need to curse my lot and bite the heads off chocolate bunnies before I can continue.  Either way, my soul is greener for it.  

Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere spend a lot of time staring at embers on these cold winter nights, reading them like the classics of literature.  These nuggets once built by sunlight, return to light and give off heat for days. We, the grim citizens of February, we need the heat, the light, the ash as we stagger towards the fires of our passions like molting pigeons, each hoping we are a phoenix. 

Ashes to ashes…we all fall down.  Ashes to ashes…we all Rise Up.

Regardless of where you are in this cycle—whether you are crawling towards the bonfires of your own vanity , rising again on shining metal wings, or temporarily all burned out—know that we desperately need the beauty only You can bring to this world. Keep mending. And Amending. Thanks for your Good Work.

With sew much love,

Nancy

A Valentine...

My Darling Valentine,

I know this looks like a public message that could be for anyone. It is.  It’s also just for YOU.  You know who you are.  I am your not-so-secret admirer.  I am that one clapping and cheering so loudly for all you do, all you are, that it embarrasses you at times.   You turn away, refuse to hear me, and retreat from such cheesy displays.  You feel more comfortable doubting yourself and sleuthing your way through the indifference of others who could not love you like I do.  “Why don’t I fit in?” you wonder. “What is wrong with me?” “Why am I never the one chosen?” You languish in the pendulum swing between wondering why no one else loves you and thinking I, who loves you so much, am a simpleton, an idiot, an Untrustworthy Exuberant.  As fervently as you sometimes believe no one loves you, you cannot believe someone does.  The truth is, you just want the Winners, the Cool Kids, and the Rich & Desirable to find you enchanting and adorable.  Not me. It’s ok.

I get it. I’m used to it by now.  I’ve been secretly in love with you for a long, long time. I know you.

I know things have been a little rough on you lately.  February is tough, even without a global pandemic in full swing. You find yourself just “going through the motions” in these “cat evenings” of Winter.  These are the feline cousin of the “dog days” of Summer, marked by an utter lack of ambition and the urge to curl oneself into an aloof and furry ball and hiss or scratch those who come too close.   You reject the wholesome food in your bowl and instead, over indulge on catnip, houseplants, and other toxic items when others aren’t looking.  It is a time of fuggy ideas as clogged as litter boxes,  general ennui, and retching up your own fur that you should not have swallowed in the first place.  I’ve been paying attention and I sense how you are not doing all that much and yet it is making you drained, fatigued, with a to-do list a mile long that incites nothing more than the urge to take a dump in someone else’s shoes.  Nothing on that list makes you feel inspired any more.  Just Burdened. You just want to lie on the rug.  Being warm and fed bores you.  Thinking of those who aren’t, grieves you. You long to be set free on the Alaskan tundra and to run until you are sleek and fleet, saying a shrill farewell to middle-class domesticity and morality once and for all.  And yet you lie there, Still…  Simultaneously outgrowing your yoga pants and shrinking your curiosity until it is left to rattle like a raisin in the hollow of your skull.

And here I come, shouting my love, clapping my hands, urging you to jump up and trim your whiskers.  I have the nerve to wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day and tell you that you are Loved.  Yes, YOU—lazy, sloppy, ill-tempered and sad you, YOU are the one I love.  Just as you are.

Other times, I see you striving, straining, laboring so hard to bring Dreams into being.  You wake up early, stay up late.  I see you tilling gardens, planting seeds, hauling manure, threshing wheat and then (unlike Henny Penny) giving all your good bread to the hungry.  I see you loving your neighbors, not as yourself but as Exalted Beings.  You have a servant’s heart.  There is not much you won’t do for anyone, including total strangers.  You go beyond generous, beyond kind.  Your amplifier is set at 11.  Your pedal never leaves the metal. (Until you crash.)   When told you are a too much of perfectionist, your first response is “Really? How can I fix that?” When others tell you to chill, you say “Tell me, how does one excel at giving up? What does Excellent Surrender look like? Is there a Dean’s List for that?”

And here I come, whispering my love, smoothing your brow, and urging you to sit and have a bowl of soup, a bath, and a change of undies. I have the nerve to wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day and tell you that you are Loved.  Yes, YOU—ambitious, amped-up, work-aholic, over-busy, perfectionistic you, YOU are the one I love.  Just as you are.

I love all the parts of you, from the sinner to the saint.  I love the “you” that thought it was smart to store an incontinent dog in a car for half an hour so you could have a Zoom conference in peace and look professional without a lot of unnecessary barking in the background.  (I love that you attempted to look professional.) I love the “you” that put a homemade sweater on the dog and gave it a warm bed with a hot water bottle and some treats because it was ten degrees out and you didn’t want him to get cold.  I love the “you” that had to chip slushy, semi-frozen diarrhea off the ALL the seats and launder the homemade sweater afterward. I love the fact that you did not yell (very much) as you cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned. (It was EVERYWHERE.)  I love the fact that you deposited all that shite right next to the car as you were sweeping and scrubbing. And I especially love the fact that you came right out the next day, stepped in it without looking, and brought it all back into the car on your own feet.  God, how I LOVE you!!  You are so dear and precious to me.  There is no other quite like you in this whole magical universe.

I love that you try so hard and always come up a little flawed.  I love how you call yourself a music teacher and then cannot find the pitch of the song that you are about to do.  I love that you were in the middle of recording a song online, with an audience listening, and a customer called and left a lengthy voice memo on the answering machine asking you to put plastic all over his suit because he is allergic to another customer’s cat hair—and you forgot to delete that part before you sent the song out afterwards. I love it that you cannot remember the name of the child you just sang hello to. I love it that you make the chickens a big clean-the-fridge “salad” once a week and eat cheerios for dinner so you can save the broccoli for them. (Or so you say…)

We’ve had a stormy courtship, you and I.  I’ve had to learn an awful lot about you in order to fall so madly in love with you. Like the sound of a human voice, the grain on an interesting piece of wood, the mistake in a quilt or a piece of weaving, or the scribble of a child--It is the flaws that make you unique and interesting to me.  They are how I know it’s you. You tried for so many years to be “Perfect”—trying everything to brighten your mind as well as your teeth.  Not satisfied with fixing yourself, you tried “fix” everybody around you too.  You helped them stop drinking coffee, avoid dairy, gluten, and anything that involved nicotine, alcohol, or Joy.  You made the children around you stand up taller, be better at sports, better at music, and know their math facts.  Your nagging was as tireless as it was tiresome. (Remember when you went on a crusade to make young and old alike memorize The Gettysburg Address?)  You administered cheery, bright little dollops of shame, like cherries, on top of every “perfect” gift you ever gave.

It took a while—nearly half a life—before you realized that you were the common denominator in every relationship failure you had.  They didn’t need to change; you did. The person you needed to “fix” was yourself.  You gave up scolding children and the vexing hobby of trying to cajole men into being better companions for women and decided to clean up your own side of the street. You joined support groups, went on religious retreats, read bales of dead trees printed with self-help affirmations, watched videos, consulted priests and gurus… At the end of it all, you realized you had had just about the same amount of luck in changing a person as before (i.e. NONE).  One cannot turn a Gentian into a Rose. It turns out that you are WAY better at fixing broken zippers than people.

You sat down then, ate a whole carton of ice-cream, drank a pint of booze, ordered six new pairs of shoes online and thought “Well, this is just crap.  Broken me… broken them… broken world… What a mess. Now what?”

And this is the moment that makes my heart beat faster every time I think of it.  It still takes my breath away.  This is the moment we fell in love. After all the tears and that fantastic pity party you hosted, you looked into my eyes and changed the only thing about your entire body you had any power to change: your lips.  You pulled them upward into a smile.  I saw the true beauty of You. I knew we’d be together forever then.  

Let me tell you, my Darling, Perfect ain’t where it’s at.  Not by a long shot.  Clothing can be fixed but people can’t. People are just to be loved. Just as they are. YOU--Your scars, your flaws, your resilience, these are what make me love you more than anything.  To me, you are “Flaw-some!”  Best of all, I love that once in a great while, you summon the Grace to join me in loving you. Just as You are.  Won’t you do that, Today? Please? Join me in loving you—Just as you are.

With deepest Joy,

Your Valentine

A Pretty Good Love Story

“If you tell the truth, it becomes part of your past. If you tell a lie, it becomes part of your future..”

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, it’s February—the longest little month of the year. It’s already been a long two days.  I celebrated the first day by having the boiler break just as the blizzard was bearing down on us.  Far from depressing me, I felt vaguely exhilarated as I put out cups of water in the cellar to see if the temperature had hit freezing yet (thus endangering any water pipes that might burst).  Late into the night, I tended the wood stove in the kitchen as I knitted a wool shawl and nurtured my inner Little-House-on-the-Prairie dweller.  I attempted to light a little coal stove in the cellar, more of a parlor stove really, but things did not go well.  I found some old bags of black rocks with kind of a greenish sheen to them in a corner near that stove.  I tried to light them but they would not ignite.  Then I watched a YouTube video, as one does, to figure out how real Prairie dwellers do this properly.  A homesteader from Missouri had the shortest video so I watched that one.  It turns out that it takes a lot to get anthracite to burn.  I also had no idea how to open or shut the baffles on the stove (I was BAFFLED) so after filling the house with smoke and having to open all the windows (which kind of defeated the purpose of heating the house in the first place), I decided to abandon the project and get the electric heater from the bathroom for the pipes.  It wasn’t very “Little House” of me, but I was getting worn out and needed to go microwave my tea and turn on my electric blanket.  I’m not sure I’m cut out for pioneering… (though I really like the knitting shawls from one’s own sheep part!)

The sheep have no idea it’s February. I’m not even sure they are aware it’s cold.  They have a choice of inside or outside and they stay outside in falling snow until they look like snowballs.  I like to sit with them during a heavy snow and feel the blanket of silence smother the nearby woods.  I tell the sheep about St. Brigid’s day—halfway from the Solstice to the Vernal Equinox—and how Tradition decrees I must go clean the house.  I would rather clean the barn. Patron saints who require one to clean the house are not my favorite saints.  Patron Saints who require one to purchase a lot of over-priced chocolates and roses are much more fun.  “Roses are delicious,” say the sheep, “but what does one want with chocolate?” 

“These are ways humans express their love for one another,” I tell them, “And the day we celebrate Love is coming up soon—in two week’s time.”

“Tell us a love story,” the little ones say. “We don’t know about Love. We just know Food and Safety.”

“Well,” I say, “That’s Love, pretty much… but I shall tell you a story just the same.”

“Once upon a Time, there was the Perfect Customer who showed up at the door of a Perfect Seamstress.  He had no needs whatsoever.  Wait…he couldn’t be a customer if he didn’t have a need, right? He couldn’t even be human… Ok, scrap that. Dude had needs.  He knocked on the door of the Perfect Seamstress. She opened it. Their eyes locked. He said Nothing. She understood his needs perfectly. As if by Magic, actually it was magic, she took one look at him and knew instantaneously what needed to be done. Wordlessly, he handed her his pants.”

“Excuse me,” interrupts Prudence Thimbleton in a warning tone, “This doesn’t sound like the sort of story one should be telling innocent and impressionable sheep.” (Prudence, for those of you who have forgotten, is that sour old “None/nun”—i.e. “none of this and none of that”—who squints judgmentally at everything I do from inside my head.)

“You’re right! A man handing a woman his pants sounds somewhat, well, seamy!” I exclaim hastily, laughing.  “Clothes!  He handed her his clothes…”

“You’re just making this worse,” tutts Prudence.

“What’s wrong with clothes?” I ask.  Everyone hands seamstresses their clothes, and pants too for that matter. I’m picturing that character handing the other character a bag of clothes that need mending.  That sounds innocent enough to be fairytale worthy to me.”

“You did not mention a bag,” says Prudence.

“OK!” I turn to the sheep, who are waiting expectantly. “There’s a guy with a bag of clothes.  He’s still wearing clothes. Everyone is wearing clothes…”

“Do you have to cut their clothes off them in the Spring?” interrupts one of the sheep curiously, “Do they jump around in the dressing room and try to escape until you lock your knees around their necks and step on a hind leg in soft slippers to stop them from moving while you cut?”

“No,” I say. “That’s just you guys… and maybe a toddler or two.  But back to the story!”

“There’s a guy who needs his clothes fixed. He took them off at home and put on other clothes.  He bagged up the bad clothes and brought them to the Perfect Seamstress, who understood exactly what they needed.  She didn’t have to ask a single question.  He didn’t have to try anything on.  He didn’t make a single request.  Not once did he say “do you think you could…” or “call me crazy but what I really want is…” She didn’t even have to get out a stick with numbers and measure anything.  He left his clothes (in the bag) and she set to work.  When he came back, it was all fixed perfectly in neat, tiny stitches… Wait, no. Scrap that. This is a fairy tale. She waved a magic wand over everything and then just waited for him to come back on a horse with bags of gold and the announcement that he was really an enchanted prince in disguise.  Then they fell madly in love and got married, always squeezed the toothpaste from the bottom, and never missed a car payment, ever.  The End.”

“That’s a fun Love Story,” says a little sheep, giggling. “That story makes me feel happy!”

“It makes a lot of people feel happy,” I say, “until the sheer impossibility of it makes them feel miserable.”

“Why does it make them feel miserable?” they want to know. “Is it not true?”

“Of course it’s not true,” says Prudence. “A TRUE love story involves an exhausting amount of communication and sacrifice and well, telling the Truth.”

“She’s right,” I say, very pleased and actually a tad surprised that Prudence knows what true love is. “I love my dear customers very much but I have no idea what they want unless they tell me.  Sometimes even when they do tell me I have a hard time understanding! And boy howdy, let me tell you, they DON’T love me if I don’t do what they want!  Our love is specific, contractual, and Conditional.”

“Tell us a true love story then!” beg the sheep.

“Ok,” I say.  “It’s a snow day.  What else is there to do?”  I settle back on my milk crate and begin again:

“Once upon a Wednesday, a pretty good customer came to see a pretty good seamstress.  He had some pretty good problems he needed her help with.  They each asked each other a lot of questions and told each other the truth.  She did her best. There were no magic wands.  She measured and took notes.  She basted then sewed. He came back for another fitting.  Things weren’t quite right so they kept talking, kept measuring,  kept adjusting.  Finally, after many hours over many days, the man came back and tried on his clothing.  It was as close to perfect as a pretty good fairy tale can allow. He was happy.  She was happy.  He paid her money and thanked her. Everyone was Satisfied and agreed to work together again sometime.”

“Now, that’s a true love story,” says the oldest ewe. “I get it.  The seamstress loves her work and wants to do it well. The customer loves his clothes and wants to fix them, not just deposit them in a landfill somewhere where, thanks to their 25 percent nylon/plastic content, they will never rot and will create an environmental nightmare over time. The seamstress loves her customer; the customer loves his seamstress. They both love the economy, the government to whom they both pay taxes, even the other people those taxes support.  In this one simple interaction, they Love themselves, each other, the community in which they live, the country in which that community resides, and the planet under All.  In the end, even the sheep get clean water to drink and good grass to eat.”

“Wow,” I say. “Who knew you were Globalists?”

“All Creatures are Globalists,” they insist. “In ever-widening spirals, the Love goes out—true love, sort of gritty, needing lots of work, with a few resentments along the way.  But mostly, Pretty Good.  It’s a Pretty Good love story.”

“That story makes me even happier than the first,” says a younger ewe hopefully.

“Agreed,” nod the wethers.

“So why don’t people communicate better?” they want to know. “Why do they lie? Why would they not say the truth, especially if they knew what the truth is? How can anyone help them if they don’t tell the truth?”

“Because they are sneaky, hopeless sinners,” says Prudence.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “All I know is that if you tell me your waist is a 34 and you are that around the tops of your legs, NOT your waist, then I’m not going to make your pants fit right.  If I doubt your words, it’s up to me to measure and find out.  (I Fact Check!!! Especially the wishful thinkers…) There are no “alternative” facts in a fitting room.  If there are, they get “alterated” very quickly!  People who don’t help me help them, who don’t tell me the truth about what they expect, are as baffling as a stove with closed baffles.  They fill my mind with ice cold smoke.  I don’t have room for that in the shop.  We don’t have room for that anywhere.  True love is based in Truth, no matter how spotted, wrinkled, chubby, or ugly that truth may be.”

I leave the sheep in a hopeful mood.  Halfway up the hill to the house, I pause and survey the beauty of the land around me.  This whole country is now grappling with bafflers, and learning what it means to tell the Truth.  We cannot begin to fix things until people are honest about what the problems are. It’s time that we Menders stand up, in our quiet little ways, in our tender little deeds, and show folks that we could have a Pretty Good Country if we just all told the truth.  Not Perfect… but Pretty Good would be a GREAT start.

That’s my Love Story for today. Keep up your Good Work my Dear Ones!  It matters!  TRULY.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Freedom

“Seek Freedom and become captive of your desires.  Seek Discipline and find your Liberty.”      –Frank Herbert

Greetings Dear Ones!

It has been snowing through the night—just a couple of inches.  The whole world looks like someone cut into a down coat and it exploded all over the shop.   This morning, there is no dawn, just a gradual whitening of the sky, like someone turning the volume up on a camera setting.  The top half of the trees look like black scratches against white, halfway down becoming white scratches against the dark of the surrounding woods, like an Escher painting. The only spot of color is the blood red of the barn, but even that is muted, more like dried blood than fresh.  As I make my way there, towards the steamy warmth of the sheep, I wonder where the coyote is right now.  A bedraggled, mangy looking fellow has been hanging around lately.  The well-upholstered Jack Russell by my ankles is ready to give him what-for.  He’s barking before he even has anything to bark at.

