Betweenity

Greetings Dear ones!

Well, I’m disappointed.  Here it is April first, and the “April Showers” are arriving as scheduled but March has failed to deliver its lambs. I go to the barn this morning and find the ewes curled up in their bedding, perched on their sternums, looking very much like those plastic sheep one sees in manger scenes at Christmas time—like legs are not included.  Their bellies splay out on each side like they are shoplifting basketballs under their wool.  They look at me and smile, get slowly to their tiny feet and stretch.  No swollen ankles or stretch marks for these ladies. “Where’s breakfast?” they want to know with all the tact and patience of New Yorkers in line at the DMV.

“Where are the lambs?” I want to know.

“We have no idea what you are talking about,” they say. 

“Am I the only one so excited about the lambs?” I wonder.

“The lambs, if there are any such things as lambs, will be here when they are here and not before,” they say brusquely. “Right Now, it’s breakfast!”  They have no Past—no recollections or regrets about a certain Mr. Someone they might have cavorted with in the fall. They have no future.  Such is the nature of The Sinless. 

I bustle about serving what we call their “cereal and salad” which I describe to them as if I am a snooty waiter in a posh restaurant.  “And for Madam?  Will you be having the Producer’s Pride All-Stock pellets du jour? No, I’m sorry the portions are indeed regulated by the management.  We don’t serve that by the fifty-pound bag, Madam…  And a petite summer salad, hold the vinaigrette and olives? Oh, NOT petite? Very well madam…” I look down my nose at their appalling trough manners as they dive bomb each other’s bowls and climb over each other’s backs to grab more than their share, sometimes yanking it right out of each other’s mouths.  My snooty inner waiter rolls his eyes and tuts in despair.  “This is almost as bad as lunch hour at that all-you-can-eat-buffet in a certain town in Massachusetts,” he grumbles insolently.

I take a wander through the orchard on my way to the house.  The tiniest buds at the very tip tell me which limbs are coming back to life and which dry sticks still need to be pruned.  I want to take off everything dead—no matter how weird it makes the trees look.  They have not been tended for so many years and there is a lot of damage that must be cut away.   This is also how it is for people surveying their own wardrobes in the wake of twelve months of confinement during which pantaloons were strictly optional.  The dead must be consigned or culled.

This week, I’ve had three customers reschedule appointments due to Mud.  Vermont has roughly 8,700 miles of dirt roads, according to the Vermont Agency of Transportation. That's roughly 55 percent of our streets, lanes, thoroughfares, boulevards, driveways, avenues, and ... roads. And this time of the year, that's 8,700 miles of axel-stripping, wheel-gripping MUD.

“I’ll see you in the Spring,” says one man, hanging up.  I am left wondering…the birds, the crocus buds, the fact that I no longer have to smash ice out of water buckets on a daily basis…This isn’t Spring? Apparently not.  Seasons don’t work here quite like they do in other parts of the country.  Here, it seems we have three:  Ski Season, Mud Season, and Creemee Season.  (Creemees are soft-serve ice creams made locally from maple syrup and the incredibly high-in-butter-fat cream from native cows.)  We are deep into mud season now.  It’s a crap shoot each day as I venture down my driveway and try to blast through the three to five sink holes that lurk between me and a paved road.   I have had to spread used sheep bedding on the muddy slope between the house and the barn so that I can climb safely.  I had tried to drag a heavy cart up the hill and my feet went out from under me so swiftly, I was (BANG!) face-down in muck, looking  like a biscuit that had been half dipped, longitudinally, in chocolate before I knew it.   (Only, what I was spitting out didn’t taste too much like chocolate!)

So! Here we are, in a lurching sort of delicately poised equilibrium: the desire, means, and necessity of attaining balance are the focus of each day as we eagerly await Changes and avoid getting stuck.  We aren’t getting to go anywhere; we are Here, in this luminal space--what Horace Walpole might have called “Between-ity.”  Who knows what he actually meant by the term but ever since a friend posted about it on her Facebook page, I have been obsessed with the notion.  It’s the perfect description for this space I seem to be inhabiting—where I must grapple with the release of the old and the embrace of the new and yet neither is yet within the reach of my grasp. 

“Betweenity” seems like the perfect union of the words eternity and between.  It makes me think of Yo-Yo Ma’s statement that the music happens “between the notes” in the length of the Silence between the beats.  It is that place where nothing can be said but so much is communicated.  It’s about dreaming and also about waiting for those dreams to manifest.  It is the space that separates and defines two entities or elements.  Polarity is required, or we might use the word “Among” or “Among-ity” to indicate that there are more than two options.

 “Betweenwhiles” is something my Nana Kennedy might have said, as she measured time in “whiles.”  When we would part, she would say “I’ll see you in a few whiles,” whether I was going to the grocery store and would be back the same day or leaving for Scotland and wouldn’t be back until I was married.   She seems to have had the same sense of timing as the sheep.

In the forests that border the mud, the sap is running.  Warm days pull it up from the roots; cold nights make it sink back.  Only in Transitional times, when the weather is shifting from warm to cold or cold to warm, does the sap run and the sweetness that is hidden from us at other times of year become available. 

“It’s good to enjoy this Pause—this (ahem)…Pregnant… pause,” says the oldest ewe in the flock, fixing me with her calm and steady gaze.  “Enjoy the great magic in Betwixity.  You feel the pressure of Time scratching at you with her claws but remember—Souls are things with no deadlines. ”

She’s right. In the evenings, I sit on my milk crate in the sheep fold and watch for signs of early labor before I turn, extinguish all the lights, and trudge the mud before bed.   I enjoy the reverie and the peaceful interlude.  Interlude—literally means “between plays,” from inter (between) and ludus (play). There is not a lot of play going on at the moment. (Incidentally, ludus is also the root for “ludicrous” which explains a lot about the month of Mud, and how things have been going lately.)  I think about Horace Walpole and his use of the suffix “-ity”  The inner English Professor loves finding out that it comes through Middle English –ite and Old French –ete directly from Latin itatem and denotes “the state or condition of…” So “anonymity” is the condition of being anonymous; “timidity” is the state of being timid; and so on. Unfortunately, the rule breaks with “serendipity,” which, it turns out is NOT the condition of a woman who has misplaced her wallet and car keys somewhere between here and the hardware store.  Serendipity (according to someone’s nauseatingly cheery Pinterest board) is  “when we go out to look for something and find instead the thing we were not looking for, only to realize it’s what we wanted all along.”  Sometimes, this brings us great joy, as in the case of the middle-aged woman who went to her car to retrieve a bag of chicken feed, realized it was covering a forgotten freezer bag of cold groceries that also contained her wallet. (Bonus: She did not have to wait for Creemee season for her ice cream to be a beverage.)

I want to rush the lambs and tell them to hurry up.  But I don’t want to hasten away the last season of an aged, tottering, three-legged dog who is deaf, blind, totally incontinent but still willing to eat his brother’s food and chase a tennis ball.  To rush some things is to rush all things. As we wait…wait…wait… for vaccines, for open markets, for sunshine and freedom and hugs and whatever New Life we have promised ourselves in which we will blossom but not age, grow but not change, live and not complain... the Spring peepers start their chorus in a pond still edged with ice.  Another Moment has begun:  A Moment as eternal as the years themselves are swift. 

Luckily, a soul is a thing without a deadline.  As the Byrds remind us---“To everything, (turn, turn, turn) there is a season (be it ski, Mud or Creemee) and a time to every Purpose under Heaven.” There is no penalty for taking our time to do the work we must do.  Our Time is here. Our Purpose is This.  Endure and Let the Mending continue!

Thanks for reading, commenting, sharing and subscribing.  We’ll all be together again in “a few whiles.”  Meanwhile, I love you dearly—Betwixity, Betweenity, and Always.

Yours aye,

Nancy

A Small Something

HEAVEN from all creatures hides the book of Fate,

All but the page prescribed, their present state;

From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:

Or who could suffer being here below?

The Lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,

Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?

Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,

And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.

Oh, blindness to the future! Kindly giv’n,

That each may fill the circle mark’d by Heaven:

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A Hero perish or a sparrow fall,

Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

--Alexander Pope “Essay on Man” 

Greetings Dear Ones!

Farmers are notoriously hard on clothing.  So are carpenters, mechanics, arborists, and people who think their waistline is still what it was when they were sixteen.  But farmers really take the cake. (And the poop.)  As a seamstress, being friends with one is like being a dentist who hangs out with people who dine chiefly on candy.   Recently, a rather elegant customer came into my shop, asking me to de-pill all her sweaters.  She can’t bear the feeling of these things, tiny fibrous clots the size of tic-tacs, clinging to her garments.  She shudders at the unsightly evidence of friction in her life.  I can’t help thinking of one of my farming mentors who took a blunt knife, the one she uses to slice the twine on bales of hay, and used it to slash off her shirt at the cuffs.  “I hate the way they flop and won’t stay rolled up.  This is way better,” she says, waving her plaid arms as if they are graceful wings and she is now free to fly. 

