Within

“I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man.  It was like holidays with pay to me…. I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.” –James Herriot

Greetings Dear Ones!

Whew… Last week carried with it some intense energy and challenges!  (“And you say that as one always in keen sight of THE EDGE,” marvels Prudence.)  How long is Mercury in Retrograde, exactly?? Is it nineteen years?? (slump) The current theme seems to be ‘releasing what was formerly held within…’ Whether it’s Good, Bad, or just plain Ugly, Life continually offers us gifts, opportunities for learning, and wonderful silver linings within… Being With what is IN takes courage. Some of the discoveries are nasty. 

“What the hell are you doing?” I say to the gravity fed steam iron in my shop.  It is burping ominously as I hold it up to the hem of a prom dress.  It starts to spit.

“I don’t feel well,” it mumbles as I quickly hold its face over a linen pressing cloth.  It proceeds to throw up black gunk all over the cloth. Like an eighteenth century quack physician, I give the thing a damn good bleeding. I drain steam until it turns to water; I empty the water tank and flush all the tubing; I scrub the face plate until it gleams.  As a precaution, I even order all new replacement parts from the Cleaner’s Supply outlet where I got it.

“How can you DO this to me?” I say to the iron.  I am frantic. “Do you KNOW what season it is?  It’s PROM season.  I have no less than twenty gowns to hem and five, count them, F-I-V-E lily white bridal gowns hanging on the rack waiting to be done. I need you, damn it!”

“I’m sorry,” says the iron, continuing to burp up watery stains tinged with rust, “I don’t like Prom Season.”

“That’s no reason to go on strike!” I say, “Do you think spraying ink makes you into a writer?  All I see in the Rorschach blobs you are creating is tales of disaster.”

That iron is no longer my friend.  I cannot trust him. Who needs a passive aggressive iron?  Around denim he’s totally normal.  Work gear, fine. Get him near a wedding gown and he’s spits like an umpire for the Yankees.  Apparently, he sees himself at one with the proletariat.  Bourgie prom gowns be damned.  The betrayal is hard for me to take.  In my shop, we serve EVERYONE.  We draw no lines.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to a bride trying on her gown in the fitting room. “My iron is on the blink and I didn’t dare smooth out all those creases after I let out the other stitches.”

“Oh, I’m so grateful!” she gushes.  It’s hard to be thanked for NOT doing something that really should have been done. I glare at the iron, who is gradually sliding off the metal stand and working his way towards a fall onto the ironing board, where he threatens to burn the whole place down.  The insubordination is astonishing. I’ve had to bring in a smaller, domesticated iron to replace him.  This one is dainty and requires distilled water to function.

I’m also seeing the inside of every sewing machine more regularly than I might wish.  We’ve had a rash of broken needles due to sequins.  The needles hit the sequins at speed and splinter, requiring me to pick all the shards out with tweezers when they fall into the bobbin mechanism underneath.  One gown, which resembled the skin of a mackerel, took five needles to make one lap of the hem.  I briefly consider adding a “needle surcharge” to the bills that involve beads, sequins, or glitter then decide against it.

Such events require me to “Go within” myself, to reach for reserves of Patience I save for special occasions and when it’s really NOT ok to throw a disgruntled steam iron out of a second story window.  I think about my customers and how much I truly love most of them.  The prom kids are adorable, especially when they arrive in giggling gaggles, forget their shoes, and have to stand on piles of books to have their dresses hemmed the right length.  They remind me of lambs balancing on an apple wood log. The brides are radiant with hope and lists of “all they have to do yet,” one of which is inevitably to get the fiancé in to have a suit altered. In the midst of all these determined damsels, I even have a dashing knight who brings in a sweat-stained gambeson for me to repair.  He is heading for tournaments and workshops where he wields a broadsword.  I love these people, their stories, their events and dramas.  I love chatting to funeral directors who refuse to allow bereaved relatives to fill the pockets of those soon to be cremated with popcorn, strong, lithe women who dismantle antique houses, and cheery education consultants whose friends want them as bridesmaids. 

“It must be heaven to work alone,” says one.

“It must be hard to work alone,” says another.

I am never alone.  I am surrounded by stories—some haunting, some inspiring—and beset by constant visitors.  And I get to work with my hands in a Time-made-tangible sort of way that is immensely satisfying.  This job is a joy. Especially when one can trust one’s iron!  It’s a wonderful place to Mend and be Useful.

Of course, my other joy is the farm.  Apple trees in blossom are like bridal veils strewn throughout the meadow. Gus and Otie just turned two and have a new yoke to fit their larger necks. They are back to work and very happy about that.  On days I cannot work them, they stand and “complain moo” over the fence.  No amount of hay shuts them up.  They want to Work! And a good grooming wouldn’t go amiss either. (I know how they feel!)

The sheep are slowly getting back to being things that eat grass and don’t cause too much trouble.  Putting Primrose in a headlock until she accepted her babies worked beautifully.  She is now a decent mother to both twins, who go sproinging about the paddock like wooly popcorn with the rest of their pals in soft, lambie jammies.

Lambing season came to a dramatic end Monday night. Poor Waterlily, the last to deliver, had a rough time of it. She’d been off her feed in the morning and I was surprised to come home from work and find no lambs tottering behind her.  Most of the sheep have delivered within a few hours of refusing food. She looked into my eyes with a soulful gaze that told me something wasn’t quite right.  Half an hour later, her water broke and I thought things were finally moving along.  Not so. Two hours of hard labor later, she had nothing to show for it.  I called my dear fellow-shepherdess friend. As we talked, I could see a nose, then a head, emerge from underneath Waterlily’s tail.  There were no feet.

“Scrub up and get in there,” said my friend. “Push that head back in and find the feet.  The feet have to come first.  She will die trying to get a lamb out head first with no feet. Call me back when you’re done!”

All the James Herriot books came flooding back to me as I scrubbed up, donned gloves, smeared the head of the lamb with Vaseline and tried to push it back where it came from.  Waterlily was not having it.  She’s worked too hard to get that much done. She jumped up and started running around the pen with an unembodied head sticking out of her backside.  With no one to hold her down, I had to wait for her to lie down again on her own.  This time, as she pushed one way, I pushed the other.  Eventually I won and the lamb went back within. I slipped my hand in too.  Sure enough, there was a foot, resting right on top of the lamb’s head.  Wait… On top??? I inched my fingers up the leg. The ankle bent the wrong way.  This was not a foot that belonged to this lamb. It was a hind leg of another lamb trying to come through backwards at the same time.  I followed the face of the lamb, past an ear, to the neck, and down the neck to where I could feel the shoulder.  Below it was the right leg. I was able to grab it and draw up next to the face. Below it, slipping away from me, was another leg.  That one was very hard to get into place.  With the next few contractions, I managed to get one leg and the head back out of the ewe.  It was a huge lamb.  I could feel it wiggle and struggle, making sucking movements with its jaw against my arm. It was Alive!  Suddenly, in a big, slippery flop, there it was on the hay behind the ewe. I cleared all the slime out its nose and mouth and it instantly popped its head up and began to mew.  The mother sat up and talked back to her. All three of us took our first big breath in a long time.  The second lamb came along, back feet first, about fifteen minutes later, without too much effort from Waterlily.  It too was a huge ewe lamb. Sadly, it was stillborn.  

All month, I had been wondering what secrets Waterlily held within her.  She was so rotundly pregnant, I assumed she had triplets.  Some days I feared she had as many as nine in there.  Was her birthing going to be like one of those clown cars where more and more babies keep rolling out? In the end, it was just two.  A triumph and a tragedy.  Both Huge.  A charcoal (dead) baby and an ivory little fighter lying there together on the straw like Yin and Yang.  

There’s some of each inside us all, I suppose.  There is the garbage the iron needs to spit out.  All that does not serve us must be purged. There is also the living dream that needs light and air to grow or it will die.  Things get jammed in the birthing canal when we try to produce too much at once.  The next step is always “bury the dead; care for the living.”  Keep working with our hands to do some Good in this world.

That’s how it’s going here---on the farm and in Prom Season.  It’s a blood and glitter sort of Spring. May you be filled with the Joys and Heartaches of a life well-lived, Dear Ones.  May your hands find the work they are meant to do.

With SEW much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. Waterlily and baby are doing GREAT. Shetlands really are rugged little creatures!

Breathe in... Breathe out...

I took a deep breath and listened to the brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Greetings Dear Ones!

The Spring days are lurch-galloping into their annual rhythm of too-much-many things to do all at once.  I probably cannot afford to sleep again until late August at this point.  The lambs have been a lot of work and happy distractions and the prom gowns keep coming… “Prom?” say people who care about other things. “Gosh, I forgot all about prom… can you hem a couple pairs of pants for me anyway?  They are just easy…simple hems…shouldn’t take too long…”

It’s true NO ONE thinks about prom unless you are going to one, are distraught because you are not going to one, or are the parent or guardian of someone in either of those situations. OR…you are a seamstress.  Then “Prom” becomes your entire world.  It makes you forget to breathe.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

I’ve been thinking about Breathing a lot lately, especially as I get to witness what James Herriot called “the miracle that never grows stale” as newborns awaken with their first breaths of raw air in their lungs.  As you read this, Right NOW, you are doing an incredible thing, absolutely fundamental to your consciousness and Being.  Miraculously, you do it as many as 22,000 times a day without thinking: You are breathing. We are powered by breathing. Our lungs fuel us with oxygen, our body's life-sustaining gas, passing it through our bloodstream, where it's carried off to the tissues, muscles, and organs that allow us to slice off yards of tulle with a rotary cutter, or vacuum up glitter three times a day, or dart around a barn or tailoring shop in total panic, wondering what to do next.

When people are anxious, (like when a mother brings in a suit that is five inches too big for her son in every possible direction and wants it to fit him by next Saturday) they tend to take rapid, shallow breaths that come directly from the chest. This kind of breathing actually heightens anxiety. This causes an upset in the body's oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, resulting in increased heart rate, dizziness, and muscle tension, especially for the seamstress listening to her. Deep breathing helps one avoid acute stress responses to mentally or physically terrifying situations, such as the urge to fight (seam rippers at the ready!), or take flight (jump out the window) when ten people call you in the same morning for help with prom gowns due in less than a week.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

Breathing creates consciousness. Literally. I was heartened to hear from a dear veterinary friend (Thank You Cynthia!) that when Blossom died, taking her lambs with her, they had not suffered because they had never become conscious. When does the magic of consciousness begin? With our very first breath. Studies reveal that states of sleep-like unconsciousness are likely to be continuously present in lambs until well after birth. In utero, a lamb fetus is actively sedated by the low oxygen pressure, its warm, cushioned environment, and a range of neuroinhibitory and sleep-inducing substances produced both by the placenta and the fetus itself.  The lambs are in either of two sleep states—the active state (kicking, swallowing, blinking), or quiet state—kind of like a teenager who does or does not have access to a cell phone.  And that’s what they look like as they are born (lambs, that is, not teenagers)—drowsy, stunned creatures just washing ashore from the Land of Nod…small, wet, empty lamb sacks waiting to be filled with air and milk and the sound of tiny, chirping baahs for their mothers.  Within the miracle of minutes, body and spirit unite. They become Present through Breath.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

It’s been a tough year for lambing.  I only had four pregnant ewes to start with. In percentage terms, 25% are dead, 25% are wonderful mothers, 25% have yet to lamb, and 25% are total psychos who want to murder their babies.  

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

Last Wednesday, just after breaking my ninth needle on a hem studded with sequins, I came home early to check on the sheep.  As I got to the barn, I heard a little voice, the size of a thimble, bleating for its mother, who answered with a warm, encouraging nicker. I thought it might have been one of the lambs in the far pen, born last Sunday.  But no, it was a NEW lamb! A tiny, mostly dry ewe lamb standing on shaky legs just near her mother.  Proud Miss Prim licked her baby then did the sheep equivalent of an angry scowl, fixating on something in the far corner, just near the gate.  I entered the pen and looked down behind me.  Something small and black was tucked into the crack near the wall. It looked like a plastic bag, a bit of trash.  How did that get here? I wondered.  Then I realized it was a tiny twin brother!  Only the mother was NOT having him.

“Do you breathe, little buddy?” I asked him.

“I do,” was the answer I saw in his soft, shallow gasp.  It’s the kind of gasp I have myself when someone brings in a dress with eight layers that takes up the entire dressing room.  Something as big as Life had just hit him and knocked him flying.  He didn’t move until I touched him. Under my hand, he jerked, struggled to attain consciousness, decided against it. His mouth was cold.  I picked up the damp rag of new wool and offered it to his mother.  She stamped her foot and charged.  He was an Intruder.  NOT Welcome. 

Oh, shit…

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

I knew better than to dry him off.  Instead, I tied Prim to the wall and smeared him with the afterbirth hanging from beneath her tail while congratulating myself yet again for having the gorgeous, LUCKY true-love kind of life that enables me to handle sequins and placentas all within the same hour.  I rubbed him all over his sister too so they would smell the same.  Still, the mother would not have him.  She re-cleaned only the female. I forced the unwanted baby to her teat to get his share of the colostrum (that precious first milk full of antibodies that means “live” or “die” for lambs).   He drank lustily and gratefully and cheered up instantly.  He could stand and walk.  There was nothing obviously “wrong” with him.  In fact, he appeared to be quite healthy and strong.  He gave a little cry, tottered towards me and hid behind my legs for protection.  He was imprinting on me, thinking I was his mother.  Prim was incensed.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

“What the hell is the problem, Primrose? You’ve always been the sweetest!” I asked his mother.  The change in her personality wrought by motherhood was astonishing. She was in a fury to smash him again.  I had to keep her tied up while we came up with a plan.  The same exact thing had happened two years ago with another first-time mom, Blossom, the mother of this Primrose.  Prim had been accepted, but the little male, “Chip” was not.  Chip moved into the house that night and was bottle-fed all summer.  I had thought that another sheep had cleaned him off before his mother realized he was hers.  That was the story we told ourselves and it made a lot of sense at the time.  Sheep have about a 30-minute window in which to bond with their newborns and claim them as dependents they will defend.  Otherwise, they are abandoned, or worse, attacked. This time, each mother was alone in her own birthing pen.  No one had cleaned him up.  What happened?

“Does this sort of maternal savagery simply run in your family?” I asked Prim. “Is it what you saw your own mother do to your brother? Or is it that your line of females simply cannot count to two? Much as I love your babies, I really DON’T want to raise one as my own.”

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

Prim, still tied up and anxious, sucked down half a bucket of warm water with molasses while I dipped the lambs’ navels in iodine, gave them each a blast of nutradrench (a mineral supplement), and completed my health inspections.  Things got a little calmer. I didn’t know what to do next.  I kept forgetting to breathe.  I DON’T want to bottle feed another lamb unless there is no other option.  I want him to have a proper mother and sister and be welcomed (and feel at home in) his own herd. How to make that happen?

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

The Internet and our beloved Hermit from Hermit Hollow came to the rescue. He helped me build a wooden stanchion out of pallets.  We cut the boards off the pallets in places so that the lambs could walk in and out of the box and have access to her udder for nursing.  It was clear that both could nurse unassisted and would figure out quickly how the system worked.  We put Prim’s head between two boards with room for her to get up or lie down.  We piled hay in front of her put a bucket within reach so she could drink whenever she wanted.  She got a lot of corn chips and explanations and calmed down immediately.  She actually seemed relieved to be confined and to have that vile imposter out of sight.

As she munched, I laid out the plan to her. I tried to be positive, though we were both still a little wild-eyed.

“According to the internet,” I panted, “you will take your baby back if he drinks your milk and his poop begins to smell like ‘you.’ You will sniff his wooly bum and know you shouldn’t kill him. Hopefully, you will decide to adopt your own damn son within 24 hours.  If not, you might have to stay in this penalty box for a week or two.  With this method, you have a shot at an 85 percent success rate to become a decent mother. And I have a shot at NOT spending four hundred dollars on powdered milk only to wind up with a problem child with attachment issues.”

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

The best mother of the bunch is little black Mollie, the orphan who a few years ago spent most of her early days in my bathtub (without water in it, of course!) and riding to work each day in my car so that she could get noon-time bottles on schedule.  She lived in the house, hopped all over the furniture, and was terrified of other sheep at first. Though adored by her adoptive mother (me), I have to admit that she had a rather twisted upbringing that left her with poor “sheeping” skills.  I was worried that she, having never had a proper mother herself, would have no idea how to mother her lambs.  Well, she’s a star!  Her babies are clean and fed and marvelous creatures with springs for legs. They go sproing-ing about the pen and play wonderful games of dash and chase and bounce.  They are totally healthy and vibrant.  She is warmly attached.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

It just goes to show that our past experiences do not determine our potential.  We can come back from hard things.  Hard boundaries, responsibility, and discipline are actually our path to sanity in some situations.  As of this writing, a full week later, the stanchion box solution seems to have worked.  Allowed to go free, Prim is tolerating her son with bland indifference and she does let him nurse.  They don’t call to each other or share special vocalizations, but he’s bonded to his twin and they cuddle nicely and keep each other company.  Both lambs are thriving.  It’s time to Breathe a huge sigh of relief!

Life hands us all our own stories of blood and glitter, Dear One.  Breathing vastly increases our chances of survival!  May your breath inhabit your body with the full sureness with which your precious body belongs in this world.  May you know your value.  May the creative companionships around you inspire you continually to learn, to grow, to adapt, to Mend…and most of all…

Breathe in…Breathe out…

Something Sacred is arriving.

Now… Back to the Glitter!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Altercations

We are going to have Peace, even if we have to fight for it. –Dwight D. Eisenhower

Greetings Dear Ones,

A young woman marches into the shop with a bag slung over her arm.  She heaves it on to the counter and begins to rummage.  She draws out a long purple thing.   “I’m not sure how much of an altercation this dress is going to need,” she says cheerfully, “it actually fits pretty good already.”

“I’m relieved!” I announce. “I despise altercations!  Peaceful persuasion is more my style.”  She looks momentarily confused, then shrugs, and enters the dressing room to try it on.  (I guess we all have to pick our battles.)  A minute later, she calls me in.

She’s right, this bargain scored from the local thrift store is generally flattering but she pokes at a few things she does not like.  We agree to do some tweaking here and there—just a few Peaceful, easy negotiations with the garment where it disagrees with her body type.  I talk nicely to the dress, hang it on the rack next to the prom gowns, and turn back towards my work table where a bunch of zippers lie in wait to beat me up—four pairs of heavy duty work pants with busted crotches and a jacket zip that was originally installed with three rows of stitches so tight and tiny they had to have been done under a microscope.  Removing them has caused me to lose blood and curses.  Altercations indeed!

It’s been a week of wild energy.  I’ve been too busy sitting in the maternity ward in the barn, having my hair and earlobes nibbled by newborns to check in on the cosmic forces at play and figure out why so many nutty things are happening.  I know Mercury is in retrograde.  (A planet never actually moves backwards; it just seems to, much the way a train sitting on the tracks feels like it is moving backwards when the train next to it pulls forwards.)  I know how Mercury feels.  I’m going forward so slowly, while everything else is rushing, it feels like I am going backwards.  I know that Things Happen For a Reason.  Everything happens FOR me, not TO me. And yet, there have been a few meddlesome DISTRACTIONS (beyond the glitter everywhere) that make me wonder whether the mischief is being done by sportive pixies having their play or if more malevolent forces are at work.  In random order, they are:

a.       A customer who needed his suit altered right away refusing to answer his phone when the work was finished because he thought my calls were coming from the Dominican Republic.

b.      Attempting to jumpstart a customer’s car that wouldn’t start, accidentally dropping my own keys through my own engine into an unreachable spot behind the front grille so that we could not start my car or hers.

c.       Locking myself out of my shop and having to break in using one of those slide rulers I call “a stick with numbers.”  

d.      A person asking me to recreate their favorite underwear that features an external “sock” to hold, um… (what pop-eyed Prudence called “the stem of the apple,” before she passed out).

e.      Briefly considering the dazzling life of Crime I could lead if I was unscrupulous about my use of a stick with numbers and a seam ripper…

f.        Nigel Braveheart, the elderly, nearly blind, nearly deaf, nearly toothless, totally Senile Jack Russell deciding to take on three young pit bulls (of course he did!) who were off leash in the cemetery where we walk each day at noon. As I scooped (leashed) Nigel in my arms in the nick of time and had barking, snapping pit bulls jumping all over me, their owner appeared and yelled “Hey! I really like your outfit! You look really cute.”

Such things are doing nothing to stop the deepening of that groove between my eyebrows that my beloved sister calls the “WTF Wrinkle.” It’s becoming a permanent trench in my face.

And then there’s the Tractor… This is probably WAY more information than you bargained for, but I must preface this by saying in Modern Lives as busy as ours, we can all agree that we cannot do as much “nothing” as we want at some points if we don’t multi-task like fury at others, especially during morning routines.  Some people brush their teeth while reading inspiring affirmations taped to their bathroom mirrors.  Some do their morning commutes listening to good literature. Some simultaneously talk on the phone, pack all the lunches, drink a day’s worth of caffeine and provide minor veterinary care to all the household pets.  Some use any “chance to sit down” as a time to “wipe ‘n swipe” on social media. Me? I use my time on the throne to shop for used farm equipment.  Hand on heart, there is nothing that hastens peristalsis like the discovery of a vintage manure spreader in the Northeast Kingdom or that a champion hay elevator is for sale in Littitz, Pennsylvania. (“There’s a Vintage Manure Spreader right here,” says Prudence, eyeing me disdainfully.)

It helps tremendously to be positioned appropriately for the crap of a lifetime when one comes across a low mileage John Deere 4032 (with not a scratch on it!), located an hour away, for the miracle price of $3,200. (“The unbelievable price is your first clue that you should not have believed it,” says Prudence, groggily working her way to her feet after the underwear scandal.) The Dream Tractor was being sold in haste by a woman who had lost her husband and needed to get rid of it quickly because she was moving and this thing reminded her too much of him.  I could barely contain my joy. I was instantly so deliriously busy—mentally clearing brush, building stone walls, digging fence posts with a fresh auger, I nearly forgot to pull my overalls up. 

Then it hit me. A woman has lost her husband.  A husband who took such loving care of his tractor (not a scratch on it!!) probably took good care of his family too.  Who was I to mentally rearrange garden beds and manure piles with a pristine front end loader when this woman was suffering? I was suffused with remorse that I should profit from her loss.  

My shame was embarrassingly brief.  Moments later, my inner scrappy lady farmer decided, “whelp, better me than some other wheeler-dealer!” I promptly composed a heartfelt note of condolence and offered to buy the tractor, telling her how sorry I was for her loss and that I would cherish the tractor in his memory.  I even promised to clean the garage and keep it indoors.   

Her reply was curt.  No, I could not see it in person. I could buy the tractor but “for the safety of us both, she wanted to use eBay services to arrange payment,” which was odd, because the tractor was not listed for sale on eBay.  And she wanted to be paid in gift cards, poor thing.  Who prefers gift cards to cold hard cash?? Meanwhile, I continued to pray for this woman and the soul of her departed husband. 

I also excitedly called my Lone-star All-star brother-in-law who, being from Texas, knows a thing or two about tractors.  Breathlessly, I told him about this amazing deal.  I sent him the picture and the model number.  “They don’t match,” was the first thing he said.  “That’s not a 4320. This deal is bogus.”   

A Scam???

WHAT????

Suddenly, I felt like Richard Pryor in that scene “whaaaaat’s happening-ing-ing to me-e-e-e?” Thankfully, I did not go through with anything, or purchase any gift cards.  “Neither, I must point out, did you clean the garage!” pipes Prudence.

I know I am leaning in to leading a life of “Wonder and Awe” but the bewilderment that arises from narrowly avoiding a potential scam-artist is not the sort I am seeking...  Who does these things to honest, well-meaning, scrappy lady farmers?

“Bad guys,” says Prudence firmly. “really Bad guys.”

“But WHY?”

“Seriously, Nancy?” she says rolling her eyes. “For money. People do bad things for money.”

“I do bad things for money,” I say.

“We aren’t talking about when you open the cuff on a pair of pants and ten year’s worth of leg dandruff falls out on the table. We’re talking about Crime. Most people don’t want to install zippers in down jackets or chop four inches worth of glitter off a dress someone will only wear once.  They want easy money, not good hard work.  Crime…”

My inner kindergartener is stunned.  My inner criminal wants to meet this tractor scammer in a dark alley with a seam ripper, a stick with numbers, and some underwear that will not be needing a “sock” of any length after she gets done with him.

Prudence has been having a field day with all this chaos.  She’s a Godly woman out to teach me that the world is a dangerous place and that people cannot be trusted.  She can hate and pray for someone and it’s basically the same thing.  Both depend on her believing she is “Better than...”   She’s not the kind of “Christian” you know is a Christian by her Love.

Frankly, I’m sick of her muttering.  I’m not sorry I am such a Fool.  I’m not sorry I get easily tricked. It means I am a pretty nice person (mostly) who gives and expects the best in others.  I might be a Fool, but I am nobody's victim. My life runs way better when fueled by Faith and Trust than fear and anxiety.  I know. I’ve tried it both ways.

So Pruddy and I have had an Altercation of our own. I’ve had to get stern with her and tell her that she can judge people, including me, but only for the purposes of awarding prizes to worthy contestants in this Game we call life. (I’m trying to get that bitch to focus on the Beautiful and Positive.)  So far, she has grudgingly awarded prizes in the following categories: Best Brother-In-Law, Most Full-Service Tailoring shop (includes automotive work), Most Appreciative Customer, Bravest (Idiot) Jack Russell, and Most Teeth (awarded to the pit bulls, not their owner).  

I’ve won awards for Poopiest Pants and Most Ingenius at getting car keys out of places in cars where they don’t belong.  The poopy pants are my favorite prize. Especially since the poopy is NOT mine (hay feeders and vintage water troughs notwithstanding).  It comes from the two little lambkins born Sunday afternoon during a heavy rain shower.  Their mother did a wonderful job for a first-timer.  She had been off her feed and looking uncomfortable at breakfast so I knew birth was immanent. Shetlands are very private and sneaky about lambing so I couldn’t tell how long it would be. The little darlings were all cleaned up in their soft new pajamas and tottering around the nest when we came back to check on her again.   

So!  Here they are, two braw lambs, strong and healthy, curious and comical—a little black ram and a little morrit (brown) ewe. Both have “the Bishop’s blessing” in a little white star on their foreheads.  Twice a day, I crawl over the fence to sit in the corner of their pen and return to Pure, unadulterated, un-altercated Innocence. I become a jungle gym for them to climb upon.  They jump my boots and hurl themselves up the mountain range of my knees.  These, Dear Ones, these are my lambs of God. They restore my spirit, my love, my faith.  They help me Mend from all of Life’s “altercations.”

Keep mending Dear ones!  Keep bringing all the YOU—innocent, foolish, or savvy YOU—you can to this crazy, amazing, mixed up world of chaos, wonder, awe and Beauty. Avoid unnecessary altercations when you can.  But when your WTF wrinkle gets so deep it requires a healthy altercation… just know I’m right behind you, a scrappy farm lady with a seam ripper and a stick with numbers.  We GOT this!

I love you SEW much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. If you don’t have your own awesome brother-in-law from Texas, maybe check out “popular online scams” before attempting to purchase used farm equipment from widows!

Mad Robins

“Sell your Cleverness and buy Bewilderment.”--Rumi

Greetings Dear ones!

Well, we have reached that time of year when I go on a colored egg hunt every day.  No, not just because it’s Eastertide… because my heritage-breed chickens (who lay pink, blue, green, and brown eggs) are now free to roam the countryside.  As soon as the snow melts and the dog starts bringing in the first ticks of the season, I set the ladies free on parasite patrol. They take their mission so seriously, they don’t take time to return to the coop to lay their eggs.  Instead, I need to hunt the mangers, the hay mow, empty tubs, and even once an abandoned sweatshirt for their oval treasures.  As I try to discover each day’s new hiding place, I am reminded of that (terrible) joke that having senility is so much fun because you can hide your own Easter eggs.  In my case, its vitamin supplements. I sent away for some that insist they reduce menopausal brain fog.  The first months’ amount was clearly not effective enough for me to remember I had bought a three-month supply so I finished the first bottle and ordered more.  Now I have a five month supply. I can’t help thinking I am the stuff of an online marketer’s dreams.  If I continue on like this, I’ll be eighty with a warehouse full of pellets I keep forgetting to eat. (If only I had done this with toilet paper before Covid hit…) To be honest, I’m not sure menopause is to blame.  If so, I may have been in menopause since the fifth grade.

I’m not the only one going mad. The weather has been nutty.  We had three days of dustbowl Summer, complete with sunburns, and then a big cold rain turned the grass St. Patrick’s Day green, except where the cows have licked it down to the mud.  I planted peas and spinach and told them “Good Luck! Go for it!  I have no idea what gear the sky will be in by the time you pop your heads up to look around.” The weather is like a teenager learning to drive a manual transmission vehicle for the first time.

There is also a mad robin on the windowsill doing battle with his own reflection.  The poor fellow keeps flying into himself in a fury.  Occasionally he takes a long, stunned rest (and a watery crap) on the windowsill before resuming the attack.  Three of the windows are streaked with shit and fury. Apparently, North American Robins are very territorial and deeply resent the presence of other males, including shadowy reflections of themselves.  Like high school seniors, years of evolutions and societal influences have shaped this guy to pit himself against his peers.  He’s not satisfied with the new-age notion that we are all winners. He took one look at himself and didn’t like what he saw. Not one tiny bit. (Who doesn’t have a day like that, sometimes?)  In the dressing room at my little shop, the prom girls are doing the same thing. Luckily, none of them have crapped on my mirror. (YET)

Instead of turning in a new direction where he can truly Soar--make a good living at a shitty job (literally, the compost/manure pile behind him is crammed with worms), troll everything from timber to Tinder to find a tolerant mate, save for a down payment on a nest, home-school a couple of offspring, do his best to teach them right from wrong and how to avoid the plagues of feather mites and social media…instead, the little robin keeps wearing himself out by fighting his own shadow.  The poor chap is exhausted from imaginary drama. Life won’t progress for him until he stops focusing all his attention on himself.

I can relate!

Not everything goes as Planned in Springtime. Poor Blossom, the moorit ewe, died last week, taking a belly full of twins with her to the vast hole in the earth that our Beloved Hermit of Hermit Hollow dug with his backhoe.  Toxemia took her life but what precipitated the decline which resulted in toxemia, we do not know. The rest of the flock (who eats the same food and drinks the same water) looks robustly healthy.  The vet did his best but her demise seemed a foregone conclusion. (Wait, are not all deaths? Including our own?)

We laid her to rest, deep and snug in Mother Earth, below the reach of digging paws and munching jaws, and smoothed the blanket of dirt above, caressing it to the edges with our metal rakes.  Then we scattered grass seed and a layer of old hay mixed with sheep turds.  It seems up-side-down to think that grass will grow and frolic over lambs, instead of the other way around.  But life is a Wheel-of-Fortune circle and you never know exactly which side will be pointing up as it rolls around a season or a farm.  Inside the sorrow is deep satisfaction, merely to be a part of it all.  

 In other news, this blog turns five this week. I’m trying to think of a way to celebrate but I feel like that runner who staggers across the finish line with brown dribbles running down his legs.  We’re proud of him and wish him well but somehow intuit that he’s not quite ready for his complimentary medal and free banana.  Neither am I.  It’s has been hard going and I definitely should have trained more before I started.

These have been five pretty grueling years, on so many levels.  I’ve moved twice, bought a farm, started my own business, survived depression, menopause and a global pandemic, just to name a few things...  I can’t begin to count the number of trousers I have hemmed or the numbers of times I have heard bridesmaids tell me “Oh? I need my shoes? Can I just stand on tiptoes while you mark the hem?”

 Writing is my form of cherishing everything from the mundane to the absurd.  There is an undeniable amount of naiveté and narcissism embedded in the premise that anyone would want to crawl inside my heart and peer at these scribbles on the walls. Why not just keep the cell locked and confine myself in private journals, as I did for thirty years before starting this blog?  In anxious moments, I fear I have the endless self-involvement of a mad Robin glaring at himself in the window. It’s easy to feel furious and on the brink of defeat.  As an artist, the worst, most troublesome thing I do (and I still do it!) is seek to value myself by looking to others for assurance. Some people make glib remarks when I meet them in public—throw-away seeds I take home and sprout and nourish into monsters that devour my resolve.  The worst is when no one says anything at all.  When I get very depressed and think I will never be “good enough,” I think about a conversation with a fiddler I adore:

I asked if he could give me “One quick trick” that would instantly totally improve the sound of my playing.  He laughed delightedly and said “Yep!  Totally.”

“What is it?” I wanted to know, feeling excited about a fast-track to excellence.

“PLAY.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I slumped. “I already DO that and it sounds terrible!  Why would I practice sounding terrible? How do I make it sound better?”

He said, “I’m serious. Play. Just play. Don’t practice anything.  Play because you love to play. Play for hours every day.  If you just played every day you’d sound better. You have an amazing ear but your music is all in your head, not your fingertips.  DO it. Stop thinking. If you really want to improve your sound, play SLOW.  Nothing over 70 beats per minute for months and months.  Listen for the Quality and go for more of that.  Figure out what kind of bow hand pressure results in “pretty.” Repeat.  Listen to yourself. Pay attention.  What’s beautiful? What’s excruciating? Optimistic curiosity will get you far when you are trying to embody (bring into your body) a skill.  Don’t do it to be “better”; do it so that you can have more Fun. It’s so much fun to know a lot of tunes and play them well. Just Play.”

This seems like the best advice ever for anyone trying to play an instrument or Write, or Mend, or Create on any level.  Connect to joy. Keep going. Stay curious. PLAY.

I’ll keep playing at writing because on another level, I believe that Life (and Love) is, at its essence, a sacred transaction.  Witnessing it is an act of dignity, courage, hilarity, and Gratitude.  Writing is my prayer. It’s good for my soul.  I share these stories because I love them.  I love this life.  I love YOU, dear reader.  I will keep writing these love letters because I want us all to have more Love in (and for) this world and definitely MORE fun!

Madly, with all my heart,

Yours aye,

Nancy

An April Fool

“I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed
monster. A most scurvy monster!” Trinculo, Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Greetings Dear Ones,

Happy April Fool’s Day!  Having been a Fool in January, in February, and straight through all the Madness of March, it only makes sense to close out the first quarter of the year and begin the next in a state of utter Fool-ishness.  The Fool, in tarot, is the most powerful card.  It signals Faith in the Journey and a reliance on Trust.  The Fool, in Shakespeare, is the wisest of characters.  It is an act of powerful innocence to begin again, begin anew.  And so here I am. Showing up once more, with no explanation, no apology, just a willingness to start again to live (and write) as a sheer crime of passion, nothing else, nothing less.  With the curiosity of a Fool, I will do it as fully as I can, for as long as I can, without assumptions, expectations, or insistences about what the outcome might be.   Having tried this for five years now, it’s damn hard to do.  The mud is deep.  Wish me luck.

As I type, two of my fingers will not stop bleeding. The cuticles have been savaged by the ripping edges of teeth from six frantic mouths trying to gobble corn chips from my gloveless hands. I have spent the morning in the pen with the sheep.  One of them is not doing well.  I separate her from the rest of the flock and set her up in her own pen, adjacent to theirs, where she can eat at leisure and not be bashed about by the greedy ones.  She does not seem to be “ill,” but ewes, like some housewives I have known, hide this really well until they are about to die.  I can feel the ridge of her backbone too prominently through her wool.  She is putting every calorie she gets into the two bowling balls filled with lambs that hang from her sides.  The hay this year is of poor quality and though she has been eating enthusiastically, she is not getting enough calories for what might be triplets and herself.  While I’ve been supplementing everyone with grain, she is still losing ground. 

Instead of bleating, or exhibiting loneliness, she seems relieved to have her own apartment. She puts her head in my lap for scratches and cuddles.  She sniffs politely at the $17-dollar-a-bale alfalfa I have bought just for her.  She nibbles daintily, like a girl who wanted pasta but ordered a salad to save her date money. (Back in the day, when salads actually cost less than law degrees from Harvard.) Calmly, she lets me drench her mouth with minerals and electrolytes.  Then we sit together in that gorgeous Contentment that hovers in a barn during a steady morning drizzle—the residents munching in time to the beat of raindrops on a tin roof.  From the doorway, the sepia forest is blurred. Snow piles mark the edges. We are living in a vintage photograph of long ago: A Vermont Homestead, a forgotten Christmas card that now doubles as a grocery list in a kitchen somewhere, behind an empty soup can filled with pens.  A blanket of mist and the smell of hay covers us in coziness.  The giant Great Pyrenees snores lightly on her bed in the corner by the feed room. 

The dog has been up most of the night barking courageously at the coyotes who have the nerve to sing to her from the orchard on the other side of the barn wall.  Again and again, she lunges and snarls, sending peals of thunder rolling from the depths of her bowels out through the bellows of an open throat.  Her teeth flash like lightening.  In the shadows of skeletal peach trees, the Wild Things sing of fear and hunger, of Lack and wanting, of sneaking and thieving, and she answers resoundingly, unflinchingly, with Death.  There is no fear when you know you hold Death within your own jaws.  I, who have spent the wide-eyed night listening to the song of my own internal coyotes, wonder ‘why I am not like that dog?’  Is Life for the Confident and well-equipped? Or the Brave and Stupid?  Only a Fool would try to find out.

Sitting in the sheep fold, a weary ewe’s head in my lap, ever so slowly I dissolve.  I melt like snow into deep ruts of mud.  I am that snow, that mud, this ewe. Water trickles towards the vernal pools and streams on the hillside below, coming from the roof, the sky, the snow, my eyes.  On the water rushes, eventually to the sea, turning ever so many wheels and woolen mills on its way.

The Christmas Card becomes a fifth-grade science diagram about the cycles of water around the earth—rain to river to ocean to rain.  We huddle under a roof in the middle of the page. The trees slurp up the water with their toes as it oozes beneath them.  The sap has been running for weeks now.  Up and down it goes, like a stubborn milkshake through wooden straws.  The tips of the branches are budding red. A pink mist in the glen signals the tiny swelling bellies of leaves about to be born.  Earth Science is everywhere, including the tree frog screaming his Tinder profile out to potential mates.

The wind picks up and Winter growls deep in its throat for a moment, signaling it is not to be messed with yet.  Spring Equinox or no, it’s not safe to plant the peas for at least another fortnight, perhaps at the next new moon. It’s exciting to think about the garden and all the work that has to be done.  We all want our muscles to stretch and the grass to green.  For now, the world is all the colors of brown. I caress the little brown head in my lap.

Work will wait. We are still tired.  We are hungry.  We are swollen with possibilities that are not yet ready to arrive.  It is a struggle to carry them.  I am still looking outside of myself for the food I need to keep going—for encouragement, for anything that says “keep going, Fool, this is valuable and Good.”  I am surprised and dismayed to be here again, at the bottom of this all-too-familiar rut.

“Spring is not a time of beginnings—it is an Ending, the ending of the gestation that has been silently occurring for a long deep winter.  It must be born soon or kill us,” whispers Blossom. “In the cycles of Creativity, Transitions are imperative. One cannot remain pregnant forever.”

“What is it you are giving Life to?” Miss Prim asks me through the gate between us.

I look at her quizzically, startled.

“You look heavy,” she says, “like someone who is carrying a thing that wants to live outside her.”

“I’m the thing that wants to live,” I say.  “My heaviness comes from emptiness. I can’t wait to have time to do the things that make me feel lighter, like write and play music.  I also need to get in shape. I’ve had too many projects, so much work, too much time with too many people…not to mention way too many cookies. Such things weigh on me. I don’t even like myself anymore.”

“Cookies???” Every head in the barn snaps towards my direction.

Prim laughs. She knows I have no cookies. (My pockets are damp from her checking.)

“No,” she says, disagreeing sweetly. “Your emptiness comes from Fullness. Giving is not what is depleting you.  It’s the NOT-giving that hurts you and makes you heavy.”

She’s got me there.  All the creative projects, the mending, the sewing, the knitting, the quilting, the tailoring—none of it fills the Void of not creating the thing one must make of one’s heart—the song, the poem, the tune, the novel, the building, the dress, the dream garden or clothesline or cheery slip-cover… These energies come as thoughts, the thoughts become words, when the words do NOT become deeds, the resulting guilt of Gifts-un-given leads to nights of wild coyotes in the brain.  

“It’s the stuck energy that makes you ponderous when you refuse to ponder it,” says Prim, wisely. “So get Pondering!”

“Actually, I ponder a LOT,” I insist lamely. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I could be a professional Ponderer. I could ponder for prizes.  As long as I don’t actually have to DO anything about it!”

We laugh. What gets done without muscles?

“You know, when you eat your toast before you come down here to feed us, your chores get done better,” says Wally.  “The water buckets get scrubbed, not just refilled. You linger longer. When you are hungry, you race back to the house. Selfishly, we like it better when you take care of yourself first.”

“I thought it was terrible that I started doing that.  All my life I always fed my animals before myself. That’s how it should be,” I say, “that’s what a Good Farmer does.”

“Well, a Good Farmer doesn’t take such good care of us as you do when you aren’t rushing.  Remember, we don’t want to talk to you until we have eaten either. It’s all just yelling and bawling until the grub goes down.”  

“Are there other ways you could be taking care of yourself that would make you better at other things too?” asks Prim, hopefully.

I stare at my feet, thinking of suggestions or insinuations others have made, some of which have really hurt my feelings.  

“By the way, do you know how much we hate your horrid little dog?” interrupts Wally. “He’s awful.  NO ONE likes him.  He’s adorable and horrible. How come you only see the adorable?”

We can all hear him up in the house, shrill yaps edged with temper.

“No, I see the horrible, too.  I do,” I admit, giggling. “I just Don’t Care.  I love him with all my heart.”

“Well, he’s a pest! He demands to be served. He bosses you night and day with his little ‘dinner dance’ that starts any time after 3 in the afternoon and continues until you relent and feed him. He’s AWFUL.  What does he do but pester you and leave hair everywhere?”

“And fulfill my longing to be loveable and loved…” I add.  There is nothing anyone can say about this dog that is not simultaneously totally True and totally of no consequence whatsoever to my love of him. I am devoted to him with no conditions.

“Maybe you could love yourself that way,” says Blossom, the clear-eyed metaphor lying in my lap, smacking her lips for the last of the corn chips.

“Yeah!” pipes up Chip with a wink, “Think about how easy that would be! You don’t shed nearly as much as he does and you’ve never been known to lift your leg and piss on the furniture. If you can love him so unconditionally, surely you could love yourself, or prom girls rolled in Glitter just the same way!”

“Prom girls rolled in Glitter are just as hard on carpets as any Jack Russell,” snaps Prudence, “Worse, maybe.”

“More importantly,” says Prim, rolling her eyes at Chip, “If you felt the same way about that Thing that wants to live outside of you, then think how happy you would be.  Even if it came out totally awful and everybody hated it, you wouldn’t even care. It would still make you happy.  You would still feed it and pamper it.  You could keep it on a leash around certain people and apologize if it bit anyone by accident, but you would still want it to be Free. To be Here. To be the Thing you Love that once was your heart.”

What a wonderful, magical, Magnificently FOOL-ish thing to try.

So! The blood has dried on my fingers.  It’s time to get back to sewing and, of course, Mending! (And writing like my life depends on it, because it does.)

A squeeze and a ‘squunch’ for the first of the Month.  Rabbit, rabbit and all that. May April showers bring you flowers.  Blessings, Dear Ones, on your own Mending, your own dogs, demons, and dreams.  What part of your heart is calling from within, begging to be Completed, begging to be Born? Let’s feed them all together.

Your Fool,

Nancy

Feeding Love...

Greetings Dear Ones!

For more than a week now, I’ve been scrambling to get the barn clean, the house clean(ish), the various larders stacked for critters and sitters.  In the shop, I’ve been working frantically to get the racks cleared of all items needed by imminent deadlines. Others will have to wait. “I’m going away for a few days,” I explain to customers, “and when I get back, I’ll be right here, sewing, but I won’t really be completely functional for a few days more.”

I don’t tell them the whole truth, letting them assume I am going on some sort of eccentric “vacation.” Little do they suspect I am trembling creature with frayed wings who knows she is about to go through a crushing metamorphosis, utterly dissolving, never emerging as the quite the same being on the other side. I have no idea who I will be five days from now but I know she will be vastly Improved!  I’m heading off to PDB music camp in Groton, Massachusetts.  Scottish Music:  It’s colorless, odorless, tasteless, invisible—but it is the most powerful drug I know.  You can drink a large glass of water while 140 exhausted people play Adam Sutherland’s “Road to Errogie” in ascending keys all through the night and feel completely drunk for five days straight.

This is the week, each February since 2007(?), where I stop playing “Seamstress in a Shop” and get to play another favorite game: “Head Cook and spud-scrubber to an unruly tribe of fiddlers.”  Music and food go on round the clock. I indulge all my fantasies of Kitchen and Community.  As a dear friend says, I get to be “the pot” that holds all the ingredients together—the One who knows on which day we are supposed to eat the carrots and where we keep the band-aids.  Being The Pot is a job I take extremely seriously—with a large side helping of Panic.  I enter with lists longer than a roll of toilet paper and 450 pounds of potatoes, hoping that’s enough tatties to satisfy 140 people nine times.  (There are nine official meals, not counting midnight chili and second breakfasts.)  Then, pretty much NOTHING ever goes exactly as planned and I emerge five days later dazed, with burned arms, wondering what to do with three quarts of cooked oatmeal that wasn’t eaten. I’m also walking on air, radiantly exhausted, triumphant and in Love—madly in love with every person who helped in the kitchen or made life better for someone else simply by playing a snappy jig in E minor while we tried to figure out how to light the stove again.  And because I never do anything alone there—we have a team, a tribe, of the most amazing humans ever to chop, scour, slice, sauce, and sauté who come to play with me. I love them like a pot boiling over!

We abandon the standards recipes and every meal becomes a version of Stone Soup, with the villagers contributing ideas and spices.  One guy says we need to add garlic to the mac n’ cheese and guess, what? It’s incredible. Everything is better with garlic! (Except maybe fruit salad…) I’ll never forget the year we discovered the magic of smoked paprika, or the year we decided to have all the onions chopped on Friday—a tradition that continues.

This camp is one of my February love stories. The best love stories of all often start off as pure accidents. Some random impulse seems like a great idea at the time and twenty years later, you look back and realize the path forked there, in that moment, and life was never the same again.   It started off as a sleepover weekend in my former home for some advanced fiddle students and their teacher.  And well… so many years and mashed potatoes later, It’s a THING.  It’s a Love that outgrew that space, and then another space, and now it is in a Big Space, becoming a Big Thing. It turns out that Love grows pretty big when it’s fed.

I look back through the coils of Time and marvel at that tension that exists in every creative endeavor—between  envisioning clearly what it is we wish to create and allowing Magic to surprise us of its own accord.  This camp is mostly born of Magic, of Happy Happenings and Joy-scream Connections —and a big willingness to chop onions, “chop” tunes, and serve each other the craziest, rarest sort of Beauty.

One of the things I love best about this camp is that it has never been about increasing the financial prosperity of the organizers. Any “profit” is redistributed so that more than a third of the attendees have access to generous scholarships and subsidies.  I think the whole purpose of organizing as a society is so that we can make room for the Disorganized.  They are some of our BEST people!  The young, the passionate, the gifted, the talented—these are not often people with a lot of financial stability.  In the wider society, the financially stable often have contempt for those less well off.  Not here. Some members need help with dorm fees and food costs and get it because their community Values them and their contributions to the music, the scene, the “vibe.” It would not be the same without their energy, their ability, and their forward trajectories that ensure the survival of this culture decades from now, after most of the financially viable have gone to take a nap in the dirt.

And so, I get a LOT of kitchen help! All the scholarship folks work—washing dishes, prepping food, cleaning messes, and deciding how much corn goes into corn chowder.  “Should we roast it first? Let’s try it.”  Every year I witness a new round of Initiation and Transition.  It’s a blessing to welcome the Fresh Eyes and “discovery” of people coming to the camp for the first time and to see those who have been immersed in this Love for years bobbing to the surface and emerging as new leaders and tradition bearers.  I celebrate it all. 

When I say I “love” something or someone, what I notice in my body is a vast sensation of Gratitude, like I just got fed warm, creamy of mushroom soup that took ten people to make from scratch. I am Full and grateful to be here.  Grateful for the music.  Grateful you showed up too, to be part of the sharing. Kitchens are the heart of any home.  In the PDB kitchen, some feet are running to get the potatoes we forgot to serve (how could we forget them? They are everywhere!), some are tapping to the melody they are playing, some are dancing, some are running in circles trying to remember where the smoked Paprika got put … These feet, these moving feet, they are the heartbeat –pumping mashed potatoes, music and magic out to the wider world, one ripple at a time.  The work is harder than haying season on a farm but I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I feel so humbly privileged to be an Eldress in this tribe.  They don’t always see me at my best but I can show up as I am and feel accepted.  I wish everyone had a place like that!  

I notice how I have grown, as a result of feeding this Love. When I examine my motives for giving up my personal time and energy, the anatomy of Awakening goes something like this:

Unconscious me: “Hmm… This [hard job] just needs to be done. Who’s going to do it? What? Me?? Oh God… Why the hell would they put a nut like me in charge?”

Ego me: “I can achieve Great Things here! Watch this! I will do a great job so that everyone knows I have done a great job and they can talk about me and tell me and others what a great job I have done.  Whahoo! Me! Me! Pick ME! Psst…Let’s not mention the raw eggs, the burned lasagna, or the soup I managed to set fire to, ok? Let’s pretend everything is Perfect.”

Evolving me: “Where have I felt fully Alive and Connected today? What can I offer in service to the Music, the Muse, the People & Purpose here?  I don’t care what it takes or what I look like in the end… We all have our jobs to do. We can’t all master reels in the key of F.  Someone needs to make a decent vegan tomato bisque as well. There is room for everyone.  That’s what community is about.”

In creeps the notion of Ubuntu, the Nguni Bantu word that loosely translates as “I am because we are.”   Desmond Tutu describes it as a state in which one’s “humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in others… I am human because I belong, I participate, I share.”  That a Scottish fiddle camp evokes these South African values, the deeply Golden principles of goodness—of hospitality, compassion, generosity, and friendliness just goes to show that people united in Love and Purpose don’t need labels, creeds, borders or definitions.  They just need to Live, if only for a weekend, in shared Respect for All that Is, while Co-creating. 

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed about Love is how it changes us. It asks of us Life’s most interesting questions:  Who or what are we devoted to? How are we willing to suspend our personal comforts and trade them for the richness of our Spirits? What are we expecting from the sacrifices we make? Who are we willing to become?  Are we willing to let a love grow so big that it is Unmanageable, requiring larger Vision, more Inclusion, outgrowing us so that we can surrender to a mystery bigger, finer, and more powerful than anything we could ever imagine?

One thing I know for sure, Dear Ones… Love is something you Feed.

 With sew much love (and potatoes),

Yours aye,

Nancy

Cow Eyes

“I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thought, I’d rather dance with the cows until you come home.” –Groucho Marx

Greetings Dear Ones,

In keeping with my February “Love Stories” theme, I thought I would share with you two of the biggest (and ever getting bigger) loves of my life.

Get up early and come with me to the barn… Gus and Otie are out, no matter what the weather, waiting at the corner of the paddock fence, gazing intently at the house, waiting for us to appear.  With frost on their whiskers, snow on their eyelashes, or drizzling moonlight or rain on their necks, they wait.  With stoic indifference, knees locked, they stand, unshivering.  Their horns have a pearly shine in the starlight; their heads are wreathed in steam from their nostrils; their night eyes like liquid glitter.  Suddenly, their bodies tense, necks rise. Their gaze intensifies.  Dark longing pours like smoke from their black eyes and coils its tendrils around us, pulling us closer.  No one can make “cow eyes” at a potential lover like a Jersey steer awaiting his breakfast.  It’s us! We are on the way. Huge, Hungry Rejoicing radiates around them, unlocking them, breaking them into movement. The wait is over!

Pause…

Doesn’t it feel good to be greeted with so much wordless glee? Their Gladness permeates the thickest Carhartt jacket.  When in your life does the very sight of you and all you represent attract so much attention, so much undiluted adoration?   

In a festival of happy urgency and clumsiness, they hop, clomp and plod their way around the back of the barn so that when you and I enter, they are already hanging over their half door, waiting to greet us, as if they had been there all along.  Otie has to eat first, because he is a bit of a bully.  He’s like that exuberant kid you meet at the beach who wants to play with you but can’t help stepping all over your sand castle and getting sand in your hair.   Let’s put his feed tub on the ground and pour the meal into it and while he is taking his first gulps, put two strong things around his neck—the first is your arms. Big hug.  Inhale.  Doesn’t he smell lovely?  His fur is so soft against your cheek.  I usually kiss him too, but you don’t have to if you are feeling shy.  The second is a big black collar made of reinforced two inch nylon webbing.  He needs to be tied up while he eats or he will steal all of Gus’s food and humble Gus with stand by and let him. Silly Gus. He’s a lover, not a fighter.

Next we feed Gus.  He knows that as soon as Otie is collared, it’s safe for him to venture in to his side of the stall to receive his rations.  Meekly, he saunters in and smiles at his empty tub.  Tell him to back up and he will.   He takes two steps back and waits while you throw his food into the tub, then rushes to begin lapping it up. He gets a tiny bit more food because he is skinnier and not as greedy as Otie.  He does not need to be tied up to eat, since he never steals.  He stays on his own side, working his own pile of hay with his jaws after finishing his grain.  He pulls vast mouthfuls in with his tongue and grinds it happily.  The swallows look like tennis balls gliding up and down the interior of his neck.  Now it’s safe for you to go into the pen and hug them both.  Gus will ignore you, mostly, though he will give evidence of his pleasure if you scratch just the right spots.  He loves to have his chest, underbelly and bum scratched—all the places he cannot reach himself. He shows his delight by arching, expanding, leaning in, or delicately extending his tail.

Otie is desperate for attention.  He will pause from eating and glare over to see what Gus is getting that he is not. He keeps track in order to make sure you give him equal measure.  Scratch him along his spine and he will turn and wrap his muscled neck around you like a hug.  Find a “spot” he likes and he will lick you steadily, in a mutual grooming act.  He will even hold out a hind leg so that you can reach his under belly more easily.  His tongue sounds and feels like 60 grit sandpaper.   If we leave too soon, he will stop eating and hang over the door and make a forlorn sound.  It’s a short, gutteral “Mmm..” —he doesn’t put the “ooo” in the “Moo”—just to register his concern. He knows how much love he should get with his breakfast and he does not like to be cut short.

As we get the wheel barrow, he will rush anxiously to the limits of his tether to make sure that we are not going too far.   He is relieved when we return with the wheelbarrow and pitchfork.  It’s time to muck the pen, while they are otherwise distracted with their food.  He turns back to his hay with renewed attention. We can move all around them, fluffing the clean bedding and removing the frozen cow pies that clatter like blocks of wood as they land in the wheelbarrow.   When the stall is clean and their water is fresh and full, it’s time to dump the manure out by the apple tree and put everything away.  I like a tidy barn.  Everything has a place.  The baling twine goes over that hook on the side of the ladder to the loft, the forks hang on the pegs by the water pump.  Next, we rake up the aisle and clear away any loose hay.  Otie observes the proceedings with satisfaction.  He likes to know what is going on.  Predictable routine soothes all animals.

Are you having fun yet?  This is what it is like to have two two-year-old steers in winter.  They cannot understand why we do not take them out and work them.  They love to work.  But the ice on the driveway is treacherous.  Their cloven feet cannot manage it.   We will have to wait for Spring, for mud, to drag the tires around. Please, come back then! 

Then, you can lead one and I will lead the other.  I’ll take Otie, since he is a bit “pushy” and apt to drag you off towards the nearest green grass. Gus is the Opposite of pushy. Gus quits at the first sign of trouble.  He will just lock his legs and nothing will move him.  When he was a baby, he used to throw himself on the ground in a “Jersey Flop” when he did not want to do something.  It was his version of a very limp tantrum.   Gus, whom I sometimes call “Gussie Finknottle,” after a P.G. Wodehouse character, is of elegant breeding.  He comes from a fancy farm, known for its show animals, in middle VT.  His fur is finer than Otie’s, and his front legs splay out in what a Highland dancer would call proper “turn-out,” though it is not desired conformation in a bovine, as his toes wear unevenly.  It’s a good thing he will never really have to work for a living.  He’s tall and Delicate, with dainty, high society bone structure, and a proclivity to diarrhea.   By contrast, Otie is more working class. He hails from a local dairy.  He’s stocky, strong, stout.  His bowels churn out cannon balls. Everything about him is rugged.  They are both intelligent—Gus in a dreamy, absent minded way, Otie in a very focused, determined sort of way.  I’m pretty sure that Otie could figure out a Rubix Cube if he had a way of manipulating it properly with his hooves.  

In the Spring, they might have outgrown their yoke and need a new one.  Working Cattle go through as many as seven or eight different sizes before they finish growing.  We’ll see… I can’t wait for the warm mornings to come again when we can yoke them at sunrise and get in a workout before the rest of the day takes off and I have to report to the tailoring shop to yoke myself to the sewing machine and wrestle gowns and trousers uphill until supper time.  

You and I, we’ll tie each lad to the hitching post, their noses the same width apart as when they are in the yoke, and give them a good grooming before we hitch them up. Grab a stiff brush and go for it! They love this part the most. Rub the fur vigorously in all directions then smooth it down with softer strokes, following the growth lines.  They love being pampered.  Just look at those silly expressions of pure bliss on their faces when we clean their ears out with recycled baby wipes, cocking their heads first to one side then the other to lean into the pleasure.  (I’m sure my boys have the cleanest ears in all the land!)  Then they stand with patient interest as we carefully sand the rough spots of their horns and coat them in a homemade mixture of Vaseline, beeswax, and citronella to keep the horn flies away.  Horn flies will bite off flakes of the horns and weaken and disfigure them.  We go through one primping routine after another. Like teenagers, they cannot get enough.  Let’s groom them until they relax enough to burp up a wad of cud and chew it. 

We never load the yoke on their necks when they are anything but willing and relaxed.  I want every interaction with us humans to involve Repose or Relief.  So far, the only trauma these two have ever faced is the day they found out the electric fence means business. (And they taught that to themselves in a matter of two zaps each.)  There is enough pain in this world already—the universal pain that we are each working at lifting up—to think of ever causing more.

Now for the best part of any day, ever… There is a soft animal in each of us, hidden in the core of our innermost self.  This animal has not always been treated kindly and longs to be at peace in its herd.  I invite you to place your animal body between these two giants and feel them press into you from both sides until you are sandwiched tightly between warmth, muscle and fur.  Isn’t that Comforting?? Feel all of you Breathe.  You are safe. You Belong. Can you feel the sun, tracing your face with honeyed fingers?  Can you feel the pulse of their gentle cudding vibrate from their slowly moving jaws all the way through each heartbeat, each breath, each sinew transmitting micro-movements? And beneath that, can you feel yourself enfolded in a greater soft Stillness?  There is nowhere to go.  There is nothing to do.  Just BE in this moment , in this “hug” they are giving you, as one of “them.” Be here in the center of your untouched Beauty.   Just stand there in the Light, pressed between two steers and feel the Love.  Remember Love?

We are each guided into our depths by our inner Longings.  Beneath the flurries, flies and Noise of Life, lies this unaffected Presence of the Infinite and universal heartbeat.   Even when we feel gutted by the toil of our burdens, the filthiness of our chores, we are not just Held, but Lifted.  Love shows is the truth underneath it all.

In some places, cows are considered sacred and worshipped. In Hinduism, the cow is venerated as a sacred being, believed to represent divine and natural beneficence.  I totally understand.

In Vermont, young bullocks are merely a byproduct of the dairy industry.  In order for a cow to give milk, she must have a calf every year.  It costs the farmers an average of $25 per calf to have them loaded on trucks and hauled away to feed lots where they will be fed until slaughter.  Most are only given moments with their mothers. Some receive her first milk, the vital colostrum that bolsters their survival rate, and that’s it.  When I called around to find out where I could get two calves to raise as working steers, I was told to show up and put one in the back of my car and take it home for free.  I’d SAVED that farmer money.

Standing in the sun, dozing at the hitching post, being spoiled like moo-vie stars, these boys have no idea that they should not be here, that only a quirk of chance, of Fate, of curiosity, impulse, and Luck grants them this precious life and an adoring Servant providing them all the hay they can munch at her own expense. 

Is the Miracle any different for the rest of us?

I have learned as much about Loving from these two beloved steers as I ever have in any relationship. Life comes with a tremendous amount of work, misunderstanding, hardship, and betrayal of our spirits. Some days I am definitely Moo-dy;  I like cows and maybe, three other people at most… I don’t handle people as well as I do animals and the human I have the most contact with is my own dear self, who can be a total Jersey Flop at times. Standing between these dozing, chewing bulls pulls me back to Love—to my infinite connection with everything, and everyone, especially the small, soft, gentle animal in me.  Though we are strangers to one another, we are kindred spirits. There is no difference in our hearts.  We are all present in the name of being Alive.  In the quiet peace of the grassy orchard, we come together to dwell in the Divine Gift of Being, learning to heal what was accidentally scarred or broken.  We come to Give, to Learn, to Receive, to know all the itchy spots of our Beloved…

…and to Mend.

With Love as Big as A Cow,

Yours aye,

Moo

Winterberries

Happy February Dear Ones!

It’s about 12 F degrees as I make my way to the barn this morning.  The air on my cheek feels like a 60 grit sandpaper kiss from one of the steers.  It’s a silent, black and blue and white world, save for three pops of red: the barn itself, my nose, and the winterberries, glistening beneath icicles on their branches.  The Winterberry bush, half way between house and barn, is large and ancient. The weight of a recent snow storm has torn off a limb, exposing the pith of the trunk where it ripped. Healing will come with the spring. For now, it trembles in the semi-darkness, offering hot bursts of color that cannot be frozen, dimmed, or shamed.

I feel like this bush—torn by weights that fall upon me (such as people who want their snow gear mended by Friday), half dying, half bursting with ideas and possibilities of a bright red new life just waiting to land upon soft, open ground.  But the ground is frozen and so am I. February, often called ‘the longest little month of the year,’ is that time of not yet living, not yet dying.  Hope is on Ice.

Yearly, I remind myself to be gentle. “Do not make any major decisions on February,” I say aloud, as on I plod, trudging the little circles of light between house and barn, barn and house, home and shop, shop and home.  It seems like it is forever time to wake up, only it’s also always time for bed.  

This is the time when Love Stories sustain us. I’m not talking about those old fashioned versions of “Boy meets Girl; Girl gets chocolate.”  (“Which inevitably lead to ‘Boy disappears and Girl is left sobbing and eating an entire trifle with her bare hands,” says Prudence tartly.)  I’m talking about getting in touch with that Enormous Source within and around us that helps us build and tread the bridges between worlds—between the interior self and outer self, the self and others, others and our community, our communities and the nation, with as much Grace as possible.  I’m on a Kindness safari.

“Know any good Love Stories?” I ask the sheep.

“EVERY story is a love story,” says Blossom.

“I am trying to make my life a Love Story,” I confess, “only I am not doing the best job of it. I have a few crust-omers I don’t feel particularly loving towards.

“Are people in your shop asking you to love them? I thought they were just asking you to fix their pants,” says Prim.

“If every customer is a story, then every one is looking for love,” says Angel Wally.

“Of course they are asking for Love. Humans are asking for EVERYTHING,” says Willoughby, with a touch of eye-rolling.

“Well, why can’t you just Love them?” asks Prim. “Loving is easy.”

“Because…” I sigh heavily, “Some people need a tremendous amount—such as [that pest] from [that state] who keeps texting me at all hours (except during business hours) to see if her shirt is ready already.  Some are easy to love—such as [that adorable person] who speaks softly and is in no rush, who needs a seat on the bench in the hall and a peppermint before he can make it back to his car.”

“I LOVE peppermints!” says Prim. “Let’s all have some right now.   Let’s taste some of that love.”

I confess I have no peppermints, point them towards the Christmas tree they have not yet finished and go on.

“Some people create a deficit in me immediately that makes me mutter to myself and savagely stab my fingers with needles, accidentally, as I sew and have silent dress rehearsals with them in my head about what they can do with their dirty mending, if they really want to know…  It bothers me that I know I give better service to crabby people and more affection to kind people. The kind people get more kindness from me, but slow service because I know they can tolerate a wait without hating me, and the demanding ones get swift service so that I can get rid of them quickly.  This strikes me as wimpy and unsatisfying on so many levels. It’s leading me to live an Inauthentic Life, against which I rebel.

“Being Nice to Nice people and Mean to Mean people is really the way it should be,” announces Blossom. “What’s your problem?”

“It’s not as easy as that,” I say. “There are too many layers. Inside I am nice to the Nice, but outwardly, they are not getting the fastest work. They are paying too high a price for my affection. And the mean people are not getting any nicer—they just get moe spoiled by having everything just how they want it as soon as they want it. I think the Nice people should have that…”

Waterlily stares at me, asbsently munching for a while.

“What makes wanting what you want when you want it ‘mean’”she wants to know. “We ALL want what we want when we want it. We ALL bash each other like mad when you put the feed in the bucket. Is that Mean?”

I laugh. It helps me to think of them as greedy farm animals just trying to get into the feed room so they can eat all the grain.  It’s just their nature to want free buttons for their thrift-store finds, and to expect me to sew them on while they wait, and then charge $2 to a credit card because they have no cash.  These people aren’t unkind or mean, they are just pushy, abrupt, abrasive, utterly lacking in charm, like two young bulls who know it’s supper time.

“It sounds like you are hungry,” says Angel Wally. “But also Fed Up. Get rid of the thing you are carrying so that you can fill up on something more nourishing. If the love you are giving does not serve you, you will not last long as a seamstress serving the public. You will burn out too fast.”

“Aren’t you the one who says the people most in need of love are the ones behaving in the most unloveable ways?” asks Prim.

They are right. What do I need to let go of so that I can enjoy something Else? We all sit in silence, cudding for a while.

“I think the thing I need to get rid of is the sense of insult that is implied when people pester me—as if I don’t want to or am unable to take care of them the way they want unless they worry at me. It makes me sense their lack of trust in me. I want to feel trustworthy. Nice people make me feel valued, trusted. I like that…” I say slowly, feeling the sting come out along with my words.

“You need to eat up a whole lot of Beauty,” says Angel Wally. “Feast your eyes, your ears, your thoughts, on the things that make you Happy, not sad. Work hard and fast for everybody. Do things in order. Don’t play favorites. Your true Heart’s Desire sprouts from a sense of yourself that is sturdy enough to have preferences independent of external factors.”

He’s given me a lot to chew, as I pass the Winterberries again...

So!  The task I set for myself this month is to reconnect to my ability to Love: to be that tiny red berry in a temporarily frozen world.  (I want to give the “nice” customers good service too!)  My plan is to keep an eye out for Beauty, for opportunities to observe others loving each other, to stock the Love Larder, so that I have plenty to share.  When we feed our hearts with caring for Goodness, we reawaken ourselves to love and joy. When a man tells me he wants all the collars reversed on his threadbare shirts by Monday so that he can move to Montana on Tuesday, I will not scream silently “Are you KIDDING ME? How long have you known you were moving to Montana, you [person whose parents never married]???” I will be too full--of the glow of a moonlight on snow, of a person holding a door for a friend at the post office, of a friend’s music, of a mother getting her son’s boxer shorts hemmed so that her son won’t be ridiculed at ice-hockey—to do anything but burp out a little sunshine. I won’t have to suppress the urge to say naughty words, or listen to Prudence’s cutting remarks.

I want to fight the amnesia of Spirit that can overtake me on bleak, midwinter days. Along with mending your pants, I am also mending my Soul. Righteousness and victimhood tell us a petulant Something about our “worth” but they do not lead us to the true, rich peace that comes from recognizing we are already truly “enough.”  They do not soften us or teach us to receive the bounty of this amazing Life.  

I want to remember that Life is an ever-changing current, a river sweeping us past a Beauty Buffet on the shores.  I am no more undamaged, or unlovable than my fellow button-hunters hunkering in our canoes.   I want to lean into Goodness—for purely selfish reasons—because everything seems to work better when I do.  Keeping others “happy” means I must also keep my own tank full.  

Those of us who are ever Mending, have not always had the best instruction on how to Receive, how to lean in towards Goodness, in our lives, in those around us, in our world.  It’s there. We learn to receive by Noticing—the light in the sky, a tulip in the grocery store, a man taking his wife’s arm, a person sharing a look or smile, the heart beneath our ribs, the silent breath that lifts and expands our chest.  

There is a dance to dance between the Light and Sorrow. There is a difference between merely living and being Alive. Loving isn’t as much about Changing as it is about Choosing.

It is your own life that you must come to Love.  

Keep up the Good Work, me Darlings! I love you SEW much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Getting Something Done

“You know you are getting old when it takes too much effort to procrastinate.” (source unknown)

Greetings Dear Ones!

How are you doing with that Baby New Year of yours?  Is it smiling, giggling, burping and cooing like an angel or is it just one exploding nappy full of poop after another? Has it hit the tantrums, teething, we-need-endless-amounts-of-whisky-on-the-gums (your gums, not theirs) stage?  Are you ready, as I was following the births of both of my human children, to take this baby back to that very nice midwife who handed it to you and say “Could you please take this for a few weeks and credit my account?  I’ll be back for it, I promise.  It’s just that I don’t have the foggiest idea what I am doing right now; I can’t handle it and I am in desperate need of a big fat nap!”  If history is anything to go by, you will be forced to take that baby home with you and simply muddle through until you both reach that blessed middle ground where neither of you needs to wear diapers and the fruit of your loins is occasionally gracious enough to teach you how to use those mystery functions on your cell phone.  (Usually by age 3…)

Well, my Baby New Year is off to a GREAT start.  I’m getting positively LOADS done. I’ve done a bunch of laundry, reorganized the fridge (i.e. eaten all the leftovers), learned some new tunes on the harp, done three minutes of AB workouts, thoroughly cleaned the wood stove and spread the ashes on the garden, de-Christmas-ed one room of the house (simply by piling the decorations in another room), and started to de-clutter the cellar. I’ve planned out where the spring lambing pens will be built and decided which flowers would look best in that awkward spot behind the house. (Sunflowers!) I’ve ironed all the napkins and cleaned up at least one bug cemetery/spider crime scene from the bathroom windowsill. I’ve “liked” several hundred things on social media venues and hyper-focused for several hours on removing that weird gunk that gets stuck between the shower door and the tile.  I’ve even spent an entire afternoon attempting to build a bull-proof wooden platform for the water tub in Gus & Otie’s pen, depriving them of the joy of flooding their stall and wasting their bedding on a daily basis.

Yep, life is getting nothin’ but warmer, cleaner, drier, Better around here!

Want to know the secret to my phenomenal productivity? I’ll tell you. (I’m that kind of gal…) The way to get a lot done is:  You Are Supposed To Be Doing Something Else.

Set yourself a Noble Ambition—something that will actually make the world a better place, such as writing a best-selling novel (the proceeds of which will be donated to helping the homeless), curing Cancer (or running a marathon that funds such research), promoting Peace in the Middle East (or anywhere at all), or removing every last sheep turd from your vehicle… then spend four hours knitting a sock instead.

It’s amazing what you can get done when you are supposed to be doing something else. 

Got ten pairs of pants in ten different colors, textures, and fabrics to hem by tomorrow morning?  Need to get the shoulders up two inches on a Mother-of-the-bride gown that is totally encrusted with beads? Wouldn’t  NOW the perfect time to get out the tiny Hoover attachments and dust behind the thread rack and oil all the machines?   This is the secret of how I “work” myself into a frazzle and still have nothing done by the end of the day.  Honestly, if I get any less done, I’m soon going to require a proper vacation!

I did so much “nothing” yesterday that I can barely walk upright today.  I found out that I could balance a piece of plywood on a ball and download an app on my phone that enabled me to simulate “hang gliding” over a jungle.  I had to use my core muscles to swerve to avoid hitting trees and birds and other objects.  I spent three minutes terrorizing what the Germans call der Kummerspeck—literally, my “sorrow bacon”:  that excess pudge we get around our tummies from comfort eating. All while NOT putting a new zipper in an anorak for a man who wants to go skiing some time before 2035.  

As I try to get myself organized for the New Year, New Me keeps discovering that the Old Me is up to her old tricks.  (I simply had no idea how many cobwebs I had in my home until I realized it was Wednesday again and I needed to write a Blog.) Whatever “Crastinating” is, I seem to be extremely PRO.  “Rast-in-ate” sounds a bit like my friend from Belfast telling me to “Rest and Eat.”  These are always Good Ideas.  But when you have done enough of these, there are plenty of other excuses NOT to climb up that hill in front of you just so you can shine your light for all to see…

“WHY do you do this to yourself??” Shrieks Prudence. “I thought this was going to be the year you finally got your shit together, and not leave it all over the back seat of the car.”

 Unfortunately, Old Me is flaking out on all of New Me’s Good Intentions. 

Naturally, We are handling this like a compassionate Adult—approaching with Curiosity, not Judgment. We slipped Prudence some laudanum, clobbered her over the head with her Bible, and gagged her with her own pantyhose.  And…After extensive Kindly Mindful Adult Introspection, it turns out that there’s a jolly good reason I am not doing What I am Supposed To Be Doing:

 It’s Hard.

What I Am Supposed To Be Doing is really HARD.

 It’s unbelievably stressful to run a business, decide how much to charge (what is your precious time worth?), do Good Work, show up on time, get things done efficiently, pay all the bills, remember appointments and deadlines, and eloquently and authentically express yourself artistically, spiritually, and emotionally with Love and yarn and Kindness for All.  It’s especially hard to rock these woolen, hermit granny fashions when der Kummerspeck leaves me only two options—breathe normally or get the zipper up.

 I don’t know about you, Dear Ones, but when I find myself getting in my own way, over-doing the under-doing, Old Nancy has a variety of Go-to options. Carefully and compassionately, let us examine each one:

 The number one favorite, of course, is to blame someone else.  This must be “Someone’s” fault. Someone is that character always lurking in the shadows at the Land of Lost Plots.  As in “Someone left the key turned and drained the battery…Someone spilled the [thing that got spilled]…Someone didn’t shut the [thing that should have been shut] and now all the [cows, chickens, corduroy clothes] are missing…Someone really should clean all the poop out of this car…” “Someone” is clearly leading a life of thoughtless, petty crime and I am the undisputed Victim.

The Second Option develops from number one, but expands into its own entity, given enough churning.  I start having random thoughts about ALL the people (everywhere) and all the things out to get me.  I have never seen their literature published anywhere (they are too clever) but I am convinced that there is an enormous and ubiquitous Society Dedicated to the Thwarting of Nancy Bell.  They have offices in every county, every city, every nation around the globe.  Alerts go out, the moment I leave home, signaling a carefully choreographed network of members to drive like imbeciles or establish endless phone trees when all you want to do is talk to a bloody Customer Service Representative. (An unbloodied one will do!)  Lights go red. Generators go out. Clocks lose time. The whole country seems to be run like Southwest Airlines.

The Next Option is to develop a series of Delusions.  For instance, I am pretty sure that if I just lie down and binge watch Season 5 of “The Crown,” I will suddenly, Miraculously, be filled with so much energy that I will leap to my feet and put a whole new lining in that jacket that has been hanging dejectedly on the “to do” rack since November. (“Actually,”chokes Prudence, muffled by the pantyhose, “October!”)  Somehow, I believe this Pause will be so effective and gather so much momentum within me, that I will explode with energy and the increased efficiency will more than compensate for the preliminary Slacking.  I’ll get ten things done in the time it took to do None.

One of the most dangerous Delusions is that procrastinating is really a form of Self-care.  I NEED to avoid doing What I Am Supposed To Be Doing because I am already doing “too much.” My inner victim wants you all to know that you have No Idea how hard I am always working. To get One thing done, I have probably had to do thirty—like simultaneously groom the dog, doodle on the grocery list, spend time trying to decide which of the daily photos of the darling bullocks is actually the cutest and therefore destined for Instagram, (They all are!) all while watching two guys called Joe and Larry do amazing Latin duets on harp and banjo on YouTube.

 Wise me knows that in order to make the changes I want to make, I need to do LESS, not more.  I need only to live One Day and do ONE Thing.  Just One. And it needs to be The Thing I Am Supposed to Do: That Really HARD thing I don’t want to start but which I know is the true work of my soul—found only in the union of the love of my heart and the work of my hands.  Deep down, I know that if I do not do this Hard Thing, something incalculable will be sacrificed.  I am here to do this thing.  I know it. If I don’t, no amount of filling Time will fill the Void.

What is your One Thing, Dear One? How can I help remind you that we love you dearly and we need Your Gift?

Me? I’m going to go hem some more pants.  That is, um… if the oven is really clean.

 Let’s keep mending!  I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Baby New Year

“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

Greetings Dear Ones!

Most of you who put up Christmas trees probably have them down already and all your holiday decorations safely stowed away in neatly labeled boxes until next year.  Hopefully, you found some nearby sheep or goats with whom to share any live trees.  That is a wonderful mid-winter treat for them.  Around here, farmers advertise that they take tree donations to feed to their flocks.  Just make sure they are devoid of tinsel. (The trees that is, not the farmers.)

Here at the Land of Lost Plots, I’m in no rush. It’s still Christmas.  (Sometimes Yuletide decorations last straight through to March in Nancyland.  Only the Christmas cookies never linger…)

“But it IS still Christmas!” insists Prudence, who is a stickler for such things.  “There are TWELVE days of Christmas.  Christmas isn’t officially over until the feast of the Epiphany on January 6th.”

“The Epiphany…”says little Prim, the sharpest sheep in the flock, “Whose idea was that?”  She wants her tree now.

I’m still playing Christmas Carols on the harp—mostly because they are easy melodies and that’s pretty much all I can manage with two hands at this point.  I play them all year. My ears are so full of the lyrics, they have been leaking into my speech.  “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentle men,” I say to the oxen as I turn out the lights at the barn. “And don’t be TOO merry!!” I add, “I’m sick of cleaning poop out of that water tub.”  I turn and trudge up the hill to a house nestled in the sliver between glittering frost and glittering stars. 

The weather has been nutty.  A few weeks ago, we got about six to ten inches of white concrete poured over the property.  It fell as a very pretty “snush” (snow + slush) and then hardened.  Since then, we’ve had more snow, high winds, heavy rain, thunder, thaw and a flash freeze followed by rain and fog.  One day, the temperature fluctuated more than forty degrees in twenty four hours.  Winter is in menopause! I am grateful for the addition of cleats to my mucks, although yesterday they grabbed so hard, I walked right out of my boots.  I was carrying a bale of hay in front of me and being followed by nine sheep so I didn’t notice immediately. Funny how ice “burns” the feet.

Back inside the warm house, my harp playing is full of so many “typos” that visiting real musicians who overhear me can’t help saying “What was that chord you just played? That crunchy one…”

“I have no idea,” I say impatiently.  My chords range anywhere from pleasantly chewy to “crunchy” to the painful ear-stabbing equivalent of walking on ice with no boots.

“Seriously, Mum, it was so bad it’s actually amazing. Try to find it again.  Show me which strings you hit…” 

“Oh, shut up!” I say with cheerful aplomb.

My favorite, of course, is “Away in a Manger.” I think about mangers all year round.  I shop for them all the time on online venues for used farm equipment.  I made the ones I have out of old wooden pallets.  I keep wondering if my critters will waste less hay if I put it in a big outdoor manger with a small roof over it.  Or is it best to continue spreading hay on the ground in new locations every day? Such thoughts occupy my mind more than I would like to admit.  I look at hay as if it is shredded ten dollar bills, which it basically is.

Mangers, as we know, are ancient things.  The ones I have are pretty dirty and would make a lousy bed.  Basically, they are wooden plates that have never been washed, only licked clean.  I cannot imagine putting a newborn baby in one.   I decided to ask the sheep about this on Christmas Eve, when Tradition says all the animals can talk.

“Oh, that’s just another one of your stories,” they say, chattering like mad. “You know we can talk any time!  All you have to do is be ready to sit in a corner and listen. Humans are such relentless creators of Stories; you sometimes forget which ones are actually true.”

“Ain’t THAT the truth!” I say, plopping down on the nearest hay bale.                                    

“Any chance you have any spare cookies in your pockets?” asks Prim.

“No,” I admit, hastily brushing the crumbs off my cheeks.

“One of the reasons you don’t hear us animals talking much is because we are such good listeners.  We listen, like we talk, with our entire bodies,” says Wally. 

“We’re very quiet and when we know we are not actually being Heard, that can make us feel afraid. It means chances are good that we are being Misunderstood.  And that’s usually when Bad Things happen,” says Prim.

“What is Fear, anyway, but just a form of extreme listening?” says Blossom in the somewhat enlarged tones of the congenitally Bossy.  She has taken over as lead ewe since Willow’s demise last April.

It feels deeply Good and sacred to sit amongst the sheep, just Listening.  The shy ones relax.  I’m not there to trim their feet, or shear them, or give them worming medicine.  Alas, I’m not there to feed them treats either… I’m just there to BE.

 “Tell me about this manger business,” I say.  “What would you think if one night you found a baby in one?”

“Why would anyone put a baby in a manger?” asks Prim. “Why not a Christmas tree?”

“Well, that’s not really how The Story goes,” I say. “In fact, I’m not even sure what the heck a Christmas tree has to do with babies or mangers at all.”

“Except that they are delicious,” says Willoughby, smacking his lips.

“Are babies something good to eat?” asks Otie, one of the yearling steers, leaning over his gate to eavesdrop.

The sheep ignore him. Cattle are not on their rather short list of priorities.

“Hey, Otie,” I say.  “I’ve always meant to ask you.  Would you say you ‘moo’ or ‘low’?  In some of the carols it says ‘the cattle are lowing.’  They never say ‘the cattle are moo-ing…’ Which is it?”

“I definitely go Low,” says Otie swelling his chest and trying to look extra macho. “Gus, on the other hand, er…hoof, Gus goes High.  His are squeaky moos.”

“You know how it is--when they go Low… we go Bah!” says Chip interrupting with disdain. “The Humbug is implied.”

“You aren’t the only ones saying Bah-Humbug,” I say. “One of my tailoring customers came in grumbling that his wife had lost her mind. He said ‘”we have chopped down a living tree and put it in the house. Now she wants to put a FAKE tree out on the deck!  So we have a fake tree outside and a real tree inside.  I’m tellin’ you. She’s NUTS!”’

“It sounds like he was not into the holiday spirit,” observes Molly.

“No,” says Prim, “but at least they can eat that yummy tree in the house.”

“Don’t be silly,” says Wally, “Humans don’t eat trees! They just eat cookies.”  

I gaze around my humble living crèche—this manger scene I visit daily.   I know the angels are here.  I can hear them in the wind, I can see them coated in snow or wool or fur.  We have a shepherd (er, shepherdess) (ME).  We have a drummer person (also me). We have at least three bearded wise guys playing fiddle up in the house.  The scene looks a lot like a Euro-centric Christmas card, especially when I wear my bathrobe to the barn. 

We’re just missing a baby.

“Hey, isn’t the New Year supposed to be a baby?” asks Prim.  “Isn’t it usually portrayed as some naked thing in a diaper with a top hat on?”

“Hats? Are hats something we can eat?” wonders Otie.

“Yes,” I admit slowly, not to hats being fodder, but to New Years being babies.

“Funny that a New Year arrives like a tiny baby,” says Blossom, “and yet everyone acts like it’s a full-grown soccer coach, here to prep them for the World Cup. They all jump off the couch, renounce booze, and rush to the gym and do push-ups until they are ready to toss all their Christmas cookies.  They make all sorts of reasons to punish themselves. Babies are sweet and soft and vulnerable. They don’t make you do plank drills!”

“They do, when that “baby” is twenty-two and you still haven’t lost your post-partum flab,” I say dryly.

“Besides, we NEED punishments,” interjects Prudence testily. “These are my two favorite seasons—New Year’s and Lent. I say, unleash the grievances!  Let the atonement Begin!”

“That sounds awful,” say the sheep.

“When we have babies, we just lie down and let them climb on our backs to help them stay warm.  We sniff them until we know them in the dark.  We nuzzle, nourish, and nurture them.  We protect them from bad things and bawl loudly if anything happens to them.  We don’t try to improve ourselves; we try to improve them.”

“Maybe that’s what I should do with my own baby New Year,” I say thoughtfully. “Maybe I will just hold it, carefully in my heart and see what it wants to be.  Maybe I’ll just follow the joys and try to witness the development of things in their natural course.

“Rubbish!” says Prudence, beginning to panic. “You need to write a book, expand your business, pay off your debts, clean up the mess in your car, and you definitely need to do some sit-ups!”

“What if you just followed the seasons the way one follows a toddler, instead of rushing ahead with an impossible agenda that will just leave you weeping and searching for more cookies?” says Wally kindly.

“How many seasons are there to follow?” asks Prim.

“Hundreds:  There’s the upcoming  tax season, and ant season, and mouse season.  These are the Nibbling Seasons that nibble away things we have stored.  Then there are the planting seasons, the weeding out seasons, the harvesting seasons.  There’s prom season, bikini season, back-to-school season.  Some seasons aren’t even seasons; for example, it’s open season for zippers all year long.” I explain. “There are ever so many seasons on a farm, in a life, or a tailoring shop.”

“What season is it now?” wonders Gus.

“It’s Baby New Year season,” announces Prim.  “Time for tenderness and Baby steps. It’s the Holding Time—hold on to your Dreams, your faith, your courage.  Have Gentle snuggles with your feelings and fears. Hold the seed catalogue but do not plant anything.  Just wait. Rest.  Enjoy long night naps.  They will be getting shorter day by day.”

Her words soothe me.  She’s right.

As the little New Year gets under way, I’m trying to be a better listener.  I can hear the animals.  Usually, I can hear the stories clothes tell too.  Though, I admit, I got confused yesterday when I was confronted with a blue shirt smeared with some sort of white paste.  “What happened here?” I asked the gentleman who was wearing it beneath a sports jacket he wanted altered.

“This?” he asked, pointing to his stomach. “Oh, I made homemade ravioli for my ex-wife on Christmas Eve.”

“That was TEN days ago,” Prudence reminds me with a roll of her eyes.

We do our best not to judge him.

“I want to have more compassion,” I tell her after he leaves. “I want to hold a bigger Grace Space for the people who confuse or frustrate me.  I want to love more, judge less.  I especially want to gossip less.”

“But how will we know whom and what to forgive, if we don’t know all the details of their crimes?” asks Prudence, with no innocence what-so-ever.  

“We’ll manage,” I promise.

The past two years have been tougher than I ever could have imagined.  We now know how strong we are, what we can endure.  Let’s see how soft we can be, how merciful and tender, how curious and open.  Let’s embrace our powerful, Fool-ish Innocence and take baby steps in New directions and follow after Joy.

Let’s see how we can keep each other Mending.  Thank you for your Good Work, Dear Ones! May 2023 bring you heaps and heaps of every Good Thing!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Ragged

Greetings Dear Ones,

Well, here it is, right in the middle of the holiday rush and I decided I would just Quit Everything for a while.  No hustling for presents.  No tree trimming.  No parties.  I have not been sewing, spinning, knitting, baking, reading, writing, or playing music of any kind.  On a good day, I may lie around watching old sit-coms from the 80’s (that I never got to see then because I wasn’t allowed to watch TV; I had to “play outside.”)   The phone is ringing off the hook and I just lie here by the crackling stove, sipping tea and watching people with rather unfortunate hair and clothing choices make a slap-stick muddle of their lives for 45 minutes at a time, before everything gets resolved with a few one-liners and that sparkling good will of another era.

My shop is clogged with work and I am getting testy emails from people “just checking” in to see if they should come in and pick up yet.

They shouldn’t.

I haven’t done their work today and I doubt I’ll get to it tomorrow.  I’d rather lie here. My body has some major decisions to make about whether we are ever going to wear jeans and walk vertically again.  

Naturally, my inner Capitalist is going out of her freakin’ mind. “Everyone says Covid is now just a mild flu.  You’re over-dramatizing this. What kind of Slacker are you? You’ve GOT to power through!” she shrieks.  “You probably aren’t contagious. Get up and plug in the iron. Fix something…Make something. DO something!” She is running in circles, shaking fistfuls of bills at me. I ignore her.

“You manage to power through for the animals,” she says accusingly.

“Yes, but I MUST.  And I always will. That’s what having animals means.  They always come first.”

“Why not people?”

“People are not going to die if they don’t get some pants hemmed.”

“You’re not going to die either!” she storms.

“Yes, but after five days of aches, chills, and fever it sure feels like it…” I mumble, turning over to cough until I see stars. 

Doing chores with a fever is not the most pleasant thing to do but at least the weather is still mild and I don’t have buckets of ice to haul and smash.  Twice a day, I feed the animals and go back to bed with a little dog who is only too delighted to keep me company in the over-heated covers.  I drag half a bale of hay out to the sheep in the field and sit on an old tree stump to catch my breath.

“You’re sick, aren’t you?” asks little Miss Prim.

“Yes,” I say. “I haven’t been this sick in many years.”

“Well, you need to hide that.  We sheep never look sick until we are just about to die.  It keeps the predators at bay. You need to pretend you are fine.”

“You sound like some of my customers.”

“This is a world pretty short on Mercy,” says another sheep. “Limping just makes you a target. Keep your suffering out of sight.”

“That seems to be what a lot of people do,” I admit.  “How many of us are actually walking around with invisible Handle with Care labels on them? So many of us are suffering like sheep afraid of getting bitten.”

“It’s a Thing,” says Wally, chewing. 

Walking back to the house makes me dizzy because there is a ringing in my ears.  Out of curiosity, I match the pitch I hear as best I can and hum it into the guitar tuner app on my phone.  My head is ringing at a faint D#.

“I hope you feel better soon,” says Everyone.  Some of these people say so with their own selfish agendas at heart; others genuinely wish me well.  Honestly, I am in no hurry.  It’s been five years since I have taken any kind of break.  I’ve earned this and no one is going to deprive me of it.  If I can’t get out of it, I’m going to get into it. Defiantly, rebelliously, I don’t give a hoot who sees me limp, or lie on the dog’s bed in front of the stove.  I am not a sheep.  I’m a crabby middle-aged woman who hasn’t slept through the night in over a week.  Frankly, that’s way more dangerous than any coyote! 

I listen to every sound in the house until all I can hear, beneath the D#, is Stillness.  I had not realized how hungry I was for this Silence, for this peace. In the Stillness… when I am Very Still…I find myself. Still.  It feels good to lie still. I don’t want to be Tough.  I don’t want to “power through.” I’m exhausted by the thought of being anyone’s pretend hero.  I just want to lie here and listen to something I am supposed to learn about Healing, about Resting, about Receiving the miracle of health I take for granted every day. Suddenly,  I am flooded with Gratitude.  I have unhooked from the relentless forward momentum of my normal life just to Be. This illness is actually a blessing.   

When the fever finally breaks and I can begin doing little things, I start my most important project:  embroidering a heart-shaped pillow for a customer.  He has asked me to make a plush toy for his child that can contain a much older plush toy inside of it.   It’s the child’s favorite toy but it is worn to shreds.  In Velveteen Rabbit terms, this thing has been loved so much it is Real to the point of disintegrating into wadded up thread crumbs stuck together with kid sweat and drool.  The idea is that the little toy will live inside the “heart” I build to put inside the much larger replica of this toy.  I have no pattern, so I am just winging it from pictures.  Love has damaged this little bunny so much he has no recognizable face.  

The little Velveteen bunny lies next to the fabric that will become its new home looking exactly how I feel.  I try to handle him as gently as possible.  Gradually, the heart and the larger new toy take shape.  The proportions are not exactly right because the hollow torso must accommodate this “heart” that is oversized and filled with ragged, damaged, but pure and true Love.  I leave the chest empty and stuff the arms, the legs, the feet, hands, head, ears… I sew on eyes and embroider a nose.  Then I pack the little bunny away into the heart and seal up the chest cavity with Velcro.  The new guy looks both hopeful and vaguely surprised—the hand-sewn mouth is a little crooked, as if this chap is a little shy but up for a good joke.  I hope he will be loved, both for who he is and what he contains. 

I have put a Good Face on something that is hiding something ragged within.  The sheep would be proud of me.  

I think about how hard this time of year can be on some of us Menders.  The Darkness is always a challenge—so is the unrelenting weight of fear and fatigue we are still coping with after two years of a global pandemic and economic and political upheaval.  We are all more tired than we think.  Most of us are carrying hearts full of ragged little loves we cannot bear to part with yet cannot survive our continued grasping.  We tell ourselves we cannot rest, we cannot wait, we must carry on.  But these hearts can be so heavy… And we can only build our newer, bigger, stronger, more hopeful selves if we take it gently, one stitch at a time.  Time is all we have and all we need.  It is the only Healer. 

I feel so blessed that I got to lie still and be authentically Ragged for a week. I had the luxury of being able to make space for myself.  Prudence and the inner Capitalist realized, for once, that continuing to whip me was futile.  I had the luxury of not giving a damn.

I’m hugely grateful to my sweet customers who mostly understood and were content to wait graciously.  All in all, it was a splendid isolation.  A perfect Advent of silent Waiting in the dark.  

Dear ones, I hope you don’t need a virus to allow you to realize the beauty of resting when you are tired or praying when you feel hopeless.  Your work is important, yes, but even more important is that Spirit that informs all you do.  If your spirits are at low ebb, please remember how very much you are needed, wanted, and loved.  Those who love you can build a safe place for you in our hearts where you do not have to pretend to be invincible.  Rest your little ragged self with care and patience.  Let old resentments and rush jobs pass you by in the holiday hurry-up.  Who cares how many days it is until the presents are due? Embrace Presence.  Giving yourself the gift of Time will do magic and mending you cannot imagine.  

For if you can love and make space for all that is ragged in yourself and others, is that not the greatest gift of all?   

Wishing you every blessing of Health & Peace,

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. I am actually On the Mend and feeling better!