“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when [people] are afraid of the light.” –Plato

Merry Blog-iversary Dear ones!

We start year three today! Woo-hoo! Like most normal causes for celebration—including my sister’s birthday, also today—it seems oddly weird and somewhat treasonous to think of making a big deal of it right now. Writing over a hundred and two blog posts about Sewing and yet never once teaching anyone a single useful thing about how to sew seems a trivial accomplishment in the light of a nation bereft of toilet paper and struggling to learn how to fashion rectangles into viable facial shields against an invisible killer. So I will keep my hooting and hopping and grizzly, two-fisted consumption of cocoa products as discreet as possible.

Two years ago, this journey started with an icy fist gripping my entrails from within and twisting them around each finger the way one might absent-mindedly basket-weave a strand of beads. I was petrified. What if no one reads this? (Scary theme music)(Summon the toilet paper! I’m going to need a Lot!) What if everyone I know reads this? (Worse scary theme music)(Forget the toilet paper; I might never need it again!) My friend Emmy, who was living with me at the time, watched me hit the “post” button and immediately want to vomit. I have no idea how I went to work that day and behaved normally. (Ok, “normally” might be too big a word here…) Since then, a small, dedicated, self-selecting subset of the population—a number comfortingly between “no one” and “everyone” chooses to tune into these rambles. I keep waiting for the weekly Fear to subside. It never does. I have the same fear with every single customer, no matter how many times I have cut into other people’s clothes over the years—will I get this right? Please, Dear God, don’t make this experience another grim “Opportunity to Learn!” Make this one a humble, monotonous, unquestioned Success.

However, despite all I think I’ve learned about garden-variety Fear from years of snuggling with it in my bed each night, it does not compare to what I have been feeling lately. This morning, as I write, I have a first cousin on oxygen in the ICU, struggling for breath and survival, who tested positive for Covid-19 yesterday. Our distraught extended family is circled in prayers threaded together over a vast distance of texts, posts, and phone calls. I worry for all my dear friends and loved ones with pre-existing conditions. I know actual people who have lost actual people. The news, staggering as it is, is not about anonymous statistics. I cry when I hear stories of people saying their last farewells by phone or songs held up to a dying person’s ear, through the enduring generosity of a kind nurse willing to hold her own cell phone. Will this be US? Meanwhile, I don’t know how thoroughly I have to scrub the cauliflower before it is safe to feed to the hermits of Hermit Hollow. Life feels surreal. Scattered yet confined, isolated yet united, I am very, VERY much Afraid.

When I start to notice I am living in fear, I realize I am relying on my own strength—strength which is more suited to building split-rail fences or patching denim crotch tears than existential angst in the time of a global pandemic. Vainly, I resist the suffering; I resist the news. (I really ought to resist eating the other hermits’ chocolate—which, unlike mine was not vigorously consumed in the early hours of the Easter sunrise.) It’s time to Surrender and remember that a lot of how things happen is not really up to me. (Ok, maybe the chocolate is…) It’s time to seek the Light, or at least brandish a seam-ripper towards the Bad Voices, Goblins, nightmares—all the ways Fears speaks to us in the night and tell us it is not safe to sleep, not safe to trust, not safe to rest—as we bob in the Dark on our solitary mattress rafts, adrift on a threatening sea of uncertainty.

Courage, I am learning, is not the same things as Fearlessness.

Courage is getting up each morning, getting dressed, (I guess pants are optional these days) and deciding to be My Own Boss. This epidemic is helping me refine a thing or two about how to be my own boss—a very tricky thing at the best of times, which this clearly Isn’t. As C.E.O. of a new start-up female-owned, small-business LLC, I had to invite myself in, sit myself down, explain to myself that while my work was Excellent, I needed let myself go (I was very sorry to hear that) and that I would not be getting a severance package, health benefits, or a “golden handshake.” (Sorry, shaking hands is against the law now.)

I was kind of ok with it because I have other side-hustles I boss myself to do. Being “Self Employed” means I cannot (technically) ever be fired. As a writer, I thought Now was the perfect time to sequester myself in a cozy nook in Hermit Hollow and write a steamy bodice-ripper of a novel in which a frumpy, middle-aged seamstress uses “Fifty Shades of Guttermann” to defeat a Virus, mend the Ozone, up-cycle some old jeans, and ultimately snag the love of her life, whom she recognizes as a distinguished older man who lets her fill his basement with baby chickens and bummer lambs and does not complain once about the smell… (This has Best-seller written all over it, eh?)

And then I am back to the Fear—and the horrors of a clogged head facing an empty page, or a clogged page facing an empty head… If I have learned anything about writing in the last two years is that Writing about running half-naked through the streets of my local village is far more terrifying (and exhilarating) than actually doing it. (I didn’t even know I was doing it at the time; it came so naturally to me…)(see last week’s entry, “Cover Up!”) Then a friend reminds me: “If you are not scared, you’re not writing.” I wonder; when did writing become so scary? When did Living?

