Survival-hood

Happy Mother’s Day Dear Ones!

Yep… At the Very Moment you are just about to get everything In Order, vast, unexpected amounts of chaos enters your life to keep you “busy” so that you end up trashing all your goals (and house) (and several pairs of pants) and forgetting “the Plot” you had just plotted.  (Welcome to the Land Of Lost Plots!) You know you were on to something Really Good when all hell breaks loose and Life (New Life) changes your plans.  If any of you Darlings are Struggling, know this: It’s probably because you were just about to do something Good but the universe is offering you something really messy, hard, and Magical instead. Take heart.  Change those pants and keep going! (I can help fix those pants!) It’s probably some form of Survival-hood—also known as Motherhood.

Farming and Motherhood are close cousins. In my case, none of the animals have been following their scripts lately.   Note The Official Farm Script:

[Sheep]: take care of your own damn lambs; don’t leave a wet newborn in a corner to die

[also sheep] : eat grass, chew cud, behave (and poop) normally.  Finding a loose board on the chicken coop and bashing down a wall so that you can get in and consume 20 pounds of chicken feed (that is NOT on your diet) is not only unnecessary but vehemently discouraged. P.S. leave the lilacs ALONE!

[lamb]: live with your biological mother in the barn, not in a box by the wood stove.  No matter how utterly appealing you are, my carpets simply can’t take yet another being with a cute face at one end and a total lack of responsibility at the other.  The Jack Russells are already starring in that role.

[chickens]: lay eggs, graze on bugs in the yard, live in the chicken coop, not the house.  

[dogs]: try not to drive me crazy with barking at all the disruptions.  Do not “sample” our convalescent house guests.  They are not for dinner.

I have had to issue a lot of “plot” violations in the past fortnight.

I haven’t had time to change up the blog, write a book, or even eat a meal sitting down because I basically turned my entire dwelling into an animal hospital last week.  We had a maternity ward, a neo-natal unit, a contagious quarantine unit, and a certain canine heart patient who is only too keen to remind me that it is “time for his medicine,” which is delivered in a bolus of peanut butter.  (Luckily, everyone lived, including me!) Three sheep got colic and had to be force-fed Pepto bismol mixed 1:1 with olive oil until they were able to pass large, greasy stools that resembled cow pies. Two bantam hens came down with respiratory infections and were cured by garlic-infused drinking water and probiotics (and living in the house by the wood stove).   I’ve been chopping garlic, mending chicken coops, and bottle-feeding my new baby. That’s right… I’m a Mama (again).  And for now (again) we’re all just in Survival Mode.

The New Baby Syndrome is my current excuse for my haggard appearance and inability to locate my car keys. I’m sleep-deprived, forgetful, and exhausted.  My house is a mess, I’m drowning in laundry and dirty towels, and I am deliriously in love.  When the baby sleeps, I just hold him, sniff his little ears, and breathe quietly.  I don’t want to wake him.  It’s amazing how swiftly a “baby” becomes the boss of the house.  

Luckily, my adopted baby has an accelerated lifespan so by day 3 he is ready for a play date. (In a few weeks, he’ll probably move out and wind up living with his hairy, horny pals who just follow the herd and never bathe from one rainstorm to the next.)  From the moment I turn up at the Play Date with a bottle in one hand and a family size bag of corn-chips in the other, I see immediately that I am not like the other mothers, who are strong and pushy and totally confident in their roles. They size me up with icy glares and the greedy yet wary disdain of suburbanites at a Pampered Chef party.   It’s true that “your children choose your friends” and I am going to have to fit in with this rabble if he is to succeed.  I have brought the snacks to share with the other mothers—a subtle ploy in the hopes that I can bribe/distract them into accepting my child.  We must do what we can to position our children for success. No parent, ever, wants to raise a victim. 