“Want me to take that shirt home and hem those ragged edges?” I offer.

“Naw…” she says, walking away. “It’s not like I’d wear this to the grocery store.” But she and I both know she will.  

I love that my life is full of these charming and preposterous dichotomies—the subtle and unique pairings that result from humans in conversation about form vs. function and about what has value to our lives. Form and function are dance partners in the same way as Birth and Death. 

I get to my friend’s farm Monday night just as her prized ewe is hard in labor and struggling to deliver a tiny ewe lamb with gorgeous markings.  The neighbor kids are in attendance to witness this “miracle of birth.” Suddenly, it’s apparent that something is awfully wrong.  The sac is so thick and strong that the baby cannot escape it.  When we realize what is happening, it is already too late.  The thirteen-year-old says in a voice aching with sorrow “Life is so cruel.” The six-year-old pipes up to correct him.  “You mean Death,” she says.   Meanwhile, the ewe, not liking so much attention, gets up and walks away.  We corral her in a lambing pen and leave her in peace. That first lamb is so tiny; there is bound to be another.

My friend sends the kids home to supper.   When we return to the barn, the ewe is pacing and pawing, in labor again with the twin.  We wait. It takes a long time for her to get back to hard labor.  I am just about grab the lube and go in after the lamb, thinking it too is dead, when it lands with an inaudible splop on the ground.  He wiggles and breaths in soft tiny cries that have his mother swinging around to clean him off as quickly as she can.  Everything looks good, though he is awfully tiny.  Is there a third? We leave them to make each other’s acquaintance and walk up to the house.  When we came back a short time later with a bucket of warm molasses water for the new mother, we find her lying down, contentedly chewing her cud, totally uninterested in her newborn.  The baby is abandoned in a cold black circle not far from her.  

My friend’s sunny face is a sudden thunderstorm on a cloudless day.  “Grab a towel,” she orders. Quick as a blink, this spry eighty-year-old is over the gate and in the pen, scooping him up, slipping her pinky into his cold, grey lips.  She swaddles the baby, who flops like he is made of rubber, and hands him to me. “He’s still wet! Get him up to the house and get him warm and dry, I’ll be along in a minute.” I turn and run to the house, feeling ice cold placental fluid soaking into my shirt as I go.   

As soon as he is warm and dry and snug in a basket on a heating pad, we return to the barn.  She holds the ewe’s head while I do my best to milk out the colostrum at the other end. This is the crucial “first milk” all newborn mammals need to survive.  The mother does not appreciate my anxious groping and pinching.  She kicks and hops.  She has not bagged up.  There is no milk. One side is completely dry.  The other gives just a few drizzles, less than an ounce.  We go back to the house and mix up some formula to add to it. We need to get two warm ounces into him. I put the sticky liquid into a human baby bottle and trickle it onto his tongue.  He swallows weakly but does not suck.  No suck reflex.  This is bad. “Should we tube him?” I wonder.  His body is now warm but his mouth is still cold—his tongue, like a tiny minnow, flopping blackly.  I keep trying.  Across the room, my weary friend, who is still getting over her second Covid vaccine and has run three times back and forth to the barn by now (up hill, a distance of about a hundred yards) announces firmly from where she is sprawled in an armchair, “It’s up to him.  He’s got to decide to live.  We can’t force it.” It is a warning and a boundary I respect. 

As I hold his head and drop milk and secret hopes into him, his pilot light continues to flicker and fizzle. A swallow. Another swallow.  I can feel his tiny belly expand with breath.  His ribs are the bellows.  “Yes, Keep the fire going!  Give it air,” I want to shout.  I can feel his tiny spirit going in and out of his nose like an invisible hermit crab trying on a shell. Will he stay? Will he go?

He lies quietly in the circle of my palms while we talk about what to do with him.  I volunteer, somewhat greedily, to sleep with him and feed him in the night.  I have have no Farmer’s wish to cut off my cuffs and blithely accept my fate or anyone else’s. I am a MOTHER—“armed” with the science of powdered milk, ready to do battle with Nature herself.  While I babble, silently, he draws in no more of this world, gives out no more of himself.  His last breath leaves him and he does not take another. All that remains of the little Hymn (him) is the Poem—the discarded Biology one can dissect for form and meter, stanza, structure, and sinew.  But the actual Music is gone.

From across the room, my psychic friend knows he is gone before I do. She hushes me with a Look.   A sacred silence passes between us—a brief moment of Grace, as Grief and Relief take each other by the hand and walk gently towards a night of unbroken sleep.  Now, the deciding and discussing is complete.  My friend gets up to go to bed.  

“Shetlands are such hardy creatures.  In all my sixty-five years as a shepherd, I’ve only had to pull a Shetland [get in and assist at a birth] once, maybe twice.  Their mothers know how to do this.  There was something wrong with these two.  They were so small.  The sacs were too tough.  There was no milk. The delivery was way too long… I’m adding it all up and thinking these were premature, though only God knows why that is...  None of the other ewes look ready to go tonight. It just figures… She’s my grand champion…”  She shakes her head sadly. 

I can tell she is deeply disheartened even as she bravely accepts her fate with the faith of a farmer.  We had enjoyed our giddy power, playing God, crossing pedigrees, choosing couplings-- now we are drenched in humility and surrender.  So eagerly, we spent the winter anticipating the surprise of New Life—its colors, its bright eyes, its stiff-kneed bounces of joy.  It never occured to us that the miracle of Life is sometimes the miracle of Death.  

I continue to hold my tiny baby, unwilling to set him down or return him to his Real Mother, the Earth.  My heart talks to his, adrift in our room, and thanks him for coming.  I look with wonder at his hooves the size of my thumb print, the “wooly brightness” of his glossy black coat, the tiny eyelashes.  This “infinity in my palm” does not even weigh three pounds.  It is a holy moment. “Where mercy love and pity dwell, there God is dwelling too…”  Such is the fate of English majors that we are never able to cup dead lambs in our hands without thinking of Alexander Pope or William Blake.  

Little lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

…Softest clothing wooly bright…

Little lamb God bless thee…

To see the world in a grain of sand

And Heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour…  

It’s been thirty years since I stumbled down the stone stairs of gothic Gladfelter Hall, in the little farming town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, clutching some Hope and a large piece of paper that said I am supposed to know a thing or two about poetry.   Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you—one doesn’t know a damn thing about poetry until one is a farmer.  

I continue to hold the deceased lamb like a warm, damp poem against my thighs.  I think of lambs and wool and spinning wheels and knitting needles and sweaters—even sweaters with intolerable little pills on them.  I see the whole “circle marked by Heaven.”  I see my tiny, disheveled, ragged-sleeved place in The Dance.  This death is neither a bad thing nor a good thing, neither a great thing nor a small thing.  But it was Some Thing—this calm, bland, anonymous messiness that took place in a corner, in a barn, on a farm, in a state, in a country, in a world the size of a bubble.  A quiet, quivering Something—a choice, an opportunity, a teachable moment for those of us seeking to know the farmer or poet,  chorus girl or costume designer, Shepherd or Lamb… or any grain of sand. 

Off we go, my Dear Ones, to crop our flowery food and dance and jump and split our pants.  Who knows what tomorrow brings? For Now, the air is going in and out of our nostrils.  As the farmer says, it’s up to us to choose.  Shall we Live?

Let’s keep Mending just in case!!!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Jigs and Reels

Happy St. Patrick’s Day my Darlings!

I have to say, shamrocks are pretty thin on the ground here in Vermont.  Spring and Winter are bickering like siblings and yanking the thermostat back and forth from 40 degrees F(that’s when we giddily strip off all the wool and run around in T-shirts) and then back to the tens, where it feels like we shall shiver forevermore.  It’s hard not to feel like hapless peasants left to the mercy of the Gods when Apollo’s sun chariot seems driven by a maniacal Uber driver from Boston…. 

I spent Tuesday pruning apple trees and shuffling from woodpile to woodpile.  I think I have enough wood to last through May.  I assume it will never be warm again. Ever.  Spring lost the latest arm wrestle and we are back to chipping ice out of water buckets and trying to collect the eggs before they freeze.  Even the trees are confused—sap is going up and down faster than a Jack Russell’s hind leg.  Everywhere I go, I see maple trees with blue tubing running from tree to tree, as if they are all hooked up on life support.  Clever Vermonters are siphoning off their blood to be boiled into maple syrup. 

The lambs are due any day.  My daily chores now include bag, tail, and vulva inspections.  (By bag, I mean the ewes’ udders.  They will fill up shortly before lambing.)  The ewes glance at me coyly, as if they have no idea what I am talking about.  Us? Enceinte? Never!  They are very sneaky.  My friend, whose ram covered all of our sheep during the same time period, has lambs hitting the ground already.   It’s just a matter of timing, which is off by an hour on the clocks, some of which I have yet to change.  I am on time in the Kitchen and the car but not in the bedroom or the shop.  (Perhaps this explains more than it should.)

I truly don’t mind the cold.  I live where I do for a reason. (It’s not just for all the groovy tie-dye, good cheese, and Kombucha.)  But I do dread the coming Mud Season.   We had a taste of it last week when all the birdsong thawed out and the ground melted suddenly into greasy slime.  I’m not talking about that brown stuff that looks like cupcake frosting around the edge of a puddle in the park.  This is deep and savage stuff.  Nothing yanks the steering wheel right out of your hand like hitting a patch of heavy mud.  The roads leading home are dirt and look as though mastodons have been rolling and taking mud baths in them.  After churning axle-deep through one plot of mud, I got on the highway and discovered that I could not go over forty miles an hour without the whole car shuddering like a woman who has just looked at what’s in the back of the fridge.  The wheels were packed so full of mud they were off balance!  Sadly, I ruined a bit of the suspension system as well.  

Being St. Patrick’s Day, naturally I am thinking about Leprechauns (whom I am convinced live here year round in the form of small dogs), pots of gold (which I will need to pay for the mud damage to the car), and MUSIC.  My little tailoring shop is closed because my son and I have eleven on-line school programs scheduled for this week in which we share the stories, culture, and music of Ireland with students Kindergarten through grade 5.  Their follow-up questions are charming. Ninety percent of them have to do with playing music.  “How do you play that?” “When did you learn that?” “Can anyone play music?” “How do you both know what to play?”  

I do not have time to tell them this story, though desperately I want to, so I will tell you instead.  I remember the exact hour I learned to play Music.  It was more magical than a hundred Leprechaun wishes and the magic has stayed with me evermore, through all the years that have passed since.  I was at a summer tune safari for Scottish fiddlers and a young woman, whom I will call Sarah (because that is actually the angel’s name), came all the way from the Western isles of Scotland to teach us.  I was in the intermediate group with the rest of the adult learners.  The advanced class was learning tunes-by-ear four at a time.  At top speed, we could only learn two.  One member of our class was chaffing at the disparity.  She thought we could learn tunes just as fast if they were just easier tunes.  She set up her microphone and recording device and waited.  When Sarah came in, this woman demanded to know how many tunes we were going to learn.

“We’ll see,” was Sarah’s demure reply. “Let’s just start with the one.”  She invited us to listen as she played it several times.  It trickled like warm honey into our ears and stuck immediately. The phrases were identifiable as a “question” followed by an “answer” in which the chordal structure resolved itself.  It was an accessible, straightforward, predictable, traditional tune. We all sighed with relief.  No weird syncopation. No weird key.  We could bag this tune quickly and immediately draw our bows to catch another one, maybe two before lunch.

It didn’t take us long to have all the notes.  We smashed them one by one as they marched along our finger boards.  It was like whack-a-mole only the moles were polite, orderly, and predictable.  “Can we learn another tune?” asked the woman at the front impatiently, “I think most of us have this now.”   A look of angelic serenity came over Sarah’s face as she smiled fondly at the woman.

“We aren’t finished with this one yet,” she said softly.  Instantly, I felt protective of Sarah.  She seemed far too young to be in charge of a group like us.  How could she know the pressure we were under—that middle-aged pressure to be better fast, because Time was running out for us and we had to grab and squeeze and make haste before someone reminded us we were adults responsible for Other Things.  We had arrived late to this game and each endured the private envy, born of poverty consciousness, of talent, tunes, of Youth itself. We needed tips, hints, and short cuts.  SPEED. We were like marauders on a beach, trying to stuff as many shells in our pockets as we could—we would take them home and polish them later.  Right now, we just wanted to grab enough notes to hang on to the tunes before they wriggled out of our fingers.

But Sarah wasn’t having it.  She went over the finer points of bowing.  She made us polish as we went.  “Are we done yet?” we wanted to know. No. Then, she taught us a harmony to the tune.  “Are we done yet?” No. Then she taught us the chords.  “Now, we are probably done,” we thought, “what else could there be to learn about this bloody tune?” No.  This sweet and clever teacher knew damn well we had all forgotten the original tune so she made us review it again. Patiently, with soft stubbornness, she made us carve and scrape and shape that simple little tune—to make sure the melody and harmony were distinct and separate.  A wave of vexation rippled silently among some of the members of the class as they surreptitiously checked their watches.  There might not be time now to learn a second tune!

At this point, Sarah motioned for us to leave our chairs and stand in a circle at the front of the class.  “I invite you to close your eyes now,” she said. “You know the melody, the harmony, and the chords.  I want you to play whichever one of those you choose.  Try not to play what the person next to you is playing.  Try to hear what is happening across the circle.  If you get stuck, go into the center of the circle and just listen.”

Grudgingly, we obeyed.  We stood shoulder to shoulder and began squishing the notes as they started to trickle around the circle.  I think most of us started with the tune.  Gradually, we heard the harmonies coming in, followed by the chords.  

Somehow, I’m not sure exactly at what moment, I stopped smashing notes.  I stopped following the tenuous mental grooves of a quickly memorized pattern.  I started feeling the tune coming from somewhere in my toes, working its way up like living sap in a tree. I swayed in time on my bare feet.  Part of me stepped back to watch myself, then Snap! My attention went suddenly to my fingers and they forgot everything and stumbled.  I panicked. Then I remembered I could find my way back home in the center.  Cautiously, I opened my eyes and stepped into the circle.  My classmates were starting to sway too, like algae, letting the tide take them.  The wall of sound coming at me in the center was gentle, palpable, yet slightly incoherent.  Then something just clicked, like a photo coming into focus.  There were the chords—the strength that marched beneath, carrying the tune on their shoulders.  There was the tune, relaxed, lying resplendently on the litter being carried by the chords.  Here was the harmony, draping itself luxuriantly over the recumbent tune like purple silk.  I could single out each part or blur them into a whole.  I stepped back into my place in the circle.  Now I could “lock on” to my target, like radar for a missile strike, and hear clearly the part I wanted to play with someone across the circle.  To my astonishment, as soon as I could hear a part, I could play it.  Others felt it too.  Our ears were connected to our fingers!  Who knew? The energy changed dramatically. 

Long moments passed in dizzying bliss as we dwelt together at the center of that tune.  No one rushed or hurried.  None of us wanted this to end. (Some days, in my mind, I am there still…) We stopped playing “notes” and began to play our parts. We listened.  We adapted.  We corrected. We kept playing—more and more together with each phrase.  The sounds wrapped around us from the ankles up and bound us together.   Then, without knowing it, we stopped playing “parts” too.  

We just played MUSIC.

We just PLAYED.

We JUST

WE…

When we finally opened our eyes and the last strains of the music drifted out the open window and returned to their place in the cosmos, we found Sarah, standing in the center of the circle with a tear-streaked face, head bowed, smiling. No one spoke.

“Now,” she whispered. “Now, we are done with that tune!”

That was the very first time I ever played Music. That was the time I realized it is actually both a toy and a language. It’s how we share without words about what is essential about Life. And it’s fun.

Knowing one tune well can give us an entry point to All the tunes.  Knowing how to play a lot badly, and in poor taste, serves no one.  We are not here to serve ourselves.  We are here to serve the Music.  Practicing “technique” is what enables us to remove “all that is not music” from our playing but sometimes we can have “all the notes” and still not make any music.  Sometimes, having only a few notes enables us to hear it fully—to feel with all our senses the Pulse of something grand and eternal coming through us for a moment.

Whatever we do today, may we hear some good Music.  And not just hear it; Become it—in our homes, our shops, our gardens, in the silence of our hearts.  I know the Music is listening too, to hear what we bring.

Happy St. Pat’s!  

With Sew much love,

 Yours aye,

Nancy

Women's Work

Greetings my Dear Ones!

In honor of International Women’s Day, here are some random thoughts about hands-on, knitting gritty “Women’s Work.” (hint:  These hands don’t just rock cradles… )

I spent Sunday afternoon in the barn teaching two young women how to use power tools, while my son—the boyfriend of one and the brother of the other, was in the house doing the breakfast dishes and his laundry, scrubbing frozen raspberry stains off the kitchen floor, and building a fire to warm us when we came back in.  In his spare time, he practiced music, did some personal grooming, and planned supper.  Meanwhile, we worked six hours in cold that turned our hands to stumps incapable of holding nails, or even hammers, by nightfall.  We stumbled numb-thumbed into the kitchen, chilled to our arteries, grateful for bread and warmth.  I stared at the pink, silent paws in my lap and thought of all the things our hands had taught our brains that day.  I have been reading Frank R. Wilson’s book The Hand—how it shapes the brain, language, and human culture lately and I am convinced that doing anything with our hands is bound to make us smarter. We smartened ourselves up enough to be almost dangerous.

We were building lambing jugs—think of a series of little cribs made out of repurposed wooden pallets—for the baby lambs the March Lion is supposed to be bringing.  My daughter, who is a very auditory learner, called each thing by the sound it made—“Do we need the Bzzzzz Bzzzz or the Duhduh-duhduh?” she would say, impersonating them the way one might do a bird call.  “Let’s use the hin-dih-dih for now,” I would answer.  They learned to use a chop saw, a skill saw, a saws-all, and the various drills, drivers, hammers, even a cat’s paw to pull out all the old nails.  They also learned how to drill deep and screw up—two of the most important things anyone can learn anywhere ever.

“We are free here!” I scream over the blare of Scottish fiddle music and a drill, “This is a SAFE SPACE to screw up as much as we want.  If we make any mistakes, we will just fix what we can and take pride in the rest.  Just go slow and be safe! Afterwards, we can hang a big sign that says Real Girls Built This Shit.”  We all cheer.  It’s wonderful to feel we can do Anything.  This barn is like the creaking galley of an old ship that might go Anywhere.

We love having the power to make what we want.  The Empress in me loves not being questioned, queried, or interrogated about “why” I want things the way I want them.  We don’t have to be sneaky here—we can boldly state out loud things like—“I think we should move the entire hay mow to the other side of the building.” And it is Done.   

We build an interior wall from wood we found in the loft, then cover the inside of two exterior walls with shiplap. My math skills are improving so much lately, we only have an extra eight feet of board leftover, not counting a wheel barrow full of trimmings that are now kindling.  We anchor a floor-to-rafter post and hang a gate on it.  Then we subdivide the space with the pallet maze to create a make-shift maternity ward for the sheep. Lambing jugs are small, usually portable pens that give each ewe her own cubby in which to bond with her lambs.  Where my ewes are all first-timers, they might need two or three days with their own “family” to figure out who they are supposed to nurse and who they are not supposed to sit upon, trample or squash. Shetlands are a remarkably hardy and wiley breed so they usually figure things out quickly. 

As we work, I keep a keen eye on my young cohorts.  They are as cute as oxen and just as determined.  They figure out how to do things without a lot of instruction. Instead, we babble joyfully about the lambs coming and plans for “the nursery” like we are at a baby shower sipping tea and watching someone with swollen ankles open bibs and onesies.  Instinctively, these ladies work as a team—juggling boards and levels, carrying long pieces of wood, measuring (twice!) and using a T-square.  They don’t know how to do these things without each other’s extra hands yet.  They proceeded with an abundance of caution, steadying each other.  I knew what we were doing was very dangerous (I could hear my father’s voice in my head “A saw does not care what it bites!”)  But there is a big difference between respecting a tool and fearing it.  I’m not exactly sure who said this quote but I know it applies to everyone from pre-schoolers learning to tie their own shoes to fifty-somethings trying to finish off a pint of coffee ice cream right out of a container without the use of a spoon:  “Never help a person do a task at which she feels she could succeed” or “Never do for someone what he is able to do for himself.”   Having tools at our disposal is only part of the success story—Knowing how to use them is where the real power lies.

It feels good to move, to create, to DO.   The ladies do an amazing job of being safe and learning how to let the tools do the work for them.  They learn how to use a skill saw so that it does not bounce along the board. They learn the right angles and pressure to keep the driver well-set in the screws so they don’t strip the screw heads. In carpentry as in sewing, concrete objects lead to abstract concepts, particularly in math and language arts.  (Ever try to spend a day working with people who have no idea what the tools are called?) These magnificent women aren’t just building lambing jugs—they are building Themselves—beauty, brawn, brain and the Spirit of “We can.” It’s Magnificent.

Of course, a skilled craftsman would put us to shame—their brains and hands being so much more connected over much more time.  There are people so adept at using backhoes, they can use one to strike a match. We don’t care.  The objective standard of the day is to create a safe place for lambs as well as women trying new skills.  Our goal is not to put carpenters out of business.  Not by a long shot.  But knowing how to do the basics, even in our crude, six-year-old-making-a-wobbly-scarf-entirely-of-garter-stitch kind of way, makes us appreciate a true craftsperson so much more.

It concerns me deeply that children today play video games instead of doing handwork or building tree forts.  These are the true “Mind Crafts.” When the point of education becomes the pursuit of credentials, rather than the cultivation of actual Knowledge (which is driven by Experience), we ask our children to forfeit their innate drive Explore, to Do, to Know.  The hand-brain connection atrophies.  We foster weakness and rob them of vintage delights we once enjoyed. They begin to think that music comes out of a radio instead of an instrument played by a human.  We buy into the rot that singing songs, dancing, and making things are only for licensed “professionals” to do.   Being able to do something “real” and meaningful to alter our own conditions is profoundly enabling, not to mention genuinely pleasurable.

In other news, some of you may know that it is a secret, girlish dream of mine to raise and train a team of oxen.  Recently, I made what I thought was an innocent inquiry on a social media site devoted to “all things oxen.”  Within moments, a person with a traditionally male-sounding name, replied with what felt to me, in my vulnerable state, like an unnecessarily sharp cut. Clearly, to my injured pride, (he?) wanted to impress on me the miserable state of my understanding and the exalted state of his.  I had wrongly used a term I thought I understood.  I would not have felt so hurt if he had gone on kindly to inform me what the customary terms were but he did not.  He simply made it clear that I was embarrassingly “wrong” and left it at that, while others indicated by adding “laugh” emojis to his comment that I was the butt of a great joke.  This is a typical, if somewhat savage way some “educators” have of separating a potential student from her ego, crushing it, then recruiting her pride to the love of knowledge only [he] can provide.   I posted a polite but disheartened “thanks” and he replied “Your [sic] welcome.” 

Then, I’m not proud of this… The little Bitch in me retaliated.  I replied again. “Thank you for helping me to see that I must research the proper terms more thoroughly. I appreciate your dedication to Precision in language. It is of great importance to me also.  P.S. that’s why I’m pretty sure you meant to say ‘you’re.’” (SNAP. Take that, arrogant foe; English major for the win!)

I let my reply sit for about half an hour then deleted it.  I don’t want to build a world where we shame each other over technicalities. What good comes of that? I’d much rather have a strong woman call a saw a “Duhduh-duhduh” and actually know how to use it than get into a piddling match over vocabulary or spelling.  Meanwhile, two amazing and generous women reached out through private messsaging to offer mentorship.  They were unbelievably warm, knowledgeable, and kind.  As much as our hands reveal our minds, our words reveal our hearts.  While one man took his laughs at my expense in a public forum, two women privately stepped up to welcome me to their group. What does that tell you about the state of Women today?  One said she is excited to get more women involved in this sport, that there is a sisterhood around oxen that is as forgiving as it is welcoming. (Are not Forgiving and Welcoming close cousins?)

I am delighted there is an international festival dedicated to celebrating Women and their achievements. (For the record, I want it clear that I also adore men, especially those who have the laundry done and delicious baked goods waiting for us when we clomp in the door covered in mud, sweat, and sawdust, tingling with Empowerment.)  I want to celebrate all the time any gender or orientation embraces tools to make this world a better place.

If you want to know how to give People (especially female people) more agency in this world, hear this: I personally never came to own a single skill by watching someone else do it on T.V.  Hand us good tools (and safety goggles!) and get out of our way.  Let us make a mess.  Cheer us as we try again.  Honor the effort, not just the result.

For Heaven’s sake, DON’T shame us for wanting to learn.  Give us the words we seek. Teach us we can and we will.  Maybe things won’t be perfect at first, or even for a long while.  It takes miles of stitching to teach a new hand how to sew neatly.  It’s not a hand thing; it’s a brain thing.  We literally have to grow a lot of brain connections to be good at stuff.  Be welcoming. Create safe spaces to try new things.  Let’s keep our hands busy and our hearts open.

DIY.  TIY.   And for all our dear sakes, Keep Mending.

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. I went out to the barn this morning and the gate actually works and none of the walls have fallen down. Wooooooo!

Envisioning

Greetings Dear Ones!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Burned out...

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

Greetings Dear ones!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some things are always bound to change (always)

There ain’t no ash will burn.

Love is a precious thing, I’m told

Burns just like West Virginia coal

But when the fire dies down, it’s cold

And there ain’t no ash will burn 

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

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

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

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

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

With sew much love,

Nancy

A Valentine...

My Darling Valentine,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With deepest Joy,

Your Valentine

A Pretty Good Love Story

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

Greetings Dear Ones!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Agreed,” nod the wethers.

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

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

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

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

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

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Freedom

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

Greetings Dear Ones!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Grassitude

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

Greetings Dear Ones!

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

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

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

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

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

I love fixing things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gratitude?” asks a young sheep curiously.

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

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

With sew much love,

Nancy

Listen to the Cricket

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

Greetings Dear Ones!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I did. And I did.

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

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

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

But sometimes we don’t.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours aye,

Nancy