The coyote does not seem to be doing nearly as well as his sleek neighbor, the grey fox, whom I have also seen grocery shopping around the barn.  The fox looks self-assured and sassy. The coyote looks confused and juvenile—like an adolescent whose single mother got sick of working three jobs to bring home dinner just to find he hadn’t made his bed and had left his crap all over the den while she was gone.  He’s obviously out in the big bad world to fend for himself now and doing a terrible job.  His coat tells me he’s doing more learning than winning.  He is easily scared away by his ferocious plump white canine cousin.  But he’s still Alive, still pulsating with Hope and Hunger in 18 degree Farenheit temperatures, which is as much as any of us can boast these days.

I say to the annoying creature yapping ecstatically at my feet, “You! Little Mister Tough Guy, you wouldn’t last a night out here!”  He pauses, mouth in a laugh, and blinks at me impudently with bright, mischievous eyes.  The slight arch of his brow informs me that he’s stopped barking because he wanted to, not because I said so.  He’s definitely one of those simpering yes-men relying on regular meals and his favor with the Queen to bolster his swagger.  Deep down, there is no way he wants to be Wild.  He likes wood stoves and down duvets way too much.  Ill-mannered captivity suits him to a T and he makes the most of it, wool carpets be damned.  

“Do you want to be wild?” I ask the sheep.  “Are you resentful of living within the boundaries I set and living on the dole an Outside (in this case, it’s Inside) Authority grants you in your station?”

“Everyone wants to be wild,” says one. “Or so they think. We make a trade when we live in community and get some advantages and lose others.  We’re very glad you are on top of this coyote situation, for example.”

“That coyote is no danger to you where you are,” I reassure them.  “He might be a nuisance in the Spring, when there are lambs about, but right now, he just wants the mice and voles eating the seeds in the hay.  Perhaps he wants a chicken too—but they are safe in their coop. He’ll have to snack on chipmunks and dip.”

“Well, no one serves us cookies in the wild,” says another, rooting hopefully in my torn pocket.

“Are you not afraid of cookies?” I ask.  

“Who’s afraid of cookies?” they want to know.

“Lots of people,” I say. “For some, they are a gateway drug to captivity and shame.”

“That’s too bad,” they say. “Tell them we will eat their cookies.”

I sigh.  I love cookies just as much as the sheep do.

“Cookies or no, sometimes I wish I was Wild,” I admit to them.  “Too bad I cannot digest bark.”

“But bark is delicious,” they insist. “Especially pine bark.”

That I have moved to this homestead in Vermont, to be Free, to escape suburbia,  to be a Feral Woman at Large (and growing larger, thanks to the cookies) in the wilds of the Green Mountains, only to see my days perforated by buckets slopping into my boots as I drag water from the well  to my fellow captives every few hours, is the kind of Irony I delight in.  Is there such a thing as Freedom without rules? Without commitment? Is there such a thing as Commitment without Freedom? What is the music that compels this dance?

I check my calendar of appointments on my phone. I have only one but it is a big fat nail, smack in the middle of the day, locking it down so that nothing on either side can wiggle.  That woman, coming to my shop today at two o’clock  p.m. to have the moth holes repaired in her sweater, has no idea that we are Married.  Our courtship was a brief series of phone calls, one email, and a re-schedule via the website template. Hardly personal, not the least bit romantic, but a Contract of medieval gravity none-the-less.  Wistfully, I gaze at the new-fallen snow, hear the call of the hills, and I want to set off into the wilderness either to be or track prey, I’m not sure which.  I’m that wild…

In this moment, I think of two things--a friend’s comment “The self-employed get to work any eighty hours a week they want!”—and Birdseed.

Many years ago, when I was a young bride in a new home, I hung a bird feeder in a tree.  A neighbor who worked for the local Audubon society commented “Well, that’s just fine.  But now you are going to have to feed those birds.”

“Isn’t that what a birdfeeder is all about?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “But you will create a dependency in the birds so now you cannot let that feeder go empty. Ever.”

“I won’t,” I promised faithfully. And I didn’t. I married the whole flock of sparrows on the spot and our mutual bliss lasted many years.

I think about that Loyalty, Fidelity, Service now, as I contemplate my customer base.    I have lured them to the shop with a different kind of “birdseed”—the promise that I can mend their clothing, hem their trousers, and feed their hunger for disco pants remade with yoga waistbands.  The only way to create Dependency is to be Dependable.  Yet there is a price to pay; we capture ourselves when we seek to domesticate others by feeding their needs according to our own desires.  It’s the eternal dance of the Co-dependent.

Sometimes we Creative Types feel so heavily wedded—to an overwhelming polygamy of chores, Beings, appointments, relationships, and tasks that takes us away from the part that cannot be domesticated—the part that wants to roam, explore, create, view, sniff, howl, or disappear silently into the woods.  This, I am convinced, is the part that brings us our art in the first place. How do we honor that bedraggled coyote within us that is reduced to poaching  on “the civilized” for survival?

In my New Year’s quest to be a better writer, I have joined a support group.  Without us really stating it as such, our first discussion touched on the dance between structure and inspiration, imagination and the creative process, Ferality and Captivity.   Like that African proverb that says “The threads of many spiders can take down a lion,” (FYI, I’ve probably misquoted that but you get the idea…) we are bound by many threads—many little ties, a thousand tiny vows—that keep us from tossing our manes and galloping away with ourselves.  The fantasy we nurture is that total freedom will be all it’s cracked up to be.  Seeing a live coyote—I wonder.

Certain relationships look like entirely too much captivity for some folks—whether they are the Birds or the Birdfeeder  doesn’t matter—it’s too costly a bargain.  As my daughter said recently, “My private opinion is that these people who claim they don’t know what Love is haven’t had a dog.  They [dogs] teach us that all our chores surrounding their care reward us with vast quantities of joy we otherwise couldn’t have experienced.” She is asserting this as one who has just adopted a cat, which I find hilarious. When I point this out, she reminds me that she does not have the time or resources to invest in a dog.  Cats require less work and can be just as loving.  “The point,” she insists, “is that our personal investment in connection is what creates the bond we call Love. Some people have never known that…”

I think this is true of sheep, customers, children, lovers, and anyone to whom we choose to give our hearts, whether they ask us to or not.  Whether our commitments come in bird-feeder-sized (weekly), cat-sized (daily), dog-sized (multiple daily), or  child-sized (minute-by-minute-round-the-clock), the “work” is mostly good and occasionally vexing—with the extreme (yet rare) impulse to gnaw our way out of our own clothing and escape naked into the woods.

Being Wild is a rough and mangy business—just ask the malnourished coyote.  Being captive is hard too.  A Marriage without love is not worth it but Love can be a Savage business, especially when the one we are seeking to love is Ourself.  Balancing Creativity with the demands of captivity is not for the faint of heart.  Just ask the Writer who had to get off our Zoom call the other night because her little daughter had just pooped in the tub.

Well, my Dearies, as Frost says, “the woods are lovely, dark and deep” but we have “promises to keep” and “miles to go before we sleep.”  There is a full moon out tonight—join me for a howl or two—then get on with your precious work of Loving and Mending.  We all need YOU.  Thank you for your Good Work.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Grassitude

Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.  Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s an exciting day today.  I could barely get to sleep last night.  Finally, at long last, I own a sewing machine that makes automatic buttonholes!  You just slip a button into the holder and the machine calculates what size the buttonhole needs to be and makes it. I know, CRAZY, right? Yesterday, I made a little woolen waistcoat and deliberately designed it with too many buttons just to play with this feature on the new machine. 

You might think I am a little dotty about tools.  I won’t disagree.  However, I will say that at the heart of any good tool is some sort of leverage that helps focus power into a more useable format.  Being a relatively small mammal, with only average strength in my teeth and forearms, I will take all the help I can get.

Tools are just ways of harnessing power—power that might otherwise have been wasted in kicking the side of the lawnmower when it won’t start, or in mopping the bathroom floor when the toilet won’t flush.  Harness power in the right way, and it’s very useful.  Let it run amok, and the next thing you know…well… it might involve creatures with horns running through your house. (Sadly, in light of recent events, that doesn’t pertain to just me anymore.)  Usually, tools used well help us get things done with less effort and more efficiency.  It’s taken me a long time to see that Power, like money, like energy, is neutral—it’s all in how we use it that matters. 

I have a fun new neighbor who has never before owned her own home.  She comes over to talk (masked and standing ten feet away) about tools and tell me her latest adventures with squirrels in her attic.  We commiserate about the secret ways we use garden implements that are probably against some sort of code.  (I had just gotten done making washers for a leaky sink out of old rubber gloves.) We’ve both been on a fixing rampage lately.  We are both too house-poor to hire professionals to do things so we are um, getting Creative, if not downright Inventive.  As I continue to prove to the Good Hermits of Hermit Hollow, “any tool can be a hammer.” My Neighbor tells me about how she pried a board off her porch so the water from the roof could run through the space instead of being fed into her cellar, where it was creating a swamp.   I help her find where the squirrels are getting in and she asks if I have some tools she could borrow.  I offer her my hot pink tool bag and apologize ahead of time that the screwdriver is a mess.  I’ve been using it as a chisel. I needed to move the strike plate on a door so that it would latch properly and, unable to find my chisel, I just drilled a ton of tiny holes in the wood until it resembled Swiss cheese and then chopped it all out with a screwdriver.  Probably the most useful thing in the tool bag is all the old baling twine.  It comes in handy for everything.

Her eyes glint as she stores the information away for later use. “You know,” she says, “You need another blog.  We’ll do it together.  It’ll be called ‘How Real Girls Fix Shit.’”  I can tell that, despite all the problems she is having, she is also really excited about being empowered to fix things.  It’s adorable to see how excited she is.  It’s fun to use tools, even if it is the wrong way.  I remember my dad, a masterful furniture maker, telling me that the two most important things in his toolbox were WD40 and duct tape.  “If it’s supposed to move and it isn’t, try the WD40.  If it’s not supposed to move and it is, then use the duct tape.”

I love fixing things.

I loved junior poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s poem today—especially the line where she says our nation “is not broken, but simply unfinished.”  I could not agree more.  In my profession, if it’s not fixed, it’s just not finished.  Going forward, we need all our tools—fancy buttonholers and mangled screwdrivers and everything in between.  If we work together, we will have all the power we’re going to need.

We’re going to need emotional and spiritual tools too.  

I find a lot of these, along with the mowers and weed-whackers, in the barn. This morning, as every morning, I went into the sheep pen to sit and be Present with things—grateful to see my breath hang in the air and remind myself I am a little animal, alive Right Now, with other little animals—social animals with no concept of media or distancing. I sit on my little milk-crate-tuffet in the corner and they push all over me for scratches and cuddles, even after the corn chips are gone. They think nothing of staring deep into my eyes and belching lovingly into my face.  They never say “excuse me.” Etiquette really isn’t their thing…

Incidentally, the sheep have had incredibly fresh-smelling breath lately.  It smells like they are burping up Pine-sol but it’s really just Christmas tree.   They have carefully stripped all the flesh and skin off this thing, peeling it with their razor-sharp lower teeth (sheep have no upper teeth in the front of their mouths) with the efficiency of expensive kitchen gadgets.  Now, just the pale ribs and spine remain, like a beached sea creature in their paddock.

I tell them that a new day is dawning in America today. “A new dawn dawns every day,” they yawn.  “Now what?” they want to know.

“Love means Work,” I say. “We need to gather our tools. We need to do a lot of repair work, starting with ourselves. We need to soften the hard edges of our words, meet hostility with gentility and kindness, cultivate Curiosity, and practice Gratitude.”

“Gratitude?” asks a young sheep curiously.

“She means Grassitude,” says an older sheep knowingly.

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you are knee deep in the tender shoots of spring and the sunshine and breeze are in total agreement to make the temperature just right and the whole fragrant meadow is in bloom and you can’t bite or gulp any faster—each chew is more delicious than the next but you don’t have time to taste it in the rush.  Every now and then a bit of clover or a dandelion bud explodes mid-bite and drags a rainbow of flavor across your tongue, but you ignore it as you continue to snarf your way across the field with your friends.  You hurry and hurry and hurry, anxiously thinking that where you are is ‘good’ but inside you are panicking because somewhere else might be better and you can’t help wondering if everyone else is getting something you aren’t.  Later, when you are lying in the shade, Calm, you begin to Ruminate on your full belly.  You see how vast the meadow is and know you are Always provided for.  Then, you burp.  You taste each bite again, slowly, and you chew thoroughly, extracting all the Nourishment.  You realize, as if for the first time, how Good it all is.  It feels good to rest, to breathe, to turn the volume down on the ambient anxiety that had your wooly undies all wadded up… You just breathe…. and chew…. You know that everything is going to be OK.  That’s grassitude.”

“Ah yes,” the young sheep smiles. “I remember now.”

Well, Dear Ones, may we all remember… Gratitude invites Grace and there is SO much to be Grateful for today.  I am grateful for YOU.  (and ewe…and ewe…)(sorry, couldn’t resist!)  Let the mending continue!

With sew much love,

Nancy

Listen to the Cricket

If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” –C.S. Lewis

Greetings Dear Ones!

I did a very bad thing this week.  It wasn’t a terrible thing, but in the same way that one rain drop does not cause a whole flood, it was definitely going to lead to worse things over time and get me into situations that would lead me down slopes more slippery than my daily trip to the barn with sloshing water buckets.  Taken to an exaggerated extreme, such slopes could lead one to take candy from strangers, then babies, then who knows where the trails of depravity lead…perhaps to the Capitol Building???

I’m not even sure I could explain what I did to those of you have never attempted to make piping for a shirt.  Piping, by definition is: “The ancient Scottish link between music and noise” AND also “a narrow fold of material used to decorate edges or seams.”  For our purposes, it is that little bit of color that sticks out around the seams of cowboy shirts…

Anyway, the details don’t really matter.  The sequence of what happened went like this:

1.       I did not research what I wanted to do.  I charged ahead without doing any genuine fact-finding.  I was arrogant enough to think I could wing it.  The truth is that I have not made piping for a long time (such shirts have been out of style since the 80’s) and I needed a refresher.  Two minutes on YouTube or a phone call to a fellow Seamster would have done the trick.

2.      I cut a whole lot of fabric the wrong way.  I cut it way too small.  I did not allow for the necessary slack, for a Margin, for error.   It slays my sense of cosmic humor when the biggest error is in not leaving room for error.  To make it perfectly, I needed room for it NOT to be perfect.  Ha! (Pause to slap the knee…)

3.      Within minutes of attempting to get my zipper foot to sit next to the cord, I found myself in a desperate fight for alignment.  The more I struggled, the more things shifted out of place.  (How much more metaphysical can we get?)

4.      A little voice said, “pssst… excuse me…but this is not working. You cut the fabric strips the wrong width.”

5.      “Shut up, little voice,” said I boldly, “I am going to make this work.  I cannot be bothered cutting new strips. That took me a whole ten minutes of life and I am NOT going back there.”

6.      “But LIFE is a Spiral Path, Dear One—it’s time to return to the beginning and begin again,” said the Gentle Voice. “There’s even a C.S. Lewis quote about this very thing!”

7.      “Be GONE, Little Voice” I bellowed, hunching closer to my task, unwilling to admit defeat. “I got this.  I’ll be fine.”

8.      For forty-five minutes, I laboriously inched and squinched (that is a word in Nancyland. You get it by combining squeezed + pinched) my way along the cord, begging to the two edges to meet peacefully next to the cord.

9.      Occasionally, things slipped out of control and I stitched right over the cord. (A big no-no.)

10.   I had to use tweezers to make it perfect.

11.    After nearly an hour, I was trembling, nearly blind, and bathed in sweat from having nearly caught my fingers in the needle several times.

12.   I had to face reality.  This was Unmanageable.

I HATE REALITY. I want to kick it in the shins.  Especially when it is not the reality I wanted.  Grundalina stumbled off in search of cookies. The inner teenager slammed doors and used curse words she’s not allowed to use. Prudence lectured. The inner child sobbed.  She wanted to play something way more fun than “Let’s be a seamstress” today.  Underneath their caterwauler, I heard the little voice whisper, “Do the Right Thing. You’ll feel better.”

So I did. And I did.

The moral of the story—for those of you who do not detest such things—is:

Help yourself out. Check your facts, REAL facts, which sometimes involve measuring things with sticks with numbers. Be clear about what you are attempting to do. Seek help or collaboration.  Very rarely is any one of us the wisest or most experienced in the room. LISTEN to that help.  Especially when it comes from within.

Our lives, our little daily lives—I’m NOT talking about revolutions or governments or corporations--but our own daily little tiny lives, demand great courage and actions that sometimes don’t have the luxury of endless thought or research or committee meetings for all concerned.  Sure, we are going to be hasty and make mistakes. We are going to leave the house without socks on, reverse the vehicle through the garage door without opening it first, and pour orange juice instead of milk in the coffee.  “Mistakes you can repent at leisure,” sniffs Prudence haughtily.   Usually, as soon as we realize we make a mistake, we try to fix it. 

But sometimes we don’t.  

And that’s when we deliberately choose something Bad.   That’s the moment we could choose something that builds the Courage Muscle instead.

My customer will have no idea I wasted fabric, as we had plenty (thank Heaven!!)  I will not charge him for the wasted time.  But a crime has been committed: Against myself.  I ignored my own inner voice and robbed myself of at least an hour’s pay and my own self-respect. This is not petty theft. I knew what I was doing was wrong and YET I CONTINUED.  I thought, in my narcissism, that if I willed it, it would turn out ok.  It didn’t.  AND I KNEW BETTER.   Respecting ourselves means listening to ourselves tell the truth, then believing what we hear. 