Like most mothers who nurse their own babies, they are very suspicious of my bottle.  Who is this for? They want to know.  Does it contain whisky? They sniff it with curiosity then contempt.  Anxiously, I compare my little guy to theirs.  Is he growing fast enough? Is he doing all the things the other young ones can do? Yes, I know what Nature intended, but that’s just not an option for our family and that has to be ok.  We’re doing the best that we can.  Motherhood is nothing if not about adapting.

The other mothers turn to the corn chips, greedily helping themselves without asking.   One pushes her entire face into the bag, stepping on her own child in her haste.  She smacks her lips and looks right through me. It’s clear that these moms will be my friends as long as I have things they want.   (I’ve lived in neighborhoods like this before.)

My child and I cuddle close to each other on the fringes of their society. We don’t look like the other families.  (We don't even look like each other.) I stand my ground and whisper, “I don’t care what color you are, what gender you are, how smart you are, in whose uterus you grew or even what species you are.  I love you no matter what.  I am committed, deeply, to seeing you flourish, both in body and spirit.” He blinks back at me with calm, innocent eyes.  Another mother tries to bash him and I bash her right back.   This is a tough playground.

Her son Wallace is the dream son.  He’s bigger than the rest, with coal black wool that feels like silk.  I’ve never seen a ram lamb with a finer fleece.  His conformation is perfect.  And, more than that, he possesses a quality I have never once witnessed in a lamb: Dignity.  Most lambs behave as if they are being tickled constantly by invisible fingers.  They leap and twitch and giggle. Not Wallace. Wallace saunters.  Wallace gazes.  Wallace is the Dude.  His mother is fiercely proud of him.  Wallace is probably going to get a full scholarship to any school he wants.  He approaches my wee boy and abruptly knocks him in the noggin.  My guy drops back stunned, shakes his head, then charges forward.  He takes his hit and gives one back and soon they are playing happily together. 

I stand on the sidelines, distracting the adults with corn chips while the little ones sort things out.  I know, from years of mothering, that it is unwise to get involved too hastily in playground disputes.  A few days later, they have formed a Lamb Club and play happy games like king of the dirt pile, while we mothers are free to ignore them and focus on eating everything not nailed down.  Wee Charlie (Chip for short) and Wallace are pals.  Chip starts having sleep-overs at Wally’s and life begins to resume its normal level of chaos.

I always find it disconcerting when a veterinary technician will say “Ok, Mom, you hold Pip and Waddle while we take Hop to the back for blood work…” Then they come back with Hop and say “Here’s your Mommy!” in a gooey voice.   Without fail, there is Prudence, hissing in my ear “Pssst….you DO REALIZE you’re not actually their mom, right? If anything, they’re more like rumbustious  roommates and you just happen to be the pigeon who winds up paying for everyone else’s tab.”

She’s right. Being a pet owner is intense and takes a lot of sacrifice, true.  But it isn’t Parenthood.  But raising this tiny Lamb, this little lamb from God, makes me feels like I’m the one who is Owned.  I’m paying—in time, in energy, and milk replacer at $25 a bag. It feels damn close to motherhood.  At the core of Motherhood is survival—of ourselves and the Vulnerable.  (Sanity is optional).   It’s a tricky balance that pits love against sense every time.  Through our love and service, we take up where Creation left off--protecting what is not yet viable without us, fighting when we need to fight, and surrendering when we need to surrender.

One thing is for sure: Mothering doesn’t look the same for everyone.   Good Mothering can look like anything that works.  In the end, it fuels you in ways you cannot explain to keep going, no matter how weary you are, to do What Needs To Be Done For The Young.  It gives you strengths you never knew you had to endure things you never before imagined—such as the heartbreak of listening to crying you are powerless to stop, having your children leave your arms for their for their peers, and poop…so much poop….