I started writing when a first class stamp only cost a dime. My grandparents lived a seven-hour drive away from us. For my ninth birthday, one of my grandmothers gave me some pretty stationery and matching stamps with roses on them and asked me to write her a letter. I did. Immediately, as soon as I sealed it, I thought of more to say so I started a second letter to the other grandmother. Then, so as not to have the Great Grandmother feel left out, I wrote to her too. Thus began a habit that went on, intermittently, for the next twenty years until one by one, my correspondents perished—let’s hope of natural causes and not split infinitives, misspellings, and run-on sentences in loopy adolescent scrawl…. Reporting to my grandparents on a regular basis became the means of permanently bifurcated my life: There was the life I was living—going to school, feeding the animals, trying to keep my bed made and my shoes where I could find them—and the life I carefully observed myself living, within the chaos of rambunctious siblings and harried parents, so that I could make a Good Report later. I was an embedded correspondent, a dispassionate and unselfconscious narrator recording and describing every triumph, nuisance, or crime I witnessed. Gradually, I became conscious of seeking out opportunities to entertain. A sense of enjoyment is a priceless attribute. The people I lived with were remarkably unaware of how entertaining they were. Like a bad tabloid, sensationalized gossip usually won the day, particularly as it applied to my sisters, whose beauty rituals and dramatic brawls rivaled the Kardashian’s. What is Writing anyway, at its deepest core, but a fundamentally human urge to Tattle?

My favorite correspondent was my great-grandmother, a German orphan/refugee who lived to be 99. She only had an eighth grade education but she wrote the most entertaining letters about her cat, in flowing script that was so pretty I wanted to frame it. A convert to Catholicism, she carefully marked a tiny cross and the letters “JMJ” at the top of each letter—her pious reminder that the Holy Family (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph) was watching over us always, in our thoughts, in our words, even in our private correspondence.

Years later, I gaze with freshly peeled eyes through my crumbling, lurching prose, into an adolescent world of aching loneliness. Then, as now, some of my writing is acutely yet hilariously self-lacerating. Some is just painfully embarrassing. (I look back on two years of blogging and feel much the same way.) The letters I enjoy the most are also the most Honest—when I was not attempting to tell a tale in a way that made me out to be slightly better than my sisters or brothers—when I wrote like a Polaroid camera not a propagandist. What strikes me most about my writing then was that it was Fearless. Childhood, they say, is our only chance to have a truly first-person experience of life. We have no context. We know no other stories than the ones we are told. We need to experience the “outside” in order to see ourselves from a new vantage point, from the second or third person perspective. Childhood is when we learn for the first time about Monsters. I had no idea then that stories, especially the stories I had to tell, could ever hurt anyone.

As an adult writer now, writing to distant people who may not love me or hold me in the same regard as the women who taught me how to stitch, knit, and cook, I am not fearless. It took fifty years but FINALLY, I am more afraid of what will happen if I don’t live according to the call of my spirit, than what might happen if I do. I believe our interests are what draw us towards our own core. Deep joy is a signal that we are on the Right Path, doing the Right Work, loving the right people, even if it is dangerous. We must disregard the fear and keep homing in on the Joy. Such Joy, even in the face of Fear is like a big jump on a trampoline—sometimes we catapult ourselves beyond our usual context and struggle for a moment to remember who we are used to being—before we sink, sigh, and decide we must Jump Again. Fear doesn’t have to be a Toxic Blocker—it can be the nutritious anxiety that prompts us to act in ways that are challenging but necessary for our growth. Those of us falling victim to our current fears are only sensing Peril—not Opportunity. Good, healthy Fear helps us to focus keenly on where those opportunities lie. (Just ask any rock climber!)

Courage is not the opposite of fear; Love is. What is Courage but the sure knowledge that we can turn our fear into Love? That we can meet hatred with Kindness; we can meet pain with Art; we can meet grief with stunning poetry or Song. We are all afraid of dying, yet dying is inevitable. Fear cannot change that. It’s Living that’s the challenge.

When we ditch fear, we can focus on self-expression, rather than self-avoidance or self-justification. Then, our motivation transitions from proving our worth to exploring our depths. It’s ok for this to be Uncomfortable. As a friend of mine once told me, “Who needs to live for Joy only? What the hell? There’s an entire emotional palette to choose from—why not live them all and just let yourself BE?”

Are you as scared as I am? Does it paralyze you like a rock some days? Be open to yourself and your deep mystery, Dear Ones, especially in these exhausting times. Make room for yourself and welcome yourself. If you pay attention properly, you will never find a better teacher than your fears. Like mine, they may never go away—but practicing Courage, in tiny actions, will give you Comfort. Your Faith will emerge from your fidelity to the insights you gain—that to love each other (and ourselves) Just As We Are is the ultimate expression of Grace. Fear is not the boss of us. There is much to celebrate in that.

Thank you all for your Kindness and your Courage and the many blessings your Good Work brings. I am so grateful to each and every one of you who reads, shares, comments, and supports me on this journey. I could not do it without you. You make it Real. All of it—the fear, as well as the Love.

Let the Mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy