Angels for Hire

Greetings Dear Ones!

Do you believe in angels?  I do.  They are all around us, everywhere, in the form of beloved pets showing us Unconditional Love, as kind strangers miraculously showing up to help in moments of need, and in the form of sweet brides who allow their bridesmaids to wear flats to their weddings.  There are devils too… but let’s not talk about politicians and lobbyists today!  Sometimes, I picture them (the angels, that is, not the politicians and lobbyists) watching us from heaven like excited school children peering into a tank of stingrays at the New England aquarium: “Come here!  Swim closer!” they beg, “We just want to touch you! We are safe!  We love you so much!” But they cannot reach us if we don’t choose to let them.  We need to Trust and swim a little closer. Free Will means we get the choice whether or not we surrender to being touched.  It’s up to us to ask for help.

I’ve gotten very good at asking for help.  There’s one sewing angel up there, whom I know personally, who’s particularly quick at fixing zippers.  I talk to her frequently, especially when I have to replace one on a down coat… I’m pretty sure that some of the feathers I clean up later are from her wings.   

According to a book called “Hiring the Heavens” by Jean Slatter, there is an entire temp agency of angelic beings just waiting to be of service to us mortals down here in the swamps of Vermont, currently struggling with “humaning.”  They just hang out in the waiting room, watching us glide by in our frantic spirals of relentless ambition and perfectionism, waiting…. Since the only price is Faith (which is a bargain when one is in Panic), I recently “hired” a whole slew of them to take over all the challenges of my life.  I hired an “auto angel” who is in charge of helping me find someone willing to replace the rusted out hatch on the back of my car and another to protect my vehicle from detection until I can get it to pass inspection.  These two are working together very effectively: I have found a wonderful auto body shop that will issue me a certificate to show any police people who pull me over before the work is complete.

I hired one to help me write the blog this week, and another to help me fix the vacuum cleaner, which was shooting out clouds of dust from underneath the rug beater.

“I welcome Divine help and inspiration in the fixing of this machine,” I said, plunging ahead and removing all of the screws from the machine before I was divinely inspired to do any such a thing.  My angel, who I can only assume is a relative of “Clarence” from “It’s a Wonderful Life” showed up a few seconds later, huffing and puffing because he has no wings yet.  I already had the screws out on the floor and accidentally had kicked one under the couch.

“Just open the hatch at the bottom that is there to help you access the clogs,” he said, wheezing. “The screws don’t need to come out. The engineers designed it that way.”

“Oops! Oh… damn…I didn’t see that,” I said.

“I can’t believe you just said damn to an angel,” hissed Prudence, mortified.

“Just clear out all that matted dog hair and dust and you should be good to go,” said Clarence’s cousin.  The Blog angel was standing nearby, smiling wryly. The vacuum cleaner, with no screws to hold it all together, fell apart.

“I can’t remember how this thing went together,” I cried, starting to sweat. The number of pieces seemed to be multiplying before my eyes.  “Quick! Can we hire a team of engineers to come help?”

A team of angelic engineers instantly appeared.  Apparently, Heaven is full of these earnest, thoughtful, practical people who do their best to make The Uncomplicated more complicated for the sake of Efficiency.  They are extremely Good People. Unfortunately, they were not especially adept at translating their thoughts to me so I just muddled about until I was furious and bellowed for the benevolent Hermit of Hermit Hollow to come add his human thumbs to the mix.  Rebuilding a dismantled vacuum cleaner requires at least two additional digits per rattling piece that won’t stay put.

“Don’t you think you should try it, to see if it’s sucking properly before you screw it back together?” whispered the Blog angel with wicked innocence.

The Hermit and I agreed. We had already misplaced the screws anyway.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” said the Clarence’s wingless cousin confidently. “The channel is clear. Go ahead and put the screws in…”

“Shhhhh….” said the Blog angel, “Just watch.  This is going to be good.  She needs a topic…”

So I turned on the vacuum cleaner.  It sucked alright.

It sucked up all the screws.

“You’re welcome,” said the Blog Angel. “Now you don’t have to scribble on and on about daffy brides who play phone tag with you four times about how much it would cost to alter a gown and when you tell them to make an appointment, they call back to say ‘should I bring the gown with me when I come in?’  Trust me, this is way funnier.

Indeed...  

A sense of humor is divine. I don’t mind being used for a joke if it lightens the load on anyone’s wings and especially if I now know precisely where the missing screws are.  A clean carpet would just be a total bonus.

I adore playful co-creation.

For weeks, I have been working on a friend’s wedding outfit. I say “outfit” because I was only responsible for the top half of her dress.  She’d purchased a gorgeous white silk skirt from Anthropologie that had a small train and all she needed was a blouse.  She had “an idea” in her head—an idea not available in any store.  Yesterday, after more than thirty hours of sketching, shopping, talking, cutting, pinning, stitching, refitting, restitching…  we completed that idea. Together with an entire sweatshop of angels, we shaped silk around ether, with twenty tiny buttons marching up the back and neck and sleeves to hold it in place, and Created a one-of-a-kind match to the skirt. It’s JUST RIGHT.  I Love it!  And so does the bride.

The bride had Faith, I had Hope (with big dashes of panic), but the greatest of these was Love, which triumphed in the end.  As we worked out the glitches and snags (I redid the neck three times!), I fell in love again and again with that Joy that never grows stale—the process of adding Skill to vision that enables any artist humbly to take part in a Miracle.  To co-create is to willingly and bravely inhabit a world of Uncertainty. Sometimes the skill is weak; sometimes the vision. Sometimes the combination is everything you dreamed it could be, a miraculous WIN.  

Is it not so with ANY relationship? …especially Marriage itself?

“You must be used to this, no?” asks the bride, as I practice buttonholes on scraps before attempting to do twenty of them on the real blouse we have spent hours constructing.  I look at her in panic.

“I love these machines but I always ask the angels to help keep potential gremlins at bay! It takes a serious amount of Good Luck to execute a plan. I’ll breath again when it’s over…” I gulp as we begin the count-down of potential disasters: twenty, nineteen, eighteen… It is completely within the realm of possibility that [a politician or lobbyist] will suddenly cause the greasy wheels of Fate to chew a small black hole of snaggled Despair in the pristine silk I hold so tenderly in my hands.  Un-dared-for Joy begins to swell with each tiny victory. Smooth, sleek buttonholes are definitely a sign the gods are with you.  The relief at the ends is nearly unbearable.

I can’t do my work without this holy trinity of Hope, Skill, and Luck.  Hope, as we all know, springs eternal.  There’s no shortage of that. And I work daily on Skill.  I’m grateful for my technical ability and the grace that endless hours of repetition have added to my thimbled fingers. But Luck…. Luck is the always-invited guest who never RSVP’s.  So I never cease to be amazed, nay, Shocked when something turns out As Planned. Creativity is a bold and audacious journey to somewhere Unknown. Sometimes you create precious heirlooms to be treasured; sometimes you just destroy medium-sized household appliances.

Again, how like a Marriage itself?

I wish this Dear Bride, and all my dear brides, and especially YOU, Dear Mender—all the joys of this Creative Journey. There is nothing quite so Magnificent as being able—occasionally, intentionally, profoundly, humbly—to make something Beautiful, perhaps even Good, with evenly-spaced, functioning buttons.  For the rest, well, there’s laughter and a chance to try again.  Luckily, there are angels for hire!

Keep at it, Dear Ones.  We are “the hands” Love needs—to Mend, to Create, to hold each other up through the tough times. “All you have to do is Believe,” says the swamp-dwelling witch with the wild hair, dusty carpets, and poopy shoes she leaves at the door.  

I love you SEW much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Barber Pole, Barbies & Blossoms

“I spend the first twenty minutes of my morning walking the garden looking for miracles.” —May Sarton

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, if it’s true that the earth laughs in flowers, then someone told a whopper in the pumpkin patch! Enormous golden blooms are bubbling and frothing over the stone wall, all over the hillside, and what remains of the beans.  Joy clogs all paths.  Merriment abounds.  Wild weeds snicker deliciously in pink and blue and white.  Outrageous goldenrod is shrieking with glee all over the meadow. The six surviving sunflowers uneaten by the sheep are now eleven feet into the sky and reaching still.  When they finally burst their mirth, no doubt it will come as a bombastic “PAH! HA HA!” that will make us all roll and clutch our ribs.  I perch amongst them, happily catching contagious glee.  After a summer fraught with rain, (which has been NO joke!), the pumpkin chuckles come to this hillside a little later than usual, making them ever more welcome—like that comic punch line that breaks the tension in a great drama.

Speaking of drama, it is with great relief that I relay the news that wee Festus, Flora, Fern and Fergus (Lambing season has been all about F’s this year…) and the rest of the lambs have pulled through the worst of the Barber Pole infestation.  Their signs of anemia are diminishing.  The bottle jaw is gone. They are eating well and regaining strength.  I no longer have to carry little Festus around because he is too tired to keep up with the rest of the group.  Their growth is likely to be stunted, as a result of this trauma, but that’s fine with me, since they are fiber animals anyway and not being raised for meat or breeding.  I am calling Festus “the Boy Who Lived” since he has survived two murderous events in his lifetime already—from his own mother and these horrible parasites.  My inner Irish person is saying bad luck comes in threes so I am still worried about him.  I was supposed to feed them spinach, to try and increase their iron levels but like children of every species, they reject healthy stuff in general and spinach in particular.  Perhaps I should feed him four-leaf clovers instead.

Sweet friends have credited me with “saving” these animals but I know my devotion to them is only a tiny part of a complex matrix and that I am minimally responsible at best.  Still, my inner show-off is happy to climb the podium and bow for all the applause, which annoys the crap out of Prudence who reminds me that we can do nothing without the Divine Will of Providence, along with some great veterinary care and sage advice from fellow shepherdesses.  A lot of the credit goes to the animals themselves—Shetland sheep are notoriously resilient, rugged little animals. And…we’ve had a damn good piece of luck.  I’ve learned to appreciate that “all we can do is all we can do” when farm animals are concerned. Sometimes we win; sometimes we find ourselves sobbing into a freshly dug hole in the ground.  “Shepherdess” is a game I play with the Fates. When we woolies win a turn, I guffaw like Goldenrod.

It’s still incredibly damp here.  The potatoes are flourishing as if this is Ireland. I’ve barely worked the cattle at all this summer due to weather and scheduling conflicts.  Instead, I try to get as much “Barbie time” with Gus and Otie as possible.

“What’s Barbie time?” Gus wants to know as I tie his halter to the hitching post.

“It’s when I brush your hair and daydream about how beautiful you are,” I say.

“Oh,” says Otie, snuggling into the scritches and scratches of the curry comb as it circles over his hide.

“We love Barbie time,” they say, closing their eyes dreamily and burping up wads of cud.

Morning time with these boys is precious time indeed.  There is something soft and tender within me that is nurtured by the act of nurturing.  I oil their horns and clean out their huge, furry ears with a mix of Vaseline, beeswax and citronella to keep the flies from biting them.  These big “metro” bullocks love their daily brushings, massages, and beauty treatments and there is something infinitely satisfying to my little girl’s heart in the combing of someone else’s hair. I could do it for hours. I spray their tails with conditioners and comb out the snarls they way I used to comb doll hair long ago.

I called these dudes my “bovine Barbies” long before the Barbie movie came out.

I’ve been intrigued by the intense and conflicting reactions to this movie.  I loved playing with Barbies as a child.  Maybe such play did me more harm than good and put unreasonable thoughts in my head.  But I doubt it. Those hard-boiled beauties represented pure escapism, Romance and Possibility. My sisters and I turned them all into nuns—Sisters of the Immaculate Kleenex with wimples taped to their heads and knotted dental floss for rosaries—so that we could play “The Sound of Music,” by far the most wonderful love story we’d ever seen.   We all wanted to sing on mountain tops, wear clothing made of draperies, and fall in love with sea captains.