Clues You Might Be Somebody’s Mother:

…You put their needs ahead of your own, maybe not always, but mostly

… You are constantly trying to do The Right Thing, even though you really have no idea what that is… (You spend a lot of time researching on the internet)

…You are in charge of what happens to their poop

…You are the one they turn to for protection

…You are the one they turn to for nourishment

…You are the one they run to for comfort

…You are their sunshine, their warm blanket and a lullabye, that silent cup of tea when they need to talk, that calm voice when they need to listen, that body that feels like Home…

…You are the one they sometimes want to Be With, even if they don’t need protection, reassurance, or food.  Your scent, your touch, your voice—just YOU—being there in song or silence, brings them peace and contentment. They know they are Not Alone simply because you are There.

… Somehow, in the delirium of fatigue, you realize it’s not about what you are “giving up” but the immeasurable ways you are gaining from this experience of loving another little being.  You’ve stopped “surviving” and started Loving.  With all of your heart…

…in raising another, you’ve found your own limits then grown yourself.

That’s when you know you’ve become one of our world’s most precious forces for all that is Good and Mending in this world.  You are a Mother.   You haven’t just Survived.  You’ve blossomed. You got this.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Betending

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” –Parker Palmer

Greetings Dear Ones!

A tiny pixie, probably age 4, enters my shop with her slightly older (probably 6?) sister.   The pregnant servant/queen who attends them limps as though glass slippers are hell on feet that have spread like cheap paint during her third trimester. She has a bag of palace mending she is never going to get around to before the next princess is born.  She plops it on my counter with a heavy sigh. One look at her little ones and I can clearly see their fairy bloodlines.  They have bright curious eyes that dart around the shop and curly ringlets of hair that squirm and dance as if they are made of horsehair and fiddle tunes.  The little one is wearing wellie boots on the wrong feet and a grubby set of tattered satin wings that droop down her back. The Domesticated sister, who has her shoes on the right feet, is one of those very eldress-in-the-making types who announces in a stage whisper “This looks like the kind of place where we mustn’t touch anything.”  She glares at her ward, then looks at me with exaggerated sweetness, clearly expecting some form of emotional Scooby snack for her prim reminder.   

“Rubbish!” I announce.  “I always let people play with my most dangerous toys.  Have a pin cushion but be very careful—one drop of blood and you will have to stay here and iron with me for a hundred years.”  (The queen looks at me swiftly and brightens.) The older one’s eyes widen as she silently accepts as if it is a hot coal the spiky tomato I hand her.  The pixie ignores me and heads for the wall of thread.  She considers it thoughtfully before making her decision.

“This is NOT a rainbow,” she states flatly.

“No, you’re right, it’s not.  I have all the cool colors on one side and all the warm colors in another section and all the earth tones on another section.  It’s not really a rainbow.”

“It looks like it should be,” she says disapprovingly. “It’s trying to be. It should be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.” Emphatically, she chops the air into segments as she speaks.  She turns to her sister, who has already lost interest in the pin cushion.

“Betend I am a fairy and this is where I make rainbows to send out,” says the Rainbow Expert, attempting to climb onto my work table.  

“You can’t touch anything,” hisses the Big Sister. (Prudence adores this big sister and smiles at her fondly.)  We are all waiting for the queen to intervene, as the pixie plans her ascent. Clearly, the tired queen has downgraded her Mothering Alert levels to basics like poisoning, drowning, tooth decay and anything to do with naked flames—leaving an opening for a middle-management position to this aspiring sibling. She opens her mouth to take charge and before she can get the word out, the furious pixie stamps her foot and says in a voice that makes vines grow up the slender trunk of her neck:

“I SAID BETEND!!!”

Betend… Be…Tend…  How much I LOVE that word.    I know her speech will get corrected over time and she will start to say the more false version of this—“pretend.” But I far prefer betend.   Betend is not about pretending anything.   Children aged 4-6 embody the seriousness of such a concept.  There is nothing fake or false or “practicing” about it.  To Betend is an invitation to get so lost in the game you have no idea what “real” is—Real is what is swirling forth from the most magical, rainbow-obsessed center of you.  You see with different eyes; you hear with different ears.  In tattered satin, flight is possible.  

Long after the magical family leaves the workshop, I dwell in the land of Betend.  “Betend I am a Kind Old Crone who must magically do all this mending so I can bring sacks of grain back to the talking animals at the Land of Lost Plots…” I think as I sort through the basket of mending.  I always know I am getting creative when I have no price list to go by. When people bring in wedding gowns, suits, bridesmaids’ dresses, pants to be hemmed—there is a price list for each of these things.  I have done them so many times I know how long they will take and what the market will bear.  The “creativity” ebbs and dwindles into deep grooves around protocols and best practices.  Even complicated things become just “busy work” when one has done them hundreds of times.  This family’s mending will require lots of ingenuity.  Each snag, tear, or rip is as unique as the being who wore it and had An Incident Involving the Laws of Physics.  There is no price list for this.    I set a thimble on my finger, choose a pretty good color from my failed rainbow and get to work. 

I think a lot about Being, Tending, Be-Tending.  I feel my utter happiest around people who are Betending.  To BeTend is not an act of artifice.  It is not the “fake it til you make it,” thing.  There is no Fake.  I am not really “a Seamstress”—but I am a darn good Betender.  I be here and tend to my customers and delight in the magic of the game other folks consent to play with me. I can hear my inner five-year-old-say ‘betend you are the customer and you rip your pants and I help fix them’.  

I am not a farmer, I Betend to have sheep.  I Be and I Tend.  One of the lambs has taken up residence in the kitchen where he is Betending he is a dog.  He has no idea how to be a sheep any more than I know how to be a proper farmer, whose animals reside in a barn.  But here we Be.  And we Tend. We show up and Play the Game and do our best. We deal with the bossy ones who try to micro-manage our roles.  And it is ridiculously Good Fun most of the time, with the right attitude, beverage, or a damn good nap.  

Another game I like to play is Betending I am a writer.  On April 16th, I celebrated the third anniversary of this blog. Yet again, I thank my dear friend Emerald Rae who forced me to start the process!   I promised myself that no matter what, I would not quit for three full years.  I would reassess then.  By then, I just knew I would be [____] (fill in the blank with anything sophisticated, organized, prosperous, thriving, well-behaved, always-know-where-the-car-keys-are kind of Successful you want) and able to look back on all I have learned with that Sage Composure of a Crone-done-good.  I would be so much wiser and more practiced then…

Well… let’s just admit that… um, three years have passed… 

In three short blinks, I’ve moved twice and traded a tiny cottage in the Enchanted Forest for one with three times as much land ten times as wild with a gazillion times more mud and chaos.  I’ve opened not one but TWO businesses—teaching Music Together, and my own tailoring shop.  I’ve worked as a subcontractor to a top-secret design firm.  I try like hell to meet my own blog deadline every week. Mostly, I do, except when extreme grief, depression, or cunning car keys outrun me. How about that year when a pandemic hit… when dear souls departed without farewells, when both businesses all but failed, my shoulder froze, the weeds refused to spit out what was left of the farm, and our entire planet panicked about how it was going to wipe its bum.  We thought we had seen the last of sanity and toilet paper in our lifetimes and anyone with a sewing machine got busy diapering faces instead of bums.

One thing I have noticed, after three years of this grueling weekly blog schedule, is that writing never gets easier. Neither does the need to do it recede. Doing it seems dreadful; not doing it feels worse.  I thought I would surely quit after three years; now I remember that a traditional apprenticeship is seven--there being so much to learn and practice in any skill, whether it’s candle-making, blacksmithing, or discussing dung in undies.  Ooof… I’m not even half way.