Being willing to say “I am not doing very well; I know I could do better,” is one of the most validating things we can do for ourselves—if we mean it honestly and are not brokenly trying to shame ourselves, or cajole others for pity.   If we cannot listen to ourselves in little ways, how can we listen in bigger ways?  How can we build trust in ourselves?  If we cannot hear our own voices, how will we hear the voices of others and realize that we are the same?  How can we build unity in our neighborhoods, communities, nations, and world if we don’t realize we are fundamentally the same?  This is step one towards treating each other as proper equals.

With horror and astonishment, we look at the misdeeds of those in power and say “they should have known better.” Well, they did.  We say “they should have done the right thing.” Yet they didn’t.  Some still won’t.   They have incredibly flabby Courage Muscles.  (And shirts with no piping…)

I’m sad.  I want them to fix our world.  But then I sit down to make a shirt and realize I ain’t got a mere “mote” in my eye. I lie to myself every day.  I say I will clean out the fridge and exercise and play my scales and practice the fiddle and harp and fight tooth decay and that mold that is under the sink…. And I don’t.  I pretend I can handle things I can’t. (Like when I thought it might be a good idea to put two hundred pounds of chicken feed on a sled to get it down the icy hill to the barn and it left without me.)

Eventually, I was proud of the shirt I made for that man.  It looks beautiful.  He will never know the struggle I had with the piping. I’m glad I had the humility to start over and make it better.  It was worth it. 

Most of us will never get the chance to live our messy lives out there in the open on the big screen for others to judge (And there’s a mercy! I’d have to scrape my boots for sure.)  But in the quiet of our little workshops, we can be in dialogue with those soft, little, inner voices—the Crickets of our conscience—who tell us how we could rise up and be Magnificent in the tiniest of ways.  As a dear friend put it recently, “If enough of us were half-decent raindrops, we could get together and make a drink for a new flower.” 

Most of us have one of Prudence’s maiden aunts in our heads, crying out “Enough of your half-assed-slap-dashery, you Wastrel!”  We hear it directed at ourselves; we shout it at each other. This is not the message. Go deeper. For there is nothing like hearing that sweet little Cricket whisper “You are Enough. You are a Unique and Precious Being who is dearly loved.  Share that—that which is the best within you—with this aching world.”  If you can’t hear it for yourself today, then hear it now, from me, an unknown, obscure fellow Slacker in a little shop in a little town in a little state in a great big hurting country. If an angry leader can say it to a mob of murderous lunatics, I can say it too:

You are so dearly Loved. Thank you for doing your best—especially when no one sees the cost but you. Gentleness will be our strength. Get your courage muscles ready—we have a lot of Mending to do.

Yours aye,

Nancy

Forward Momentum

“It’s not about inviting great things into our lives. Rather, it’s about accepting the invitation of great things to step out of our lives.” Craig D. Lounsbrough

Greetings Dear Ones!

Let me start by expressing deep and sincere gratitude to all who took the time to write me a message last week.  Some of the most heart-warming thoughts came from people I have never met, in countries, states, or counties I have never been to.  I am deeply moved by how far apart some of us are geographically and yet how close in spirit. Membership in our tribe is not bound by the externals of governments, geographical locations, race, creed, color, age, or gender—but by what we choose to cherish.  Thinking of us all as “best friends we have not met yet” cheered me a great deal. Thank you!

This is especially heart-lifting, given the waves of fear and anguish I feel about what is happening in my country/our world right now.  I’ve had to spend a lot of time with my sheep lately to stop watching the news and to ground myself in normalcy and Good Manure.  When I told my wooly pals that there were beings wearing horns snorting and rampaging through our nation’s capitol building Wednesday, they looked shocked.

“Were they looking for cookies?” they wanted to know.

“I’m not even sure they know what they were looking for,” I admit. 

They look thoughtful.
“Horns, you say?” asked one.  “They must have been sheep…”

“I’ll bet they were either sheep, or maybe wolves trying to dress like sheep,” says the oldest ewe, knowingly.  “They do that, you know. You can always tell because they get the fluff all wrong.”

“But were they Devils?” I want to know, “Devils also have horns.”  Instantly, I realize too late that I have insulted the wethers (who have horns). They look at me as if I must be being sarcastic.  I’m not.  I’m secretly very afraid of horns.  To me, anything with horns could be a devil.  I have a friend whose teeth were knocked out by a set of horns.  

“Were they playing fiddles?” they ask mockingly.
“Touche,” I say.

“They were mostly sheep with a few wolves who are just planning to eat those sheep later,” decides the youngest one with fearful eyes.

We are all silent then, pondering.  Normally, the ewes are chatterboxes—running back and forth nervously asking a bunch of silly questions:  “Are we going out? Are we staying in? Is there anything to eat that is different from the stuff we have already been eating all day? What’s in your pockets, girlfriend?”  They are like those people on a tour bus who have to know everything first so they can then inform everyone else.   Today, they were subdued.  Perhaps they have not forgiven me for another scary-silly thing that happened the other day. 

We’d gotten a lot of snow followed by a lot of rain followed by a steep drop in temperature.   As a result, the ground was covered with a six inch crust of frozen grizzle, for lack of a better word.  It’s like poured concrete to try to shovel and slick as glass.  Getting down the hill to the barn with a full bucket of water in each hand is no joke.  The dogs and I had managed to skitter our way, finding toeholds in old boot prints as we went.  Once at the safety of the dirt floor of the barn, I opened the gate to the sheep pen to let them out to roam the field and nibble brush.  For some reason, I assumed they would walk out daintily, like wooly ladies and gentlemen.  NO.

They blasted past me in a mass rush I have only before witnessed at Italian train stations when the doors slide open.  They stormed out in a block, as if they were stuck together with Velcro.  They had picked up a lot of speed by the time they hit the ice.  Four went down at once and slid several yards, scrambling, as if they had been bowled, or used in a curling match.  The rest screeched to a halt at the dirt margin and watched in horror as their companions tumbled, struggled to right themselves, and then, well, sheepishly tried to ice skate on tiny hooves back to the shelter of the barn.  They kept falling over.  The poor sheep, deprived of friction, behaved like true Newtonians, which is a scientific word for when a Jack Russell sneaks into your car and eats an entire box of Fig Newtons you happened to leave there, then gets trapped inside for several hours. It was a mess.  

One of the blessings of my odd little life is that I get private viewings of things like sheep attempting to ice skate.  I don’t set out to create these situations; they just happen. But the sheep were not amused.  No amount of cookies could mollify them.  Luckily, no one got hurt.  They are all like fluffy pillows with a stick at each corner for legs and I am so thankful that none of those slender sticks were snapped.

It made me think about the dangers of Momentum and the mad rushes I get myself into in the shop.  Each project needs a certain amount of preliminary force and to get it over the hump from “undone” towards “done.”  It helps to make a certain amount of progress very quickly before letting something sit for a while.  I hate it when I get to an order and completely forget the details of what I am supposed to do.  I curse the former self who thought she could remember the curve of a woman’s hip or the length of a man’s arm without writing it down.   The old saying “well begun is half done,” seems very true to me.

Very often, Progress begins backwards: Step one is destruction.  We cannot underestimate the significance of the destruction phase—whether we are cutting up old shirts or brand new fabric, we are making Transformation irrevocable and undeniable.  There is no going back.  To stop with simple destroying is unthinkable.  As craftspeople, we embrace the idea that ruining something is only the first step towards creating something we believe will be better.  Yes.  We are gamblers.  Many people stop right here.  They cannot cope with the fear of wrecking something.  It takes exquisite Faith and Vulnerability to say ‘I dare to change this (thing) into something else.’   Many people who fear change—in their fabric, in their relationships, in their country, don’t appreciate how necessary the release of “the old” is in the creating of the “new.”

However, destroying for the sake of destroying is NOT something creative souls do.  It is the work of toddlers, cowards, and sheep who should never have discovered the back kitchen door was open.  When I work, I need to keep strong the envisioning of a Good Outcome and immediately to begin the positive steps towards reconstruction.  If I pause the project during the “take it apart” phase—I get demoralized and find it doubly hard to gather momentum when I come back to it.

That’s why I hate it when people bring me a bag of shreds saying “here—I tried to fix this only now it’s a mess…” [translation:  “Now, that it’s a load of total crap, I bequeath it to you. It’s all yours. P.S. please make it perfect!”  or WORSE “I thought I’d do you a favor and save some time by starting the job for you”—like the woman who chopped the sleeves off her husband’s shirts and wanted them made into short-sleeves, only she had cut them off too short.  The poor man was going to have to wear capped sleeves the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1960’s.  I wound up having to splice the old sleeves back on and start over…  If there is a mess to be made, I kind of like to have a choice in how it’s made.  It’s often much harder to fix someone else’s botched attempts.

Sometimes, we can’t help it.  Life hands us other people’s mistakes.  Our work, and the joy of Mending something or making it even better than before, is in using our creative Magic despite our lack of control around how it arrives at our station.  Like the charge of the Light Brigade, “Ours is not to question why/ours is but to do or die.” Not Diet.

Physics tells us that

P=mv

           p= momentum, m=mass, v=velocity

…Which basically means that a certain amount of Friction is necessary for progress.  And that a Moment is the center of Momentum. 

“It’s going fast but not falling on your tum in the moment,” says a young sheep, helpfully. “Sliding head first through life really only works if you are Pete Rose…”

“And MASS means you need to go to Mass!” bellows Prudence.  None of us know exactly what velocity means but the sheep are learning.

“Most of life is dull and grubby,” they say, “but the thought of cookies is the kind of excitement that leads to action.”   And Action, as we have seen, can lead to a mess if we don’t stay over our own hooves.  To make progress, we need to understand the substrate beneath us.  We can only go as fast as safety permits.

But neither may we stop.

From the wreckage around us, may we rebuild greater beauty.  Into the anger and the hate, may we pour our love.  I’m absolutely not being a sweet person when I say such things.  I mean it savagely, with wild passion and raw strength.   I’m asking you to help me Love (not necessarily forgive, condone, or not hold accountable) the eejits who bring us the messes we don’t want to have to fix.  Let’s grab our needles, our fiddles, our pens, our hearts and Let The Mending Begin. (again.) (and again.) What TINY little thing could you help us fix, TODAY? 

Handle your rage responsibly and then get on with it.  We have a LOT to do…

Well, my Dear Ones, I was SO almost ready for the New Year to begin… I was just going to get a few things organized… Wait, WHAT?? It left without me??  I’m going to tip-toe carefully over the ruts of ice and hope I can catch up.

May you be safe and healthy.  I love you SEW much!!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Closure...

“First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down.” –George Burns

Happy New Year’s Day, Dear Ones!

I am sipping a cup of Peach Detox tea with the last of the Christmas cookies this morning.  I have been told recently that I need to eat more “intuitively.”  I heartily agree.  (Especially when my inner voice says that I should eat up all the cookies NOW, rather than have them around later, when they might tempt me.)   The first sunrise of the baby year has managed to throw a tiny leg over the New Hampshire mountains in the distance and make its way steadily to Vermont.  Through the window, I can see the barn gradually turning from shadow into color.

More by the light of the moon than the sun, I go to visit the sheep and see that their new manger, built for them on Christmas day, is full.  It is.  They are lying down, uninterested in last summer’s salad. They want this winter’s cookies.  Thanks to Christmas cookies, the new sheep—who were a tad shy at first—have learned to rush the unsuspecting and bite at their gloves in search of sugar.  It’s impossible to go in and visit with them without being bullied and pushed and shaken down for treats. 

I plop down on my little milk crate seat in the corner and start to talk with them about closures—about how lovely things like Christmas cookies have to come to an end.  “We all need to go back to eating green stuff that needs a lot of chewing” I tell them.  “Cookies are over.”  They refuse to believe me—nudging and snuffling and nipping at my pockets and gloves.  They want to eat Intuitively too.

A new dawn, a new day, a new year comes quietly, gently, tenderly to the sheep fold.  I bury my face in the rich aroma of warm raw wool and sigh out steam that hangs in the air, then curls away.  There is so much I need to leave behind with 2020.  The past few months have been filled with intense physical activity and deeply sorrowful personal struggle.  I feel depleted, exhausted.  I know this is true for so many of us.  I have longed to write more, to process, to share, to commiserate but in the end I just had to endure it wordlessly.  And yet, I am deeply grateful for the many blessings that 2020 brought too—my new home, a wonderful new shop and work space, new music buddies, and above all, Clarity about what is truly important to me.  But it’s been Hard…

I know You understand.

The sheep don’t.

Placidly, they burp and munch.  They have nothing to leave behind except small handfuls of what a six-year-old friend calls “doots.”   They have no idea what day it is. “Your problem is that you think you have a Future and a Past,” one tells me, looking deep into my eyes. “This is nonsense.  You have neither.  There is either Cookies, or Not Cookies, that is All.”  The others nod sagely, chewing. 

“So you ascribe to philosophical presentism?” I ask.  “Are you Zen Buddhists?  Forgive me for assuming otherwise--The way you hang out around angels and mangers, and that big part you played in the original Christmas Story, you know…  I kind of thought…”

“That we are Semitic???” asks one.

“We are more like Taoists who eat shrubbery and have a tendency to panic,” interrupted another, setting me straight.  We leave it at that.  I have to get going.  Even though it is a “holiday” in my world, I have to get to my shop to work.   My opening day of 2021 is going to be all about closures.  Literally.

A woman called the other day and asked if I did zippers.   “I have six jackets I’ve been carrying around with me looking for someone who will fix them.  I dragged them all the way to [town about thirty miles from here] to a place that used to do them but they said that they don’t do them anymore…”

“Yes,” I said soberly, biting my lips and trying not to cross my eyes… “bring them in.  I’ll do my best.” Then I hung up the phone and wept.

You might think that it’s because I hate doing zippers. (I do.)  You might think that it’s because she was dragging six (ugh! SIX) of them towards me at the speed of a Subaru Forrester (it’s Vermont. Everyone drives Subarus—unless, of course, they are lucky enough to have a vintage VW bus.)  But honestly, it’s more than that.  It’s because suddenly I ached all over for my friend, whom I once nicknamed “Zippy,” who has been diagnosed with an awful kind of cancer that is known for being particularly swift and savage.  I texted her and told her I was thinking of her and she wrote back saying she really wished she could do those zippers for me, if she could.   We then called and had a good chat and told each other how much we loved each other (again).  And then, us being US, we couldn’t help laughing and being very silly.

We laughed about all the times we would arrive at the old shop at the same time and race each other to the back door, keys outstretched, trying to be the first one in so that we could claim “employee of the month.”  We laughed about how we wanted to make a reality T.V. show out of all the hilarious things that happened—men who asked us to repair their boxer shorts in odd ways, female cops who needed their uniforms to look more “sexy,” ghastly bridezillas, customers who roamed the shop in their underwear, and people who wanted custom outfits for their pets…  We laughed about which “Golden Girl” actress would play each of us in the movie version and which customer we wanted to be when we grew up.  I had wanted to be the stale-smelling librarian with the fascinatingly smooth coif of hair and vintage tweed clothing that fit her so perfectly despite a significant dowagers hump.   Zippy wanted to be the one who slapped around bare-legged in furry galoshes with her slip hanging out.  “It’s not that I want to look terrible,” she had clarified at the time, “it’s that I want to live long enough not to care if I do or not.”

Those words haunt me now.  Young people, PAY ATTENTION.  It’s never too soon to stop caring about how you look! People who run about in plastic boots with Eisenhower-era slips hanging out under their clothes are probably having a way better life than you are.  Get to it!

So today is going to be a Zipper day in my little shop.  I have been doing quite a lot of them lately.  I remember Zippy saying that “there’s not that much to it, really—if you had to, you could do it and get good at it.” She made it look so easy.  When I let go of my tendency to Avoid hard things, I learn quite a bit from them.  “If you can’t get out of it, get Into it,” barks Prudence.

Prudence feels the need to teach you all a little about Zippers:

For one thing, the adage “little things mean a lot” definitely applies.  The teeth must be intact and perfectly aligned.  For want of a tooth, the pulley was lost; for want of a pulley, the zipper was lost; for want of a zipper, the jacket was lost; for want of a jacket, the teenager was lost; for want of a teenager, the mother had to nag herself voiceless and then shovel all the snow herself…and so it goes… Check first to see if you have all your teeth. (Try not to bite anyone, even those holding cookies.)

If there is not a tooth missing or broken, Alignment is key. How spiritual is that?  Get all the Little Things in order and BIG CONNECTIONS can occur.  I love it.

The Left and the Right must come together and agree to alternate appropriately.  (Now that’s a message for a country that doesn’t want to run around getting snow down its pants!)

99 % of all damage is operator inflicted. Good people of Earth, PLEASE HEAR THIS: Begin mindfully and carefully. You cannot just start yanking on a Pulley and expect it to do your bidding like an obedient Labrador retriever.  So many people are in a hurry and don’t bother to line things up right at the start.  Zippers are moody little things.  They need to be appeased. That little metal doo-dad MUST be properly seated first, like your honored granny at Thanksgiving, or a toddler just learning to poo in the potty, or things won’t go well after that.  Get them all firmly seated in their proper places (possibly in an outhouse located three counties away) before you begin.

Here’s another tip: Know when to stop.  If you yank past the stopper, you pull the whole pulley off and there is NO getting it back on without tiny pliers stolen from your son’s guitar case, specialized machinery, AND a magic wand. The next thing you know, you’ll be watching a loved one, arms trapped overhead, head entirely missing, doing a disturbingly violent (yet oddly erotic) dance as he/she/they tries to escape before you have to cut them free with rusty kitchen shears. 

I hate zippers.   But damn, they ARE Good Teachers.   Like Covid-19, Life without them is all Buttons and Bows.  Ever since 1851, when Elias Howe introduced the “Automatic Continuous Clothing Closure,” (which was not a marketing success),   zippers have been transforming lives and fashions.  Grudgingly, I admit that they are jolly useful. Many’s the time I have stood in a dressing room, watching a woman (it’s always a woman) in a stretchy knit pull-over dress, scrunching up fistfuls of fabric in her hands, saying “why can’t you take it in?  It’s still so loose…”   And the answer is always, “because, Madam, we would never again get you OUT of that garment.  You need the ease to accommodate entry and exit.  If you want it that tight, I shall have to install a zipper under your arm.”  

For, what are Closures anyway, but Openings in disguise?

That’s all for now, my dearies!  May 2021 bring you every blessing.  May we continue to learn from and with each other.  May we view this world with tenderness and lavish the love it needs. May we work swiftly, with all the skill we have to Mend what needs mending.  May we have the Grace to listen to the problem fully before we start pulling towards the answer.  May we bless the past, embrace the future and eat our greens (or cookies) in between.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S.   I invite you to comment, share, or subscribe.  I am looking for ways to focus more on improving my writing this year and the generosity of your insights is invaluable. Thank you.

The Shopping Season

Greetings Dear Ones!

To Prudence’s horror, we heard an advertisement recently that called this season “The Shopping Season.”  What??? No it’s NOT!!!  How dare they claim for Capitalism this deeply Spiritual Season of Preparation—when we reverently garnish our homes with garish gee-gaws, gawdy ornaments, and crinkled tinsel (“almost as vile as glitter…” huffs Prudence). Then we have a tree slain in our honor that we may bring it indoors and spend the next six weeks (or, if you are like me, the next six months) watching it die and vacuuming evergreen needles out of the rug  (Just kidding! Who vacuums??)—All so we can welcome the relatives we already had enough of at Thanksgiving.  (As if people returning within a month won’t recognize the place with all the elf statuary, mistletoe, and Jingle Bells.)  It’s the season of eye-itching sweaters, odd food pairings (like smoked fish and candy canes), and occasionally gruesome music whose themes seem to center on the fauna of Lapland who, having been mercilessly teased for their sinus issues, then run over and murder the elderly.  And all in the name of helping us forget this is essentially a Pagan festival born of Fear of the Dark. 

The Truth is, it is more than likely only a HALF-birthday for the Christ Child (for those, like my nephews, who celebrate half-birthdays) since he was almost certainly born during lambing season—which is approximately five months away.  Still, who doesn’t want to party in the Dark and celebrate the Return of the Light, especially if it involves beverages made of eggs and indoor shrubbery? (Indoor shrubbery is not actually an intended ingredient…though, after a while, it does turn up in everything from pockets to pancakes, kind of like glitter.)   The whole thing, like the year of 2020 itself, seems to be the invention of an imaginative fifth-grader trying to make a story as weird as possible… “Yeah, um… there are going to be some flying deer, and a barn full of  animals who talk at midnight, and a pesky elf who causes worn out parents to lose their minds because they were so darn busy putting cloves (Cloves?? When do we ever use cloves any other time of the year?) in their baking that they forgot to move him and now the children are in danger of suspecting there isn’t really a jolly man with carbohydrate issues who is going to stealthily break and enter their home while they are asleep and eat all their cookies…

Yeah…. “I guess we might as well call it the Shopping Season,” says the part of me that isn’t cynical at all.

A young shopper came to see me about a week ago.  She had (I’m not kidding) nearly twenty things to try on.  “I just brought a few things to start off.  I love to shop,” she giggled as she held up her forty-gallon kitchen trash bag full of clothes.  “It helps me stay sane.  I guess I feel powerless with the Covid thing, you know, so I get to decide what I want,” she said miming the act of clicking a mouse.  Apparently, she wanted a whole lot of stuff that wasn’t her size, along with the exact same skirt in every single color available, as well as a lot of past-season bargains that she won’t be wearing until next summer, or maybe January, if Greta Thunberg is correct.   She kept asking me if things looked like “her.”  I had no idea how to answer.  I had only just met her!  She was looking directly into two large mirrors but she couldn’t “see” herself. So often, we use other people “seeing us” as a way to see ourselves.

Maybe she was just asking if they looked good on her, which is hard to tell when things don’t fit.  I am always loath to answer questions on fashion.  (Please, don’t ask the middle-aged woman with animal dung on her shoes what “looks good!”) After all, having gotten off the fashion train in the 1830’s, my own personal “look” is some version of Amish-track-star-in-cowboy-boots.  I keep imploring such customers, “Tell me what you want.  I want you to be comfortable.” Prudence is more harsh:  “We are here to make this fit YOUR whims, not ours.  We are not available to follow you everywhere in your life, capering in constant rapture because you chose this cardigan, which really would have looked much nicer in navy blue, buttoned to your throat…” (If you think Prudence is mean, you should have seen her prototype—the nun who taught me in eighth grade.)

Gradually, as she tried on various styles from her bag (we’re back to the young customer now, not the nun from eighth grade), I began think I could see who “she” was—a dear, sweet, very Young soul, in a masquerade ball of “choices.”  She was Me, ten, twenty, and thirty years ago. She didn’t have clothing; she had costumes. Like most of us, she was a great variety of people who might be glimpsed differently through the eyes of a date, a boss, a teacher, a lover, or a friend.  In our private confessional, behind the dressing room curtain, she was asking me to see her, at least partially, as all these things. Some things made her look pretty; some made her look smart; some made her look sweet; some made her look smoking hot; and some made her look like she was entering renal failure—or at best, like she had dined on raw salad onions at lunch and was going pale and waxy from being forced to breathe her own fumes beneath her mask.  None of them looked to me like HER. Watching her shape-shift from powerful to meek and back was like observing a kaleidoscope of femininity.     I began to think about women and clothing and Power, wondering, are we Choosing, or hoping to be Chosen? In short, “Which are we, the Shoppers or the Merch?”   

How many young women (I know I should say “people,” but in this case I actually mean women) are given the impression that they are supposed to make a nice little package of themselves and hope the Right Buyer “values” them enough to trade whatever blood or treasure is necessary for the pleasure of “keeping her” happily, ever after?  And what is it the mystery “buyer” seeks—Autonomy or Loyalty? Self-reliance or Interdependence? Are we supposed to be Strong? Or make them the heroes? Are we supposed to see ourselves as Alone? Or anchored in ourselves by being the center of a web of important connections with others?

These questions and insecurities radiate outwards in all areas of our lives--especially in this, the “Shopping Season.”  Who, exactly, are we shopping for?  What do we hope will happen as a result of all our Spending? 

This time of year, I like to sit in a corner of the barn and try to explain basic economics to the sheep.  I tell them that the Christmas tree they ate last year got turned into wool that is going to be made into a Christmas shawl for someone special (if I can get it done on time!)  They just nuzzle me, enquiring what happened to all the corn chips.  “Are you Shoppers? Or are you Merch?” I ask them.  One looks at me and blinks.  “We only talk on Christmas Eve,” another whispers out of the side of her cudding mouth.

“Nonsense,” I reply.  “I know you talk all year round, to those who are listening.”

They roll their eyes and shrug.

“Ok. We’re Merch,” they burp.  “Definitely. All prey animals are.”

“What about Pray Animals?” I ask.

“They have Free Will,” they say with unconcerned nonchalance.  “They get to decide.” 

The sheep, who know considerably more about Fashion than I do, insisting “there’s no such thing as bad weather; only bad clothing,” hunker down in the straw and help me devise the following Guide to help us during the “Shopping Season.”  As you go forth to make your buying decisions, here’s how to recognize whether you are becoming The Shopper or  The Merch:

1.       Shoppers see themselves Directly, without the help of Middlemen (people)

2.      Merch needs other people to see, to praise, to validate, or encourage their image of themselves.

3.      Shoppers choose based on how things make them feel, rather than how others think.  They buy to share Joy, not to “make someone happy.”

4.      Merch hopes, passively, that it will get “chosen,” by choosing “the right thing,” though they haven’t a clue what that is.

5.      Shoppers don’t need other people’s opinions because they don’t want to get stuck having to manage energy coming towards them they cannot control or be responsible for.

6.      Merch gives to Others management of issues they should handle themselves.

7.      Shoppers don’t actually have to buy a damn thing.

8.      Merch will purchase anything in order to gain approval

9.      Shoppers are not for Sale.

10.   Merch will continually bargain itself down in humiliating spirals in the hopes of going home with someone…Anyone…

Merch, according to the sheep, (bless them), will also eat up all your old Christmas trees if you let them, not to mention any stale bread or corn chips you might have lying about.  They will wear lumps of wool and sit in draughts and placidly listen to you go on and on about how much you hate shopping, even on-line shopping.

I would definitely write more—as this feels Unfinished—but there is a fragrant Jack Russell at my feet, whom I suspect of being a Shopper. He says there is no Free Will where incontinence is concerned and if I don’t want to have to add “shop for a new carpet” to my list, I shall have to sign off Now.  If I have to buy a new carpet immanently, I’m not sure who I will turn into… perhaps someone who never finished her blogs…

Take care my Dear Ones! This is a time of Patience with the Dark.  May we give each other the respect, the tolerance, the forgiveness, and the Service that one can never find in a shop.  Charity is Price-less.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Still Thankful...

“We Thank Thee, Lord, for food and friends, And all the Good thy mercy sends”

Greetings Dear Ones,

When a gorgeous pumpkin pie the size of a hubcap shot from its store-bought container and blasted out the open back of the SUV like it had been fired from an extra-terrestrial pie gun* and landed naked, face-down in the driveway mud, my first words were definitely NOT “Oh! Goody! Disasters are wonderful opportunities.”   No…  I said Other Words.  Very naughty words.  I stared in disbelief at the upside-down pie on the ground.  It’s packaging was still exactly where I had balanced it, along with all the other feast-fixings.  They were intact.  That pie, and just that pie, had its own private agreement with gravity.

Slacker me was very disappointed.  Not because I like pumpkin pie all that much; I don’t.  I prefer any kind of pies to pumpkin pies but I definitely prefer pumpkin pies to no pies at all.  I hadn’t had the time to make a pie in the first place, and now I didn’t have time for a return trip to the store, certainly not the store where I had bought that pie.  And that pie had been the crowning glory on what was to be the “Perfect” first Thanksgiving with my family in the new house. The artist in me mourned its perfection.   It wasn’t just a vast wheel of pumpkin Goodness; it was a work of Art with perfectly carved finials of crust around the edges.  It was, in fact, the Platonic Ideal of a pumpkin pie.  My inner Victim instantly recognized the sabotage and suspected this pie of knowing it was way out of our league.  Even shattered in the mud, it shimmered with cinnamon and nutmeg charm.  Of course we could never have a pie like that… It had to jump ship and commit pie-icide.  For folks like us to dare to aspire to a pie like that…what was I thinking?

From the bushes, the chickens emerged as scavengers.  They were absolutely delighted to discover the mess.  By the time I had the groceries in on the kitchen counter they had pecked off the entire crust and exposed the orange sunset beneath.   They were making the kind of noises that satisfied guests make when they discover you used real butter in the crust.  Their compliments to the chef were almost more than I could bear.  It was worse than watching the Great British Bake Off and not getting to nibble the burnt bits.  (Those are always the best bits, eh?)

Where was I to get a replacement pie?  If only there were such things as the “pie guns” mentioned above.  When my son was young, he used to spend hours building complicated ships out of Leggos, with impressive canonry which he insisted was used solely for inter-galactic pie dispersal.  “These are not scary guns, Mummy,” he insisted. “They are not for killing. They are for getting the pies way far away quickly to people who need them.  They make people smile.”  How does one call out for an intergalactic pie delivery?  I wondered.  How could I be entering into a holiday celebrating all we HAVE with the idea that there was something missing? There was something bordering on obscene in the irony.

To distract Grundalina Thunderpants from the impulse to lie down in the mud next to the lost pie and snork what she could through a straw, I thought about my work day and an interesting conversation I had had that very morning.  A man had entered the workshop asking “Do you know the difference between pants and trousers?” before he even said hello.  The eyes above his mask were bright and curious.  “Why is that plural even though a shirt is not and they are each just one item of clothing?And what about slacks?  Where do they fit in?”

I love questions like that.  I love learning about the origins and uses of words.  My inner professor lunged for her podium, brandishing the lecture on garments designed to cover our lower halves. “Pants,” she announced, are the shortened form of “pantaloons” and are pluralized because anything that can be bifurcated (i.e. cut in two) is considered plural in our language—same with scissors, trousers, glasses, sleeves etc…  There are “two” pants—one for each leg.  In America, we use the word pants for anything that covers the legs from the waist to the ankles.  In the U.K., they reserve the use of the word to mean only underwear or underpants.  They use the word “trousers” for outerwear for the legs.  Breathless, fearful that her audience was losing interest, she continued: In America, we also use the word trousers interchangeably for pants—but we tend to imply that the garment has more tailoring—with topstitching, pockets, belt loops etc… and is worn more formally.  “Slacks” comes from an old Saxon word for “loose” and they tend to be a fuller cut… Normally, customers glaze over with this much detail but his eyes brightened further.  I liked him immediately.

“I’m a problem analyst,” he said. “I’m intrigued with language.  Language often can reveal where the problem is.  I go into big companies all the time and have them tell me where things are going wrong.  I listen to how they explain the story.  Then I show them how their “problems” are just fantastic opportunities.  There is no such thing as a mistake.  Every single disaster brings a gift.”  He beamed, then handed me the trousers he was holding. Clearly, a “gift.”

I nodded. I knew what he meant—at least on a certain level.  If people don’t rip their pants or need me to hem their dresses or tailor their clothing due to some specialized requirement which, sometimes, is the result of a disaster, then I have no work to do.  In a way, I “profit” from their problems.  But he was taking it much further than that.  He meant that the people themselves were blest in some way from having to address their own needs.  The needs themselves, not the absence of them,  ARE the blessing. 

I stared back at the pie at my feet and thought about his sentiment, the energy in his words.  Was there a thought with which to try to leverage great value from a smashed pie in the mud? How could I be Delighted with this experience?  Clearly, the chickens were profiting.  Perhaps they were saving me fifty-seven cents’ worth of chicken feed that I could invest in the stock market and turn into a lucrative IRA fund in three-hundred years… I rolled my eyes.

Then I struggled.  I struggled physically with the groceries, with setting things to rights in the kitchen, and getting food prepped for the dinner the next day.  But most of all, I struggled mentally with that gorgeous pie in the mud.  The best I could do was promise myself a jolly blog about it later.

Against Covid regulations, at least 32 people showed up to dinner this Thanksgiving.  There were only five human bodies seated around the table—and three furry canine bodies waiting patiently for “drop-age” underneath the table—but the cast of internal characters each one brought along—the victims, the heroes, the pleasers, the achievers, the slackers, Prudence, Grundalina, Festus T. Bumfluff, Madam Scumblebum… not to mention the inner pussycats, lions and tigers and bears (Oh My!) made for a crowded family weekend.  Some of them mourned the loss of the pie; some were relieved that there would be nothing to sneak down and eat the rest of after midnight while others were sleeping.   We all talked candidly about our individual journeys between the distances of Expectation and Reality and where true Gratitude could be found.  My children are of that wonderful age (in their early twenties) when it is customary to have one’s parents stand trial (without a jury of their peers) for the crimes of their childhood—especially when we look through photo albums and they realize the full horrors of my early fashion choices on their behalf.  Over and over, I found myself humbled by the generosity of their answers, questions, and willingness to seek Forgiveness over Righteousness (though I was never fully absolved of putting them in Colonial outfits for the 2008 Christmas cards).  I explain that most parents do their best to provide The Best for their children but some “pies” just have their own agreement with gravity.  Sometimes, despite our best efforts, things just Flop.  It’s up to each of us to then make it for our own damn good.

In this moment, I realize with great sorrow that we teach our children so many things; we give them so many things (“only some of which are actually necessary,” shrills Prudence from her corner) that they may experience Gratitude.  Do we give them the ability to see a Lost Pie as an “advantage”?  An “Opportunity”? A way to, with laughter born of Resilience, find brussell sprouts as an acceptable alternative for dessert? (Ok, maybe I would be the only one happy about that…)  How do we teach them to get out of the mud when they too get stuck, when they can’t get “what they want”?  Apart from standing there and singing that Music Together hit single “Oh, My! No More Pie!” what can we do?

The zeitgeist of 2020 has been catching me a lot these days.  The mud is deep and slick around my home.  I have been laboring more than usual to do good work while taking on exhausting extra projects in the margins—some related to the coming holidays, some related to my new farm, some just the desperate efforts of keeping the chickens out of the kitchen when the door’s left open.   It’s hard to look at Hard Things—losses, illness, rejection, and grief and try to find the Good in them—the “Opportunity” for learning or greatness, or even just sullen acceptance that one must now change course.   It’s hard to lose not just pies, but the Idea of Pie—the cherished Hope that we can provide/procure/produce some sort of Perfection for those we love so dearly—and still feel Grateful.  Sometimes, we just can’t.  And that’s OK.   Perhaps the shared Hunger, not the food, is the gift.  

May you be nourished in Spirit, if not in Pie.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S.After all that, guess who turned up with not one but two small pumpkin pies? The Inter-galactic Pie Gun Hero of the day!