“Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for its own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one’s thoughts” Mary Ellen Chase

Greetings Dear Ones!

I woke up this morning in “The Land of Lost Plots” to find several trees down, including a towering cherry tree that had a long low bough out to one side that I had already picked out as the perfect site for an old fashioned rope swing. I was going to make the wooden seat wide enough for two, like a courting swing, with nearby hammocks for arboreal-minded guests. There was going to be fresh-squeezed sugarless lemonade and everything… But now, there’s going to be a hella lotta prime cherry firewood instead. Life isn’t giving me lemons or lemonade—it’s giving me cord wood. And I’m grateful!! Lemons won’t keep me as warm in winter as cordwood, and winter lasts about eleven months a year around here…

Yesterday, one of the strongest, most enthusiastic Hermit Hurricanes came to visit with his weed-whacker and managed to hack a swath of land around three sides of the house, until he ran out of string and the remnants of Hurricane Isaias overtook him and started to prune the trees. Both have cleared a bit of breathing room around the house, which is looking a little less like a forgotten cottage in a fairytale and more like someone who just decided to shave after ten years and forgot how. It’s Rough. Last week, I took my little push mower, set it at the highest setting and gamely plowed a path to the barn. It was ninety degrees out and I mowed until we both ran out of gas. In the process, I ran over a lost boot—a really sturdy, size 10, steel-toed work boot someone had left in the meadow. This land is full of overgrown garden plots, mysteries and surprises. Taking a brush mower around here will be like sailing into an unknown harbor and having no idea where the rocks are. Who knows what sunken traps or treasures lie beneath these waves of grass?

I can see lilies, peonies, and phlox struggling to avoid strangulation by rogue bittersweet and marauding wild grape. They are putting up a diminishing fight as they bow backwards into the engulfing green. There is a bramble hedge only a Knight in armor could sunder with swords to reach the sleeping blueberries locked within the walls of their keep, over which sagging rafters, grey as driftwood, signal a missing roof once upon a long ago… It’s like an ancient blueberry cathedral in ruins.

Decades ago, this place was dearly loved and cultivated by an endlessly energetic Gardener. I can read her love in the still-thriving patches and plots of raspberries, grape, blackberry, and fern. I know her name was Nell and I know she sewed (her antique treadle machine is still in the attic) and she kept sheep and spun their wool. She was into photography, chickens, beekeeping, and Feeding Others. I feel her welcome and her presence as I now take up the work she left behind.

She was happy here. I am too. I wander the mini orchards of apples, peaches, pears. Small fruits cling to the branches—it’s just about harvest time for some of the peaches but they are tiny, Unencouraged. Everything needs pruning, clearing, amending. The land, like my own Spirit, feels simultaneously abundant and ravaged, full of Possibilities and in need of Enforced Tenderness. Who doesn’t feel like this these days?

As always, my mind turns to how my exterior world is so often a metaphor for the interior landscape of one’s thoughts. (I am quite certain there ARE random, abandoned, size 10 boots all over the place up there! Prudence trips over them and tuts in disgust. ) This property is crying out for Good Boundaries, weeding, prioritizing, and Sensible Efforting to make the dream come true. It’s a Big Dream. I love working (I tell myself I have just bought myself an outdoor gym) but I feel a little overwhelmed—like if I pause and gawk too long, the weeds will snag me, drag me under, and eat me too. (Was that the grizzly fate of the mystery boot wearer?) I keep wading through grass, like it is water in a bay at low tide, searching for a life jacket to rescue my hopes.

And THERE it is, on a scrawny peach tree, sagging apologetically into the wind. There, on the end, on the tiniest branch, clings a clump of yellow velvet the size of an egg. There is the flesh and seed of New Life. There is the future… It comes at the weakest part, the smallest, most hopeful growing edge, not the strong trunk. The sweetness is located at the most vulnerable part of the tree—the newest and bravest part—the part where the tree is Reaching. This thought is like a boot I have just hit with my mower.

Trees need a few years before they fruit. They need good soil and strong roots. They need to endure a winter or two. They need to Establish themselves and claim their space. And ever, no matter how thinly, they need to keep reaching. So it is for us Spirit Farmers too.

I think about the sewing shop and how starting a business is very much like growing a tree or re-creating a homestead on land that has gone feral. It is true for growing the Life of our dreams as well. There is something to be said for the patience it takes for things to bear fruit and that a harvest is not only about picking the peaches and apples in front of us, but tending them all year long, before the buds even turn the trees to bee-bridesmaids in Spring. There is water that needs to be hauled, manure that needs to be valued, collected, spread as mulch. The soil needs to be fed before we can be.

For musicians, this means doing all our drills, all our daily practice, all our twenty or ten thousand hours that we plan to commit to whatever level of amazingness we are willing to risk being. For cooks, this means waiting for the flavors to meld, holding back on the spices, then going for it when needed, always stirring and watching, “listening with the nose.”

There is no end to the Process. There IS NO END to the work. We must live within one day only, like addicts, content with all we cannot do, finding peace where we are. We need the balance of strong roots and a sinewy, muscular core that holds up in hurricanes. And we need to reach, to risk, to hope. At the tips of our outstretched fingertips—that is where the fruits of all our laboring will be.

A recent customer says to me “I love sewing. I actually sew a lot but this bridesmaid gown and getting something to fit myself while I’m in it is a bit beyond my scope, that’s why I have to come to you. I’m glad you’re here. I know I could never sew for other people—it’s too scary.” She is acknowledging my bravery. She’s right. I acknowledge it too. I have spent years “Reaching” for these skills, learning from failures, enduring winters of “no harvest,” for this Sweet Moment when I can offer this beautiful young woman the fruits of my labors. It’s a Glorious Sweetness indeed. There are few things sweeter than knowing you have what it takes to help someone.

I know of many people, especially recent graduates, who feel so stalled by the disasters occurring in our world right now. Jobless, Rudderless, they feel stuck, depressed, Unencouraged, Overwhelmed. I get it. I feel that way too… A LOT. 2020 feels like the Year of Lost Plots for all of us. May it also be the year of Surprise Fruits! All I can say is Stay Vulnerable. Life is about seeking our edges. Keep Reaching! My Darlings, keep reaching like it’s a Yoga Class where you have supreme confidence in your leotard and you haven’t overdone it on the beans for lunch. Go to the edge where you can grow the most and see what happens next. Who knows who you may one day feed. It might even be you. Let the Mending Continue!!

With so much love for your Good Work,

Yours Aye,

Nancy