Secretly, I have longed for these three years to be complete so that I could end my promise to myself without guilt or regret, while proving I actually DO have the self-discipline to do at least 85% of what I set out to do.  That much I can celebrate. But more than that, way more, I still want to find that sweet spot of authentic service where my own gift of Gladness—all the things that spark my heart or humor—might meet a need in someone else who wants to share that Gladness.  That is where, I realize now, I have wanted to go with this journey all along.   And it is still ahead…

To go to war weekly with the parts of ourselves who want to Create Something Useful in the face of crippling self-doubt is an extremely hellish but necessary form of self-care.  You, Dear Ones, Fellow Creatives, understand all too well that Creativity is an act of Healing the part of us that was “domesticated” before we were six.  It requires us to hear old voices saying we will never be good enough and stop up our ears like Ulysses, lest we be dashed upon the rocks of Public Opinion.   Playing to public opinion causes us to sacrifice our hearts, our pride, sometimes even our gifts in order to assume labels that force us into genres where we can be compared.   I have done that and felt bitten.  I have leveraged gifts for praise and felt icky. I have held back and felt choked.   I have been honest and felt Clean. Rejection is painful, especially from those we want to love us.  I have learned that my friends are not necessarily my fans.  That’s ok.  Not just in politics, I have had to feel my way towards truly forgiving those who do not value what I value.  None of us want to be “fixed”—we just want to be seen, known, Loved. I am here to fix pants, not people.

I do really want to alter this blog, however, and the three-year mark seems like a good time to do that.  None of us learns to knit with the idea that evermore we shall churn out only yards of scarves in garter stitch.  We all want to make Fair Isle, Fisherman’s Knit, or grubby lace of some sort—or perish trying.  In order to improve my craft a bit, I need to stop being so slap-dash about it.  It might need to take up more than dawn on a Wednesday.   I see that grinding out endless, long-read, first drafts is exhausting and deprives me of time to Betend other games in my life.  One game I would love to play is Editing this Stuff and Creating Something Jolly or Useful out of it—perhaps a slim volume the right size for propping under a rickety table leg, or something one might like to poke through in the outhouse, in the unlikely event one cannot locate one’s cell phone or a Montgomery Ward Catalogue. 

No matter what, it shan’t be easy. There is a fierce unholy battle going on between our bossy, domesticated six-year-olds, who have paid close attention to Prudence and the Crabbit Ones, and our feral fairy five-year-olds who know that disorganized rainbows do need our help.   This is a heroic and serious battle—many pants will be ripped in this fight.  

Just DO it. That THING, the thing calling you from the center of your heart—that tune or song or mountain or film or book or painting or baby or farm or garden that stirs your spirit to Betend it—it is your call from Heaven.  You must help with Creation. Answer it!  We each have something precious within us that we must either share with the world or rob from it.  Put your wellie boots on wrong, grab your tattered satin wings, and BETEND, my darlings, Betend with all your might.  Hell, if I can, you can too.

Be well, my Dear Ones! Thanks for coming with me on this journey. I enjoy your company more than you could ever know.  I am humbly indebted to you Sweethearts who “Like, comment, subscribe, share,” and bolster me with your faith and generosity.  Thank you so much!

Let the Mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Potentials

Greetings Dear Ones!

Spring may be in the air—it’s not yet in the barn.  Each morning I go out to check and there are no little boing-ing things bouncing around in tiny wooly coats and shiny new hooves.   This morning, a giant clipped-off toenail of a crescent moon, was sneaking along the horizon just before the rising sun.   It was late and it knew it.  Even the moon is slacking here.  It reminded me of myself as I hurried to check the ladies in waiting. Waiting they were… for breakfast.  They heaved themselves to their feet and I could tell that all their stories were still inside them.

I sigh.  Serve hay… chop wood… fetch water...  Living in a Zen koan is not as peaceful as it sounds sometimes.  I am wracked with a passion deprived of sensuality.   I want to bury my nose in fresh fluff and inhale a mixture of milky breath and that “new baby” smell.  I want to hear a voice the size of a thimble calling for its mother.  I want to watch tottering first steps turn into boisterous, impudent dance moves.   I am sick of lifting up their mamas’ tails the way one lifts a lid on a pot on a stove to see if it has bubbled yet.  I am here to tell you that watched pots never boil.  Apparently, watched hoo-hahs don’t either.

In my longing to see what I want to see, I blind myself to all that is.  How tragic to miss all the tiny miracles slipping in from the margins! I remind myself to peel my eyes.  At the spigot where I draw the water, a determined little crocus opens up a yellow cup. Next to it is a tiny family of blue flowers whose names I do not know.  They have come, as if by magic, from the mud that was trampled and torn by last summer’s weeding and ripping of rogue vines, some of which had (literally) climbed in the kitchen window and reached around for some salt and pepper so they could eat the rest of the house.  We tore back those vines and discovered bricks beneath a six-inch crust of topsoil.   Then we removed all the bricks to dig a trench so that we could have an endless supply of mud on paws coming in the door and getting everywhere, including on furniture and in sheets… (just kidding, it was to put in a drainage system). All the while, I had no idea that a tiny capsule, containing the genetic code for Beauty, was working its way to the surface—a hidden benediction from the past, a blessing from the former Gardener who chose this darling for this spot. And now it blooms.  It turns its little furred eyebrows to the sun and sips with its toes the drizzle left as my full bucket splops. It’s time is Now.

All around me, I can feel the pulse of New Miracles making perennial journeys through tight, dark canals that thread us to the Past. By a pile of scree  pushed up by the plow, a quartet of jonquils is just getting ready to unbend their necks and release a silent Yellow yell.  There is a reddish mist in the upper branches of the cherry and apple trees as they break with a rash of new growth.  I wonder if it aches a tree to stretch and grow from the inside out and burst one’s bark at the weak places?  The part of me that is part tree feels such an ache. 

In the shop hangs a large collection of Blessings and Promises in colorful folds all along one wall. Unlike a crocus or an oak, this fabric is not locked to any genetic code or pre-determining.  It can be anything it needs to be. The Potential is wide open.  All I know is that it almost certainly will not be what it was intended to be, as there is no way of knowing what the original purchaser envisioned.  Her daughter bequeathed it all to me when her mother died.  Certain potentials have a shelf-life.  The plans and dreams for this fabric have gone to the Great Beyond  with the woman who called them to her, then dispersed them like seeds on the wind.  The fabric hangs now, uncommitted, in a silent row of stories waiting to be drafted then donned.  They are dormant as crocuses, until the exact Right Conditions appear.

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This is as far as I had gotten with writing this week’s blog when a lamb (of course) went and ruined all of it by being born. (Ha!)  Just as I am bleating about the anticipation fatigue—boom, here he is, trailing glory, like a much anticipated guest who thinks it’s fine to arrive so late to a party the hostess doesn’t know whether to bop him over the head or reheat the borscht.  (Both must be done at some point, I suppose.) He’s a large singleton ram lamb full of a sense of swagger and adventure.  We’ve already had to modify the jug [pen] he shares with his mother because he keeps escaping to visit his aunts. He’s off to see the world!

Immediately, I call my shepherdess friend. She wants to know what color he is. “He’s black,” I say, “Coal black, down to his skin, which is also black.” 

“That’s impossible,” she insists over the phone, not able to see him. “His mother is an Ivory Muskit [pronounced “mooskit” i.e. off white] and his father was a Moorit [brown].  There is not gene for black there… He’s not black.”  

“Ok,” I say, and hang up, smiling.  “You’ve given birth to a Miracle,” I tell his mother.  “Everything is a miracle,” she says softly, licking him gently all over, even his tiny bum.  

“Yes,” I sigh happily, “I don’t care what color he is--he’s just perfect the way he is.”  She makes tender agreeing rumbles in her chest.

“That’s where you are wrong,” says the old ewe, listening from the other corner.  “Nothing is perfect here.” 