According to articles I’ve been reading, in the 1960’s the Barbie toy was supposed to teach young girls poise and fashion so that they could choose good husbands.  If that’s so, I can assure you that playing with Barbies is perfectly safe: Years of playing with the things apparently had NO effect on me whatsoever.  Yesterday, I went to work and worked half the morning—seeing clients, talking to other humans in a completely normal tone of voice—totally unconscious that I had put my dress on inside out.  It was not until I was in the fitting room with a customer that I happened to glance in the mirror and spot a tag flapping at the back of my neck. Another day, I worked five hours with the back zipper of my dress only half way up.  Apparently I had gotten distracted while dressing, or just quit when I couldn’t reach any further.  Who knows? It amazes me that people will ask me for help with their garments when I don’t seem to know how clothing works on myself.  “Fashion and Poise indeed!” mutters inner critic Prudence, rolling her eyes beneath her Kleenex wimple.

The thing the Barbies DID give me was a place to design, to dream, to create, to escape.  I’m grateful for a childhood that gave me that. My sisters and I made our doll’s clothes and homes from things we had available. Shoe boxes were sports cars. A baby food jar glued upside down over a bit of wood made a great “lamp.”  Blocks of wood slip-covered with socks made couches and chairs.  We invented. We imagined.  Playfully, we co-created. We learned to “see” the worlds we described to each other with our minds’ eyes—“here’s her couch; this is the parlor…” We had to explain these things to each other because sometimes our workmanship was so shoddy no one but the creator could understand what she was looking at. “Hey! That’s my window!  That’s not the door—the door is over here…”

I love any toy that can do that for a child.  

I still draw heavily on that “play-full” part of my soul in my daily work.   My customers are my full-size Barbies—whom I adore and work hard to clothe in their own fitting and proper choices. (Thankfully, I’ve moved on from Kleenex as my fabric of choice.) Though sometimes I am tempted to pop their heads off to make a tight neck line easier to manage, I never view their bodies—no matter what size or shape or gender they are—with any judgment.  This is how they came from the Manufacturer. I deal with what is there, without question.  Neither do I look at their bodies and judge my own. 

As a child, I had no idea that Barbie’s exaggerated proportions might cause dysmorphia in girls. It never occurred to me to compare myself to six inches of plastic.  If anything, I was doing my best to make her world as realistic (i.e. like mine) as possible—not the other way around.  I never aspired to walking on tip toes, wearing high heels, or riding side-saddle.  I felt sorry for her that she could not actually bite into a cheerio covered in nail polish and experience the taste of a real donut.  But I learned how to sew, to knit, and most importantly, to daydream and envision.  I learned how to make whatever the game of the day needed or required. Sometimes all I wanted to do was create a beautiful little space and stare at it for hours.  I still do this—just with larger hunks of wood, linen, wool, or Kleenex.

I’m pretty sure this is what the little girl in Mother Nature is doing as she’s plumping up the pumpkins, bejeweling the jewel weed, poking the pokeberries… Until everything Wild, including my soul, is awash with revelry, ingenuity, and Beauty. I could stare at it for hours.

Perhaps this is what is at the heart of all us “Menders.”  We aren’t fixing anything that is “broken!” We are participating in a game that calls forth and celebrates the sacred interweaving of what is Possible and what is Fanciful (fancy-full!) from the available beauty around us—inviting us to smile in the form of neatly stitched buttonholes, grin in visions of voile or toile, and co-create in ever-expanding experiences of community and fellowship.  We want things to fit if not Magnificently, perhaps just a wee bit better, whether it’s made of old curtains, duct tape, cotton, or silk.  Most especially, we seek to help our fellow playmates create the visions we all know could be Real-ized with just a little more love and skill.  “That’s not a wall, sister, it’s a window! The doorway is right here…” Please, come in. Laugh like a pumpkin blossom. It’s time to play!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Truth & Beauty

The pursuit of Truth and Beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” Albert Einstein

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, here I am a day late…but I am determined not to let another week slip by! While I adore, and choose to live by, Positive Affirmations, the Disappointing Affirmations are hitting the mark: #1. “The best way to cope with your problems is to add new problems to distract yourself from the old ones.”  This is working pretty well for me at the moment, since my car won’t pass inspection and I can rarely locate the keys to it anyway.  So let’s focus on why the lambs are acting skinny and depressed. Worms, you say? Deadly worms? WHAT?! #2. “You are exactly where you are supposed to be. Because you make terrible decisions.” Maybe planting zucchini next to tomatoes wasn’t my best idea. 3. “Why do something right away when you can wait until it gives you a panic attack?”

Welcome to August. We’ve got about half an hour left of summer here in Vermont.  Folks are starting to ask where their jackets (needing new zippers) are.  They’ve been hanging at the back of the rack behind wedding gowns and bridesmaid dresses since June. The jackets, that is, not the customers.  The customers are free to roam around and chat about how damn rainy it is, how difficult it is to go anywhere on Route 30 these days, and how hard the hay farmers are struggling to get their crops harvested. (Ok, maybe that last one is led by me…)  Many clients are still suffering the effects of severe flooding.  Some, with typical aplomb, announce that they had to clear out their cellar or storage unit and throw everything away but they feel better now, lighter—the stuff didn’t bring them joy anyway, that’s why it was in the cellar.   Neighbors have taken in neighbors and I have fixed a bit of clothing here and there, free of charge, so that it could be donated to the needy.  For the most part, people are resigned or cheery. The level of community spirit in Vermont is everything one dreams it is.  I am grateful every day to live here.

Our little Bell Haven, being on a steep hill, wasn’t affected by any of the initial flooding. But the groundwater levels are now so high that there is standing water in the garage and barn every time it rains and the driveway looks like a river bed.  It’s been so humid in the house, mold is growing on the upholstered furniture in the little back parlor I call “the Cozy Room.”  I’ve had to move the sheep to the other side of the barn so that they could get out of the puddles in their pen.  The rain has kept the grass growing long past its normal cycle and the grown up sheep are dangerously fat.  Nonetheless, they continue to eat with the lawn-mower-esque speed of a middle-aged woman who’s gotten into a steaming plate of local sweet corn on the cob with Amish butter.  

The garden is a jungle of oversized everything.  Things I never planted—rogue seeds from the compost pile—have flourished and are now producing vast quantities of things that colonize the counters in the kitchen.  Recently I hauled in several baseball bat-sized zucchini for processing.  For dinner, I carved one into a boat and stuffed it with all sort of yumminess—roasted cherry tomatoes from the garden, onions, peppers, mushrooms, olives, artichoke hearts…the works.  I smothered it with cheese and baked it for as long as it needed to be baked.  I forgot to set the timer, of course, so when it smelled “ready” I took it out.  It looked like the cover of a magazine.  It was gorgeous.  But LOOKS, as we know, are NOT everything.  One must penetrate the surface of Beauty to learn the Truth.  Sorry Keats, anyone who tasted my zucchini supper must beg to differ with the assertion that “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” That’s Garbage, Keats, garbage.  Sometimes one must bite the zucchini to know.

The first bite was awful.  The second one was worse.  It was fascinatingly BAD and bitter.  I was mystified.  Nothing was burned. The filling had tasted amazing before I scooped it into the boat and sent it sailing gently into the oven.  What could make it SO BITTER?

It turns out that nuclear waste, radioactive gas, and the smell of the dressing room after someone who cannot digest dairy has been in there aren’t the only things toxic. Unbeknownst to me, there is a thing called “Toxic Squash Syndrome” (look it up! It’s real!) and my zucchini plants have it.  According to the experts on the internet, my plants are “stressed” and are producing excess levels of a chemical called cucurbitacin.  It’s poisonous.  Ingesting it can cause vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach pain. 

I seize my phone displaying this information and march out to the squash patch. “Are you kidding me?” I yell at the beautiful zucchini plant that is so large, it has consumed an entire hillside.  “You don’t look stressed!  You look gorgeous.  You are taking up all the room and spreading out everywhere.  I’ve never seen a more healthy looking plant!”

“Shush!” whispers my delicate inner being who hates conflict. “You’re hurting it’s feelings!  No wonder it’s stressed, poor thing.”

“Why shouldn’t the squash be stressed?” snaps Prudence with satisfaction. “Everything else around here is.  And that’s how it should be.  Life isn’t meant to be jolly.  We should suffer and offer our suffering for the good of others…”

“Wait, aren’t others supposed to suffer too? Why is it just us?” wonders my inner eight-grader who wants to be a lawyer.

Meanwhile, the zucchini looks bitter and defiant.

“Don’t you like all the poo we give you?” asks the Delicate Inner Being with deep compassion in her tone. “Would you prefer sheep poo to cow poo? Is the cow poo too harsh? What do you need?  Do you just need someone to talk to?  Is it that you don’t like having tomatoes for neighbors?  Sometimes neighbors can be a little intrusive…Or were you cross-pollinated badly?  Is this about your parents? Would you like to tell me about your mother? Are you from the wrong side of the compost fence? Was life too hard for you as a seedling? Do you form unhealthy attachments?”  She is so kind and gentle, exploring all the possibilities around nature vs. nurture and yet never, in all her sweetness, letting the zucchini get a word in edgewise.  She’s like that.  Never go to her for therapy.

The zucchini reminds me of a gorgeous bride, whose dress fits perfectly, but still has her anxiety level amped up to eleven.  In all my days, decades and decades of dining on homegrown zucchini, I have never encountered a bitter one, never mind one so bitter it’s inedible.  I learn that eating it can result in swollen organs and severe hair loss. “That’s all we need,” says Prudence, “is to have you running around here with your hair falling out, and a swollen abdomen, producing toxic gas.  Wait…you do that already.”

This is just “a weird summer.” That’s all we can say.

In over fifteen years of raising sheep, I’ve never once had a problem with parasites either but now my lambs, the poor lambs, are in big trouble. The continuous warm, wet conditions have fostered the flourishing of a worm called Barber Pole Worm.  It’s deadly.  All the vets around are seeing a lot of this, this year. The lambs eat the larva off the grass and it passes into their fourth stomach, where it develops into an adult worm that sucks the lifeblood out of them at nearly a cup a day or more until they are so anemic, they go into shock and die. Three of my five lambs show signs of this—one so severely that he’s developed a large edema (pocket of fluid) under his jaw that has the nickname “bottle jaw.”  My vet says he’s on the verge of needing a blood transfusion or euthanasia.  A blood transfusion is out of the question—mostly because it is a costly horror show and would be traumatic for him and we’d need a donor from my already compromised flock. 

We are giving them a combination of Ivermectin, vitamins, and other wormers to kill off the internal worms, but it might be too late.  I am in yet another of those interminable “wait and see” bubbles that anyone who has livestock must endure.

Last night, I went into the pen to hold him in the semi-darkness and have “The Chat” I have with all of my animals at one point or another.

“I love you so dearly,” I say, stroking his wooly head.

He sighs and lays his globular chin into the crook of my elbow.  He’s weak.

“You get to choose, of course.  As long as you are eating and looking like you want to live, I will give you a hundred chances.  But if you stop eating and start suffering, I will not let you suffer.  I will help you go sweetly and peacefully, and you will be returned to the earth where your grandmother is buried.  If you can live, you will be cuddled and cared for to the best of my ability all the rest of your days.  Either way, you will be loved, Always.  You ARE love.  You come from Love and will return to Love.”

He turns his head to look at me with sleepy eyes.

He knows.

I’m just talking to comfort myself in my pre-grief panic.

“You came just to delight me with your capers and your joy.  You came to help me fall in love with Life (and now Death) again.  I’m grateful for that.  Thank you.”

For once, all the sheep are silent. They have nothing to say. They stand calmly, unafraid of the Dark.

I kiss him on his curly head and climb out of the pen again.

Down the aisle, the steers are putting themselves to bed.  Otis is curled up as cute and small and cuddly as it is possible for a 1300 lb bullock to be and Gus is standing over him, licking his back methodically.  They groom each other frequently as part of their bond. They have each other and we do too. Watching them makes my heart calm.

The endless downpours, discouraging temperatures, the flourishing of parasites, poor air quality, and the waste of produce can do nothing to dim my love of living here. The earth is still a lush paradise.  All too soon all this green will turn red, gold, then white.  Weather is not a requirement for Joy.  Summer is more than just Sunshine.

That is the Truth. And it’s Beautiful.

Keep Mending, Dear Ones!  Thank you for doing your Good Work. I love you sew much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Magic Wands

“No waving of enchanted wands but heightened perception. No magic objects, but a transformed and enhanced reality. No spells or chants, but the raw power of the human will to enact supernatural change upon the universal fabric. This is the kind of “magic” that fills Lords of Rainbow – elemental, organic, humanistic – an extension of reality.” ~ Vera Nazarian

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s been another soggy week here in the land of misty mountains and muddy floods. Gus and Otie, the Jersey steers, are growing webbed feet. The sheep have gotten used to the idea of being caught in the rain once in a while.

“You’re from SHETLAND,” I tell them.  “It’s not like that is the arid land of endless sun!” Twice a day, they scamper out to the meadow to gobble all they can.  After about an hour, they are hanging by the barn gate, wanting to come in again to escape the rain, heat, and bugs.  They are content to flop against a wall, chew their cud, and spill the tea.

“What’s happening?” they ask. “Do you have any extra cookies? Stale bread? Corn chips?”  The lambs gather around me for under-chin scratches and cuddles, pushing and shoving to be next.  They step on my feet, burp in my face, poop directly into their water buckets and demand endless amounts of service and attention.  This sort of neediness would be irritating from human beings but from the lambs it is utterly endearing and adorable. I think we can tolerate a lot from our animals because they never require us to step away from our authentic selves.  There is no need for professional perfectionism or manufactured politeness.  We are free to take each other as we are.

I flop down next to one and begin processing my day. 

“Life is a merciless reflection of our own attitudes, isn’t it,” says Wally, knowingly.  “What’s happened now?”

“Well, the short version of the story is that a bride came in and her dress fit and I didn’t have to do anything to it,” I say.

“That sounds like a Good Thing,” says Prim. “What’s the long version?”

“Well, I think I can learn a lot from her.  She’s a pretty amazing young woman.”

“People are in our lives to teach us and help us to evolve into the Highest Essence of the truth of who we are,” says Moll.

“AND to distribute cuddles and cookies!” says little Flora, the smallest of the spring lambs, snuggling up against me.  

“Yes…” I say, sifting through empty pockets, “I do hope that when I come to die, people find the Highest and Best version of me, smack in the center of a whole lot of Good.  If they do, it will be because I really listen to my customers.”

“I hope people find me smack in the middle of a whole lot of food,” says Waterlily, the bossiest  of the mamas.  

“A whole lot of food is probably what it will be that kills you,” I point out. “That’s why I keep the grain room shut and all the food in metal bins with lids. Overeating can be lethal for you guys. For any of us, really.”

“I don’t understand why you don’t just go into the feed room and eat all you want any time you want. You could, you know.  You have that power,” says Prim.

“Firstly, it’s not my kind of food,” I point out. “Secondly, there are two kinds of power. You are talking about the power of ‘Yes, let’s do it.’ But sometimes saying NO is actually even more powerful.”

“We don’t know how to say No,” says Flora, sweetly. “we just say ‘YUM’.”

“I know.  That’s why it’s my job to take care of you,” I say hugging her. “I try to take care of everybody who cannot say NO. Sometimes it’s not my job to do that but I seem to try anyway.  I have a meddlesome “fixit” reflex that gets me into trouble with other humans.”

“Let’s get back to the bride,” says Wally. “Does she have the power of No?”

“Indeed she does,” I admit. “But what’s really confusing and impressive, is that her NOs all add up to a  YES.”

“That IS confusing,” says Moll. “How can NO be also a YES?”

“Well,” I explain, “a few months ago, she came in with her wedding gown.  She’d bought it before the pandemic and then her wedding plans got changed and changed and changed and she’s still not even married yet.  Only now, her dream dress doesn’t fit.  She says ‘It’s a wee bit tight…I can’t quite get the zipper up in the back.’  And by ‘can’t get the zipper up’ she actually means that the zipper is about six inches apart at the top. She had become a very different shape than she was when she bought the dress.”

“What did you tell her?” asks Fergus, a curious young ram lamb.

“I immediately jumped to my usual routine of reassuring her that I could fix the dress, that I have a magic wand that makes any dress fit any body… A good seamstress makes one feel comfortable in both one’s clothes and their own skin! I gushed and blabbed and tried to make everything ok in that way that I do that is actually very emotionally manipulative because I feel so uncomfortable when other people are sad. It’s incredibly hard for me to love anyone without feeling the impulse to make her life better, which is truly arrogant, if you think about it. Their lives are the product of their choices. Who am I to say that they have made poor choices? Look at my own choices for “Heaven’s sake!”

“Indeed!” huffs Prudence, my inner critic with her clipboard of crimes at the ready, rolling her eyes.

“Do you really have a magic wand?” Fergus wants to know.

“No.  I just replace the zipper with a corset back and the dress becomes a lace-up dress that fits well and looks just as beautiful.  Sometimes it even looks nicer than the original zipper.  But this bride didn’t seem happy about that suggestion. She just stood and smiled bravely at herself in the mirror with big sad eyes.  ‘I am going to wear the dress just as it is,’ she tells me quietly. Inwardly, I panic.  I beg her not to crash diet or do anything crazy to make the dress fit. ‘Change the dress, not you,’ I tell her. ‘You are loveable, worthy, and enough just as you are, right here, right now. You don’t need to change a thing.’ She smiles wanly and gets dressed to go home.  ‘I haven’t been loving myself,’ she says.  ‘I can do better than this. All the stress of these two years has made me change in ways I don’t really want to change.  Life’s about choices.  I need to make some better ones.  So don’t do anything yet.  How soon before the wedding can I come again, just in case I need you to put the corset in?’ ‘Give me two weeks,’ I tell her.  She nods. ‘I’ve got two months to make some healthier choices. Let’s see how that goes. I’ll come back two weeks before the wedding.’ As soon as she leaves I order corset kits in three different shades.”   

“So now the dress FITS her again?” asks Prim.

“Yes.  She did it!  I have seventy five dollars worth of corset kits that we don’t need.”

“Save them for other brides,” says Wally, burping knowledgably.

“Good idea,” I nod. “I will.”

“But this bride…what did she DO?” everyone wants to know. “How did she melt back into her old shape? Did she have a magic wand?”

“I asked her the same thing,” I say. “She told me all the things she did and I thought they were very sane, sensible things. She didn’t go crazy.  She did calm, centering exercises; she did a lot of walking; she made thoughtful food choices and established healthy boundaries around when and what she would use to nourish her body.  She got good sleep. She drank plenty of water. She followed through each and every day with her plan.”

“God, that sounds Dreadful,” says Waterlily, sighing.
“I know,” I admit. “I hate knowing that slow and steady dedication can be so effective.  I want magic wands, dramatic flourishes, quick fixes. It’s so discouraging to think that if I just do The Right Stuff every damn day that Good Things will result. Where’s the fun in that?”

“I think that’s what true Mending is all about,” says Prim. “Isn’t it? No highs? No Lows? Just steady faithful forward steps, one step at a time, one day at a time. You start making changes when the pain of NOT doing something becomes greater than the pain of doing it.”

“Yes… Yes…” I say. “She said none of it was actually painful even.  She just kept redirecting herself towards what would be ‘more loving.’  It’s so inspiring.  I’m not proud of her for losing weight, I have to say. She could have climbed a mountain, learned an instrument, written a book… the goal and tasks don’t matter.  I’m impressed that she Stuck With A Plan: A big, hard, long, slow plan that required patience and planning.  And she has a vibrant, glowing, energized, healthy result.  She didn’t traumatize herself. She LOVED herself enough to do tiny hard things over and over and over…”

“So, now what?” Festis and Fergus want to know. “Is she going to stay on the plan? Or did she just do this so that she could fit into one dress for one day?”

“I asked her that too!” I say. “I was really curious.  But she told me she’s made these choices for life.  She’s not going to stop.  It wasn’t for the wedding. She said—and this is the part that blew me away—‘I just looked at myself in your mirror a few months ago and realized I could be loving myself better than I was; that stress was no excuse; that I deserve to feel amazing and I didn’t.”

“Whoa…” says Prim. “I get it now. Her NO really was a YES. She said so many yeses to things that were good for her that she didn’t even have to say NO.”

“I know, right?” I say. “This is why I need to think about this a lot.  So many of us traumatize ourselves over our choices without actually believing that they ARE choices. It’s so much more fun to blame others or our circumstances without thinking about how Love is a choice always available to us.”

“Traumatic relationships are usually ones in which people consistently deny, avoid, or overlook each other’s truths.  From what I can see, for you humans, the most traumatizing relationships are actually with yourselves. It sounds like she was able to tell herself the truth, hear it, and then live into a new vision she chose for herself instead,” says Wise old Willoughby from the back. “The really cool thing about her is that now she knows she can make a commitment and keep it. That’s an amazing thing to own about oneself before pledging lifelong union to another person. Her half of that union is really strong.”

“Yep! I learned a whole lot about Mending and the self-love journey from this gal.  The sweetest thing about her was that she had no attachment to the outcome whatsoever.  She told me that she just wanted to see what two months of genuine self love would make her look like. She didn’t care if she fit into the dress. She knew I could make it so that she could wear it.  But now I don’t even have to do a thing.  She’s her own dream coming true, wearing her dream dress.  She’s not going to be amazing for a day, but From This Day Forward…until death does she depart.  She knows Love can reshape anything. No magic wand needed.”

The sheep are happy.  They enjoy stories like this almost as much as corn chips.

If you are like me, Dear One, as much as we sincerely want to cheer for good choices, you might hear a fairytale like this and a tiny, icky part of you will say “Well, damn her! I’m off to [insert destructive behavior here].” I certainly do. We’re Human. Free will is our blessing and our curse.  Stories like this can be very triggering if we listen from a place of “Yuck. I’m not that Good.” Nothing makes me want to do a whole bunch of naughty, self-sabotaging things like hearing some sweet princess is out there, dropping weight, toning her abs, glowing vibrantly, and over-achieving her pure heart out while I’m wallowing in a pen, chatting to sheep, eating all of their corn chips. (Ha! I’ll show her!  I’ll spend the next forty-five minutes shopping for shoes I don’t need and farm equipment I cannot afford!) Doing those things meets my need for numb Comfort and my connection to a story that “I simply can’t…not now…because of…” when really what gets in the way of our Magnificence is the persistent abandonment of our own love.  I’m telling you now, in case you need to hear it, YOU are worthy of that love. Treat yourself to an extra glass of water and a heap of self-blessing today. Who needs a needle and thread when we have True Love itself to reshape us?

I love you SEW much,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Another Season

I need a six month vacation twice a year. --unknown

Greetings Dear Ones!

Greetings from soggy Vermont! This blog might be a bit more rambly than usual. Let’s just say that it’s been a wee bit, um… DAMP here this week. By that, I mean Monday brought the kind of epic, biblical downpours that had Prudence pondering the sinfulness of mankind and researching the length of a cubit. The lambs had on their life jackets and snorkels and were marching around, two by two, wondering when I was going to fashion an Ark from some old wooden pallets. (I fashion everything we need around here out of old wooden pallets.)  Thankfully, we live on a steep hill.  The water didn’t get over their hooves.

Others were not so lucky. The torrents may have closed roads, neighborhoods, and businesses but they also opened hearts. I am awed and humbled by the sense of Community here and the willingness Vermonters have to help each other.  So many folks have checked in with me to make sure I am ok.  It’s lovely and instructive. THIS is how we live Together.  “Vermont Strong,” is not just a saying.  “We take care of our own, mend what’s broken, and extend our hands in aid to those in need,” says an email from a local corporation urging us local business owners to help our communities rise from this challenge. All fourteen counties of Vermont qualify for disaster relief and Mending. With yet more rain expected Thursday, it’s Flood season.

There are so many “seasons” in a tailoring shop.  Prom season and Wedding Season are the most famous, but there is also “Vacation season” which is also happening now.  This is when people give you three days or less to get everything done for them because they are going away somewhere that requires a whole new uniform without which they cannot survive the duration of their adventure. None of their regularly scheduled clothing will do.  For some it is sundresses and formal evening wear, for others it is rock climbing gear. 

“Did you have a nice vacation?” asks a customer recently.

“Vacation?” I mumble, scratching my head.

“Yeah, you were gone for three months.  I couldn’t get an appointment online.  I figured you must be traveling.  Did you go to Ireland?”

I stare at her in disbelief.

“No, ma’am.  I certainly wasn’t on a vacation.   It was prom season, lambing season, wedding season, and graduation season. You couldn’t get an appointment because all of the time slots were filled by other customers.  I was bringing work home with me nights and weekends to try to keep up.”

I said it as nicely as I could but still she curled her lower lip downward.

“Don’t you have a helper? I needed things done,” she said. “I assumed you were away.”

I may have been ‘round the bend’ as they say, but I was NOT away.

To be honest, I don’t want to go away.  Though it’s lovely to go to fun places and do cool things, my dream is to stay Home, piling aged sheep dung on the “poo-tatoes,” pottering in the garden, and hanging out with the animals (animals who are NOT in the garden, just to be clear.)  I have not created a life for myself that I am trying to flee.  I relish the urgent turbulence of each season.  Just when I get tired of hauling and stacking firewood, it’s time to relearn how to start the weed trimmer without flooding the engine.  Just when I finish vacuuming the last of the prom glitter, it’s time for people to haul in their crop tops and swimwear.  That’s just how it is here in the land of 36 seasons.   And SWEET CORN Season is coming up soon!  Wah-HOO!!!! Who’d want to miss that? I’m stock piling butter and salt.

For those who are taking vacations in Vermont, well… the test of a place is how beautiful it looks in the rain.   As in Scotland, we can tell it’s summer because the rain is warmer than usual.  There was one day when the “sunny” and the “warm” actually coincided, which caused some locals to part with their long johns for an afternoon.  But the joy was short-lived.   Had the ancient Greeks lived here, there would be a myth about some immortal toddler randomly spraying us with Demeter’s garden hose,  laughing violently, then getting spanked by his mother as Phaethon goes galloping by in the Sun chariot momentarily ablaze. Thunderstorms, flash flooding, and damp lambs have been the norm lately.  

The interstate is populated with SUVs with out of state plates loaded with camping gear. I see them and sigh.  Those families are heading off to create the kind of memories that will only become funny years from now, after intensive therapy, when everyone who has to spend a week eating cold beans out of a tin and taking turns to poop in a bucket under a tarp has healed.

I’m telling everyone to keep an eye on their friends with naturally curly hair. It might be hard to tell the back of them from the front. Check to make sure their airways are clear, that they haven’t accidentally Velcro-ed themselves to the inner ceiling of their cars, or gotten snagged in some brambles during a hike in the woods, never to return. It’s a treacherous time for those of us with corkscrews for follicles. We struggle to get adequate nourishment and hydration under all that unruly wool.   I look like a dandelion gone to seed. Years ago, in barometric conditions such as this, I once had a tufted tit-mouse dive bombing my head, ripping out nesting materials. (True story!  We have it on video.)

This level of humidity is tragic for both hair and hay. A local at the feed store said to me recently, “Welp…gonna be a BAD year for hay this year…”

“I beg your pardon, Sir, just exactly when have we had a GOOD year?” I inquire.  Every year there is hay drama.  We grump if it’s too dry; we grump if it’s too wet.  This year, apparently, it’s been too Much of everything. We’ll see.  First cut, “out of the field” (that means you go get it yourself, right where the baler dropped it; there’s no delivery) is already averaging seven dollars a bale.  Out of the barn is a dollar more.  Delivered is yet more.  As ever, I am hastily constructing and extending fence lines as quickly as I can so that my animals can eat grass instead of money.

“Nothing is more conducive to enhancing tranquility in a bucolic setting than setting two young steers loose to graze upon a lawn without fences,” said NO farmer, EVER.  My bright idea was that (read the next part in a sing-songy tone) ‘they would stay right in the middle of that green, lush buffet and behave themselves like grateful gentlemen until I called to them in dulcet, domesticated tones that would prod them to proceed politely back to the barn.’ HA!.It turns out that their bright idea, once free, was to buck and plunge around the house—looking in the windows, tromping on the septic tank, messing up flower beds, and eating giant pots of cherry tomato vines right off the deck, then take off and cruise the neighborhood looking for something more interesting to do.   Instead of dulcet tones, the neighbors heard a middle-aged banshee hanging out the open window of a Ford Explorer, screeching for her cattle, as she drove around clanging a feed scoop against the side of the car.

The steers have decided, rain or no rain, that there’s no point in living in a barn again when there is too much fun to be had outside the gate.  This is probably how some people feel about vacations and freedom in general, though the two are vastly different.

Freedom, as I am fond of saying, requires Fences. In an effort to get my flock to eat as much free greenery as possible, I spent three hours bush-whacking a trail around Gus & Otie’s pasture to extend their current fence line into the woodlands behind the barn.  They stood on their side of the wire, watching me intently the whole time.  Apparently, Gus had no idea what I was doing. Otie knew.

As soon as I had the new wires hooked up and disconnected the old, Otie crashed right into the underbrush and began to munch.  Gus paced the old familiar path and looked anxious.  Where was Otie?  Otie had just disappeared beyond the magic force field!  Gus mourned.  He went to his stall and lay down and moo-ed in a forlorn manner, grieving.  Just a few yards away, unconcerned Otie was happily stuffing himself.  To Gus’s utter relief, Otie returned an hour later with a full belly, plopped himself down in his usual place to cud and doze. He had great stories to tell. He had gone somewhere new to refuel and returned safe, happy, and replete.  Gus, stuck behind strong mental barriers, could not do that.  To his horror, Otie lurched to his feet and wandered off again.  For two days, Otie got fatter and Gus grew nervous, lean, and gaunt, before he worked up the courage to follow Otie into the Great Unknown. “The vacation we often need is freedom from our own mind,” says Jack Adam Weber.   When I went to check on them this morning, Gus peeked out from behind a mountain of multiflora rose brambles and smiled a guilty smile.  He still doesn’t feel quite right about leaving his usual groove, though he’s filling out some.

Leaving our usual groove is harder for some of us.  Sometimes it takes the violence of a natural disaster, or the gentle, persistent persuasion of a friend. Having said all that…the dream is happening again… the dream that I will do two things this summer—I want to hike one of the smallish mountains nearby and spend one whole day at a beach, basting myself with sun sauce and reading the kind of novel that requires one to go to confession. Too many summers have passed since I have managed to do either of these things. Both will probably involve picnics with a bit of sand in the sandwiches, friends, and a temporary absence of cattle.  I’m ready for Something, if not a true vacation, at least a New Season for a day.  Bring on Deep Summer: when laziness becomes respectable and we can disgrace ourselves with heaping piles of sweet corn and Gluttony. (I hope all this rain is making the corn grow!)

Maybe we’ll dry out by then…

Thanks for your Good Work, my loves!  Send some of your good Mending energy to Vermont! The folks here could use it.

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Gettysburg

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Greetings Dear Ones!

Happy Fourth of July!  I am a Bell at Liberty today and I am Grateful for that. 

A dear friend rang me up last night. “Do you know what today is?” she asked.  I paused.

“It’s Monday, right? It’s not the fourth already, is it?  Am I off a day?” Her question puzzled me.  Was she the one confused? What day did she think it was?

“It’s July 3rd.  A hundred and sixty years ago, you and I were dead by now. The battle was over.” 

“Ha! Yes!” I laughed.  When I first met her nearly eight years ago now, she told me before we parted, “You and I, we aren’t meeting for the first time.  I’ve known you before, from Gettysburg.”

“Gettysburg?” I searched her face for clues. How did she know? She was not someone I recognized from my youth, or undergraduate years at Gettysburg College or the subsequent years of combining a pilgrimage to my favorite fabric store in town with a visit to my parents who still reside nearby. Every summer, I usually take my children, friends or visitors on a tour of the battlefield—I offer anyone who can recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by heart at the end of the day a slab of the best homemade cheesecake ever at the Lincoln Diner as a reward.    Was this lady a faculty member? A park ranger? A townsperson?  Did she serve cheese cake at the diner? Gettysburg is a very intimate place; one gets to know most people quickly, from Billy the hat maker on Carlisle street to Jim the high school librarian. I could not place her.

“Your neck,” she said pointing at the lines above my collar bone, “you’ve died violently at least three times in past lives. I can tell. You’ve probably been hanged as a witch at least once.  And I know you died with me at Gettysburg.”

That was our first meeting. As I grew to know (and positively adore) this woman, I came to understand that all her favorite people “died with us at Gettysburg.” When I introduced her to the beloved Hermit of Hermit Hollow, she confided, “I knew the instant I saw him; he died at Gettysburg. One look at those eyes and you just know.”  

“Know what?” I want to know. I have no idea how she determines such things, whether she “reads energy” or, like a great storyteller, just knows her audience.  A New Englander through and through, as far as I know, she’s never had anything to do with Gettysburg personally, except that she believes we both once died there and have been drawn to return there as part of this life’s events.

“Utter nonsense! She’s stark-raving mad!” says Prudence, reaching for her prayer book, “there’s no such thing as reincarnation.”

“But Pruddy,” I protest, “energy is neither created nor destroyed.  We all contain some of Napoleon’s last breath…”

“And some of Napoleon’s last fart, too!” chirps my inner fifth grader.

“Who’s to say if we don’t pick up some of the energy from the places that are dear to us?” I continue, ignoring the fifth-grader, who is still snickering. “When we love a place for its hills, its rocks, its water, wind, and weather—is there not some alchemy by which we leave a part of ourselves behind and trade it for some indelible groove Love carves upon our heart? Is there not a sticky sort of Transcendental Oneness that means we can go nowhere, and do nothing, without simultaneously marking and being marked?  Do the atoms which make us Now, not contain something of Then too?”

“That’s a far cry from telling me that you, as you, marched around clutching a bayonet, with crumbs of hard tack stuck in your beard,” sniffs Prudence. “It’s hardly the same thing at all, though I do think that all atoms ought to be thoroughly sanitized before being used again.”

“Did I have blisters, from all that marching?” I wonder. “Ticks? Lice? Dysentery? Jock itch?  What was life like for soldier me? Did I have a tent? How bad were the mosquitoes?”

“Pretty bad,” says Walt Whitman, who has appeared from behind a leaf of grass. “But you were young and manly and beautiful, and I loved you so!  Ignore Prudence. Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes… if you want me again, look for me under your boot soles (Leaves of Grass)…for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you….”

Whatever magic or miracles are at play in recognizing each other as kindred comrades across time, my friend is right:  Gettysburg is a dear and hallowed place for me.  I cannot explain my connection to it.  On the hottest, noisiest day, there is a palpable Silence, a shimmering Reverence emanating from the grass, and continually the barely suppressed impulse to turn suddenly and look behind oneself, as if to catch something there.  The nameless, invisible Presence may be Life itself, haunting the dead rather than the other way round.  The hollow dead are at peace, having emptied out what Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion.”  For years, I rode my bike all over the battlefields, sometimes at night after the park had closed. Oddly, the Silence is softer at night, after the tourists have taken off their headsets, tossed away their guide books, and retired with cardboard buckets of fried chicken or Tommy’s pizza to watch T.V. in their air-conditioned motel rooms.  The Silence relaxes, breathes a whisper in the woods. What is not Serene surrenders. Peace smothers all with an Ache distilled by cricket song.   The crickets are native—descended from the very crickets who witnessed the horrors of brother mauling brother.  The turkey vultures circling ominously overhead? Well, legend says they came from the south, following the daily feast of carrion as the battles led them northward on full bellies.  They soar there to this very day—descendants of those who dined on the mortal remains of Courage, Fear & Fury.

I think soberly about all these things, today, as we celebrate the founding of a country that still has Mending to do.

Like today (here in the northeast, anyway) July 4th, 1863 was a day of rain. General Meade, having won the battle, did not press his advantage and rout Lee once and for all.  Had he done so, some argue, the war would have ended then, instead of dragging on for another two shattering years. It’s possible that Meade, who had only been in his post as General for little more than a week, had no idea how decisively he had won.  He had lost many of his generals and commanders and wasn’t fully aware of his command structure to start with.  After 96 hours of high-end combat, his men had reached the limits of human endurance and were not able to transition from holding a defensive position on a hill to active pursuit of the enemy.  Lee was able to slip away under the cover of drizzle and darkness and get his exhausted men across fifty miles of Pennsylvania mud and Maryland before crossing the Potomac and reaching the safety of Virginia.

Gettysburg, considered the high water mark of the rebellion, accomplished three things: it finally stopped the Confederate momentum after a string of southern victories, gave the North a badly needed boost in morale, and most likely obliterated any chance of European countries intervening on behalf of the South. And, with over 50,000 to choose from, it left my dear friend a lot of potential comrades who “died with us at Gettysburg.”  It was the deadliest battle of that un-civil war—untethering as many as 23,000 Union and 28,000 Confederate souls who were killed, captured, or wounded in the course of just three days.  The wagon train of wounded Confederates leaving the scene was 17 miles long. And that’s just the humans.  What of the oxen? The horses? The dogs? The farm animals nearby? Estimates are that around 5,000 military horses and mules were lost in that battle.

Having had to bury dead livestock in the full heat of summer, I know that it is only hours before a foul, greenish foam is leaking from their nostrils and from under their tails.  Their abdomens bloat, then burst and it’s an unholy mess that requires frequent puke breaks to clean up. FIVE THOUSAND of these things?  Dear God…

Townsfolk carried around vials of peppermint oil and pennyroyal to mask the stench of death that hung in the air until winter.  They hurriedly covered everyone they could in ad-hoc hasty graves, some of them in trenches filled with as many as 150 anonymous bodies (there being no dog tags then).The shallow graves were easily disturbed by weather and wild animals.  The appalling post-battle scenes prompted then Governor of Pennsylvania Andrew Curtin to establish the Soldier’s National Cemetery on the hill overlooking the site.  It was at the dedication of this cemetery on November 19th, 1863, that Lincoln gave his famous, sacred address—calling us all, then and now, to dedicate not the ground, but ourselves to a cause which remains unfinished.   

Today, as we turn to fireworks, soggy hot dogs and potato salad, to celebrate the triumph of enduring Democracy, we can acknowledge that sure, it’s not everything our founders ever dreamed of—as Peace-filled, civil disagreement and the gritty Grace of compromise come with steep price tags.  But it sure beats the hell out of every other alternative.  One hundred and sixty years ago, we had to fight our own sisters and brothers to ensure that “…government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  I hope my friends and I did not die in vain.  Perhaps the atoms rearranged themselves to give us one more chance, in Kindness and Gratitude to “take increased devotion to that cause”—that noble, blessed proposition that ALL people are created equal. 

Menders, we got us some powerful work to do! Maybe we all died together at Gettysburg, maybe we didn’t. We are ALIVE NOW. Let us use our needles, pens, fabrics, fiddles, and bows to bind up our nation’s wounds… and let’s rejoice that we don’t have to wear button-up boots and hoop skirts while we do it! Yee Haw!

Let the Mending Continue!

With SEW much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Liberty and Law

Greetings Dear Ones!

Today is the Summer Solstice here in the Northern hemisphere—the astronomical start of summer—though we all know that “summer” in Vermont might just be a few hours where we whip off that last layer of wool sometime in mid-July or August.  Still it’s nice not to have to light the stove to thaw digits and dogs each morning.  It’s beautiful to bask at twilight in the chorus of the bug choir and see the fire flies (some call them lightening bugs) twinkling in the meadow like the whole farm is the scene of Edward Robert Hughes’ painting “Midsummer Eve”—though instead of an enchanted barefoot sylph of a maiden with a wreath of flowers in her hair, picture a stocky, middle-aged woman in grubby overalls and welly boots.

The lambs are getting big—they are two thirds the size of their parents already.  I have one friend in particular (the one whose mama tried to smash him every day for the first week of his life) who comes and stands next to me every time I am near.  He just stands, quietly, looking up at me.  He has appointed himself my special assistant at feeding times and he always lingers at the gate for extra cuddles and scratches before going out to join the rest of the herd.  We have a unique bond that was born in his trauma, when it was safer to be close to me than to his own mother.  He probably has no idea why he likes me anymore—he just knows that he does.  He’s moved on with his life but his lingering connection to me feels like Gratitude.  Naturally, I can’t help feeling like he is my secret favorite.

My secret least favorite is the little white lamb I helped birth. She wouldn’t be here either, without me, but she shows no damn gratitude whatsoever. She never goes where she is supposed to go (with the other sheep) and blazes her own trail around the outside of the pen instead.  She is as skittish as a fawn and refuses to be captured or caught, even with the temptation of a scoop of grain.  Sometimes, I have to get the entire herd in and out of the field several times before they are all united and little miss smarty-pants has joined the group. She’s the reason my next dog will probably be a Border Collie. She’s bigger than the other lambs because she is a singleton and has all her mother’s milk for herself. The other lambs, being sets of twins, must share.   

“Why don’t you follow the rules?” I ask her.

“I don’t like rules,” she says impudently.

“No one does,” says Prudence, “which is precisely WHY we need them. If everyone just did the right things, then there would be no need of them.”

“Rules help keep everyone safe,” I say.

“I will keep myself safe,” she says, still balky. “I know what I am doing. Rules are fine for others, not me. I’m ok without them.”

She is as infuriating as the dog-owner who lets her dogs run free off leash in public areas and yells to everyone they jump all over “They’re just being friendly!”  I have met these dogs twice now and they are NOT friendly.  They are young, stunningly gorgeous pit-bull terriers whose “pack” mind takes over when an elderly Jack Russell tries to pick a fight with them.  (Despite foggy eye-sight, half his teeth missing, and poor hearing, my delusional darling thinks he can take on two pit-bulls in their prime, especially if I hold him up high enough to reach them.)  

“They’re friendly!” screams the owner of the pit-bulls as they bolt towards us.

“My dog’s NOT,” I bellow back, “He’s going to start a fight. CALL OFF YOUR DOGS!!!”  I struggle to maintain my grip on eleven pounds of enraged rascal as the growl and bark of the younger dogs gets more intense.  Jaws are snapping in my face and their claws are scratching my back, arms, legs as they try to get to him.

“They just want to play!” their owner calls, totally deluded about the tenor of their growls.

Their blood is up.  I know better than to run. I do my best to stand firmly and to speak with authority to the animals: “NO, OFF, BACK” but they ignore me and the situation escalates with each leap, turn, twist and snap.  It takes the woman several agonizing moments to cross the distance to us and manage to pull her dogs away.

“PLEASE,” I pant, “keep your dogs on leashes. This is not safe.”

“They were not going to hurt him,” she insists defiantly.

“Yes, yes they were. You cannot trust pack animals in a prey situation.”

“They’re good babies,” she says, as she struggles to pull them away.

I lose my temper.

“Keep your dogs ON A LEASH.” I yell, “THIS IS TERRIFYING!! YOU HAVE TO KEEP YOUR ANIMALS UNDER CONTROL. THEY ARE NOT UNDER CONTROL!” I am shaking all over.

“Ma’am, you’re FINE,” she yells back, as if I am being ridiculous. “They would never hurt you.”

I march away.

“Have a blessed day!” she screeches after me in a tone that tells me I can actually do otherwise. It’s Christian for “Go engage in sinful lust with yourself.”

I stomp to my shop, where a bride is waiting for an appointment.  She’s early.  I ask if I can have a moment to compose myself.  I cannot stop shaking.

Just then, a tenant from down the hall arrives. 

“I saw the whole thing,” he says. “I tried to film it for evidence for you but then I realized you were in trouble so I started to run to see if I could help, so the video is just of the ground as I run… But let me know if you file a report.  I’d be glad to testify as a witness.”

I haven’t considered filing a report.  I haven’t considered anything. I am still flooded with rage, disbelief, relief, and adrenaline.  I thank him. It feels good to be witnessed, even if I never saw him.  All I could see was those hot pink mouths, popping like firecrackers in my face.

“She was not the least bit sorry, was she?” I ask.

“No,” he admits. “She wasn’t.”

She was the one with her dogs off leash acting like I, the one with a dog on a leash getting jumped on, scratched and barked at, was being unfair and unreasonable.  When did the leash law become optional?   

Doing the bridal fitting helps me calm down. The bride is “a dog person” and can sympathize with all sides of the issue.  I have nothing against pit-bulls.  These dogs are beauties and all dogs deserve to be walked in public—but On A Leash! What’s so hard about that? That woman clearly has NO control over them, which just makes having them unleashed all the more dangerous.  It’s Dog Owners who are ruining things for dogs.  There are trails in town that say “No Dogs Allowed” at their entrance, no doubt as a result of irresponsible owners. How sad is that? The dogs will be the ones to suffer in the end.

Another building tenant comes to visit.  He’s heard of the incident and has a dog himself. He tells me the lady with the pit-bulls is not a tenant.  Even though this incident happened on the campus of our building, I should not report it to our management as it could jeopardize the rights of us tenants to bring our dogs to work.  None of us want that.  We are happier and our animals are happier when we can live respectfully in community with each other. My dog sleeps in a little bed underneath the sewing table.  Most customers have no idea he is there.  He is content just to be near me, instead of home alone, having anxiety attacks and destroying things with nervous energy.

I can’t wait to get home at the end of Monday to be with the sheep.  I need to talk things out and find my Peace again.

“Why don’t some people want to follow the rules?” I ask them.

“Rules are not fun,” they admit blithely, stating the Obvious.

“Rules are inconvenient,” says Willoughby, “Restrictive.”

“Your problem is that you get upset that they don’t follow the rules.  It’s like it shakes your faith or something.   You get insulted when people don’t respect your boundaries and disregard your safety.  You make it all about you.  But that’s silly. That’s not their job—to take care of your feelings.  It’s not their way. They DO just think of themselves.  You need to accept this and not get upset,” says Watson.

This is hard to hear but it lands like Truth.

“Yeah,” says Waterlily, “How are people any different from us?  We all want to get to the feed room door and find it open and get in there and gulp down anything we can.  That’s just the way of things.”

“It’s not your job to grieve the fate of the world and get all morally indignant about rules.  Just keep the feed door shut and the grain bins sealed. No emotions are required,” says Prim.

“But LEASHES are…” I protest woundedly.

“Hey, Wait! Is the feed room door open?” ask Molly, who hasn’t been paying attention.

“NO,” we all say at once. I say it with authority, they say it with regret. I go back to mulling over what we are calling The Incident.

“I’m not upset with the dogs…  This is just what poorly trained dogs do,” I say.

“Dogs are just coyotes you let live in your house,” say the sheep shuddering. “We ARE upset with the dogs, just as a matter of principle. All dogs, any time, any place.”

“I’m upset with the people,” I say. “People have a CHOICE.  People have access to reason, consciousness, compassion that enables them to create and follow laws that make it possible for everyone to play fairly and survive.”

“Are you saying that people are better than animals??” asks Prim, backing up with flared nostrils.

“Well…. I’m with Aristotle on this.  He says something like ‘At our best, we can be the noblest of animals.  Separated from law and justice, we are the Worst.’” The noble animals around me just listen, considering. Some of them wander away to graze on some fresh poison ivy they have found.

“I definitely felt like the Worst sort of animal today,” I admit. “I’m upset that I lost my temper and screamed at her but secretly, I really wanted to bite that lady myself. Now I am afraid to take my daily walks.  She truly doesn’t care and this has happened twice and will just keep happening. John Locke is right: The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”

“He sounds like the type of guy who kept his dogs on leashes and his grain bins sealed behind doors,” observes Wally.

“Yes, he does.”

I sit in the deepening gold of evening, surrounded by munching lambs and gradually feel better, grounded, Resolved.  I’m glad I live in what John Adams called “a country of laws not men.” Laws are important though it’s disappointing to need them in the first place (as a replacement for what should be common moral decency amongst the citizenry) and even more disappointing to have to enforce them through a justice system.  I want to live in a world where we all respect each other and our good boundaries but I live in a world that IS—where our Natural (animal) instincts are fiercely subsurface at all times, and where unleashed pit-bulls and politicians run violently amok.  In THIS world, where selfishness occasionally runs rampant, where everyone from dog walkers to presidents thinks it’s ok to flout the law… our choices are to protect our Laws or surrender our freedom. Either way, it’s a nasty fight. 

“Fight,” says the white lamb, “fight.”

For a cute little lamb, she certainly is a tough one. 

Love yourselves to itty-bitty bits today, Dear Ones!  We’ve got some mending to do! I love you Sew Much. Thanks for your Good Work.

With Liberty and Justice for all,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

P.S.  May your Mid-summer’s Eve be Magical!!!

A Festival

“It is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.” —Seneca

Greetings Dear Ones!

The windows are still dark when I am awoken by a small stirring, a shifting on top of the covers by my feet.  Something the size of a football comes paddling up the bed and sticks a cold nose on my cheek.  I open one eye and then close it.  A harsh scratch follows some persistent nudging.  I open the eye again and glance at the clock.  It’s well before 5 a.m.  “Are you kidding me?” I snarl in the direction of the small furry face that is only barely darker than the room gloom surrounding it. As soon as I make eye contact, he begins to wiggle all over.  I reach out to grab him so I can stuff him under the covers and snuff his ambition but he is too fast for me and flings himself off the end of the bed and starts his celebration dance.  “Hooray!  You survived the night! A new day has begun! Let’s go outside and find stuff to pee on!” he dances, wiggling his bum like a bee trying to show other members of the hive the way to more flowers.  He alternately hops, then perches like a prairie dog to see if I am up yet.  I have not moved.  His urgency increases.  One end of him wants to get filled, the other emptied.  He scowls. I do not emerge.  He barks.  My covers are soft and warm; who cares about the fate of the carpets?  His hopes capsize as I submerge into slumber again. 

The next thing I know, he is sitting on my chest, fixing me with bright, beady eyes.  Someone is with him.  He’s brought a friend. A shadowy man in a toga stands next to the bed, gazing down at me with eyes that are not there.

“Get up!” the shadow commands. “Your bonus has arrived.”

“Seneca?” I ask. “What are you doing here?”

“Get up!” he says again. “Death has cancelled his appointment with you.”

“Death? Appointment?” I sit bolt upright.  I had not realized Death was one of my customers.  I hadn’t seen his name on my schedule.  I flop back on my pillow. That damn schedule—people make appointments via the website but if I don’t go through all the confirmation emails and manually transfer them to the Google calendar, well… things slip through the cracks.  I try to get them all but they are like lambs trying to slip past the gate while I’m not looking.  It has happened twice in the last month—once to a groom needing his suit trousers hemmed at the last minute, and once to a bridesmaid who accidentally scheduled three different appointments and did not know how to cancel the two she did not want.  Inevitably, I was not there for the one she actually wanted.

“What does Death need?” I ask Seneca. “Cloak patches? New leggings? His biker jacket lined with tie-dye?  Whatever it is, just tell him to make a new appointment through the website.  I cannot cope with phone calls. I forget what people tell me as soon as we hang up.  Use the website.”

“Death is the worst customer,” says Seneca solemnly. “He comes without appointments.”

“It figures,” I mutter. Death is like a few people I know, who think they can just stop by unannounced.  They have no idea how disconcerting this is.

Seneca continues on, in his native ancient Greek, which I cannot understand. Prudence translates.  She thinks memorizing a semester’s list of Latin prefaces makes her a master of the Classics.

“Your arse,” she says, “Get it out of bed and be grateful you are not dead.”

“Your Bonus has arrived,” says Seneca again, ignoring Prudence and switching back to English.

“Bonus??” I sit up again.  THIS interests me. I would LOVE a bonus! Did someone leave a tip? Or better yet, a great review?  Did my tax refund arrive? Did I earn enough points for five bucks worth of store credit at the local feed store?

“This DAY,” says Seneca. “This whole blessed day--It is your Bonus.”

“What??? This day? Really?” I thought I was going to have this day anyway.  If this day was credit, I’ve spent it already.  I have a full rack of work to do, customers to placate, chores waiting, animals to feed, oxen to train, pants to hem, bridesmaids to slip-cover in organdy, fences to build, animals to tend, gardens to weed, keys to lose and find again, lawn to mow—each and every noun a stone in disguise and each and every verb a lash… None of this feels like a bonus.  The time is already gone—frittered away on yesterday’s debts for yesterday’s crusts.  I might as well pour myself a nightcap and stay where I am, lodged between the sheets of Comfort and Denial.

“Today IS a Bonus,” says Seneca stridently. “You were NOT promised this day.  You have no such contract. Regardless of your so-called promises and obligations, you still get to choose your actions today.  So Celebrate!  Make of it your own Festival.”

A festival?  A festival sure sounds like way more fun than the day that Yester-Nancy had planned for us.  Yes!  Let’s have a festival.  A Frolic of Absurdity! Bring it.

“Whom will you love Today?” Seneca wants to know. 

I lie there, thinking of all those I want to show love today.

“HEY!!!”yaps the little dog, “Love ME!!!  Love ME!!! Take me to the dog food and let the FEASTING begin!”

I carry him carefully down the stairs and out to the patch of wildflowers he has been watering daily. We race each other back to the kitchen and dance and do the Morning Howl while I prepare his food and heart medicine.  Thanks to his medicine and good veterinary care, he has this bonus day too.  I am suddenly Grateful to have any day with this dear little buddy at my feet.  

I think of the others I wish could share this day.  I sip my tea and pretend I have endless blessings rising like the steam from the cup of lemon balm and peppermint.  Mentally, I lob them like light balls at all my kith, kin, creatures, customers—and YOU, dear soul. Yes, YOU.  I wasn’t even going to write this blog today (before it became a festival) but I thought of YOU and how much more fun it would be to write and tell you about the Festival I am having, instead of a regular day.  Tedium is Cancelled. I hope you can join the festival, wherever you are.

“What prisoners will you release?” Seneca asks.  “It is customary to release a prisoner or two during festivals.”

“Well, I cannot release the chickens.  The coyote is waiting. I heard her howling in the night. Not the bulls either—that is generally not a good idea.  Those two will ramble around, knocking things over and generally making a mess.  They got loose in the barn a few weeks ago and it took two days to put things right again.  They broke the gate to the sheep pen and set all of them free as well.  It’s a good thing the grain room was locked or they all would have died of the glee of overeating.”

“We can’t have that,” admits Seneca. “Feasting has to be kept at healthy levels.  There are no vomitoriums for ruminants.”

“I will set the lambs free,” I concede, “but only for a moment so that they can run up the hill to the pasture where they will be safe within fences.”

“Good Fences are important,” says Robert Frost, who pops in unexpectedly, “especially if you want good neighbors.”

“Thanks, Bob. Good to keep in mind,” says Seneca before turning back to me. “What are YOU setting free today?  Besides sheep for a few minutes?  That doesn’t count. What criminals lurk within your jails—behind the bars of tyranny and regret? Who are the Unforgiven? Could one of them be your own mostly innocent self?”

“I’m not doing that,” I say flatly. “I do not wish to wander through the jail during a festival.  That does not sound at all fun.”

“Who said it all had to be fun?” he wants to know. “It must be JUST.  It must be Fair. This takes courage and strength of spirit. Trust me, it enhances the celebration to see Justice done and the prisoner freed.”

“I take no prisoners,” I lie.

He waits.

“Ok, maybe I take a few…”

Chin lifted, eyes on the horizon, he keeps waiting. I crumble.

“Ok…fine. I’ll set a one free…”  

I get out a pen and paper and make a list of grudges, grumbles, gritches and culprits I wish to set loose for the Festival.  Seneca is right.  This is feeling Great.  I go giddy and decide to set every last one of them free. I go to their hiding places where they languish and skulk and I root them out with the point of my pen. “Go Away,” I command them. “I declare our debts paid. I will house you no more.”  I put on some music and put the list in the woodstove and light it.  The smoke of regrets is carried away with the lemony steam of Blessings. 

“Now you are ready to claim your Bonus!” announces Seneca. “What will you celebrate today?”

I celebrate the song of the birds as dawn comes, as the fog rises, as the sun burns through the clouds and coats the freshly-sprouted sunflower seedlings. Everywhere I look, there is singing—in the melodies of scented herbs blooming in their pots, in the grayish green baby blueberries, the tomato seedlings scaling the wall of the compost bin, the deep, shaggy tangle of green that crawls all over the land, the land itself, tumbling like laughter and rocks down the hill to the secret meadow…

I celebrate the feel of hugging a lamb I’ve caught trying to escape the gate—how his belly feels like a water balloon covered in wool, how his burp smells of milk and clover, how he feels too fat to have any bones at all, as I toss him back in with his rock-hopping colleagues. They leap and play, bounce and frolic. Today is their Bonus Day too.  They know it.

I celebrate the smell of steer breath and the feel of my cheek on his shoulder as he eats his breakfast.  I see the liquid emotion in his eyes, hear the forlorn ‘moo’ with my heart, as I part from him.  I have a friend who has recently lost a pig.  Our whole group holds her gently in her grief.  We understand. There are inter-species bonds and losses that some folks cannot comprehend.  I celebrate the blissful Ache that comes from loving deep and wordlessly.  Every day with these creatures is a Bonus.  

I celebrate my own Yearning—that we cannot have what we want all the time. It is in the reaching for the toy she cannot grasp that the baby learns to move, choose direction, stretch and develop new skills.  It is Wanting that creates Mending and Creativity itself. 

I wasn’t going to write this blog this week.  I thought I was too tired, too busy, too depressed.  But then I got this lovely BONUS!!  Wahoo!  I’m choosing to sing and dance and feast and sew and do things for those I love simply for the sheer joy of it, because I am so LUCKY I got this bonus! It looks like my regular day but, secretly, it’s a FESTIVAL!!! Yay! What are you going to do with yours?

With SEW much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Managing

The Manager does things right; the Leader does the right thing.” –Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

Greetings Dear Ones,

Every day, Heartsoul walks into my shop and sighs with happiness. She sings, “This is such a beautiful space!  Look at those windows!  That Light!  All this fabric, thread, tools!  What amazing things we could create here! Let’s make a linen wrap dress—you have so much fabulous linen in that box up there… maybe some quilted hoodies… No!  Let’s do something amazing with that collection of tartan scraps!  A wall hanging depicting the Highlands maybe?” The glow radiating from her dims the dapples peeking through the trees by the window.

“No time for Creating,” snaps Prudence, “There’s too much work to do. These wedding dresses are NOT going to hem themselves. And the mending rack has been full since Prom season. Then there are all the bridesmaids’ dresses that need to be done by Saturday. Get to it!” Instantly, Brain begins to strategize.  What color is already on the machine?  Where shall we start?  Who’s deadline is most immanent? Arghhhhh!  What to do first???

Heartsoul sags…

“We never talk anymore… it’s time we have a Conversation,” she says, tugging on Brain’s sleeve.  Brain is distracted.  Brain has been distracted a lot lately.  Brain is the reason we have been breaking into the shop with a butter knife for the past three days.  Brain has no idea what happened to the keys.  Luckily, there is a spare car key, or we’d have to travel by Ox Cart and Gus and Otie can’t even manage to stay on opposite sides of a pull chain yet.  Brain starts to run in circles, flapping arms, panting.

“Conversations between Head and Heart, along with epistolary novels, went out of fashion during Thomas Jefferson’s administration,” says Prudence says dryly to Heartsoul. And to Brain, “Stop Dilly-dallying!”

“I think we need to get re-aligned,” says Heartsoul. “There’s nothing for me to do around here. I’m bored.”

“I’m not happy either,” admits Brain, turning on Prudence. “I miss Heartsoul.  I like it best when we work as a team.  We do our best work then.”

“Who cares, as long as all this work gets done,” huffs Prudence.  Disconnection between head and heart are just fine with her.  She becomes ever more brisk and bossy.

“Who is giving us all this work to do, anyway?” asks Brain.

“Our Worthy customers, obviously,” retorts Prudence. “Their needs are way more important than yours, so get going.”

“But why can’t we say ‘no’ to a few things?” asks Heartsoul. “Now you even have a workshop space at home. You work until bedtime. Then you get up and work in the morning. It never ends.”

“It CAN’T end,” says Prudence. “That’s what running your own business with a poverty mentality and steep hay bills is all about.”

“Surely we could have a few limits. Like maybe we should not return business emails and texts during non-business hours… Maybe we could not overload ourselves like this.  You cannot pour any more water out of an empty cup.”

“But then we wouldn’t be the BEST,” says The Pleaser, Prudence’s sycophantic side-kick. “We MUST be the BEST.”

We all turn to stare at The Pleaser.

“It’s YOU!” cries Heartsoul in horror.  “You are the reason we have too much work to do. And get paid so little for it!! YOU are the one promising away all our evenings and tomorrows and times to swing in a hammock with a good book, or sip tea with a friend, or sit around hugging fat little lambs for no reason except for the sheer joy of it... YOU….”

The Pleaser gives a guilty-but-not-sorry grimace-ish smile and steps slightly behind Prudence for protection.

“You realize, of course, that by agreeing to please everyone, you actually please no one. Our friends are sick of hearing we are ‘So Busy.’  Being Too Busy is an exhausting, self-consuming way of insulating ourselves from more busy-ness—some of which we might like.  With no boundaries, we actually have no choices either. No hammocks. No hikes. No choices, no Freedom, no true creativity…” Heartsoul slumps with her heart in her hands.

“This is what female entrepreneurs have to deal with,” says The Pleaser defensively. “Without Unparalleled Excellence and Accessibility, what is there to protect your reputation against bad yelps from people who could not have their ski suits and prom gear fully restored half an hour after they dropped it off?”

“But that’s the thing,” says Brain, “I’m just beginning to realize how long it takes to do all this stuff.  You’ve taken on so much, we’re lucky to get things back to people within a month.  You’ve made it so that everything is an ‘emergency.’”  Brain, thinking of several things at once, remembers last seeing the car keys in the car, and begins itching to go check. Brain disappears.

“This is hopeless,” says Heartsoul. “We have this fabulous business we have created—the three of us—Heart, Head, Hands, and we do wonderful work for wonderful people.  We love what we do. We love whom we serve. Why does it feel so overwhelming?”

“Well,” says The Pleaser, “I guess we love it so much, and we know we could love and serve more people, so we need to do More.”

“Sometimes Doing More is actually Doing Less,” says Heartsoul sadly. “People don’t get the same service.  They start to think they need to call ‘to check on their things’ and give sweet, subtle complaints such as ‘I was just wondering…no rush of course…but…’  So how do we remedy that?”

“Easy,” says Prudence. “You simply Work Harder.  You work at night. You work at home. You decide that work is really your ‘play’ and that you don’t need friends, or relationships of any kind.  You get addicted to the satisfaction of completing things, instead of dancing or playing your fiddle.  You Keep Calm and Sew On.”

Heartsoul is too sweet to even think of kicking Prudence in the shins so she just wilts with weariness.  There is no fight in her—just a longing for Authenticity, Connection, and Beauty united to Purpose.

 “This is Survivorship,” she muses. “I didn’t come here just to eke out survival. I came with a Gift, to Share, to Shine, and also to Receive what it is I need, in order to keep on Giving.  This is what a lot of artistic people face and why there is so much Mending that needs to be done among the population of Sensitive Souls who substitute monetization, obligation, or mere production for Creatorship.  This is what happens when we allow certain pressures to mold us in ways that seem “good” but are ultimately destructive, ways that ultimately sever us from our true Purpose.” 

“Morality requires us to put the collective interests of a group ahead of our own needs,” reminds Prudence. “We are born into families, relationships, bonds of kinship and community.  Our safety is contained within our membership to our group and its fate. It borderline Immoral to put your own needs first.”

“But what about the other side of the Golden Rule?” asks Heartsoul. “Are we not also instructed to treat ourselves with the same love, respect and dignity with which we treat others?”

Prudence is Silent. She would love to contradict Jesus, but she doesn’t dare.  We have her there. Brain, who has returned triumphantly, car keys in hand (they were wedged in a sun visor between the car seats), seizes the advantage.

“We can be doing perfectly “Good” things but if they are not actions that connect, motivate, and inspire us—what good will they be? How long can we run a vehicle on one tank of gas alone? Provided we can still locate the keys…” says Brain, smugly dangling them in front of us. “Knowing How to do something is great fun.  But that fun fades when we forget WHY we are doing something and we just keep doing it without Heart.”  Heartsoul smiles gratefully.

“What if we really do feel and think more in terms of a true Collective Mentality?” asks Heartsoul. “What does that look like?”

“Now you’re talking!” says Prudence, approvingly.

“Ah!  But ‘We’ are not outside of ‘Them,” says Heartsoul slyly.  Prudence’s eyes narrow.

“WE,” continues Heartsoul, “are Connected to a dynamic, playful, consciousness—a wide swath of The Fabric of Life—of which we are a beloved and worthy part. To Mend or heal any part of that fabric is to serve the Whole (and the Hole). To take good care of ourselves IS to take good care of each other.”

“This sounds a lot like New Age Narcissism disguised as embroidery, stitchery without function, N-Bell-ishments, on the Fabric of Humanity,” says Prudence warily.

“It isn’t,” insist Brain and Heartsoul, holding hands. “It means that if we adhere to regular business hours, if we operate with Integrity, Honesty, and Clarity, we will actually serve our people better and we will not be tempted to crawl headfirst into a bottle of Scotch the next time the Iron spits more black shit on a wedding dress.  Nor will we procrastinate by spinning yarn when we should be paying bills.  Doing what Jack Russell and Jodi Marquis, in their book Self-Sustaining Leadership, call “the right thing for the right people at the right time based on increased self-knowing” is what will lead us from gritty, tear-streaked survival to actual Creatorship.”

“I would love that so much!” says Heartsoul hopefully.

“All we have to do is take inspired action on the Right tasks,” says Brain. “No matter how much we love them, people do not get to come into our life, or our shop, or our home, and take from us our time or energy or resources without our permission, unless they are an elderly canine or an incontinent lamb. We must stop issuing permission to anyone else!! Ok Gang, who wants to be in charge of Boundaries?”

Everyone falls silent, even Prudence.  She loves restrictions but restrictions and Boundaries are not the same thing and she knows it. Boundaries, especially those that allow us to fill up with Infinite Love of all we are and all we do, are not on her list of favorite things.  She is addicted to being Needed and Resentful.

“How about…” says Heartsoul, whispering softly, kindly “we all agree to TRY to love each other more dearly, just as we are. How about we accept our flawed results and grandiose intentions ‘to be and do Our Best,’ even when we fail.  Just for today, we stop telling everyone how busy we are and tell the truth about our abundance. Let’s stop saying ‘Yes’ to things that make us feel tired and crummy; saying ‘yes’ because we did not know how or why to say ‘no;’ saying ‘yes’ because we were actually seeking attention, approval, or reward, rather than giving from the heart?”

How about we only say YES because we are truly giving, not seeking? How about we call an end to the conflict between fixing what is broken and creating something different. What if they were one and the same?

With Sew Much Love to you all, Dear Menders!

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Home of the Brave

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…”

Greetings Dear Ones,

“Nothing is happening TO you; everything is happening FOR you,” say The Wise Ones, who apparently never had to reenter a kitchen to discover they had left a pan of eggs cooking and it is now on fire.  I am trying to keep this maxim in mind as I navigate yet another week of coyote strikes, ants in my pants (literally), and attempts to plant fifty pounds of seed potatoes during black fly season in temperatures that force me to choose between wearing a personal sauna or having arms that look like lunch meat gone bad.  With so much happening FOR me, I don’t mind boasting a little that I am going to be an amazing creature one day, ant bites on the nether regions not-withstanding...  The ants came in on a load of cedar logs that I hauled in my vehicle.  I need them (the logs, not the ants) to extend the cattle pasture so I don’t have to mow anything while my mower gets an overhaul at the local tractor repair center.  Because, who needs a working mower when one has perfectly good, hungry cattle?  And I am tired of using hand shears to clip buckets of grass for them as treats.

 Apparently, in the Living of my Joy and fostering the growth of my soul, I could not make enough Spiritual Progress with simple things like forgetting all the passwords to my bank accounts.   That’s for beginners. Try the Zen of focusing on highway traffic while being swarmed by ants!  Yep! So accelerated is my Divine growth that it even required a full bottle of Kombucha to explode into my keyboard before starting this very blog.  It’s all happening FOR me… (and for YOU, dear ones)! Lucky, Lucky us…

It’s no easy task, even in the best of weather, to pursue Happiness in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  For one thing, not everyone is free and hardly any of them are happy.

 “Why can’t we go outside?” plead the incarcerated chickens.  “We don’t think it’s fair to punish us, since we aren’t the ones who got eaten!”

“Relax,” I tell them. “Have some frozen corn on the cob.  This is for your own good.  It’s not done TO you; it’s done FOR you. Trust me.”

“We don’t want corn. We want grass and ticks!” they plead.
“I’m sorry,” I say.  “There is a coyote nearby raising a den of pups and I don’t want you to be the next chicken dinner! We’ve lost too many of you already.” I gaze forlornly at the empty spaces on the roosting poles. I miss the plucky little rooster the most.  He was a Bantam form of Mickey Rooney in a feathered tuxedo, who took himself and the protection of his ladies very seriously, though he was always very respectful of me, after he and I came to a little agreement two years ago that if he attacked me again, I was going to swing him around by his feet until he changed his mind.

“We demand our freedom!” pine the chickens.

“Freedom means the constant threat of death,” say I.

“Isn’t that what Freedom ALWAYS means?” they ask. “Freedom means the highest risks, the highest rewards, and all the bugs you can stomach.”

And so it is.

The lambs too are royally pissed off.  Their pursed lips and perturbed looks are tragically comical—ridiculous expressions for those who only want to bounce and play and run imaginary Sheeple chases around and over piles of rocks.  This coyote is a terrible problem.  It goes at these chickens like a black Friday shopper trying to get the last Nintendo Switch.  It is huge—larger than a German Shepherd, and unphased by my efforts to scare it away from the chicken coop at 4:am when I am awakened by commotion.   I shout from the back door of the house and it saunters to the edge of the woods, folds its arms, and stares at me with belligerent contempt.  This is an all out battle between the haves and have-nots and I am determined to defend “my” property.  The coyote, eyeing me warily from the edge of the Dark Forest, is momentarily inconvenienced and shrewdly content to wait until I am out of site.  I go inside feeling like that mother whose child’s visiting friend is just waiting for me to leave the kitchen so he can steal cookies.  This animal hunts in the middle of the day, at dusk, at dawn… No time is safe, especially when my back is turned.  (I’m mostly talking about the coyote here, though I suppose such could be said of the child’s friend too.)  It has taken to leaving a dump right by the front door for the dog to find (ok, definitely only talking about the coyote now)—a calling card of sorts—that says “no place is safe.”  

“You are too small and delicious,” I tell the lambs, grabbing one, squeezing it tight and burying my face in the heavenly scent of his baby soft wool.  “Stay right here in this nice, safe pen and climb your mothers instead of rocks.  You’ll be ok.  I’ll babysit you in the big field when I get home. You can’t be out alone.”

I leave them bawling with regret.  (I mean the lambs are bawling…though I too have a throat tight with sorrow.)

I think about sad lambs and suicidal chickens and what Freedom requires as I go to work on Memorial Day.  I meant to take the day off, really I did. But the on-line calendar booking feature embedded in my website has no idea which days are holidays and accepted seven appointments before I even realized it was happening.  People had booked these appointments weeks ago and it was going to be a nightmare to try to reschedule everyone. So I went to an otherwise empty building and worked.

“It was not my intention to be engaging in commerce on a national holiday that honors our veterans,” I explain to the first customer as she shuffles in the door with a dress over her arm. As luck would have it, she happens to be a disabled veteran.

 “It’s fine! Personally, I’m so glad you are open on Veteran’s Day,” she says. “I have this wedding to go to this weekend and I just found the dress and no one else could do it on such short notice.”   She has driven a long way to get here and on the way has enjoyed discovering more of the scenic beauty of this country she was willing to die for.  She is not originally from New England and finds it charming.  (I notice her arms are free of black fly bites.)

“Well, I guess I’m glad I get to thank you in person for your service on Veteran’s Day,” I say, feeling lame.

“Let’s thank each other,” she says generously.

Not much has been asked of me in the service of my country and I know it. As we strategize about how to accommodate her unique needs and challenges, painful results of dedication and sacrifice, I am grateful that my own moral courage need only extend far enough to be able to open a pair of pants seams that I know are filled with years of rotting leg dandruff.    Aside from voting, showing up for jury duty, and abiding by the laws (mostly) of the land, and eating red-white-and-blue cupcakes on the Fourth of July, not much is required of civilian citizens in this “Home of the Brave.”  We are mostly free to sit on the couch, flattening our bum fluff, pursuing  whatever Happiness we choose, whether it is in the form of bargain seed potatoes from Facebook marketplace, or the right to watch Nascar 24/7.

So what gets in the way of this “Happiness?” Why aren’t all Americans “happy?”  Well, honestly, I’m beginning to think our collective unhappiness is actually rooted in the belief that we should be happy—at all times, at any cost.  If we live here, in America, purely for the pursuit of Happiness, then sadness becomes our failure.  When difficulties become framed as the opposite of Success, we reject half of the entire ebb and flow of what is Life and to be Whole-Hearted.  My life in the shop and on the farm teaches me that loss and sorrow can be intensely beautiful and grace-filled at their core, in ways that surface glee and the shallow dopamine hits of finding bargain farm equipment on E-bay cannot sustain.   I told a Dear One who expressed regret at the loss of my sheep and her twins, “I’d rather weep at the grave of a beloved sheep than wander through a glitzy cocktail party not knowing what to say or whom to talk to…”  Life, in all its gritty Mystery, seems more Complete down here where I can see the dirt.   A full life, a big dream, a whole-hearted Vocation requires a lot of work and sacrifice, the commitment of inspired daily actions, and occasionally, tiny, savage, unexpected bites to the bum.  

As Humans, we try to organize our lives around uncertainty. This means having rules—rules for how we treat each other, how we protect what we earn or love or create, and how we drive.   Some are the Laws of Nature—such as how long it is possible to apply heat to a raw egg before it explodes and begins to smoke.  Some are the laws of Man—which means one cannot plow straight through the next five cars with out-of-state-plates in Memorial Day traffic just because a bunch of ants have found one’s butt crack!

It’s so easy to confuse Rights with Responsibilities.  We think we have an inalienable right to Happiness—as if Pleasure had no other side to balance it.  What is food without hunger? What is water without thirst? Rather than divide experiences into negative and positive, we can see things as part of a whole. When we look at a rainbow, we wish to see ALL of the colors, not just our particular favorite.

“Um…Excuse me,” interrupts a little lamb, “Is there such a thing as a totally green rainbow?”

“Yes, Love,” says her mother, “look down the valley at that field below—every shade of green in the whole world is growing right there, on top of the earth. Now use your mouth for chewing, not talking.”

Emotional diversity, not the presence of “happiness” alone is the real indicator of Well-being (Beings who are Well).  The more variations of emotions we are ready, willing, and able to feel—the less we need to engage in potentially destructive behaviours around the ones we seek to avoid.  In such cases, our “safety” can come at a terrible price—such as all the –isms that inevitably lead one to a dreary church basement, a circle of metal chairs, and luke-warm coffee where The Grateful meet to help one take the first of 12-steps to sobriety. (I’m still waiting for the twelve-step program for those of us who numb out by knitting fourteen pairs of slippers in less than a month. Don’t kid yourself, ANYTHING can be an –ism.)  Barricading ourselves from our feelings comes at incredible costs.  Any veteran will tell you that living in a state of siege is not really living, for either side.   

Let us forgo the pursuit of Happiness and pursue Wholeness—in the work of our heads, hearts, and hands.  May we Mend and help others with their Mending!  Creatorship is a form of Leadership. We create and hold hard boundaries (fences, laws, chicken coops) to keep those we love both safe AND free, recognizing we allow some peril for a price.  We pledge our sacred honor to defending those we serve and serving those we defend, even as we dance—with ants in our pants.  

I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Amor Fati

My formula for human greatness is Amor Fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity.  Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity—but to love it. Friedrich Nietzche

Greetings Dear Ones!

Someone asked me recently if I had one day of my life to live, what would I want to do with it.  I said “hem prom gowns with eight layers of tulle each—then at least it could be the longest day of my life!” The list of things I could do on my “last day” includes things like discovering a new lamb has glue for poo and needs his bum washed (not just washed, but picked clean by my gloved hand because the “glue” has hardened like epoxy, effectively sealing him closed), or attempting (for hours) to get the mower to start, and when it finally does, I cannot drive it up hill because the safety mechanism shuts it off when I don’t sit fully back on the seat, which I cannot do uphill because my legs are stumps that don’t reach the pedals...  These (and attending a swim meet or golf tournament) are all things I would definitely save for “last.”

I’ve been at the shop until eleven p.m. every night this week growing more and more vexed with Marcus Aurelius, who taunts me from the quotes adorning the margins of my work table.   “Make every day your best day,” he chirps.  “Who’s best day includes having to vacuum the work table for glitter four times?” I want to know. “Sweat more in practice and you’ll bleed less in battle,” he says smugly, as I accidentally jam a needle under my thumb nail and cause it to spurt a cranberry drop on fabric intended for a white dress someone wants to wear to an upcoming graduation ceremony.  “What does a 2nd century Roman statesman know of suffering?” I say to him, “What are kilted men with swords and grudges, who bind their wounds with red wine and raw garlic, to a bride who has just glimpsed what she thinks is some extra fat on her back?” Marcus goes silent a moment—he knows we can face no more devastating foe than the one in the mirror.  He says quietly, “The Happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts. Therefore, guard accordingly and take care that you entertain no notion unsuitable to virtue.”

“Listen here, my good man! I’ve had quite enough of your chipper little platitudes,” I grunt, as I heave a dress the size of a Volkswagon onto the table and begin my foray into a forest of bramble-ridden tulle. I am definitely having thoughts unsuitable to virtue. I’d rather be de-pooping a lamb.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength,” whispers Marcus encouragingly, unable to help himself.

“Oh, for God’s sakes! Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one!” Barks Prudence.

“Hey! That’s MY line,” says Marcus petulantly.

Attempts to philosophize, to draw wisdom and understanding from the ordinary are how I make it through Prom season.  It’s no use thinking thoughts like “how did this [the full rack behind me] get like this? Who said yes to all these things we now have to do? Could we have done differently? Could we have known better? Would a different system (such as simply refusing to answer the phone… EVER) have netted us fewer negatives and ultimately more positives, or at least slightly less glitter?

Stoicism is not going to cut it at eleven o’clock at night with four gowns to go.  The part of me grieving sleep is going through Kubler-Ross’s five predictable stages: denial—“it’s not so bad, dawn’s a long way off”, bargaining—“if we go to bed now and get up early, we can knock this off then we are good and fresh,” rage—“why the hell do we even have events that require such dumb things as having teenagers spend an entire family’s disposable income on a gown they will wear ONCE?” grief—“no one is coming to save me… I am pitiful…alone… I will die here, choking on glitter,” to…finally…Acceptance of my fate.  Back to the Stoics.

“The Stoics were good, but not quite good enough,” says a new voice.  It’s Nietzche.

“Hey Nietzche,” I say wearily. “Welcome to the party.”

“We don’t want any of that shit about God being dead,” warns Prudence. “The only thing keeping us going right now is the thought that Saint Peter is the desk clerk at that fabulous Hotel in the clouds and  will one day scan his list of reservations, find our name at the top and say Oh! You! We’ve saved a special place for you.  You hemmed nineteen prom gowns in four days? Welcome! You get a non-smoking room right next to some quiet Mormons and the ice machine.”  

“Don’t worry,” says Nietzche calmly. “There’s more to what I said than that. As lives go, mine contained its share of misery so I studied the Stoics too.  Every generation invents its own form of fashion and  misery—the ultimate union of which has to be gowns constructed of swimsuit material that runs like Hussein Bolt when you pull one bloody thread the wrong way, but I digress.  The trick is not just to accept the inevitability of our suffering but to try to fall in love with it.  All of it. Love and embrace Life exactly how it is—with all the good and bad, success and failure, the satisfaction and pain, yummy vegetable pakoras you got at the co-op and the blistering glitter that is ruining your iron.”

 “Are you asking me to LOVE glitter?” I ask Nietzche.

“Yes,” he says, not in these actual words, “Instead of stoic acceptance of our fate, what if there was enthusiastic and total adoration of What Is, a declaration against Regret, a version of affirming that it’s not just ok if we are not ok. It’s actually Magnificent.”

Love glitter… hmmm….the best I can do is love some of the people who wear the stuff.  Some of them are truly adorable. Why otherwise fabulous people want to roll themselves in sparkling crumbs of toxic waste confuses me but I try not to judge (not much, anyway).

“If she just controlled herself better, she wouldn’t have this fate, be it miserable or Magnificent,” tuts Prudence. “I remind her daily, to no avail.”

Prudence and Nietzche grumble amongst themselves for a while. 

There is always the mirage of Wishful thinking lurking like the remnants of a bean burrito in the dressing room—the idea of “if only…”   We regret and yearn for “otherness”.  (If only I was playing fiddle right now… if only I was in a hot bath outside under the stars right now…) We all assume that if we made better choices, we might have better outcomes.  There were potential different options of ways for things to go in the past and there are still potential ways for things to go in the future but in the reality of NOW, the reality we must live, there is no option to have done anything differently and there is no way out except to grab a  gladius or rotary cutter and get in there and start chopping. Every decision we make is the one we must live out.  

To regret or desire to go back and edit the past assumes that the things we wish to change, especially the things we perceive as “wretched” now, once contained an option for a camoflaged “best” we should have recognized. We become obsessed with how things could have gone differently (had we measured twice before cutting) and that somehow everything would be different now had we done so.  This is the sentiment of every bride who enters the dressing room wishing she had simply confronted her future mother-in-law like a grown-up, instead of spending her time between fittings stress-eating her feelings with two pals called Ben and Jerry.

Eventually, we realize it’s not that “Life could have been different” (or even should have been) that is the problem but that we resist finding the Beauty in how it inevitably has gone. Resenting what has happened to you or because of you only heaps additional misery onto the Now—adding more to resent or resist. (Prudence loves that part—the compound interest of Regret.)

Can we fall in love with things right now, as they are?

Nietzche says,(his real words) “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly.  I do not want to accuse; I don’t even want to accuse those who accuse.  Looking away shall be my only negation. All in all, and on the whole, some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

The notion of what people will say yes to boggles the mind. “Like four-inch heels and underwire bras,” observes Prudence. Why not add in a little treachery and loneliness, failure and disaster, loss and death? It’s hard to imagine crowing “YES, I lOVE it” in a case by case sense, especially when poo-glue and glitter are involved… but in a larger sense, we CAN gain perspective.  (For those who cannot, there is this lovely stuff called Scotch. When you’ve had enough, there are 12-steps back to Serenity.) But when sufficiently distanced, when in high enough Spirit (NOT the Scottish variety), like after a soak in a rusty cast iron tub out under the stars, it is possible to practice a certain love for the Whole of It.

I’m with Nietzche on this--to see all things through the lense of love. Perhaps the only way to experience the beauty of things is to think about them beautifully. Yep… that includes glitter. And zippers people have removed themselves “to help you.” And lambs who are glued shut with their own poo. This is a Gladiator-sized struggle in a society which values self-overcoming, achievement, power—the constant defining and accomplishments of goals set forth in the image of what one views as their “ideal self,” (“a self devoid of back-fat,” sniffs a bride).

If we try to overcome life itself, we fail, as the end has already been determined. (Our Heavenly Hotel reservations have been pre-paid!)  But overcoming the Ideal of Overcoming—surrendering the notions of an unattainable ideal self and ideal life, to smile, even as we are being defeated… Wow.  Prudence finds the conundrum too dizzying and falls silent.

 Amor Fati—to “love one’s fate” and accept at last the way things have gone and will go—to love a life that in many moments will try to make you hate it or yourself—to look it in the eyes in the dressing room mirror and say “Yes, I love YOU,” even with your hair a mess, your raccoon eyes, and that armpit meat hanging peeking out from each side of your bra. 

This Life is Beauty and so are YOU.

A wise person once said “He who works with his hands is a laborer.  He who works with his hands and head is a craftsman.  He who works with his hands, head, and heart is an Artist.”  If we must labor, let us labor with Love.  It might not change the outcome but it certainly changes US.    

I’d love to write more…to write all day in fact… but I’ve got two more gowns that just came in.   Keep up your Good Work, Dear Ones!  I love hearing from you!  Thanks for sharing these letters with our fellow Menders.

With sew much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy