Tiny lights

“A candle loses nothing when it lights another candle.” —Thomas Jefferson

Season’s Greetings, Dear Ones!

A time of great Darkness is upon us… and I don’t just mean politically, emotionally, spiritually…  I mean quite literally.  Here in the Northern hemisphere, as we lean outward towards the farthest reaches of our earthly orbit, like screaming kids about to wet their pants on a tea-cup ride at the county fair, we feel the struggle between the forces of gravity (of the grave) and the outward pull of centrifugal forces making us cling every harder to whatever center we can grasp.  It’s a good ride that leaves us just a little dizzy, just a little scared, and grateful for strong kegel muscles.  The night sky descends like stage curtains of crushed velvet filled with glitter earlier and earlier each day as we hurry to do our seasonal chores, decorating, cleaning, and whatever it is we do to Prepare for whatever it is we celebrate.  Personally, I usually resent these seasonal exercises, especially if they involve shopping or cleaning.  I prefer to think of this time as a good time to hunker by a fire, hide from wolves, sleep a lot, wake occasionally to snuffle towards my pantry to snack on winter stores. It’s inner chipmunk time.  Feral women and chipmunks have no need of tinsel or glitter.

But this year, for some reason, I’m really into the spirit of Preparing.  Some folk do this by bringing in shrubbery and garlands, colored lights and ornaments.  Our beloved Hermit of Hermit Hollow and I prepare by going into the cellar and jacking up the floor joists below my kitchen.  We add a twenty-five foot beam and two lally columns.  You know, in case the Christmas crowd wants to dance without crashing into the potato bin ten feet below.  Or in case I eat so many Christmas cookies I can’t plod across the floor without all the dishes in the big hutch shuddering and clinking as I pass. (It was happening already…)  Seven hours later, the kitchen floor is now level and stable.  The future clinking of glasses will be hand-held and intentional, not the result of sagging floor joists.  And I can eat as many damn cookies as I please.  Yee-haw!

“Honestly!” huffs an exasperated Prudence.  “Stop thinking about the cookies! A little fasting and praying wouldn’t go amiss, followed by some gruel and repentance.”

I ignore her.  I am busy unpacking the Christmas china I have not used in ten years. I’m going for it!  This Christmas cottage is going to look like the set of a Hallmark movie if I have to vacuum pine needles until March.  I string up garland and lights wherever I can.   I overdose on hygge and the scent of pine.  And Candles!  Can’t have too many candles!  I light them every evening.  

As I apply a spark to each waxen stick, I think about how it is a time of lighting candles everywhere, in many faiths.   My Jewish friends are lighting Menorahs.  The Catholics are lighting Advent wreaths.  It’s a time of tiny flames and big wishes all around the world.   This is a comfort to me as I strike each match.  There is a cozy connection to each other as we individually yet collectively face the dark.  It’s a deep comfort to believe that all around a globe suffering its share of pain and tyranny, a good many of us are focusing on Mending, Miracles and Preparedness. 

Frankly, I think preparedness IS a miracle.  Having what we need, having enough to share, these are incredible blessings. (Think back to the weeks in 2020 when we thought we couldn’t buy toilet paper!)  I wander into the velvet night, down to the barn to feed the manger scene there, and ponder the stars sparkling above the lighted doorway.  Those stars are suns.  Vast, unattainable solar systems.  And yet, there is barely any light.  Up close, a candle lights more than a sun.  A candle in a car during a blizzard gives enough warmth to ward off death.  Proximity matters more than size.

In my shop, with its wall of seven foot high “e-North-mous windows”, the gloom comes just before four in the afternoon.  By five, my canine office manager and I are driving home in pitch blackness.  (He’s been urging me to go home since three thirty.) Without the light from my tiny sewing machine bulb, I would not be able to make a straight seam.  The darker it gets, the more the tiniest of light illuminates a huge area. I sit hunched in the yellow circle it provides, pondering the shadows.

The advancing holidays invite us to examine our core beliefs—

Who am I?  Am I naughty or Nice? (“Definitely Naughty!” insists Prudence.)

Who are Others? Are they deserving of our love, food, time, taxes, or homespun knitwear for which we will have to pull at least two all-nighters?  Whom do we love? Do we love them as ourselves? How can we expand our tolerance? Hint: If you are part of a religion telling you whom to hate, get out of it.  You are involved in a political movement, not salvation. 

Thirdly, what does the future bring? What awaits us round the next bend—a monster or a miracle? December has a lot in common with Life. The more negative our core beliefs, the less we will enjoy Life in general and December in particular.   Harmful core beliefs lead to low self-esteem, low other-esteem, depression, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, or the need to eat cookies until the dishes rattle.  For some, December returns us to a childlike anticipation that someday soon, Something Wonderful is coming for us.  Meanwhile, we need to “chop wood, carry water” (in my case, quite literally!), and do all kinds of boring stuff to maintain homeostasis and homeo-cheque-book but with renewed hope and optimism undaunted by the current bleakness.

The other thing about December is that every day is Numbered.  Literally.  Everywhere we look there are cute calendars with sleighs and elves and candy-cane-encrusted versions of memento mori.   They seem to say “You might as well have a piece of chocolate, you slacker.  Another day is gone forever… and YOU have not yet secured enough bargains, sent enough greeting cards, or remembered to tip your postal delivery person. You only have  x  # of days to shape up.”

“Now that I know I am not going to live forever, I can relax!” announces my friend with terminal cancer.  “I don’t have to do any of that shit anymore!”  She sounds enormously relieved and cheery.  She is looking forward to a series of visits with her dear ones, that is all.  The rest of us, under the illusions that the holidaze matters, continue creating our own tiny tornadoes of activities as core beliefs influence thoughts, thoughts influence feelings, feelings influence behaviors…   The more the pressure mounts, the more we are wired to ignore any information what-so-ever that comes into conflict with our core beliefs. I go through great lengths to hire a set of inner lawyers who affirm that I CAN knit an entire afgan in one night if I want to. They tell all the people trying to convince me otherwise that their facts are simply “wrong.”   My inner lawyer, who is fed by cookies, has decided that I also have plenty of time to make some new curtains for the dining room.

“Where, exactly, did you go to law school?” I mutter as I struggle to cut seven yards of cotton in a straight line.   “Here’s a new fact for you:  I’d rather put zippers in down ski jackets all day long than attempt to make curtains for myself. You can tell Prudence I’m chalking this up as penance!”

“I just tell you what you want to hear,” is his blithe, lip-smacking reply.

The cloth squirms under the scissors, the iron belches steam that wilts the fabric, anything cut on the bias tries to turn into a semi-circle.  I’m left with uneven rags in out-of-date Buffalo check that I drape from some cast iron hooks driven into the molding above the window.

“These look awful,” admits Prudence, surveying them critically.

“Rustic… Nice… They look plenty straight enough to me,” says the crooked inner lawyer.  “And they aren’t big enough to block out any light.”

“What kind of slap-dashery creates a curtain that doesn’t even cover the window?” Prudence wants to know.  “Facts CANNOT be manufactured by faulty core beliefs!” she shrieks at the lawyer.  She’s decided that, because they are red, they can stay up until Valetine’s day—the “curtains” that is, not the core beliefs.  It’s the rag bag for both as soon as possible.

Indeed.  

I abandon the curtain chaos to get started on a million other projects.  I start to clean the house Nancy-style—you know, by filling the washing machine with laundry but not starting it, and deciding to clean out the entire fridge while the abandoned vacuum cleaner is still running in the other room.  Christmas cards are everywhere, just waiting for me to find the list of addresses and a decent pen… I’ll save the afgan, and perhaps another homespun shawl for the last minute.  There’s plenty of Time, right?  The inner lawyer doesn’t answer.  He’s just spotted Party Girl heading for the Christmas Sherry.   Prudence is rushing off to call Santa Claus.

__________________________________________

The Light is precious these days, Dear Ones. We don’t need much of it to keep ourselves bright and cheery in our chipmunk coves. Thanks for Being a light, wherever you are Mending.  Thanks for spreading sparks of Joy.  When life is as dark as it is now—spirits at low ebb, fingers and hearts numb with the coldness that pervades—we  don’t need to be great big stars, just little candles, tiny and warm, for those who are right next to us, Waiting.  Proximity is everything.

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Connected

“The meaning of life is just to be alive.  It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.” Alan Watts

Greetings Dear and Darling Ones!

There is so much to be thankful for… Rather than panicking about how my house is a mess and there is not much in the larder except all the dirty potatoes I have been digging out of the ground and the number of impending guests expecting a Thanksgiving meal in twenty four hours’ time is fluctuating between thirteen and seventeen and all those potatoes need to be scrubbed but not as much as the inside of the shower does only I need to put up a sign telling the city folks that the septic system can’t actually handle nine showers a day and those who feel comfortable doing so should definitely pee outside as often as possible…. But I can’t start on all that until a young customer gets three pairs of his grandfather’s hunting pants altered to fit him… So! As an Artful Procrastinator, I’ve decided to plop down next to a warm dog in front of a cozy fire and dilly-dally-scribble a bit about how GRATEFUL I am! (Especially for warm dogs and cozy fires)

I’m especially grateful for my dear Crust-omers—those who help me earn my daily crusts as a seamstress.  They are an endless treasure trove of inspiration and delight.  I am continually fascinated by their stories, talents, abilities, and the gifts they share with our community.  I wonder how anyone but a lucky seamstress would come across so many wonderful souls? It’s been an incredible blessing for someone who is new to the area and needing “connections.”  Always, no matter what crisis occurs, a customer will turn up in the shop who is especially skilled in that very thing!  Airline pilots who do farrier work on the side, educators, carpenters, electricians, blacksmiths, lady-entreprenuers with good accounting advice—I meet and need them all.  It’s as if the angels are sending me Helpers all the time. Through our service to one another, we become the answers to each other’s prayers.

Last week, it was a young arborist who needed a suit altered in a hurry for a friend’s wedding.  An arborist was JUST the thing I was wondering how to find! Not far from the barn, right over the new path to the meadow, was a deadly “widow-maker” where a giant cherry bough had snapped and gotten hung up in the crotch of a dead Ash tree nearby.  The bough was suspended, waiting to fall, maim or murder anyone who might pass under it, including Gus or Otie, the Jersey steer-oids who might bumble around beneath it.  It had to come down but it was about forty feet in the air and there was no way to reach it with a ladder and felling the dead tree out from under it was also potentially lethal.  I needed a Climber!

He came out last Sunday and made short work of the issue.  He was up his ropes, in his harness and pulley system with a practiced grace that had me spellbound. As he was getting his ropes organized, I asked “Aren’t you afraid to go up there?”

“Absolutely,” came the confident reply. Then he grinned impishly. “I hate heights!”

“This is a remarkable choice of work for someone who hates heights,” I said.

“Precisely,” he admitted. “I like to challenge myself. Being a tiny bit scared helps keep me extra safe.  I take nothing for granted.”

His matter-of-factness blew my mind. Within minutes, he was swinging his way higher and higher, smoothly and professionally, with a fascinating economy of movement bordering on reverence, he was above the broken bough, cutting it free. It swung loose, crashing into and splintering the dead tree holding it up, then fell and smashed one of the only sections of fence I have standing on the whole farm.

“Sorry about the fence!” he shouted from the treetop.

“No worries!” I called back, laughing unexpectedly, suddenly giddy that he was safe.  Everyone was safe. I could exhale. That limb was down.  We all will live to build another fence one day. 

Afterwards, we spend as much time in the kitchen sipping tea and coffee and telling stories as we had outside.  (He was a sociable Climber!)  His knowledge of trees and botany and Nature is vast and infused with a deep and poignant spiritual resonance.  When he talks about how to take care of all the ailing trees on my property (which have been choked with vines and neglect for many years) he uses words that convey the emotions of the trees.  “Those cherry trees are not happy,” he says. It’s true.  There is something about all the cherry trees in particular that looks listless and forlorn.  They were the first to lose their leaves and stand shivering at the edge of the meadow. He tells me about all the arboreal survival tactics they are employing and the infections they are fighting.  He can identify all the scars and stories each trunk reveals.  He can see that the damage started about forty years ago or more, probably by someone’s attempt to create a pasture around them that disturbed the delicate balance of forest mulch and fungi around their roots, which have since been clogged with grass.  Who knew that grass can compete with trees in ways that make the trees struggle? When he talks about how bacteria in the soil send signals to the tree and vise versa, his eyes light up like sparks on a brush pile. “Energetically, biochemically, it’s all connected.  It kinda blows your mind, doesn’t it?”  

“Sometimes living is just a matter of surviving,” he says. “Your cherry trees have been surviving.  Somewhere in there is a slow death but it might take another twenty years for them to succumb.  It just depends on what the load is that each one carries.”

“That’s just like US, isn’t it?” I say.

He nods thoughtfully, with a sorrow that is way too old for one who has just turned thirty.

“Yep… We think life is going to turn out a certain way and then somehow it doesn’t. Certain messages fail to translate from our roots. We get confused. We get infected with something non-lethal but non-life-promoting.  And then it becomes a matter of survival because we don’t realize we are carrying a nameless grief for The Thing That Wasn’t and all the time, The Wind is blowing and causing us to shift our balance.”

“WOW,” I say. “That pretty much sums up being a Seamstress, being a farmer, being a parent, being in any kind of relationship at all!  It’s like that Instagram post that says ‘I used to think adulthood was one crisis after another. I was wrong. Multiple crises. Concurrently. All at once. All the time. Forever.’ They are all interconnected and related.”

He smiles ruefully and stares at the fire in the woodstove. We sit in shared silence for a few moments.

“Thanks for talking about this,” he says. “I think about these things but it’s hard to find people who share these ideas.  I look around at the world today and shake my head. It’s not the world I thought I would be living in when I was a kid.  I assumed things would be different.  The biggest problem is that other people don’t see how Connected everything is.  Everything we do has a direct impact on something else.”

“I know,” I say. “When I want the front of a jacket to fit someone better, I take in the back. Front and back are connected, as are left and right. You can’t take a bit out of one side of a circle without making the whole circle smaller.”

He grins. “That reminds me… my suit is now a tiny bit too tight! I didn’t want to mention it.”

“Bring it back!” I cry, as we say farewells.

I will feast on that conversation like a homemade pumpkin pie in the weeks ahead. He’s made me think. He’s made me feel. He’s reminded me how the most miraculous things are hidden right around us in the mundane, the ordinary, things so utterly accessible they become invisible.  His youth, his skill, his enthusiasm for knowledge in general and his passion for trees in particular inspire me.  My love of trees has no vocabulary. His does.  It’s fun to listen to him. In daylight, I smile with motherly fondness at his attempts to unify his painful disillusionment and his joyful, idealistic determination and mold them into a meaningful vocation for himself.  But at night, in the bleak wee hours of the morning, I am not so wise. The youngest part of me shares the ache he articulated so beautifully--of that Grief for the things that remain intangible, Unfinished.  There is nothing so painful on this earth as a tree or life or Love which has been denied its flourishing and exists merely in survival mode.  In a world torn apart by ignorance, we all share in the sorrow of things that “Shouldn’t Be” and sense the absence of the glory of things that “should.”

How can we fix this?

What is Love, truly, but the recognition of Connection?

EVERYTHING is connected. In a world constantly delivering both expectations and limitations, communication is only half the battle. Comprehension is the key.  We can communicate all we want, but if someone is capable of understanding, it’s just chaos—like the customer who dropped off a pair of pants with the attached note: “take out at the wast.”  I keep thinking of the phrase “to Know is to Love.” Loving and Knowing are as much in partnership as Loving and Serving.

I had another great conversation with a customer who is an electrical engineer.  “All energy derives from polarity,” says he.  Indeed—as profoundly evidenced by the state of our Nation! (From him I also learn that unplugging something is not the same thing as turning it off but that is a subject for a later date.) Our differences are both connective and explosive, useful or destructive, depending on how we harness that energy.

So how do we make the Connections? How do we ground the energy and use it productively? How do we use the beauty and mystery of existence as an endless source of vitality and renewal?

Gratitude.

Gratitude is the magic sauce that puts us in touch with the things that truly have value to us and helps us relinquish that which does not have that much value at all. We all find ourselves caught up in a frantic race for external recognition, relentless achievement, and Black Friday bargains, but the true essence of our lives is right here, right now. The sheer act of being alive is a miraculous gift. There is richness in each breath, each pulse, each experience, each precious moment of Connection. Sometimes we take things too seriously. 

Maybe for a sacred moment we can choose joy and amusement, rather than the  rat race spurred on by capitolism… Maybe on Friday, instead of rushing to the mall to clobber our fellow citizens who are competing for gimmicks and gadgets the way grass competes for micronutrients, we can rebel… we can claim our own Authenticity and look with clear eyes at the scars on a tree, a friendship, a country, or that weird uncle who isn’t going to vote the way you are in the upcoming election cycle. We can witness suffering and still find space for Gratitude.  We can appreciate the profound simplicity of being alive.

We are not just casual observers. We are pivotal and causal. We are an integral part of the ongoing voyage of discovery and expansion the entire universe is taking with itself.  Gratitude puts me in touch with Faith—faith that we can see this through, that there is always enough, if we share.  (I just found out one more is joining us for dinner tomorrow…)

Well… I’ve made this essay as long as possible in order to stave off the scrubbing of floors and potatoes. Alas, too long.  I hope you get a quiet moment to savor your own private Gratitude and the magnificent Work you do in Mending. I am thankful you are here.

With Sew Much Gratitude,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Casting Off

Greetings Dear Ones!

My life is so full of sparkles at this moment you’d think it was Prom Season.  It’s not.  It’s the dew in hard frost on the grass.  Some of it has blown like dust when you shake a carpet and landed in the sky.  The stars caught in the black blanket are so low, I see them through the tree trunks.  It’s cold and dark here in the Northeast of America—a splendid time for Hunkering.

“Pay the bills and say no to the invitations!” I announce to no one in particular.  It’s one of my favorite lines delivered by Rex Harrison as Henry Higgons in the movie version of “My Fair Lady.”  He says it to Mrs. Pearce, the housekeeper, with an air of crisp indifference as she tries to hand him the morning post.  For some reason, it has stuck with me for all these years.  It’s a throwaway line, hardly significant, but to me it represents the giddy heights of the “middle class” opulence he represents.  He can afford to pay his bills.  He can afford to say NO to invitations. It’s the stuff movies and dreams are made of.

I try to explain November to the sheep.

“No What?” asks Prim.

“No Cookies?” worry Festus, Fern, and Fergus—the spring lambs who have just discovered the joys of stale oatcakes.

“No, sillies!  November.  It’s November!” I laugh.

“What’s a Vember?” they want to know.

“Well, I’m not sure what a Vember is, but an EMBER is the part of the fire you sit next to late in the evening when you knit other people presents.  It’s nice and warm. It’s the end of the fire.”

“So November means the end of the fire?” they ask.

“No… I’m pretty sure November means nine, from the Latin novem, because it used to be the ninth month.  Now, it’s the eleventh month, but for me, it’s the beginning of the fire season… A few sticks of wood at a time keep my little house snug and cozy. I get up and light the wood stove in the morning and I bank it and fill it for the night before I go to bed, ending my days and beginning the mornings with embers and ash.”

“Our wool keeps us snug and cozy,” says little Flora smugly.   All the lambs have dense fleeces now, with what seems like extra up around their necks and cheeks. 

“I know,” I say. “It keeps me warm too.  I’ve been knitting your mamas’ wool from last year into beautiful shawls that keep my lap warm as I knit.”

“What happens to the fire when it turns to ash?” they want to know.

“I take the ashes out to the blueberry patch and spread them around the roots of the bushes.”

“To keep them warm?” asks Prim.

“No,” I say.  “To help them grow.  The wood ashes sweeten the soil and help the blueberries flourish.  Every ending helps something new to grow if you use it properly.”

“Sweet soil reminds me of cookies,” says Willoughby, snuffling through my pockets.

“Sweet soil is good for blueberries and anything else that likes lime and potassium.”

“I’m using this November to Say NO to as many things as I can—except paying bills, of course.  I’m saying No to all the things that do not bring me Joy (like obsessing over how those in politics are behaving) and instead trying to do small, good things each day.  I’m trying to do one comforting thing and one hard thing.”

“We only like comforting things,” say all the sheep together, “like eating as much of our supper as we can and lying down and taking a nap in the rest.”

“I think I could safely say the same thing about myself and a bowl of mashed potatoes,” I admit.  For weeks now, I have been digging up a day’s worth of poo-tatoes from my former manure pile, scrubbing them THOUROUGHLY, then making a comforting supper by roasting them and slathering them with butter, beans, cheese… They are the BEST!

“There are so many circles you tread,” observes Prim, who is the sharpest of the bunch.  “The circle of the old ashes to the new blueberry, the cow poo to the potato…”

“You’re right!” I say.  “And Circles look like the letter ‘O’—N’s O’s!  Nancy’s No’s.  I need to say no to a lot of things right now in order to say YES to the things that are important—like keeping these circles going.”

“We need time to rest,” says Molly, yawning.  “You can’t run the circles.  Maybe you could walk them.”

I agree and turn out their light. 

NO-vember is a great time to slow down.  Savor. Simmer.  It’s an exciting time to be Casting Off. Yesterday, I cast off on two different shawls I had been accidentally knitting concurrently.  I’d started one last year and misplaced it—thankfully not between the seat cushions of the couch where it could have damaged someone!  The other one I have been spinning and knitting almost non-stop for the past fortnight.  It “got into my head” and the only way to get it out was to put several hours a day into it.  I couldn’t wait to see what it looked like. 

Finishing it was such a joy!  Sometimes I like a project to last a long time.  It becomes a companion of sorts that I drag with me like a disgruntled spouse to places I don’t want to be—like waiting rooms, dull visits, long car journeys where someone else is driving.  Other times, it’s a rush to help something twist itself into being beneath my hurrying fingers.  Yesterday, I finished both sort of projects.  I ended two “relationships.”   There is deep Satisfaction in seeing something Completed. It’s a funny sort of drug that makes me start immediately another project whose fate is yet unknown.  Will it be a quick flame? Or a slow burn?  Will it get lost in the couch only to have me sit on it later?

If only we could finish all of our relationships in such neat and tidy stitches, with bound off edges and pleasing boundaries.  As I slip the loops across the needles and into their final resting places, I get lost in the reverie about what it means to “Cast Off.”  It has both pleasing and painful connotations.

In knitting, Casting Off is when one takes the stitches off the needle by looping each one over the next until only one loop is left.  Then you draw the end of the yarn through that last loop, snug it closed, and weave that bit of yarn into the edge where no one will see it.  Casting Off can be used as a falconry term—to send a bird of prey soaring.  Who knows where these shawls will go and what they will see from new vantage points?

Casting Off is also the discarding of something unwanted or undesirable.  It’s time to let go of the things we were trying to force into being that have not worked out.  It’s ok to hunker, to comfort, to work small stitches every day to envision ourselves in new ways.  No-vember is saying NO to the things to all that has temporarily defeated us.  It’s time to clear out the clutter that is occupying space we need. 

I had the pompous, middle-class audacity of Henry Higgons to say ‘No’ to several jobs this week and it felt amazing.  One was a leather job I literally could not do. I apologized politely and told the truth.  I could not put a new zipper in a pair of boots.  The boot would not fit under my sewing machine and the leather was too stiff for a regular sewing needle. Another outfit contacted me and wanted me to do bulk repairs at wholesale prices—which translates kind of as “do all the things you normally do but for way less money and we’d like priority service.”  No, thank you kindly. Ain’t nobody got time for that right now.

A friend asked me to make about 200 small bags for her.  I said yes, made a few and then regretted it, as they were a lot more work than they first appeared. I confessed to her that I could not match the price she had been paying someone else.  That other woman was probably seriously undervaluing her time, which may be why she stopped doing them… I told her I was not able to create these bags alone, in her desired time frame, within her desired budget.  BUT!  I was willing to work with her, collaboratively, and do them together.  She agreed.   So last night, her husband brought us pizza and salads and we worked together, cranking out forty completed bags and starting another forty.  We developed a great system of steps and utilized each other’s native skills (I was faster at pinning and sewing; she was good at cutting and measuring.)  And we had a blast!  We laughed and chatted.  We can’t wait to work together again.

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE how that “No” turned out.  

Casting Off also means to set a boat free from its moorings to begin a new journey.  I have set my shawls and myself free!  We are now at liberty to drift downstream on the currents, wherever Life sweeps us to be wrapped up around projects, or shoulders, and small creatures and Jack Russells seeking warmth.  Yes-es are No-s; No-s are yes-es. Ashes are sweeteners. Poo-tatoes taste Great.  In the quiet, sparkling darkness, great Magic is happening.

Keep cycling and circling, collaborating and celebrating, Dear Ones! Happy No-Vember! “Pay the bills and say No to the invitations!” Go fabulously fallow for a bit and knit.  Great things will come of it! Thanks for all the Mending and the Good Work you do.

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

The Mirror IS the Costume

Greetings Dear Ones!

“A pinch and a punch for the first of the month!  White rabbit! No returns!” and all that lovely nonsense.  Something silver is fluttering down from the sky so softly and slowly I can’t quite make out what it is—Regrets?  Discarded prayers? River Mist tightens its fists.  Dear God… it’s SNOW.  It’s Snow-vember in Vermont. It’s so faint—it’s more like cascading frost—Winter’s calling card. She’ll be back any minute. It’s time to gather in the pots of herbs and drain the garden hoses—not one of which I actually used during the rainiest summer Vermont has seen in seventy-five years.

Last night was Halloween—All Hallow’s Eve.  As a grownup (most of the time, anyway) who reads the news, I can tell you that the Dark is not what we need to fear; the scariest things are happening in broad daylight.  I sat by my fireside, peacefully working my way through a basket full of Sheltand roving on the spinning wheel and a nearby bowl of milk duds—you know, for all those trick-or-treaters who might wander up and down several dirt roads to my darkened dwelling in the forest.  The solitude was as sweet as the milk duds.

“What the hell do you think you are doing?” asks Prudence when she sees this.

“I’m finding myself,” I mutter through teeth glued together with toffee. “This is what self-care looks like to me tonight.”

“Humph… It looks to me like you are losing yourself,” she huffs, “and when you return, you are going to find a whole lot more of yourself that nobody asked for.”

I awake this morning with the ancient stoic Marcus Arelius standing beside the bed again.   Prudence, the inner critic, is beside him, looking smug. She summoned him. He looks irritated.

“Get up,” he says curtly. “I’m here to remind you to be Noble.  You are going to die.  Everyone you know is going to die. Life is grossly unfair and you need to make the Best of this as if, simultaneously, None of it matters and All of it matters.” Behind Prudence, lurking in the shadows is a hot guy, gently flaring his nostrils and gazing into the distance in a bored way.  I have seen him before, albeit only from a distance. I’ve been desperate to get his number for years. 

“Get up!” announces Marcus. “Accept the things to which Fate binds you, and love the people with whom Fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”

“Who’s your hot friend?” I whisper out of the side of mouth as I quickly stuff my feet into slippers and don a sweatshirt.  I take a sideways glance at Hot Guy’s rippling physique and hastily shuck the sweatshirt and grab for a pretty robe instead, trying to look as alluring as one who’s hair looks like a mass of cobwebs dumped out of a shop-Vac can possibly look.  

“Him? Oh, that’s Self Discipline. Everyone is always lusting after Self-Discipline. You might as well put that barn sweatshirt back on,” says Marcus. “You’re not his type. He’s got a partner already.”

“Who???” I ask breathlessly.

“Self-Love.”

Even Prudence looks disappointed.

“What?!” I say in disbelief. “Self-Love? Yikes.  I hear Self Love is pretty ugly.  Why is a hot guy like that going out with Self Love?”

“Self Love is not about looks—she’s all about Feels. Trust me, no one can make you feel quite like Self-Love,” says Marcus. “No one.  Self Love offers a Sweetness, a Kindness, an Acceptance of All Things with Grace and Humor that can hook any partner for life.  No one in a relationship with true Self Love will ever leave to seek another. She makes Self Discipline willing to do anything for her.”

“Our friend here doesn’t need Self-Love,” says Prudence eyeing me balefully. “She’s already eaten every last Milk dud in the house. She needs Self-Discipline.”

“It’s true,” I admit boldly. “I’ve been longing to make his acquaintance for years!  I have an attic to clean, a book to write, cattle to train, people to please…. I’m overwhelmed and I know he could help me.  If nothing else, he could help my jeans fit again. Please, introduce me.”

“He doesn’t go anywhere without his partner, Self-Love.  You will have to meet both together or not at all.” 

I peer into the shadows, searching, but Self Discipline is gone. 

So I get up, watch a bunch of crap on YouTube, Avoidantly knit half a skein of homespun yarn into a shawl, do NOT go for a run, or clean anything, or practice anything, or improve anything, or write anything. I briefly consider brushing the parts of my body that need it most, starting with hair and teeth, but can’t be bothered.  No amount of shameful glaring from Prudence makes my arse any less comfy so I don’t get off it.

Halloween is over but most of the people I know will keep wearing costumes, including me.  Briefly, I wonder what kind of costume Self Love wears when she goes out. And Why am I searching after Self Love and her hot boyfriend anyway, when I cannot even find my self these days.  I feel splatted—shattered into a thousand pieces lately—by news, by loss, by disgust with myself over how I have been showing up with those I care for and about.  Parts of me are stuck inside my own head in the coils of disparaging thought loops.  I am shaming myself for Failing, then for apologizing way too much until the other people involved have no responsibility to share in the mistakes we make together.  Poor attempts to smooth a situation over, to gulp down all the blame before others can taste their share, creates a very bad taste in my mouth over time—a taste NOT enhanced by Milk Duds.  

I’ve decided to live as a hermit.  I’m just not good at People.  

When I am around people “on the outside,” I tend to get lost—to absorb their energies, thoughts, feelings and forgo my own.  I lose sight of where someone else stops and where I begin.  It all gets mixed up. I know…it’s from wearing my costume too often. I’m like that five-year-old who wants to be Buzz Lightyear all year long.

What is my costume, you ask?  Simple.  It’s a mirror--A perfect metaphor for a seamstress, don’t you think? My costume has always been a mirror—showing others what they want to see.  I learned early in life, long before I could sew, that “My Best Self” is not really myself at all. It’s definitely Someone Else.  I suspect that most of us “Menders” masquerade as mirrors more often than we like to admit.  We use the mirrors elders and peers hold up around us so that we can be accepted, so that we can figure out what we hold to be true.  As children, we have absolutely no idea what we believe or think.  We try other peoples’ thoughts, dreams and values on for size like bargain thrift store finds—we look in their mirrors to see if WE fit, not the clothes.  I left home at seventeen not knowing exactly who I was, other than an actress who could wear the costumes, play the roles, recite the lines. (It turns out I can play almost any role except that of a decent Math student.)

Over time, as we grow, we become mirrors ourselves as people seek us out to give them comfort and Presence and a view of themselves that they can see is loveable, acceptable, worthy.  I wanted that so much for myself, that I dedicated my life’s efforts to being that for others. When I was younger, I wasn’t even sure there was anything behind the mirror I was holding up to the world.  I just wanted everyone to smile more.

But mirrors are Heavy.

Once, a very Good fellow mirror described her situation: “It’s a lonely gift. No one listens to you.  No one cares who you are. No one checks in with you to see how you feel about things.  Those who spend their days helping others discover a deep loneliness.  People don’t come to you to see YOU, they come to see themselves. There are days I feel I do not exist, because I don’t.  I need to cease existing in order to help others.  The minute they see me, I lose my effectiveness in showing them themselves. That’s how we get lost.”

Ooof.

I put my mirror down, lean it against the wall, and peer into it. There is something Ugly there.  I don’t want to see it. I squint my eyes.  I see a six-year-old, sitting outside the principal’s office at school. She is picking at a hangnail on her thumb as if, if she can just find the right start, she’ll be able to unravel herself like some bad knitting and just disappear.  Her teacher has told everyone she is a liar. She has no idea that in six months, this teacher will be in a mental institution for her abuse of children.  By then, the little girl will have been sent to Catholic School in the hopes that Good Discipline will help her stop “lying.”  There is another little girl who is new at school for the fifth time in eight years. She is confused because a crowd has gathered to watch her drink her milk at lunch time.  Unbeknownst to her, a “popular” girl has put garlic powder in it and summoned all the popular kids so that they can laugh at her as she takes a sip.  The little girl doesn’t know why they are laughing, why they are being mean, why she has no friends.  She refuses to cry, saving her tears for later.  She makes it her job to study People, to figure out their needs before they even know what those needs might be, so that maybe she can earn a place in their vicious tribe.  She knows she will never truly Belong and that “being of service” will be the best she can do.

Out they come, one by one, these shy, tiny, sensitive, sensitive girls.  The ones with haircuts so bad strangers sent them to the men’s room to pee. The ones not chosen for dodgeball.  The one who spent a whole summer training a horse and winning its trust only to have its owner sell it for meat.  Over and over they have been told to “toughen up,” but they can’t.  A priest who has been molesting her classmates tells a young girl she just has to “have Faith.”

These misfits form a line, standing behind each other in a row of ascending size, eyes clicked together at the same spot.  One set of eyes, staring up at me through the glass.  So much ugliness.  So much shame.  A tear drops onto the glass… a droplet that appears to be shared on both sides races itself to the bottom. The eyes look more beautiful now. They smile.  Behind them, I see Her.

She wraps her arms around them all, all those lost and frightened little girls, and holds them until they melt into her and disappear.  She looks steadily back at me through their eyes—a grown-up with chin hairs, scars and wildly unmanageable hair.  In her, the eyes of the children shine brightly. She is fiercely Kind.  She smiles at me in a way that feels like Summertime, when school’s out. I am stunned by her Beauty.

“They are all Loveable, Worthy, and Enough.  And so are you,” she says.  “Ok, so you fail occasionally.  WE ALL DO.  Sometimes we fail catastrophically.  Stand by these failures in order to recognize your successes.  You’ve been looking to reclaim yourself in the barn, in the fiddle, the thimble, the spinning wheel—through the Embodiment of Being in treasured tasks… As you collect yourself like a bunch of wild flowers, don’t forget to search amongst your failures. The prettiest roses are amongst the thorns.”

 “You can learn to trust,” she said. “Not everybody wants to love you. And that’s ok. Those who DO will want to do the work of understanding you.  To love, you must be vulnerable; you must agree to be seen.  You must look IN the Mirror, not out from behind it. That is a terrifying and exhilarating proposition. There is nothing quite like the feeling of being SEEN. To have someone come back for more because they love what they see is among the peak experiences of human existence. Halloween is Over. It’s time to drop the costume.”

“Hey there,” says Self Discipline, sneaking up behind me, tapping me on the shoulder and handing me a glass of water, “What do you say, you and me hit the gym today?”

Self Love winks at me and blows us both a kiss.

Keep Mending Dear Ones!

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Pumpkin Soup

“You will know you’ve found that place when you are aligned with a purpose that makes you come alive, when you feel Harmony between your Great Hunger and the needs of others.” –Dr. Tererai Trent, The Awakened Woman

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, we’ve reached that blessed time of year in Vermont where we are free to wear our flannel pajamas underneath our clothes and no one knows the difference.   The days have been a mix of “jacket, no jacket, yes, jacket” and you might need a warm hat at one end or wool socks at the other but not both.  The tree colors seem a little subdued but still glorious.  There has been talk of a bear sighting in my neighborhood.  According to 2022 data, Vermont has the most black bears it’s had in five years.  Like me, they are eating all the summer leftovers they can get their paws on and getting ready for winter, though they have less firewood to stack.

Last weekend, I had the joyous and exhausting privilege of feeding 120-ish musicians for four days during the Boston States Fiddle Camp at their new home at Potash Hill in Marlboro, Vermont.  It was a good excuse to dig up seventy pounds of homegrown potatoes for home fries (that were genuinely from HOME) and to use a few of my rogue pumpkins in soups.  The pumpkins had sprouted from the compost pile, unplanned, unplanted, welcome but not invited—kind of like those people who show up to help you before you even know you need help and wind up being extremely useful.  I sliced them in half (the pumpkins, that is, not the people), stuffed them with cherry tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and fresh thyme from the garden and roasted them very slowly in the oven until I could scoop out the soft, creamy flesh and puree it into a soup base.  I added white beans that had soaked overnight and some spices and had a very nice vegan soup.  In every way, the rogue pumpkins were a nourishing bonus.

The summer weather was such that some of the things I planted and worked hard at drowned or died and things I never planted thrived. My tomatoes were a disaster.  I had a bumper crop of blueberries but couldn’t find the time to harvest them so the birds got them. There were pears but no apples or peaches due to untimely spring frosts.  Is it not so with Dreams?  As I look at back at past harvests in the Garden of Life, I see patterns of struggle that just led to disappointment, abundance that led to waste, and yet the places where “one thing led to another…then another…” became unexpected Blessings where my hungers were satisfied.  Suddenly, I find that cooking at a fiddle camp or running a tailoring shop are the best, most nourishing things I have ever done.   Why do otherwise sensible people hire me to cook for their music camps when I have no such training?  Why am I running a tailoring shop?  I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t part of my plan when I left college with an English degree, a passion for 18th century literature, and a desire to wear tweed every day.  But here I am. A rogue pumpkin seed.  I fell into a pile of shit and I bloomed.  Nourishing others has become my Hunger. (That, and making sure their pants don’t fall down.)

Blooming, as well you know, can make one look like a Blooming Idiot at times.  Such pain in the midst of “spiritual growth” is not insignificant.  My temperament does not come equipped with a lot of what I call “Decision juice.” I love to dream. I have great visions.  I can be people oriented OR task oriented but this requires a LOT of solitude or support in order to function around distractions.  Put me in busy kitchen for fifteen hours a day where I am constantly bombarded with questions, demands, and queries when all the time I am wondering where the hell I last saw the garlic and… well… let’s just admit that I am no longer operating at my Highest and Best. 

I was out of decision juice by 7:am when someone came in and dumped all the freshly brewed coffee and we could not locate more filters. Do I go to the store? Send someone else? Call the manager of the camp and see if they have any? Or just quietly go lie down in traffic? Only there isn’t any. It’s Vermont.  Luckily, I couldn’t decide so I just kept cooking and someone else figured it out. I normally have a vast Vat of Patience but even that was running dry by the time someone said “All the things on the buffet table say ‘vegan’ do you have anything for vegetarians?”

“To put it mildly, if your soul was a pizza, and sins were toppings, your dough would be buried in anchovies,” says Prudence, my inner critic.

Luckily, my house-sitter canceled on me so I was forced to commute home each night to do chores, which always helps reset my cogs.  (Everything is always working out for the highest and best!) Forty-five minutes of sitting in silence was unexpectedly healing.  I arrived home numb and calm, went in the house to tend to the dog then returned to the garage to head to the barn.

That’s when I saw them.

Bear tracks!  IN MY GARAGE!  Wet bear foot prints on the cardboard walkway leading to my door!  I was suddenly wide awake. I looked around the garage.  I could not see the bear but the tracks were unmistakable. I could see the heel, the toes, the claws very clearly. It seemed like a smallish bear—probably an adolescent. I panicked and ran to the barn.  Everything was calm there.  I fed and watered everyone and returned to the house. I peered inside the garage.  THERE WERE MORE TRACKS!  I gulped and shivered.  Where was my phone? Whom should I call? Everyone I knew who might be Useful was at camp. 

I bolted to the door, slammed it, and looked out the window at the tracks. There were even more now!  Heaven help me! What was I going to DO??? Wait… MORE tracks? I looked down at the running shoes I was wearing. From the top, they look like normal white trainers. I lifted a foot and checked the tread. Yep…  I’d found my “bear.”  These shoes, a gift from my ace marathon-running daughter, were fancy Barefoot shoes that left a trademark “foot print.”  Who knew?  Late at night, alone in my garage, I was living a scene straight out of Winnie The Pooh, when Pooh and Piglet find tracks in the woods and decide the heffalumps are after them.

So…This Bear…was a middle-aged woman with a high degree of imagination and very little Brain. 

“It’s too bad you didn’t have my vintage Winchester to hand—you could have shot yourself in the foot!” said my dad, later when he heard the tale.

The moral of that story is all too familiar: As Taylor Swift sings it, “It’s me—hi, I’m the problem, it’s me!”  I am the monster on the hill, slowly lurching towards your favorite city.  No wonder my Instagram algorithm fills my feed with images of feral menopausal women who grow lots of herbs, live in the woods, and alarm the townsfolk. The tracks that lead to my door—the footprints I leave in my wake—these are the tracks of a monster.  To turn and face them is to feel genuine terror.  And Relief.  And uncontrollable, side-splitting, chortle-snorting Glee.  Carl Jung and Prudence nod from the shadows.

It’s ME. I’m the problem. It’s ME. Whew… (And also, “Oh NO!”)

I think of my dear friend, now home from her ordeal of brain surgery, who tells me she can walk just fine if she uses her hands.
“Your hands?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says happily, as if this is a great new development. “All I have to do is make sure I have something to hold on to. I reach forward, touch what is solid, use a hand rail or a walker, and I am just fine.”

I tell her the story of my “bear tracks.”  She laughs. 

“It’s a mistake to look back too much,” she says. “Reach forward.  Stop running. Steady yourself. You’ll be fine too.”

On my last ride home from the camp, I think about all I have experienced and shared in the space of four enormously short days.  I go to the scenes that warmed my heart the most:  There’s little ginger-haired pixie, knee-high to a grasshopper, helping in the kitchen at the dish rack.  Her favorite thing to do is to follow her big sister and put things away.  The whole world is one fantastic Puzzle and she holds each piece carefully in her hands and she looks and looks until she finds out where it belongs.  When she cannot reach, someone helps her and she claps and beams, then dashes off to get another piece of the puzzle from the drying rack.  Soon, she will know where Everything Goes. (Someone should put her in charge of coffee filters next year!)

There is the gentle dispute I overhear between two young people in their twenties about whether a tune is Irish or Scottish, whether it requires ornaments on the down or up bows.  Traditions matter to them.  They want to get it right.  It is to these we pass The Torch and they are fully invested, right up to the full measure of adorable, petty, persnickety-ish-ness. I look at them and if I blur my vision just a little, I can see them when they are eighty.  Someone else will stir the soup then.   

There is the “dance” where more people are playing in the band than dancing in the hall. There is the joy, the Harmony, the laughter sparkling from every face.  And through it all…swelling and filling every heart and crevice…is the Music.  We are here to live and breathe and play and Serve the Music.  Gluten free, fat free, sugar free, dairy free, calorie free—it’s the ultimate Nourishment.

Hopefully, having such reverence for our own culture will give us the imagination and compassion to value everyone’s rights to such customs, music, dance, food and communal rituals of celebration.  It is in these precious circles that we find a Home amongst the Home fries—whether we be Unplanned Pumpkins or tearstained monsters in disguise.  We all belong.  We all have our special place in the tribe.  Ask the Ginger-haired girl.  It’s true.  

If we walk forward on our monster feet and use our outstretched hands—reaching, touching, cooking, sewing, writing, holding, dancing, playing music, grasping on to one another, we’ll be fine. I know we will.

And there will be soup for dinner!

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Reluctance

When to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

 –Robert Frost, “Reluctance”

Greetings Dear Ones!

All day long yesterday, I wanted to write to you but the day slithered out of its corner and dragged me around the pen a few times, like the big strong lambs I was trying to vaccinate.  First, there was an “emergency” wedding suit to alter for a man who is leaving town today, then the vet came and there were oxen toenails to trim, ram lambs to castrate before the colder nights made them feel too amorous towards their aunts and mothers, and the entire flock to vaccinate for rabies.   Just after lunch, there was a moving communal tribute, “a celebration of life,” to a beloved Boston Irish Music icon to attend via an online link with fellow mourners who could not attend in person.  At some point, I learned that my dearest shepherdess friend, whom I speak to daily, collapsed and had to be taken in to hospital for urgent brain surgery tomorrow.  They have discovered a tumor.

And of course, there is all ‘the world news’—the horrors of Ukraine and Isreal and our hobbled Congress  to fret over and worry about. 

From the little dog in my lap (who is in progressive congestive heart failure), to the ever-widening circles of home, family, community, world, there are endless opportunities to choose--fear or gratitude?  Pity or prayer?  Action or acceptance?  What can be changed? What cannot be changed? What is the difference?

At moments like this, my favorite thing to do is Nothing.  I can do Nothing with the best of them.  I also happen to have one of those amazingly comfortable bums, like Lori Chapman, who says: “I like nothing more in the world than sitting on my ass doing nothing. And it’s not my fault I have this attitude because I happen to have an amazingly comfortable ass.  It may not look like much, but if you could sit on this baby for two minutes, you’d realize that getting off this ass would be a crime against nature.”

But sitting on my bum gets pretty hard sometimes, especially when I hear a certain kind of knocking at the door.  I know exactly who it is, so I run. I do not want to answer that door.

I run to the field, which is littered with stones, and fill wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow with rocks the size of fists and drag them to the edge of the roadway.  I rake. I sweep. I shovel.  I go to war against the brambles.   I run to the barn and clean it.  I run to the shop and get swept up in deadlines and projects.  I run errands.  Then I just run…on a treadmill…in the basement…going nowhere as fast as I can…while lives and eras end above me.

I go to the sheep pen, finally, and sit (on my comfortable arse) near one of the recovering rams.  In the silence, we all hear the knocking, even louder now.

“Who’s knocking?” asks Prim.

“An old friend of mine,” I say. “She’s horrible.  I came here to hide from her. Don’t let her in.”

The older sheep nod and keep munching.

“Please,” says the friend, “let me in.”

“Who is she? What is her name?” the ewe lambs wonder.  They have never met her.

“I think I know who she is…she’s that vet, right?” says Fergus, shifting uncomfortably and laying his head on my leg.

“No, it’s not the vet,” I tell him, stroking his ears.

“Who is it then?”

“Grief.”

“Please,” she says, “Let me in.  You know I will just keep chasing you.  I always find you in the end.”

 In the presence of the lambs, I decide to let her in.

Gently, she sits down beside me.

“I don’t like our little visits,” I confess. “They are too sad.”

“I know,” she soothes, “you and your inner party girl don’t have time for this.”

“It’s just that I’m so happy until you show up—I’m excited about planting bulbs in the garden, harvesting pumpkins, all the changes around the farm in autumn—and then you ruin everything.  You remind me that we are all just struggle-trudging towards death.  Party-girl and I think you are a real stinker.”

Grief giggles, smiles at me fondly.

“I love you so much,” she says sincerely. “I’m here to give you the medicine you need to help you grow.”

“Have you seen my ass lately?” I ask petulantly. “I don’t need to grow anymore! My clothes don’t fit as it is.”

“You know that’s not what I mean,” she admonishes gently. “You know the drill.  Get on with it. You know you are always grateful in the end.”

She takes me in her arms and I let her. In the darkness behind eyes slammed shut, I feel something like angel wings enfold us both.   Then the eyelids begin to leak.  First, the salty drops trickle down my cheeks.  Then they seep into my soul—drip, drip, wash, flush.  A torrent cleanses away everything that is Not Important.  Away on the stream go thoughts of chores and petty grievances.  I release that woman who thinks she needs to get everything done yesterday.  I release all desire for material wealth and pleasure and bargain farm equipment on Craigslist. I release thoughts of food and panic about how many people my septic system can handle at Thanksgiving.  Prudence Thimbleton (my harsh inner critic), who has been nagging me about the daffodils, grabs a life preserves and gets swept away in the flood.  I notice, as she goes, that her tight hair bun is askew and her Victorian swimwear is making it hard for her to stay afloat.  I smile.  It feels good to clean out a soul’s closets.
“I am all the Love that is not finished yet,” says Grief, stroking my hair. “Feel that Love.  It’s never gone.  I am here to help you transform it.  That man in Boston, who died…he is not gone.  He lit a flame in all the hearts of those who knew him whose job it now is to keep the music going.   His energy returns in those who play, those who cherish, those who promote and teach and share as humbly and enthusiasticaly as he did.  He is not gone but merely transformed—splintered into the hearts of all those who loved him and what he did. As long as anyone remembers him, and even after, he will remain.  He has left a mark not easily removed.”

“But what if none of us is as good as he was?  There will never be another like him.”

“Celebrate that,” she says. “What a gift!  Honor that someone triumphed in that way.  And try to do a little better in your own life.  Become the Love that feels “missing.”

“But my friend…” I gurgle. I can’t speak any more, as I think of her in a hospital bed…alone…facing brain surgery.

“Your friend and you have shown each other dear and loving companionship and playful co-collaboration.  Your relationship will never end until you are both done being an influence on each other, until all you have taught each other is complete. Change is always changing but Love isn’t.”

“Does that go for my relationships that have failed as well?” I sob.  “Does it apply to those painful places where I still feel so ashamed, abandoned, and misunderstood? Where I have walked away and ended things because of overwhelming disappointment and fear?”

“Of course,” says Good Grief, “Of course.  Just keep looking, learning, softening, opening.  I will hollow you and help you carve out new capacities for compassion and understanding.  You will grow deeper, stronger, wiser.  You will do better next time.  Let what hurts hurt.  Get to know it fully.”

“But my little dog…” I sputter. “How can I ever be happy again without this dear little companion to keep home and shop with me? I can’t bear the thought of losing him…”

“Your dogs, all your animals, even you yourself… these are all just forms of Love.  Love will find you, again and again, in so many ways.  It always has.  That’s how he found you in the first place, when your last dog transitioned.  Love will choose a new form and come to you again.”

“I want the OLD LOVE.  I hate change! I don’t understand why there is so much suffering in this world!” I rage.  “I hate it.  Why do bad things happen to good people?”

She holds me gently until I am empty.  Until there is nothing here at all, except a big space, bigger than ever, to be filled with What Really Matters. 

I am fragile now—prone to choosing carefully.   I choose to keep Mending. I choose to keep Loving.  I choose to keep Hoping.  Party girl smiles shyly from the corner. She’s got her dancing shoes in hand.  At some point soon, we’ll get off this immensely comfortable arse and keep Living.  I hope you do too!
Wishing you Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. If my friend Grief chooses to visit you soon, I hope you let her in.  She’s really ok.

Invisible

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” –Jonathan Swift

Greetings Dear Ones!

Ever since a pint-sized super hero in a Halloween costume came into my shop and asked me which I wanted more—“Do you wish you could fly? Or be Invisible?” I have been thinking about super powers in general and Invisibility in particular.

“Oh, I can fly already,” I inform him. “Flying is easy. Anyone can do it.  I’d like to be invisible.  Really Invisible.  That’s WAY harder.”

His brow furrows. His face becomes a soap bubble of swirling colors and emotions.

“People cannot fly!” he bursts suddenly, insisting uncertainly.

“Oh, sure we can,” I say calmly. “We have airplanes, helicopters, rockets, hang-gliders, not to mention the most important and easiest way to fly.”

“What’s that?” he asks with rounded eyes.

“Your Imagination!” I say.  He looks annoyed.

“But we don’t have wings,” he says sadly.  Another Icarus…

“No, but we have bright eyes and super powerful imaginations that can swoop us to the top of any tree or house or tower, up into the stars at night.  Anything we can see with our hearts we can fly to in our minds. Sometimes, I even go sit on the moon and eat some of the cheese there. It’s delicious. ”

He looks at me significantly, deciding (not for the first time) that some grownups probably shouldn’t be trusted.

He leaves with his mask, his sword, and his mother, who was getting some pants hemmed.  He is invisible to me now but his magic remains—enough that the part of me that is a faerie dusts off her wings and flits about the shop for a while.   She is immensely grateful for fourteen foot ceilings in the old mill building where we work.  Within a minute, she’s popped out through one of the nine-foot windows and into the Blue Beyond.  It’s a good time of year to remember we can fly—there are so many puffy white clouds that need to be bounced upon and so many turning maple trees on which to perch and survey the quilt of colors made by fields below.  And it’s lovely and poignant to join a V behind the geese and follow them for a while…

Flying is easy.

Being Invisible is hard.

Being invisible is not the same thing as not showing up.  Being Invisible is being so fully present that you go unrecognized, unseen, unfelt, unheard.   It takes incredible skill and persistence to go unnoticed—to be so good at doing something that bystanders are only conscious of the Art, not the Artist.

The best compliment I ever receive about my work is “Wow! I can’t see what you did.  It looks like you didn’t do anything.”

When I hear that, I feel like someone just gave me a huge bouquet of invisible flowers.

I love being invisible.   According to the MIT Technology Review, “To become invisible, an object must do two things: it has to be able to bend light around itself, so that it casts no shadow, and it must produce no reflection.”   I cannot exactly bend light around me but I can definitely step out of all the photos mothers take of their daughters in wedding gowns, making sure I am not even in the mirror with them.  

On a metaphysical level, I think about “casting no shadows and having no reflection…” This is the essence of any kind of Good Service that accepts and includes EVERYONE.   A “Sew-cialist” tailoring shop is no place for Shade!  Invisible diversity means we cannot tell by looking what level of education or experience someone has, whether they love to dance or draw, their marital status, religious beliefs, military service, sexual orientation or what their favorite foods are (unless it involves  mustard and it’s all down their shirt front). I can’t tell if you lost weight because you put yourself on a healthy meal plan avoiding “meats, wheats, and sweets” or instead binged on something regrettable from the back of the fridge (that should have gone to the compost pile) and gave yourself dysentery for a week.  All I know is that your pants don’t fit and I can help. When you come back, they will wrap around your waist like an invisible hug, like “nothing changed” except now it’s Better.  

One thing invisibility involves is the eyes.  Eyes are the things with light receptors.   Things that are invisible are imperceptible to the eyes but they can be felt with other senses—for example a good fiddle tune or the taste of Love baked into a home-cooked meal.

Yes, I enjoy being “Invisible.”  I’m especially glad that some of my customers cannot see what happens to their wedding dresses when they are inside out and chopped apart, looking like an out of control bubble bath all over the table.  Being Invisible can be safe and satisfying.   I didn’t think to tell the wee super hero this, but the Super Power I really want to have is to have the kind of goggles that enable me to SEE what is invisible.  Now, wouldn’t THAT be something?  To See, truly see, what others mean when they say confusing things, to see the notes passing by over head in an mad pub session where “I know, I know” the tune but cannot seem to “find” it with my fingers. 

A man called me this week and asked if I could tailor a suit for him.  He wanted to know if he should make an appointment.  I called back and told him yes, and explained how to use the website to book a time convenient for him.  Then he called again to ask if he should bring the suit with him to the appointment.   Wouldn’t it be marvelous if I didn’t have to say, “Yes, please! Unfortunately, my limited humanity prevents me from seeing the suit any other way.  I do not have the super powers required to see a suit that is not actually present with you in the dressing room.”

Sometimes we get so used to seeing things that we forget to see them at all—like green leaves on trees, a mess that needs to be cleaned up, flowers,  or a person holding up a cardboard and sharpie sign on a street corner saying “anything helps.”  I’m trying to get better at seeing what (or whom) is invisible.  I practice on simple artifacts like a sandwich I buy from the co-op at lunchtime.  I see the hands that assembled it and go on a “Little Red Hen” journey from there. Who grew the wheat? Who threshed the grain? Who ground the flour?  Who made the bread?  Who thought adding sauerkraut to a hummus sandwich was a good idea? (it really was!) There is a mind-boggling amount of “invisibility” all around us once we focus on it.  A sandwich could be just a sandwich or a portal to All that Is.

In the evening, as soon as I get home, I go to the hay loft alone to throw down another meal for my animal family.  Up there, I see easily the invisible hands of Norm, the 83-year-old farmer, touching every twine as he loads the bales one by one on the elevator for me to catch and stack in the mow. I picture him cutting his fields, raking and baling, scanning the sky for rain each time he swings the tractor on a wide turn.  His face is set in concentration but cracks like an egg into a wide smile at any excuse to be jolly.  I see my dear neice, children, and friends stacking those bales, helping with what I call “Operation Field Mouse” as we prepare the farm for winter.   Down below, Joe and Emma and MK are doing the summer clean out of the sheep fold, Roger is vacuuming up a shop-vac’s worth of cobwebs, and Former Me is neck deep in a pit, digging a new hole for the water pump.  In the Silence, they are invisible…but their energy is deeply and dearly present.  

At dusk, I wander the meadow edges and dance along the low stone walls with my eyes.  I can see the oxen teams of long ago, the workers wrestling with iron bars to get the boulders in place.  I can see the field hands in the apple trees, the housewife in her herb garden.  I wish I could hear their songs, their jokes, their stories.

 Time moves along like a fiddler doing scales with a metronome.  Showing up daily, doing all it takes to be Invisible is tough stuff.  Practice is all the hidden work we do so that our efforting becomes unseen—so that all that remains, if one has the super power to see it, is the Love that remains.

Be well, my darlings! Keep looking for Magic.  It’s in all the Right places.  May you be surrounded, always…

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

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