I look around at all the half-finished projects and the debris that still needs to be cleared away… What does she think this ought to be? The Ritz? “Well, I know…” I stammer, “I’m doing my best to get the place cleaned up.  Don’t worry…”

“That’s not what I mean,” she says.  “Perfect is a silly term. It’s not why we are here.”

“Don’t listen to her!” says Prudence, snorting to life from her perch in the back of my head.  She is gravely alarmed by such heresy. “Perfect is why any of us is here,” she shrills, “so that we can judge ourselves harshly and compare ourselves to others and see what undeserving Slackers we are and Repent!”   (I note with amusement that Prudence’s vocabulary has evolved from calling us sinners to slackers.  This is a big step. Yay, Prudence.  You are learning, old girl! Slackers are on the right path—they’re just slow.  Slackers gonna get there in the end…)

The wise old ewe shoots Prudence a sharp look.  “Tell her that perfect can’t exist for a damn good reason.  We are not meant to be perfect.  We are meant to be HERE.  Perfect doesn’t work here.  Perfect is for somewhere else.  Perfect might be where we came from and where we might return—but there’s no sense of being Perfect now.  How could we possibly learn? No, my darlings, we are not here to be Perfect.  Don’t wish that on anyone. We are here to learn.”  

She is resting on her sternum, with her legs tucked neatly out of sight, looking a bit like a hen on a nest, only sheep-shaped. Her name is Willow. I have been feeding her special grain all winter because her teeth fell out last year.  Sheep lose their teeth as a function of age and don’t live too long after but she is going strong.  She’s been going out on the new grass, gumming it for all she is worth.  She seems excited to taste another Spring.

“We don’t always leave when you think we should or come when you want us, you know,” she says blinking slowly. “We have our own Time. Yours is not to control the hours but to live them.”

I bow my head… I’ve been in so much of a rush to get nowhere lately—mostly what I do is hold my breath and run muddled, from workshop to barn, to house, to garden, to workshop, getting less and less “done.”  It feels so good to sit, expand, exhale.  This week, there has been a wedding dress, a Harris Tweed jacket, ten pieces of toddler mending bombed out at the knees, a sick chicken, some long underwear, a lost bank statement, a biker jacket, some misplaced car keys, and a dog with an enlarged heart who could not stop coughing until I dropped everything and reported to the nearest veterinary clinic to hand over whatever money was required for him to feel better.  Of course, he stopped coughing the moment I passed him through the open car window at the curbside appointment.  (I swear he gave that vet a conspiratorial wink!)

A vast swirl of worries, anxieties, and things that make us feel crummy seems to be crushing a lot of us right now.  We need good and proper Mothering. I tell myself it is Ok to be exhausted and to rest.  It’s ok to grieve.  It’s ok to not make progress.   Sometimes simply maintaining our place costs us effort enough. We cannot force what is coming any more than we can prevent what is leaving.   It is a time of Transition—and transitions are always full of unexpected blessings and annoying delays or challenges from all that is Divine and Feminine.  It is these achings and breakings—of egg shells and membranes and soil and bark—that usher in the New Life we have longed for.  It’s coming yet.  With horn buds and eyelashes, it will come when we least expect it, even if we are tired of expecting it.  And it might not look at all like we expect.

The temptation to skip publishing this blog is as strong as ever this week.  But I want you to sit with me a moment—here in the quiet barn.  Come…be still… The warm and sleepy newborn has a tummy full of milk. The other ewes, seeing we have no cookies, get bored and begin to nap.  A busy bantam is making a nest in a hay feeder.   There is a secret cache of free-range eggs hidden in the feed room.  Song birds are pilfering nesting materials from the loft.  In the meadow, a robin steals a discarded fluff of wool caught on a bramble.   In vernal pools in the forest, tiny frogs proclaim their lust.  What timeless miracles of mothering are happening where you are?  What can you notice from your perch?

Miracles follow miracles and wonders never cease.  Now is all we have.  Drink it up. Refresh your spirits, Dear Ones.  We’ll get back to the mending as soon as we can.

With sew much love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

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