Offer it Up

“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.” —Michel de Montaigne

Greetings Dear Ones!

A dreary wind that sounds like a far off freight train blows an exhausting sort of cold through all the cracks in doors or windows. It’s true; we do have a little more light these days but it feels thin and watery and uncertain. Winter is losing its charm yet overstaying its welcome like a guest who should be going any day now.  It makes me think of that line from an Eagle’s song, “the sky won’t snow and the sun won’t shine/it’s hard to tell the nighttime from the day…” Only our sky DOES snow, with great regularity. Every few days, a fresh layer covers up the grimy stuff like a temporary whitewash that disguises treacherous ice or slush underneath.

The sap is starting to run up and down beneath the bark of the trees, confused as to whether spring is really coming, and all the maple sugaring folks are out there in their torn coats trying to wrestle a bit of sweetness from the bleakness.  It takes a lot of resilience and pancakes to survive in New England at this time of year!

I am tired of the grime—on my car, on my coat, on the floors when we walk in the door… I am tired of wearing heavy layers and boots that feel like depression yet I am NOT ready to don a bathing suit either! My body, along with my spirit, has gone to seed… Prom gowns and wedding gowns are trickling into the shop and bringing with them big, tiresome hems that take a whole afternoon to do properly. Last week, I did a gown so encrusted with glitter, it was like a glitter bomb had gone off in the shop.  I had to vacuum my machine afterwards because the bobbin case was jammed with a thimble’s worth of glitter.  There was glitter on every surface of the shop, glitter in our lunch, glitter falling out of my hair onto my pillow that night. I hate glitter!  It’s disgusting stuff that I’m convinced is actually an environmental hazard and should be outlawed.  Where does all that shite go eventually? Into our drinking water? Into the playgrounds of baby dolphins? One shudders to think of it.

A girl in the dressing room has eye-color-changing contacts which give her the effect of having the eyes of a wild goat.  She has jammed her arms through the ribbon loops at the armpits of her strapless gown and is now wondering why they are too tight. I explain that those loops are really to hold the gown on its hanger; they aren’t straps.  This is, after all, a strapless gown.  When I emerge from the dressing room, another customer is waiting for me at the counter.  She confides, in tones usually reserved for conveying the news that there has been a death in the family, that her undershirt has a layer that is “loose” and she cannot live another moment with it like that. The shop phone is ringing while a millennial, not realizing that seamstresses use their hands for other things besides texting, is simultaneously texting the cell phone to see if we are open.  Meanwhile, I have to get on with the business of destroying a wedding gown for a bride who fancies herself a great designer.  She bought a dress online that does not fit her in any way and is now having me hack it to bits to make it look like trashy lingerie.

I gaze out the sunless window at a passing plow truck scattering grit and sigh… If only there was some way to make all of this WORSE.  When things get Worse, they are usually on their way to getting Better. This time of year is so dull and dreary and filled with mediocre tedium.  We are all waiting for spring but not ready for it either. Making or forcing things to be better does not seem like a viable option yet.  Literally, we must wait for the planet to hurtle a few million more miles through space yet—it’s like the long trip to grandma’s house—and we are all asking from the back seat, “Are we there yet?” No.  So how can we make things worse?  Prudence steps from the shadows.  “I know a wonderful way to make everything worse,” she says.  “It’s called LENT and it starts today.  Offer it up.  Offer up all your measly little sufferings like spare change you can use to pay someone’s debt in Purgatory.” “Isn’t this Purgatory, right here?” I ask. “No,” she says. “Purgatory is a waiting room in the sky, full of people holding crumpled little numbers like the ones they give at the deli and they just watch the big screen with all the current prayer tallies in numbers spinning like trades at the stock market. They haven’t paid full fare to get to Heaven and they are stuck, hoping your bout with lumbago will get them on the next ferry.”

Offer it up.  It is an echo from my childhood.  Whenever I had a complaint, my mother or grandmother or some nearby desiccated nun would say “Offer it up.”  Whatever you are suffering, whether it is a stubbed toe, the torment of a sibling, or a broken heart, a nice slice of guilt is the perfect side dish for your troubles.  Think of how LUCKY you are and how Unfortunate someone else is and offer your suffering for the release of their pain.  Collude in your own neglect/abuse/discontent by choosing to embrace it, on a spiritual level.  You may not have any choice in the matter in the physical realm, but you do in the energetic realm.  This is what sainthood is all about. Choose to accept your suffering and make something holy of it that you can offer as a gift.  Prudence, who fancies herself holier than most because she “suffers” more than most, smiles a satisfied smile as I roll my eyes.  I hate being told to offer it up.

Still, there is a lot to be said for changing my energy around what cannot be changed.  I often say, “when you cannot get out of it, get into it.” Even if that means making things temporarily worse.  A friend of mine is going through a dark time and confronting some personal demons. “Don’t run,” I say. “Stay and fight. Get in there and wallow.  Get scratched up and bloody and find out what these demons have to teach you.  You’ll be a better man for it in the end!”  Once we admit that the Buddha was right: All of Life is Suffering, then there arises some beautiful evidence against it. 

Today is the day that many people will go to church and have their foreheads crossed with ashes and be told “remember man that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”  (“I wonder if your house is some sort of way-station for people coming and going,” whispers Prudence.)  I used to think that this was to make us humble and to show us that life was essentially pointless. I used to think that we were encouraged to give something up so that we could suffer extra for the souls in purgatory—or just suffer for suffering’s sake. Sometimes Lent was just like a mini New Year’s resolution to lose weight or give up a vice.  I am reminded of the story of the man who told his son he was giving up alcohol for Lent.  Three days later, the boy witnessed his father having a beer. “I thought you gave up alcohol,” protested the son. “Oh,” said the father, “this is just a beer.  It’s not hard alcohol.  I just gave up the hard stuff.” “Whew!” says the boy, “what a relief!  You know how I gave up candy? Well, it was only hard candy!”

For some, the next forty days will be all about dropping a size or two before consuming all their lost calories in chocolate bunnies and peanut butter eggs.  For some, it will be a time of deep reflection and acts of piety and service. Maybe we will all be better for it, maybe not. It’s worth a try—bargaining and reworking our bargains with ourselves until we get back to where we started. It’s a great idea to test ourselves with consuming less and doing more.  These are good ideas any time of year whether you choose to hook them to a spiritual practice or not.

Don’t tell Prudence, but I like the idea that the next forty days is a potential workshop for the soul, though I have no intention of making myself humble as a result. Humility just leads to arrogance, as we try to smugly out-humble each other.  I am the oldest of five—I know exactly what smug out-humbling-as-a-way-to-start-trouble is all about!  When we are arrogant, we think certain people and jobs are beneath us.  When we are humble, we think we are less than and undeserving.  Neither is true.  When we are with What Is and see ourselves with loving clarity, then no job is too awful, no weather is too bad, and no season too dreary.  We get on with the business we came here to do and we continue the journey lovingly with our fellow travelers. We do that filthy, glitter-encrusted work AND we are Grateful!!! Like the pancakes, life is sweeter for our laboring.

Be well my Dearies!  And do good work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Drama Mamas

“All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.” –Oscar Wilde

Greetings Dear Ones!

February is slipping by as if it was greased. March looms and with it one of Prudence Thimbleton’s least favorite seasons of the Shop.  No, it’s not Prom Season—this is just the nasty little hors d’ oeuvres (or horse’s duvet, as some like to call it) preceding that banquet of insanity: Solo Dance Costume season.  Now, for those of you without teenage daughters, let me try to describe what is happening in innocuous-looking sidewalk studios around the countryside:  Essentially, grown people are losing their minds and deciding that fragile, young female psyches should be performing as near to naked as possible in bodies they don’t fully recognize yet, trailing glitter, glory, and grief on their way to their crash landing on a psychotherapist’s couch.  A mother, inquiring after the status of her daughter’s custom-made outfit, turns to me and says in utter seriousness, “Is this material stretchy enough for my daughter to lie on her back and spread her legs as far as possible?” (Prudence, wondering if the child was destined for a dance recital or a brothel, nearly had apoplexy.)  Another mother explains that she will be taking her daughter out of school for her fitting, since she cannot change the girl’s hair appointment after school.  School is the thing that is expendable in their frenzied schedule.

Preschoolers  and High Schoolers alike are being swathed in bling-ed-out spandex outfits that resemble a unique blend of circus performer and street walker. They will be spray-tanning youngsters fifty shades of beige and gluing fabric to their bare skin—all in the name of charging their grandparents five bucks a piece to watch them on stage. There is a lot of pressure on these girls and even more on their fraught mothers who have a series of maneuvers they must perform themselves:  they must keep the prized daughter happy and practicing (an impossible task), they must appease the demands of the coaches who seem to be suffering the after-effects of total lobotomies, and finally, above all, they must never let the husbands/fathers in question know how much any of this costs. 

Needless to say, this does not often bring out the best in the girls themselves.  “If there’s one thing sure to rot my garters,” huffs Prudence indignantly, “It’s brats who treat their mothers as if they are ignorant servants—who roll their eyes at us as if dealing with these simpletons is simply insufferable,” as the door slams on yet another angry-yet-entitled teen, trailed by her bewildered and beseeching mother.

The mothers are barely holding it together.  Last week, a mother of four came in and set three live squirrels loose in the shop.  I’m just kidding, they were little girls.  She held the baby on one hip while she tried to negotiate the fitting of a dance costume for the eldest and the two middle squirrels made laps of the shop and pushed all the pins from one pin cushion into the upholstery of a waiting room chair in the shape of their initials.  Among the rubble left when they all departed was the woman’s wallet and handbag.  We tried to ring her cell phone to tell her but she could not answer because the three-year-old was using it to play video games in the back seat of the car.

Wednesday night, on my way home from Brattleboro, I encounter a completely different sort of mother.   It is snowing lightly and I leave fiddle practice early in the hopes of beating the worst of the weather.  I am a few miles from home when I notice a minivan off the side of the road with its hazard lights flashing.  I slow down.  As I pass, I notice a small child, crouching behind the van, looking at one of the rear tires.  I drive on.  I start feeling a strong pull in the center of my gut to go back.  We are all each other’s angels here on earth.  Maybe this family needs “an angel” who can change a tire quickly in the falling snow, rather than having to wait for triple A to show up.  Out here, that could take a while and the roads are already getting bad.  I can almost hear the music they play in Old Westerns when the cavalry shows up as I turn my car around and head back to the van.  Oh, how my ego makes me laugh sometimes!

I leave my hazards blinking and cross the road to the driver’s window. A woman is sitting there with her hands in her lap.  “Are you guys alright?” I ask as she rolls the window down, “How can I help? Is it a tire?” She looks in her rearview mirror and sighs.

“No,” she says with beatific serenity, “We are just sitting here until we calm down enough for me to drive safely again.  I cannot drive when she is in a rage because it is too dangerous.” With that, the child in the back seat, the one I had seen earlier behind the vehicle, gives a savage kick to the back of the seat in front of her, jumps out the door, and starts running up the road, screaming.  “Is she ok? Will she run into traffic? Shall I chase her and bring her down? What do you want me to do???”  My questions are a torrent that she meets with a bleak and weary smile as she heaves herself out of the car and tries to reassure me.  “She’s ok.  She won’t run into traffic. She’s on the spectrum. She’s just having a really hard moment because she is angry and not getting her way.  It doesn’t mean she’s going to get her way.  I’m just giving her the space she needs around her disappointment.  I’ll wait as long as it takes.”  “Oh,” I say, really wishing I could change a tire instead.

We watch her run up the shoulder of the road, almost out of sight, as the snow begins to collect on our hair and faces.  “You have no idea how much I want to be home right now,” the mother says, her face suddenly dissolving in weary sorrow.  “Wow!” I breathe out slowly, taking in the whole scene.  I realize I have not been breathing until now.

She lifts her chin as some headlights flash by in the darkness and I can see that her eyes are the color of a deep, untroubled sea.  She radiates Resolve and Character and Strength.  This is no cringing, placating, vacillating dance Mom I am dealing with here.  I realized how arrogant I have been, thinking I might stop and “help” her.  She has this all well in hand.  She is forcing nothing.  She is threatening nothing.  She is just waiting, pausing, holding the space—as she has clearly done so many times, through so many dark and lonely hours already.  Divine Feminine Grace. There are no trophies to be won with this kind of mothering but there Should be!

“I’ll go if you want me to,” I offer. “But I would like to keep you company for as long as you like, if it’s ok.  This is one time you really don’t have to do this alone.  I know how awful this kind of stuff can be.  Sometimes being the only gown-up is just utterly wretched.”  She nods.  We stand together in the falling snow.  She tells me about her other children.  This one is the youngest of six.  “The others are normal,” she says, then laughs hysterically, “whatever the hell that means…” We both laugh.  “Normal” is just a setting on washing machines, I say. She talks about how people have judged her harshly based on this one’s behavior—as if having five other children hasn’t given her a single clue about parenting.  She has been told by well-meaning and concerned strangers to spank or hit this child to straighten her out.  “I used to be a preschool teacher,” she says. “I’m actually trained to deal with children! But I had to give it up to stay home and advocate for her.  It’s a fulltime job.”

“Being a mother is a full-time job,” I say, “no matter how ‘Normal’ your kids might be.” She laughs.  She doesn’t remember what it is like not to be a mother.  We talk about how mothers are on the front line for a significant amount of sibling sadism and general chaos that seems medieval by modern corporate standards.  I think about all the anguished dance mothers coming into the shop and a pregnant friend of mine who is awaiting the birth of her first child.  “You don’t know what you are going to get when you become a mother, do you?” “No,” she agrees. “It’s a total hijacking.”  By then, the little nine-year-old is back and begins raging and beating on the car.  She opens the side door, climbs in, stamps with snowy boots on seats and begins screeching for me to leave. “Go Away!” she screams. “Go away!  This is none of your business!” “Honey, you are SO right,” I say, smiling. “This is totally none of my business, except that I care very much about your safety and I’m going to stay here with your mama so she doesn’t have to be alone until you calm down. Take all the time you want. Everything is ok. You know what to do.”  Lest anyone have any delusions about me being a wanna-be child psychologist, let me just say that my kindly words have the effect of making her roar and catapult herself to the front seat and trash the front of the car.  She rips the rosary hanging from the rearview mirror and uses it as a whip to flail against papers and debris around the car.  Deftly, the mother slips her hand to the ignition and rescues the keys before she can be locked out.  Then she leans against the car and sighs again. I think guiltily of the Peace awaiting me by my fireside less than four miles away—my fiddle and spinning wheel, little snoring dogs, happy son playing music… This woman’s night will not end for many, many years, if ever... 

“God Bless You,” I blurt out, “You are so amazing!”  She laughs.  “Children are such irrational beings! Love isn’t rational either, is it?  Love isn’t about being rational or reasonable.  It’s about Inclusion.  It’s about making space for this…” she gestures towards her daughter rocking the whole car with her drumming heels.  “You can’t tell me any child wants to be like this or feel like this… they are at their own mercy as much as we are.”

Her words echo in my heart after they eventually drive away. LOVE is INCLUSION.  I realize that I didn’t stop to help. I was stopped to Learn.  She was the angel by the side of the road, not I.  I need this message. I need to appreciate the tremendous gifts we give one another simply by INCLUDING what is unexpected.  

When all the craziness of mothering passes, when it’s over and our children are gone and we can finally get some good sleep… When they’ve taken our wisdom and our tools and the last of our best shampoo—that organic stuff that’s twenty bucks a bottle—and they are off to reject everything we ever taught them and find out for themselves… When all the dance recitals are just photos in scrapbooks we never look at…  We turn and see that we haven’t raised our children at all. They’ve raised us.  Now we know how tough we are.  Now we know what is truly important to us.  Now we know what cannot break us in the fiercest storm and what can melt us without even a word.  Now we know what Love is…  And that’s pretty much all we ever need to know.

Be well, my Dearies!  And do Good Work!

Yours Aye,

Nancy

And I Love That!

“You can never be a first class human being, until you have learnt to have some regard for human frailty.” –Abhijit Naskar

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s 4:am and I sit bolt upright in bed, wondering if I can substitute coconut milk for regular milk in the French toast so that all the dairy free campers can partake of it?  We need to use up all that bread going stale.  Can we serve that with the leftover baked potatoes-turned-hash-browns? We have six hotel pans of them leftover.  Will that be bad? French toast with a side of hash-browns? Who does that? It’s a Scottish music camp and they’ve been happy to eat sixty pounds of potatoes per meal so far… Then I remember: I’m home.  Home in my own bed, surrounded by snoring, farting little clumps of twitching fur.  It’s over.  AND I LOVE THAT.

Last Wednesday, exactly a week ago, I came home from work at 5 o’clock in the evening and stopped pretending I am a Seamstress and began pretending I was a Head cook.  For the next five days, I shopped and peeled, chopped and stirred, tasted, muttered, tutted, and cursed, for an average of 17 hours a day.  I stunk of onions. I looked wretched (especially in the God-awful hats we had to wear) with smears of food on every article of clothing I wore.  Lifting such enormous industrial pans and cauldrons strained every aching muscle in my body… AND I LOVE THAT.  

I am by no means what-so-ever a trained chef but I found myself responsible for feeding 125 people three times a day for 5 days.  During that time, I thought a lot about food, humans, and the amazing similarities between being a cook and a seamstress. I got an intense look at how far I was able to push myself emotionally and physically.  I realized over and over how much I LOVE serving people and yet how challenging it is to be a human myself. Over and over, I lost everything from my dignity or patience to items such as a number ten can of beans or an entire case of peaches.   I came to appreciate the mind-body connection in a whole new way and marveled as I watched my body literally dart around in circles when my mind was disengaged.  So many trains of thought left the station without me… AND I LOVE THAT.

So, how did I get this gig?  Years ago, this camp began as an annual gathering in my former home.  A Boston-based fiddle teacher wanted a place to have a weekend retreat for her advanced students.  Initially, there were less than about 25 people.  When you grow up in a large family with a father who loves to cook enormous amounts of food, it turns out that cooking for 25 is really not that big a deal. It was like Thanksgiving every day. I made all the teenagers help.  Some of them had no idea how to peel an apple. They learned. We cooked together, building both meals and strong communal bonds.  I listened to their stories and their dreams and their music.  Everyone wanted to hang in the kitchen, jamming by the fire, while their friends cooked. Over the years, they left to do and be exciting things but always returned to this event and the numbers swelled to 40.  It might sound crazy to have 40 people in one house but they were all so dear and familiar—they really were FAMILY by then. My son slept in a cupboard under the stairs, his sister at a friend’s house; all the people from Vermont slept in the barn; my former husband slept in one of the larger closets. Sometimes I slept in my car, with all the dogs so they wouldn’t bother people.  The floors were strewn with sleeping bags in every room and one could hardly take a step without having to avoid a body.  The music and the fun were sublime. Every now and then, one of the goats would get loose and wander through the house. It was chaos.  AND I LOVE THAT.

Sadly, my husband and I parted ways and left the dear old tavern that was so crammed with music and memories. We had to find a new venue for the retreat, which by now had many people of every age and ability level clamoring to participate.  My friend asked if I could keep up the cooking tradition, if she found a new place. I agreed wholeheartedly. That year, it became an official “Camp” with administrators and coordinators and things like a “decorating committee” (formerly, my “decorating” had consisted of  a quick dusting and making sure there were no dog turds on the carpet!) but we all agreed that the kitchen magic of coming together to prepare wholesome food for ourselves TOGETHER was a key ingredient in community building and would remain.  “How many people are coming?” I asked. “Eighty,” she said.  “Ok…” I said, “so we just make twice as much!” Easy.  Now, more people could come. No one would be excluded for lack of space on the floor. They would have actual beds.  The community would grow.  The kitchen was bigger and could accommodate more helpers. AND I LOVE THAT.

In two short years, the camp overflowed that venue and we found a new one, with an amazing, fully-equiped industrial kitchen full of enormous things I had no idea how to use. There is an immersion blender there for scrambling eggs that looks like it could power a small motorboat. There is a walk-in fridge, a walk-in freezer, all kinds of racks and trays and warmers and steamers and convection ovens and a cauldron big enough to hold a live goat, though sadly, they are no longer welcome! It’s heaven for cooking for a large crowd.  I volunteered and cooked there for a day with the head chef just to learn how to turn everything on and off.  He taught me how to scramble ten quarts of eggs at a time and cook them on a griddle the size of a Volkswagon. AND I LOVE THAT.

This year, 125 people came. I have never cooked for so many people.  I had some challenges I did not expect. I am not a chef.  I never went to cooking school. I learn by saying dangerous things like, “Hey, what’s the worst that could happen?” and “Why the hell not?” But if you put an apron on and pretend you are in charge, people will treat you as if you know what you are doing and expect you to do great things for them.  People will ask you over (and over and over) how they should cut the (melon/pineapple/onions/potatoes) for you until you want to scream at them “How do I know?? For F* sakes? Make them like Lucky Charms in hearts, stars, clovers, and magical surprises for all I care!  Just take that thing and make it into pieces that might fit on the end of a fork so that some poor soul can get it past their lips!” But of course you don’t do that because you are a “A Nice Person” Or at least pretending to be.  And anyway, you cannot treat well-meaning volunteers that way. AND I LOVE THAT.

One morning, the real resident Head Chef, who was living quietly on the campus and observing things from a safe distance, came to help me make breakfast.  In minutes, he had assembled a delicious breakfast casserole.  It was amazing to watch how deftly he chopped things, how unhurried yet efficient every move with the knife was.  “Where did you learn to do this?” I asked. “Oh,” he replied airily, “I have no formal training. I just learned by doing and got the chance to work with some great people who helped me with the finer points.” Hmmm…I thought.  Exactly how I became a seamstress.  Exactly how a lot of us learn the REAL work we do on a daily basis. We talked about the need to tailor the meals to people’s dietary limitations the way one has to tailor the waistband on a pair of pants.  Both jobs involve a lot of cutting, accommodating, understanding what the requirements are, and a good deal of plain old-fashioned Making It Up As You Go Along.  He laughed at some of the struggles I was having.  His warm, understanding laughter made me feel better instantly.  I was Daunted in a way I had never been daunted before but I was going to be Ok.  It was comforting to know that Real Professionals have these troubles too and that the only things that could seriously hurt me were physical burns, mishandling heavy things, and Unreasonable Expectations of myself or others.   AND I LOVE THAT.

I learned again that people interested in Character Building Experiences can accelerate their personal growth opportunities tremendously by trying to accomplish simple, menial tasks in a timely manner with people who have no idea what they are doing.  I learned the value of teamwork and collaboration and that those who just “See what needs to be done and do it” are INVALUABLE everywhere they go.  An earnest young man, wishing to be helpful, came up to me and said “It says my job is to wipe down the tables. How do I do that?”  I paused and looked at him carefully.  He was not kidding. I sensed the Goodness and the Innocence of him and the kindness in his eyes. My heart melted.  I gave him a rag and a bottle of cleaner and showed him how to wipe a table. And my heart sang with joy at the thought of what we are all able to give each other from this shared experience.  We did NOT hire anonymous professionals to serve us.  We learn to serve each other. AND I LOVE THAT.

I love that the Originals who come back every year are now so capable and competent.  They are amazing human beings who have stepped in to fill the significant gaps in my own competence with their own. Every year I try to do better and every year I hit a point where I just fall apart.  So I decided to add the words “and I love that” to every time I must surrender my ego to the process of building something I cannot do alone. I learned that we find out Who We Are by rushing the limits of what we think we can do and we find out where that line is by going past it. Then we find out who our true friends are when they come to gather up the pieces left by the crash and help us put ourselves and the Plan back together. Our weakness, our incompetence, our weariness is the gift we give others who are Strong—who by coming to our aid, belong to our hearts in a way they never could have otherwise. We finish Together—Tired yet Triumphant, totally nourished in Body and Soul.   I wasn’t the Super-Hero I wanted to be. I needed help. I got it!  AND I LOVE THAT.

Be well my darlings!  And do good work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

A Valentine for You (yes, YOU!)

Greetings Dearest,

This letter is for You… Yes, YOU.   I have something deeply personal and intimate to share with you that might make you feel like you have just eaten too many sugar-free gummy bears but I must tell you anyway.  I’m too shy to say it aloud when I am with you, so I have to write it out.  STOP wondering who this is “for”…it’s for YOU.  I love you.  I love everything about you.  Truly, Madly, Deeply—smitten in the most smittenish way one could be smitted. But I’m not sure you know yet… One of the reasons you might not know I love you is because you don’t Notice.  You are so guarded against Receiving what is yours that you don’t even hear me.  Please, pay attention now:

 I said I love EVERYTHING about you.  You are absolutely, without a doubt, 100% Adorable.  I love your laugh, your smile, and when your eyes glitter with passion and energy when you talk about the people, places, and things you love.  I love to witness you being lit up with Joy.  I love all the things about you that are so Good—that are so much better than some things I see in myself. You inspire me! You guide me and instruct me, without your even knowing it, in the Grace-filled ways you move, speak, listen, share.  I am in Awe.

I love all the parts of you that are the same as mine. I love how similar we are.  I love the sense of connection, communion and community I feel in all the ways we are the same.  You make me feel like I belong, like I am not alone.  We are equals.  We are peers. We are cut from the same slightly warped piece of cloth and we can laugh about it.  We understand each other. I love that!

I love all the horrid parts about you: those icky, shameful parts you wish I could not see.  I see them.  And some of them are truly awful—every bit as terrible as some of mine, I realize with considerable relief.  I look at you and think “Whew!  I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that! Yikes!” I watch you flail and struggle with your humanness and then I find myself loving you even more.  Thanks to you, I learn pity, compassion, forgiveness.  I learn that truly loveable people are not perfect.

I love the parts of you I cannot understand yet. Every time you reveal that you are YOU and not someone else, and especially not me, I become more fascinated and intrigued.  Just when I think you are familiar, you surprise me. You are a source of endless curiosity to me.

I love how Wise you are—it gives me a chance to learn.

I love how Stupid you are—it gives me a chance to teach.

I love how Clumsy you are—it gives me a chance to be patient.

I love how Patient you are—it gives me the space I need to try again.

I love how Experienced you are—it gives me a chance to trust.

I love how Innocent you are—it gives me a chance to protect.

I’ve looked around enough to know that there is absolutely no one else precisely like you on this planet. You are Rare.  Of the 7.6 BILLION people on the globe, you are a sub-set of ONE. You were tailor made of the Highest Quality.  You are not mass-produced, off-the-rack, cheap quality goods.  No, my dearest, like the finest Continental suit, you are Bespoke.  You were bespoke in your mother’s womb and you’ve been making yourself ever more interesting with every new scar or skill since that first moment you took a tiny breath of All that is Infinite and set your lungs and life ablaze with your own private fire.

Does knowing I love you this much make you uncomfortable? What an Odd thing that a declaration of Love could make one cringe… Relax! There’s no need to worry…I’m not going to knit you scratchy socks or harvest a bunch of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme and make you Cambric shirts without needlework.  (I know better than to give you something that requires ironing!) Besides, I’ve made plenty of those in my youth and I am, quite frankly, a little tired of that kind of sewing.  My eyesight and idealism are fading.  I don’t want to be your True Love anyway. (On the bright side, I won’t be asking for an acre of land between the salt water and the sea strand either.  I am too old for that kind of farming.) I just love you, that’s all.  Live where you want.  Wear what you want.  Marry who or what you want. I honestly don’t give a rip if you ever even love me back.

When I was very young, I used to wonder who would ever love me.  Who would comfort me? Who would hear me? Who would see me and be my witness that I am here?  I could feel an ache in my heart-space where love from some source outside of me was supposed to go.  As I matured, and was shaped by Family, Faith and School, I began to realize that my heart ached not with love that was Missing but with Love inside of me that was meant for Others. It was not my job to receive but to Give.  Give and Give and Give. Now that I am what a friend’s five-year-old calls “a little old latey,” I can see that I was wrong both times. Each time, I wound up feeling empty, lost.  Now, I know we must give AND receive. I no longer ask “Who can fill me?” or “Whom can I fix?” but rather “How can WE play a useful part in helping all of us love each other better?” How can I help you to love yourself? How can I see my own love in your mirror?

One of the most amazing things a True Love ever said was “You are so Special!  What is it you do that makes you You? I need to know so that I can help you keep doing that thing.  I love you and I don’t want you to stop doing anything that makes you Who You Are. It would be a terrible loss if you could not bloom into all you could ever be.”

So now I put the same question to you: what is it that makes you YOU? What makes your heart sing?  What makes you giddy with Joy? What makes you calmly Serene? What do you need to do or experience or create or feel to bring yourself to the center of your own sacred Being and give glory? Do you need to Run? Dance? Garden? Fiddle? Drive with the windows down and classic rock blaring? Neuter tom-cats? Macrame plant hangers? Knit things out of animal fibres? Play Guitar? Keep shuffling important papers in a cubicle in HR? Stop thinking about what the world around you needs.  It needs You. You need to show up and do your best You. I want that for you more than giving you twelve dozen roses, your weight in chocolate, and a winning lottery ticket. You’ll be a far better student, parent, worker, artist, dreamer, writer, builder… if you are fully present as your full self.  Once you realize how precious you are, you won’t care so much if the secondary details are not as important as you thought.  Who cares if your house is not that tidy, or your mind isn’t either for that matter? And if you do your best to show up and that “you” is sometimes grumpy, lazy, ill-tempered and sad—ask yourself what you need in those moments. Know that I want you to have it.

I know you are more comfortable Giving than receiving.  I’ve seen you. I know. You are conditioned, like me, to prefer the subtle resentments of over-giving to the guilt of receiving. It’s one of the endearing things I love best about you.  But it worries me too.  Even now, I know you are wondering who I’m “really” writing to.  Trust me, it’s YOU!! You need to be able to Receive.  If you cannot receive the love in this note, how will you know which sunset is for you? (hint: ALL of them!) How will you tune your soul to the magnificent Silence of starlight on snow? How will you remember to stop and sniff all those over-priced roses for sale this week? (Do it!! They’re gorgeous!) Or even appreciate the exquisite beauty of someone who actually knows how to execute properly the entry and exit of a traffic circle round-about? (a true miracle of Un-nature)

It’s not your endless Giving that depletes you, Dear One—it’s that you do not let your own well refill with gracious Receiving. You are mostly Wonderful—apart from the fact that you are not loyal to your own wonderfulness. Like a stray cat, you expect others to notice it and feed it.  Stop doing that. Adopt yourself.  Doing so will not make you “selfish” in that horrible leave-all-your-dishes-in-the-sink-for-others-to-do kind of way (it shouldn’t!) but if you don’t start serving seriously your own wonderfulness, then you deny the world of a precious gift it was meant to enjoy—and in essence you steal yourself from us all.  

Thank you for being you. I love you so much! Today, please do what it takes to keep being you.  Serve your gift. Do whatever it takes to bring the Love to the world that only you can bring. Tomorrow is Valentine’s day—a good enough reason to send you this letter.  But please, don’t think I love you just for this day only.  Read this letter Any day!  I love you for Always. Receive it as best you can and pass it on.

All my Love,

Me

 P.S. Now go smell the Roses!!!  REALLY smell them.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

“What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you.” – Nietzsche

 Greetings my Dear Ones!

It’s February…our temperatures have fluctuated by almost sixty degrees in the past five days.  After the recent cold snap that went only as low as -12F at my house (not quite the polar vortex suffered by the Midwest), we ran around like fools in T-shirts when the mercury rose to 50F—it felt so balmy!   Every year, I have to remind myself to make no major life decisions before the daffodils appear.  It’s too hard to trust anything in February—from the weather to my internal sunlight-deprived state of mind.  One must dress in layers of wool and skepticism.   We have nothing to look forward to but mud, shams, and shamrocks in March too—it’s tempting abandon all attempts at Elegance until mid April.  Getting from the house to the car will be a full-contact sport for many weeks to come.

Valentine’s Day is coming up.  So is Prom season.  It’s as good a time as any to ponder lies.   For one thing, people seem to lie to us in the shop all the time.  Sometimes, their lies are really funny.  Sometimes they are deeply painful.   Sometimes they affect us financially.  Sometimes they keep us up at night.  Some might argue that a lie is a lie and any Untruth is a crime against our spirits.  I think reality is more confusing than that.  For one thing, we create our own reality based on both our ignorance and our experience.  A woman came into the shop and said “I’m so glad I found you!  I had no idea you guys were here.  I’m not from around here.” “Oh, really?” I ask, instantly curious. I love meeting people from other places.  “Where are you from?” I inquire, thinking she will say something exotic like Colorado or Michigan.  But NO.  She names the town Right Next To This One—the one whose very border is less than three miles from our doorstep.  She’s lived there all her life, never lived anywhere else, just never bothered to go three miles southwest! But she’s not from “around here.”

Sometimes lies are just big verbal turds that people leave behind, expecting others to clean up.  There is a woman who works in the local prison system who had all her uniforms altered and then got promoted before she could collect her order.  She no longer needs those shirts, so she won’t come pick them up.  Nor will she send a check.  This has been going on for nearly a year.  On the rare occasions that she can be reached by phone (by tricking her and disguising the number of the shop) she laughs and says she’ll be in “tomorrow” to get everything.  Then she isn’t.

A bride came and picked up her wedding dress on her wedding day.  She did not have the full payment with her.  She gave us less than a third of the total cost and gratefully promised to send a cheque with the remainder later.  We let the dress go.  What kind of monsters would deprive a bride of her dress on her wedding day?  Who doesn’t have compassion for the disorganized and flustered on that day?  These things happen.  We have allowed many brides to take their dresses. Now, she refuses to pay for about fifty hours worth of work that she feels should be free because she didn’t like the price of professional service to begin with.  A trip to small claims court did nothing.  She tearfully told the adjudicator that “it’s not like she didn’t pay something—she paid “what she could” but we were just “too greedy.”  Our prices were too high, though she admitted that the quality of the work was outstanding.

I agree with a man who says lying can be defined in terms similar to murder: There are first degree lies that are told with malice aforethought and intent to deliberately mislead or do harm.  Then there are second degree Falsehoods of Convenience that folks use to convince themselves that they can have things the way they want them, unencumbered by the Truth.  Finally, there are the so-called “White Lies”—which are some of the dirtiest.  (Why tell someone they look good if they don’t?) But we are all guilty of saying we are “fine” when the reality is more like your cat just pooped in your shoes, your girlfriend dumped you, and you just found out there is a snow storm on the way and you have neither bread nor milk.  Sometimes these “White lies” are told to prevent an argument or bad feelings over something generally meaningless: “This? Why it was on SALE! Yes…it was practically free.” Sometimes the information we have said only includes things we want to say and excludes things that we don't want anyone to know. So while TECHNICALLY we have not told anything false, we have also not revealed all that we know to be true—as in: Me holding up crusty trousers:“Did you wash these?”  Customer: “Yes. (once, a long time ago, probably during the first Bush administration) Yes. Definitely. They have been washed.”

Growing up, lying of any kind was a Serious Offense in my family home, with swift and HARSH consequences—what Prudence nods to approvingly as “Good Old-Fashioned Discipline,” not  the little chat or “time-out” that people give their kids today.  My mother had a fool-proof way to get us kids to tell her the truth.  When crimes or misdemeanors were committed in the household, Inquisitions were held immediately.  Anyone whose testimony was doubted was required to stick out his or her tongue.  She had us convinced that if we told a lie, a “black spot” would appear on the surface of the tongue.  We lied to each other and into mirrors all the time to test this phenomenon but we never saw a single black spot.  She told us it was something “only mothers could see” and that one day, if we were lucky enough to have rotten little children of our own who lied to us, we would be able to see the spots then.  It was incredible.  She always could tell when we were lying.  We had no idea how she managed it.  She was never wrong.  (Let’s not get into the extreme Irony around the fact that my mother told this great Whopper herself, in order to get us to keep to the straight and narrow.  Maybe anyone who has five or more children is allowed to fight dirty for Justice to be served.) Twenty years later, over a beer, she admitted that she could always tell by how fast or slowly we would stick our tongues out whether or not we had something “to hide.”

I learned very young that Yes, the Truth hurts—sometimes excruciatingly so.  As I have aged, I have also come to learn that the hurt from a harsh truth never lasts as long as the hurt from a lie, no matter how well-intentioned.   

So why do people lie, especially when they don’t need to?  Do we really care whether it was your dog or your cat or your own recklessness that caused your pants to rupture? We don’t need to hear what you were drinking when your sleeve caught fire.  From my little sewing desk in the corner, here is what I think is The Truth about lies:

Most Liars really want us to like them—at the very least, they don’t want to disappoint us.  They come up with the most fascinating stories to make themselves look like good-humored, totally innocent victims we should Not Judge.  Fundamentally, they are trying to hide themselves because they suspect they might not be acceptable, never mind loveable, just As They Are.

The lies may not matter to us, but they matter to our customers.  They invest in their stories, no matter how irrelevant we may find them.  They actually care deeply about centering themselves in a reality of their choosing—even if it’s that they own a magic Christmas tree farm that requires them to wear costumes from the Australian Outback in the nineteenth century. 

They are often trying to control a situation and are using lies to manipulate an outcome. “I need this shirt done by Friday (which is secretly two weeks before I actually need it) because my sister’s/friend’s/pet gold fish’s previous owner has requested I wear this shirt to her wedding on Saturday…” instead of simply ASKING “Is there any reason I could not have this when I want it?”  At least once a week, we are in a panic that someone has not come in to collect an important item, only to find out they don’t need it for another week or two and had given us a false date. Such subterfuges are demeaning to us because they belie a customer’s lack of faith in our willingness or ability to serve him/her just because it is the Right Thing To Do! (How does anyone stay in business if they don’t give their people what they want when they want it??)

Lies swiftly become great big, fat snowballs.  They roll downhill gathering weight and collecting more and more details and complications as they go.  I can always tell when a customer is feeling nervous and starting down a tricky path of um…. “FABRIC-ation” about her garment.  Sometimes a little inaccuracy saves them tons of explanation.  Sometimes tons of explanation leads them far astray. 

They don’t think they are lying anymore—they have told this particular fib for so long that they actually think it is the truth. “No, seriously, I AM a size 10.”

They know it is not the truth but they so desperately want it to be true—like the time I asked my five-year-old who had scribbled on the wall in crayon and written her (misspelled) name about eighteen inches off the ground and she told me right away that “Daddy did it.”  Among my personal favorites:  “This fits great—I just can’t get the zip up.” “It’s not my size but it fits me.”

I believe most people are honest most of the time.   Some statistics would have us believing that people are confusing or misrepresenting themselves to us about thirty percent of the time but as Mark Twain pointed out, there are “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

What do you hear when you know someone has lied to you? “I hear that I am not valued,” says a friend.  Personally, I think it’s just the opposite.  I think the liar is not valuing him/her Self.  The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves—sly deceptions spun from clever minds and bitter hearts.

And that’s as close to the Truth as I can get today.

Be well my Darlings!

Yours aye,

Nancy

In the Trades

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers. Aldo Leopold 

Greetings Dear Ones!

 It has come to my attention that quite a few carpenters and “handywomen”  read this blog! One might not think so but it can be pretty difficult to tell carpenters and seamstresses apart: We use a lot of the same tools, materials, and methods—just on different scales. We both “measure twice, cut once” and swear like naughty sailors when we get it wrong.  We both deal with bolts, though with differing meanings for that word, and in the end, we each produce a lot of scraps.  We both find ourselves doing the most ridiculously simple and menial chores for people whom, had they not eliminated Shop and Home Ec. classes from the standard high school curriculum in the 1980’s, (or had a conscientious grandparent!) should have been able to do for themselves. As we work, we both visually tessellate items in our minds—turning things inside out and backwards in our imaginations. We have the kind of brains that can imagine things “taken apart.” We are both dependant on the reference points of “plum” and “level,” though we seamsters are more apt to refer to it as a garment’s “center line.”

 Recently,  I had a conversation with a professional designer/builder and told him all the ways our work was similar.  He laughed and said that being a seamstress was more like being a shipwright—that making clothing was more akin to building a boat. Everything has to be accommodated in biomorphic shapes, dealing with rounds; there are no perfectly square edges on a human. “Plum” and “level” become only relative reference points that must be read with a skilled and experienced eye in relation to the ship or body itself, rather than a fixed point on earth.  Humans bob around in air the way that boats bob around in water. If only every hemline had a gimbals! (that mechanism, typically consisting of rings pivoted at right angles, for keeping an instrument such as a compass or chronometer horizontal in a moving vessel or aircraft).

 In both carpentry and tailoring, there is a difference between being a “tradesman” and a “craftsman.” Sadly, we don’t get to be craftsmen (or craftswomen) very often.  We are too busy fixing people’s stuff! A woman comes in to have us stitch a label back on her husband’s tie.  A mother needs her daughter’s uniform skirt hemmed. A young man needs a button sewn on his coat. Another man has ripped his jersey.  A debutante has bought a bargain at TJMaxx only to discover that the shoulder, stitched on with a chain stitch, has given way and is now unraveling the way one opens a sack of dog food.  “It’s just a little thing,” they say, “I wish I knew how to do this.”  So do I, Dear One, so do I! 

Craftsmen devote themselves to making Lovely and Useful things and harnessing Beauty in wood or cloth or metal.  You find a lot of them on Etsy. “In the trades,” we are more often relegated to serving the public than the Muses.  It’s much dirtier work.  Here, I want to avoid creating the wistful, romanticized notion that mine is a “simpler” life that is somehow more authentic or more democratically valorous for being “working class.”  However, I do wish to rehabilitate the honor of the trades.  There is a great sense of agency and competence that comes from doing manual work that is better than any therapist or self-help book in terms of building one’s confidence.  I have been told many times throughout my life that those who work “from the neck up” have way more money and opportunities than those of us who work from the neck down and that does seem to be true.  However, our increasing manual disengagement in a “post-industrialist” society is leading to some terrible things. What ordinary people once made for themselves or each other, they now buy. Instead of fixing things, they just discard and buy new. Our landfills cannot take this.  Also, and I mean this kindly, people seem to be getting dumber about basic, practical stuff they should know how to do.  Not a day goes by that Prudence doesn’t look at some item and say to herself, “Seriously? How is it that a grown-arsed-adult doesn’t know how to x___ y___or z___?” If they are simply too lazy, that’s one thing and we are happy to help.  If they are truly Ignorant, in that unsullied, delicate, exotic way that Oscar Wilde talks about, well then, we as a Society need to look into some things!

 Today, most of our schools, with the exception of a tiny number of Vo-tech schools, give manual trades little Value—celebrating instead the ideals of “potential” rather than achievement. Craftsmanship is about learning to do one thing really well.  Traditional colleges, especially those championing what is known as “a liberal arts education” are designed to give one an open passport to a future, rather than any concrete or saleable skills.  Yes, we are taught rhetoric and logic, but it is not the logic of the skill saw, lathe or sewing machine that could bite or maim us.  It is not even logic one can stub her toe upon.  It is the type of learning that propels smart people into the cubicles of middle management.  As a result, rather than producing skilled workers, our highest levels of educational institutions are churning out hordes of compliant “generalists” untethered by any single set of useful skills, qualified only to go on to more schooling. Plato himself makes a distinction between technical skill and rhetoric in that rhetoric has “no account to give of the real nature of things and so cannot tell the cause of any of them.”  I just LOVE rhetoric.  I could sit and talk about it for days.  But there is a certain submission one must undergo when dealing with the logic of Things, rather than fantastical arts of persuasion.

Give me a good, old fashioned system of indenture! Let us learn by doing. (Think how good this would be for those whose alternative learning styles don’t conform to the factory model of today’s educational system.)  Skilled manual labor involves a very systematic encounter with the material world.  Experience is key.  In days gone by, a young tailor would expect to be an apprentice for a minimum of seven years to be called a master.  As one who works with her hands daily yet still feels the ache of all I am not yet “good” at, seven years to Excellence seems like a dizzying pace.  The wonderful ladies I work with have more than sixty year’s worth of professional experience between them (Which is amazing, considering they are both only “29!”) and yet they are still learning and trying new things. There is a joy in making things. I know the enclosure of my skills and I feel a secret thrill when I am drawn over the edge of them into new experiences, new learning, new patterns and ways for the hands to manifest what the mind imagines.  This is going to take me WAY longer than a mere seven years to master! It is a path, not a destination. 

 The dictionary defines a Trade as “a skilled job, typically one requiring manual skills and special training.”  It is also the exchange of something for something else, typically as a commercial transaction.  I like digging deeper and finding out that the modern word came into Middle English from Middle Low German, and literally meant ‘track’ (of West Germanic origin).  It is also related to “tread.” Early senses included ‘course, way of life’, which gave rise in the 16th century to ‘habitual practice of an occupation’, ‘skilled handicraft’. The current verb senses date from the late 16th century.  A trade is not just a skill but a way of life, a thing one “trades” for things like money (or help building a chicken coop), and a way of knowing and navigating one’s world. I like the notion that “Trade” embodies, at its root, the notion of Life’s Path, or vocation.

We don’t just shape things; they shape us as well.  They literally change our Minds, our very brains. I am also beginning to suspect that manual dexterity is far more easy to cultivate in the young.  It is not impossible at any age, however, the odds are stacked against the older learner, who will require more repetitions than a more malleable younger brain. The cognitive demands of skilled manual work are very high.  They involve a kinesthetic learning over time that creates skill that cannot be had by reading about or watching a task.  I had to do over two hundred button holes by hand before I could reliably create buttonholes that were of consistently uniform size and shape and quality and more than seven hundred before I was actually proud of them.  The intellectual “knowing” or understanding of “how one makes a buttonhole” and then there is the ability to make one.  The two are vastly different things and can only be synthesized over years of practice.  The “brain” must extend all the way to the fingertips and into the tools that are being used—and dendrites grow slowly!

There is literally and figuratively a lot to be said for the hands-on approach to problem solving. Sometimes it begins with the realization that the assumptions and demands of formal education must be ignored or actively resisted.  Once launched, this process of exploration-by-doing, the self-education and development never stops.  There are infinite ways to explore a craft.  No two problems or situations are ever the same. People become skillful and thoughtful only when they care what they are doing.  Through our work, we begin to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the Spirit.  There is no fundamental separation.   Only by pursuing knowledge through our hands do we come to appreciate the interdependence of human skill, intelligence, and soul.  “If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it,” writes Matthew Crawford, author of the brilliant book Shop Class as Soulcraft.  I could not agree more!

Be well my Dearies!  And Do Good Work!

Yours Aye,

Nancy

...Of Mice and Brides

“Plans are worthless but planning is everything.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower

 Greetings Dear Ones!

Here in the dark underbelly of mid-January, the thoughts of this shivering Seamster turn to ice, mice, and brides.  “Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste/ An’ weary Winter comin fast/ An’ cozie here, beneath the blast/ Thou thought to dwell…”

The recent storm was the perfect opportunity to dwell in Snowetry (snow + poetry):   Burns by the woodstove—while outside, the whole forest became its own Poem. Friday is the 260th birthday of Scottish poet Robert Burns and anyone with a drop of Scotch in his/her veins will be wearing “hodden grey” and dining on “hamely fare” of “neeps and tatties” and singing odes to mice and lice and prehistoric-style sausages made of all the mutton the Scots couldn’t sell to the English. This morning, according to Accuweather, it is -2F degrees with a “real feel” of -27 and a wind speed of 17 mph here in my enchanted Forest.  It’s the kind of cold that makes one’s nostril hairs clink if one sniffs quickly.  It’s the kind of cold that has all the Jack Russells piddling on the welcome mat outside the door because they will venture no further into “bleak winds ensuing, baith snell an’ keen” to do their business. (They care nothing for Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening either!) Our wee homestead is a vaguely familiar foreign planet I navigate shin deep in a white, granular substrate. My snow gear, like an astronaut’s suit, impedes any forward momentum as I bring the breakfast hay to the sheep and fresh water to the chickens. It is literally Breathtaking to feel my eyelashes freeze and my eyebrows go crispy as I pause to gaze at the fading morning stars, which seem like local chips of ice themselves, rather than heatless distant suns.

 In the warm bright shop, our “earth-born companions an’ fellow-mortals” come blasting through the front door, stamping their gritty feet, blowing on their reddened hands “wi’ bickerin brattle” and blurting dumb things like “Cold enough for ya?” Most folks seem to hate the cold and can’t believe how COLD it is. “I just can’t believe it is this Cold,” shudders one woman.  I can’t believe she can’t believe it.  “Were you here last year?” I want to know.  It’s Winter… In New England. This shit happens Every year.  And it’s MAGNIFICENT.  The intensity of all four seasons is why we live here! (It’s certainly not for the antics of our fellow motorists in heavy traffic, on macadam renditions of Swiss cheese.)

In the dressing room, the theme of “white and wild” continues.  We have two bridal fittings: First up is a  “wee, sleeket beastie”— standing on the platform in the dressing room.  She is beaming into the mirror and turning this way and that to see the contours of lace frothing about her like she is a dishwasher gently overflowing.  Her wedding is not until October but she is Ready.  Her eyes glitter with deep satisfaction.  “You are so Organized!” I say with admiration.  “Well,” says her mother, nonplussed, “She’s only been planning this since the fifth grade. She has been holding a spot at her favorite venue for the past two years, just in case her man proposed. You know how those prime venues are…” I nod because everyone else is nodding knowingly but secretly Prudence and I are Astonished that Franz, the head coordinator at Top-of-the-Hill-Posh-Weddings-R-Us-Estate knew her wedding would take place there before the groom knew he was going to be a groom!”

Later that afternoon, we have a vastly different fitting with another bride, with “O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!” who, by no stretch of the imagination seems to have been planning her nuptial celebrations since last week.  Who knows?  Maybe she just woke up on Monday and realized she had to get her act together by the weekend. She has been pulling all-nighters for several days. Her bridesmaids are with her.  They look irritated and exhausted.  She just got the gown and it needs quite a bit of work.  We’ve got less than a week to slap this thing together before it gets stuffed in a suitcase bound for a beach resort in the Carribean.

It amazes me that on the Same Day, we could entertain the opposite poles of the Bridal Planning Spectrum.  One girl is methodically ticking items off a long list of Everything She Ever Wanted, the other girl, the now-crazed slacker, is going to have to make mad dashes, split-second decisions, and surrender to the Best that Can Occur in the moment.  Both women will be beautifully dressed and equally married by the time all is said and done but one will have the blood-pressure of a New York stock trader and the other will have nothing to do but organize her future husband’s sock drawers.  No doubt, the friendships of all those in both wedding parties will be tested to the limits.

It makes me think about the clarity needed to manifest what we want—whether we know that years in advance or moments.  We need to ask for help.  We need to rely on our friends. We DO need plans. I can’t help thinking that astute couples will look at how they are getting through the wedding prep as a potential blueprint for how the rest of the marriage could go.  I imagine one couple systematically acquiring a mortgage, coordinating the arrival of their children around their vacation schedules, then saving for college and retirement…the other couple just winging it in a perpetual state of reactive astonishment as Life Choices come at them like asteroids in a video game.  In the Amusement park of Marriage, some couples choose to sit in the Tea cups and go gently round and round smiling; others ride the roller-coasters, holding hands, strapped in, screaming all the way.

You might think that I, or certainly Miss Prudence, might have some judgments around which one is doing it “Right.” (Prudence does not care as long as they all Get married and Stay married, with minimal fuss and as little karaoke as possible.) Truly, I have equal affection for each bride.  Each one is a strong, young woman doing her best, with certain presuppositions about how she manages her world or how her world manages her.  Things change.  If there is anything I have observed from my little sewing table in the corner, it’s that Life usually throws the Best Planners a curve ball or two and those who don’t plan at all lurch abruptly between disappointment at not getting what they think they want and suddenly having things work out for the best anyway.  Fate has a way of grinding the roughest edges off us all. But I’m not saying anything than an Ayrshire farmer turning over a mouse nest in the 18th century didn’t already say way better!

Despite all our anxiety and fretting, the truth is that none of us REALLY knows what is really happening until it happens.  We live for our goals, for our routines, for the constructs and structures we create for ourselves “Till crash! the cruel coulter past/ out thro’ thy cell.”  We all know “the best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men (and brides, and parents, and lovers, and seamstresses) gang aft agley,” but what is there to do but plan anyway?

On we slog, in “Winter’s sleety dribble, an’ cranreuch cauld!” and backward cast our eyes on prospects drear—while forward, though we “canna see,” we guess and fear!  So we plan, and insure those plans… and then, when plans fall through, there’s always Poetry! 

Be warm and well, my Darlings!  Button up and aye be cheerie! And do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. If you come visit me any time soon, please don’t wipe your feet on the Welcome mat!

All We Cannot Do

Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you. --Saint Augustine 

Greetings Dear Ones!

 Winter finally has us in its teeth.  A raw wind whips and licks the corners of the house and icicles drool onto the walkways and steps.  My unpaved driveway is once more a frozen, rutted track for the daily Subaru Luge.  Thirsty animals gulp greedily as I break the ice out of their black rubber buckets and haul liquid water to the chickens and sheep twice a day.  They are remarkably cheery and stoic for creatures with no boots or socks.    

 At work, huddled by the radiator, I am instructed, by means of an attached scrap of paper, to mend the buttons on this coat.   I look over the coat: The collar is also frayed.  The lining inside is hanging in ribbons. The other buttons are limp and in need of a little button Viagra… I sigh. I am tempted to fix everything.  This decrepit woolen puddle of a coat needs an overhaul.  But I am only getting paid to fix what is on the label that has come from the cleaners.  The customers protest mightily when we fix things they do not wish to pay for… It’s sad to say, but thinking about what is best for the garment is often bound to enrage the customer and lose us money in the end.  So I fix the buttons and hang the rest of the mess on the “Done” rack.  It kills me to do this—to walk away from what would be easy to fix if I could just indulge in the impulse to make everything right with that coat.  It’s as hard to walk away from as a dog that needs a good brushing, or a mewling cat that needs feeding.  Without permission, I can do nothing and too many other items await my needling.

 Lady Mothball has arrived with ten pairs of out-of-date summer-weight trousers she wants tailored.  She needs them in a week, she says, when she will return to Florida with the rest of her acrid-scented wardrobe.  Lord and Lady Mothball are what we call “Snowbirds,” which means they are terrified of outdoor cold and so migrate up and down the eastern seaboard attempting to live their entire lives in air-conditioning.  The only ice they wish to encounter will be floating in their gin and tonics. Because most of her clothing is in storage for six months at a time, it reeks of mothballs so badly that as soon as she exits the shop, we hasten to hang her order in the back hall, where it won’t contaminate the clothing belonging to other customers.  Why do people even use mothballs? I wonder, as I press the iron tentatively against her inseam, turning my head to avoid the tiny mushroom cloud of toxins emanating from her inner thigh.   Working on her clothing is giving me an instant headache.   Judging from the look of these pants, no self-respecting moth would want to eat them in the first place.  Prudence Thimbleton is all in favor of quaint home remedies and practices and maintaining the traditions of bygone eras, however, she draws the line at using carcinogenic neurotoxins as pesticides, even for dreaded things like moths.  As a spinner and knitter who happens to store a lot of raw wool around, I despise moths and panic when I see one.  I have been known to store yarn in the freezer, and fill my storage areas with herb sachets, and cedar to discourage them.   The moths know good material when they see it—eating only natural fibers.  Most things today are mixed with polyester, which they won’t eat.  Lady Mothball’s clothing is almost entirely synthetic, so using mothballs is redundant.  We could bury this stuff in a garden and it would never rot.  But there is no convincing her otherwise; she is of a mindset that insists on smelling of indifference and superstition.

 The phone rings.  A woman is lost. “Do you have a sign out?  I can’t find your shop!”

“Yes, madam, it is a large sign.  We actually want you to find us.”

“What is your address?  The GPS system says I am there but I don’t believe it.”

“Yes, that is our address. We are right across from a large yellow diner, you can’t miss that, surely.”

“Oh, I’ve seen that many times. But it’s on the other side of the street.  You are not on that side of the street.”

“No, Madam, we are not.  I merely mention it as a landmark.  If you pause near that establishment and look directly at the other side of the street, you will see our own rather large sign. There is a little driveway on the side and we have parking in the rear of the building.” 

“Ok….” She says hesitantly, as if I have just told her the world is round and if she goes too far in any one direction she will roll unwittingly downhill all the way to Australia, or downtown Fitswell, which she fears more.   That lady, with her phone, motor vehicle, and the full power of the Global Positioning Satellite System at her disposal, never manages to locate us.

 Day after day, we are presented with what a friend of mine likes to call “Opportunities.”  These are opportunities to be humble, to surrender, to make peace with all we cannot or should not do for others, no matter how we might want so to do.  We cannot stand on street corners dressed as thimbles, flagging down potential customers, like the Liberty Tax person.  We cannot make people forego their impulses to poison their clothes.  Sometimes, we cannot even do what we know ought to be The Right Thing for a garment because someone will complain.

In 2001, my former husband and I bought a house together.  It was an enormous house—formerly a tavern in the 18th century, that had fourteen rooms.  We were a family of four.  What the hell were we thinking, buying a house that HUGE? Our two children were under the age of four.  In the unlikely event that we were ever each in separate rooms (let’s face it, both kids and two dogs usually even followed me into the bathroom) there were still TEN empty rooms in that house.  It was crazy.  But we bought it anyway.  In addition to the house and five acres of lawn, were not one, but TWO enormous nineteenth century barns in need of constant repair.  When my father came to visit for the very first time, he looked around everything and then asked me a question that haunted me for the next seventeen years. “Can you live with all you will never be able to do here?”   I had no idea what he meant. We could do anything! Over time, I learned the wisdom of his insight.  In the twenty-two hours a week it took to get the gardens in shape, the house would become ankle-deep in dust bunnies large enough to carry off the resident toddlers; by the time you got the house cleaned, the lawn would have eaten the sheep. By the time you found one of the goats eating groceries in the back of the mini-van, one of the barns would have threatened to collapse.  On and on it went.  To live there happily, one had to agree that getting One Thing done each day, of a possible 42,000 was “progress.”

 It takes a lot to get things done.  It also takes a toll to live in peace with all that is NOT done, what can never be done, so that we don’t collapse in despair and overwhelm.  It feels like failure, rather than sanity, to walk away from things that Could be done if we chose to do them instead of something else.  It’s daunting to take the reins of our own Free Will and take Responsibility for what is most important in each moment. We must live with this in the tailoring shop on a daily basis.  There is only so much we can ever do in the hours of daylight we are given.  The work always exceeds the time and energy available.  Learning “when to say When” is very hard, yet learning to take care of ourselves and lock the door at 5:pm is vital to our mental and physical survival.  The jobs can extend beyond our capacity; we cannot.  We have limits. Sometimes, like dogs on a leash, we must strain to reach that limit and then simply lie down next to all that we cannot do.

 As we age, as we parent, as we seek to Serve each other, we keep encountering new things we cannot or should not do.  Some of it we may wish desperately we could do. As we try to update our wardrobes, physiques and bank accounts before our New Year’s Resolutions wear off, it is well to remind ourselves of the prickly peace we must embrace in being able to live with “all we cannot do.”  Perfection is not often an option. Embedded in the Serenity Prayer is the notion that we must be able to discern what can be changed and what cannot. Some things could be changed—but not by us—and that needs to be Ok.  All we can do is all we can do. 

 Choose well and BE Well my Dearies! Be kind to your dear selves and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

A Ripping Good Start

Greetings Dear Friends,

I am painfully aware that the following story does not put its protagonist in the best light.  Therefore, I have put it into fairytale language and changed all the names in the hope of protecting someone who vehemently protests her Innocence—even though we all know she is NOT!

Once upon a time, a certain Seamstress, inspired by the first three chapters of Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, decided to take the contents of her entire closet and pile them on her bed.  With the New Year energy driving her to make a Clean Start, she proceeded to purify the empty closet and dispose of all sorts of rubbish she would not like to mention here because it involves nests of mice and empty pizza boxes.  When the floor was polished and every dust mote removed, she returned to the pile on her bed and began the process of holding each item of clothing to see if it “sparked Joy.” The things that didn’t were thanked, blessed, cleaned and folded to be donated.  The Magic was EVERYWHERE.  Because this is a Fairy tale, the mice were talking mice (very rude mice—not the kind that help you with stitching your ball gowns at the last minute), and the clothes talked back to her—though most of what they said cannot be repeated here.

When nothing but Joy was hanging neatly and ecstatically in the closet, the Seamstress was exhausted and fell into a deep slumber amongst the rest of the sadly departing clothes that she was too tired to pack into bags for donation.  She slumbered for a thousand years but no knight in shining armor hacked his way through the jungle of tangled laundry vines to give her love’s first kiss, nor did the peas and pizza boxes bruise her tender skin. She is a Seamstress, not a Princess, for Heaven’s sake! So she woke up in that mess and struggled in the pre-dawn dimness to find something to wear to work that day.

At the foot of the bed, near one of the snoring canine “footmen,” she could discern a folded pair of jeans. “Ah!” she thought, “I’ll just wear these and have a casual sort of day.  It’s our first day back and the weather is lousy. These will be fine.”  She worked them over her hips in the dark.  They fit beautifully.  “Gee,” she thought, “I don’t remember having these.  How did they get in the donation pile?” she wondered. “These look great!  They feel great! I need to keep these!” she thought happily, sparked with Joy.  (It is important to note that At No Time did this beloved heroine ever ONCE actually look in the mirror.)  Off she went to feed her sheep and chickens and have the local flora and fauna sing to her just like they do in fairytales.  She had porridge for breakfast and left her woodland cottage only a hair late for work, which was progress for her.

At work, because this is a fairytale, all she had to do was wave her silver thimble over things and they got better: Lumps got smoothed, trousers tapered, dresses hemmed, and zippers fixed with a mere whisper.  All the customers danced and clicked their heels and sang show tunes. It’s “zipper time” in the shop—the time of year when every second customer needs to have a zipper fixed.  Noblemen and peasants alike approach with ratty coats saying “Can you help me? I know it’s ugly but I only use it for shoveling snow.”  (It’s beginning to dawn on our heroine that she may be the only resident of New England who shovels snow in her pajamas.)  The “emergencies” that are not zippers are for funerals.  There is a certain percentage of the population of Fitzwell that chooses to shuffle off its mortal coils rather than face another three months of snow and jammed zippers.  Right away, there are three funerals this week and our fairytale seamstress spends a good bit of the morning crawling around men’s ankles, getting their hem lengths just right.  Yes, this is very important to the story: picture a woman CRAWLING on her knees, with mirrors on both sides of her, mirrors she does not see because she is so focused on her work and her attention to her customers. Bending down. Bending over. Crawling...

And now, the fairy tale continues…

A middle-aged man comes in.  She asks him how he is. He gives a stock standard, typically stoic response born from years of snow and funerals and jammed zippers, “Well, I can’t complain!”

“Would you want to?” she wonders. “Why can’t you? Are you not allowed?”  She is curious. Perhaps it is another one of those New England things. Or maybe it’s because this is a fairytale and no one is allowed to complain in fairytales, except the evil ones.  This man does not look evil.  He looks tired.

“I need these pants hemmed for my mom’s funeral on Saturday,” he says.  She nods and leads him to the dressing room. “Your mom just died and you can’t complain???” she wonders in awe. Just WHAT would it take to make you complain??? When the door opens, she crawls around his feet for a few moments, then he leaves.

Over lunch, one of the other seamstresses starts talking about how they have to get back to going to hot yoga together.  Cookie season is over.  It’s time to get serious about having their pants fit again.  First, our heroine wonders idly what would happen if they ate a bunch of Raw cookie dough and then went to hot yoga? Would it bake? Then she looks down at her mystery jeans and thinks again “I must be getting a little squashy in my head.  I seriously don’t remember buying these but I’m glad I did.  I never have jeans fit this well so early in the year!”  Out loud, she says to her co-workers, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a second brain that we could have resting on a charger while we drain the first one, like the battery packs on a cordless drill?  Mine runs down too quickly during the day.  I really need another brain! I don’t remember buying these jeans.” They nod understandingly.  It happens to everyone.

She rushes home to feed the dogs and animals, then rip off all her clothes as fast as she can to change for yoga class.  It’s your standard fairytale yoga class with everyone feeling virtuous and supple and smugly sweaty.  By the end, everyone is magically smaller and more toned and infinitely more flexible and spiritually healed, and probably wealthier too, since the class was on discount…

This Whole peaceful, happy FAIRYTALE ends abruptly that evening when the Seamstress gets a call from her daughter in college. “Hi Mom, how’s it going?  Have you gotten a chance to fix the pair of jeans I left on your bed?  It has two large holes in the bum, kind of underneath the cheeks. I’m not sure what happened.  The fabric just kind of gave way and it needs a patch.  I’d get rid of them but they are my favorite jeans.  They are so comfy!”  Suddenly feeling dizzy, the seamstress hastens to her laundry basket and holds up the pair of jeans she has worn all day.  This is the first time, since dressing in the dark that morning that she has actually LOOKED at them.   What she sees makes her want to pass out.  Her whole fairytale day fast-forwards in front of her eyes…the crawling… the bending… Oh dear God… She probably looked just fine standing up but standing up is not the only thing she does all day.  Visions of dough bulging through two holes haunt her. Is it even possible, to be THAT oblivious that a bit of one’s arse can hang out ALL DAY (no wonder those jeans fit better than any she owns!) and not be physically present enough to realize it?  Yes…apparently, it is… Suddenly, she has to lie down.

WHY DID NO ONE SAY ANYTHING???

Because, well… Here in New England, “we can’t complain.” Also, maybe we don’t really look at each other all that closely.  Maybe we are all more swept into the concerns of our own chattering minds. Perhaps a seamstress in bombed out jeans is no surprise to them: “Physician, heal thyself; Seamstress, mend thy ways and cover your bum while you’re at it!”

In any case dear Reader, I sincerely hope that you can stop weeping over this tragic tale long enough to appreciate that, like all good fairytales, this one contains a rather stern Moral: The life changing magic of tidying up is nothing to the life changing magic of looking at your damn clothes before you wear them! If something seems to fit too well, check again!

Be well, my Dearies!  And may your new year be off to a Ripping Good Start!

Yours aye,

Nancy

In the Beginning was....

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every year find you a better man.” –Benjamin Franklin

Greetings & Happy New Year, Dear Ones!

As the last sands rush through the hourglass of 2018, a December man, looking a bit like Father Time himself, comes into the shop, tottering on three legs, to see if we can alter his new suit.  “How old do you think I am?” he bellows. We shrug.  We have learned not even to guess such things.

 “Twenty-nine?” I tease.  He chortles.

“I’m ninety-six!”  It’s true; he looks great for ninety-six. “You ever hear of a ninety-six-year-old getting a new suit?”

“You can get a new suit any time you want!” announces my friend from behind the counter.

“You ever see a trailer behind a hearse?” he shouts.  We shake our heads.  He smiles and slaps the table. “I’m getting a new suit because you can’t take anything with you when you go.  My grandson asked me if I was getting it for my funeral. ‘What the hell,’ says I, No Way man.  I ain’t buying a suit because I’m gonna die!!  I’m buying it because I’m gonna LIVE.  I’m gonna live. Live it UP until I go. I’m spending your inheritance.  What else am I supposed to do with this money? I can’t take it with me…Yeah, and that men’s store in town is going out of business and so I thought, what the hell, might as well save a little. It was half off. What a bargain. I couldn’t resist.”  We are tired and he is garrulous. He tells us we are crazy to be so tired at our age.  We are just babies.

Next in are two December Women in their early nineties.  Their niece drops them off out front and they manage to squeeze each other through the heavy front door before it chops them both in half.  They are sisters and still act like it.  Nothing fits them at all.  They come from an era where fabric is supposed to owe them a lifetime of service. “We don’t want to buy anything new at our age,” explains one. “We aren’t going to get the wear out of it so what would be the point?  There’s still plenty of wear in what we’ve got.” What they’ve got is a collection of pants suits hanging off them like they are both supposed to wear them simultaneously. After about twenty minutes of good-natured bickering and teasing, the fittings are done and their niece collects them again.  They insist on paying for all their alterations up front. “At our age, you never know!  Take the money while you can get it!” says one, writing out a check.  She hands it to my friend and then these dear, fond sisters grab each other by the elbow and head for the door, arguing about where to eat lunch. After they are gone, we look at the check.  It is made out for a hundred thousand dollars more than it should be. There are way too many zeros.  “Wow! That’s a big tip,” I say.  My friend shakes her head. “We can’t even cash it.  It’s not made out to us. I don’t know where she thinks she was, but this is not our name.”

These were among our final customers of 2018.  I enjoyed contrasting their attitudes about age and money.  I reveled in the fact that they were so old, like the year itself, and yet so vibrant and so determined to look their best at any age.  Their work is waiting for me as I head to the shop today to pick up my thimble and begin another year of sewing.  I cannot help thinking of them without a certain optimism. 

 I remember last year, on our first day back, a man rushed in with a pair of pants and said, “Here, can you take these in?  I’ve been on a diet for about 24 hours and I think I’ve lost an ounce or two. It would do my mental state a lot of good if you had to take these in already. I would feel like I made progress.  Go ahead and measure me. It would keep me going.  In fact, I want you to make them too small so that I don’t quit.”

I love bodies.  Truly, I do.  I love them in the way that Walt Whitman celebrates them in his poetry.  I can’t help thinking that the ancient Greeks, with their ideas concerning denigration of the body, favoring Spirit over flesh, were wrong.  I feel a pang for all the bodies out there this morning, under the tyranny of fresh resolutions, that will be forced to march on treadmills and drink nothing but spinach juice and chlorella until noon or until this latest impulse at self-improvement crashes. I feel sorry for all the hearts and minds that, three to six days from now, will be tortured around the idea that they “failed” again.  I have done this to myself so many times:  I set a resolution to do something to improve my wretched lot, like practice my fiddle every day, then I miss a day and I think, “damn, the Week is wrecked.  And now there goes the whole Month. Which ruins the year…Now I have to wait until NEXT year to be any good at the fiddle.”  For this reason, I hate resolutions! (I resolve not to have any!)

 Still, the notion of self-improvement is intoxicating.  Who Doesn’t want to be an upgraded model of themselves? Prudence Thimbleton adores the idea that, at the start of the New Year, so many people become dissatisfied with a certain moral mediocrity in themselves and rebel against the idea that they should follow their desires wherever they take them and approve of themselves as long as they aren’t hurting anyone.  She is all for having us take stock of ourselves and find ourselves a little less impressive than we had hoped—to realize there is a humiliating gap between our actual selves and our desired selves.  To her way of thinking, we are going to have to return these bodies and souls, like the abused rental cars they are, to their Maker and be given a huge fine for all the damage we’ve allowed. We should be ashamed of ourselves and do something about it.

 I, on the other hand, rebel against the notion that we can divide ourselves into parts that are unworthy of us and still love and celebrate our wholeness. That a young woman might say “I am a loving mother, a darn good accountant, and a dutiful spouse but these thighs are unacceptable,” feels tragic to me. Your Wholeness includes all the parts of you that you might change, but at a level that is Unchanging.  That is what it means to truly love yourself. I cannot help thinking that if we really want to be better humans (which IS a darn good plan!) we need to be more Whole, not more punishing. The business of being Total means we equal the sum of all our parts and perhaps then some.  It is noble and to follow through on the Higher callings of our best selves—to choose discomfort and trade it for deferred Good, rather than immediately present comforts—but not at the point where we must divorce a fundamental part of who we are.   I cannot think that my aim is to be “happy” all the time. That is not Whole. Being Whole means I am a deeply sad person who also knows joy; I am a deeply joyful person who knows sorrow.

Rather than choose a “resolution” this year, I am choosing a “word” that I wish to live into.  I was inspired to do this after a conversation with a friend who said she is doing this as well.  The plan is to choose a word for the coming year that becomes the lens through which you view your opportunities and choices—like “Powerful,” “Abundant,” “Thrive,” “Flourish,” etc… and ask yourself how living into that word will inform your options.  So, you are sitting on your couch, about to dive into a giant bag of Doritos and you pause and say, “is this helping me live into “Vibrancy” (if Vibrancy is your word)? You get invitations to do things over the weekend and you ask yourself, which choice offers the most of (your word). 

 I like this idea better than a resolution (at which I will most certainly fail) for so many reasons.  For one, words have extraordinary power.  Our Western society and the entire Judeo-Christian tradition is based on the idea of Logos—that a Word can create Order out of Chaos. (Our entire judicial system depends on it.)  Also, choosing “a word to live” reminds me of Benjamin Franklin’s attempts to cultivate his “manliness” (Vir being Latin for “manliness”) by practicing one of thirteen Virtues each week.  Much of his success in life relates directly to his drive to improve himself constantly around Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Tranquility, Chastity, Humility, and Cleanliness.  But the key is that he did not strive to do it all at once.  He focused. He worked on one at a time for a week at a time. Lastly, choosing one word incorporates a satisfactory amount of “grey” area into the mix—there are gradations of (Flourishing), not absolutes.  Perhaps we were not  as (Accepting) as we had hoped but we lived into it somewhat, to the best we could.  There is always the chance of being more (Graceful) tomorrow.

 The world needs more people living into words like “Vibrant,” “Flourish,” “Generous,” “Strong.” If you drop a dress size because that happens to be the outcome of living into “Vibrancy” then, who are you to complain? But believing “the world needs more people to be a size six by March” is just ludicrous.  

I think of the racks awaiting me at the shop today. They are a metaphor for the new year ahead: There is too much Good needing to be done in this world to be able to do it all at once.  Don’t get overwhelmed. Just Pick one thing.  Do what you can. Do one thing at a time. Do your best. Forgive yourself often and make better choices as a result of your learning.

Love and Joy come to you, and to you your Wassail too (or green tea or Kombucha, as you see fit), May God bless you and send you a Happy New Year!

Be well, my darlings! Live into your Words and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy