If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” –C.S. Lewis

Greetings Dear Ones!

I did a very bad thing this week. It wasn’t a terrible thing, but in the same way that one rain drop does not cause a whole flood, it was definitely going to lead to worse things over time and get me into situations that would lead me down slopes more slippery than my daily trip to the barn with sloshing water buckets. Taken to an exaggerated extreme, such slopes could lead one to take candy from strangers, then babies, then who knows where the trails of depravity lead…perhaps to the Capitol Building???

I’m not even sure I could explain what I did to those of you have never attempted to make piping for a shirt. Piping, by definition is: “The ancient Scottish link between music and noise” AND also “a narrow fold of material used to decorate edges or seams.” For our purposes, it is that little bit of color that sticks out around the seams of cowboy shirts…

Anyway, the details don’t really matter. The sequence of what happened went like this:

1. I did not research what I wanted to do. I charged ahead without doing any genuine fact-finding. I was arrogant enough to think I could wing it. The truth is that I have not made piping for a long time (such shirts have been out of style since the 80’s) and I needed a refresher. Two minutes on YouTube or a phone call to a fellow Seamster would have done the trick.

2. I cut a whole lot of fabric the wrong way. I cut it way too small. I did not allow for the necessary slack, for a Margin, for error. It slays my sense of cosmic humor when the biggest error is in not leaving room for error. To make it perfectly, I needed room for it NOT to be perfect. Ha! (Pause to slap the knee…)

3. Within minutes of attempting to get my zipper foot to sit next to the cord, I found myself in a desperate fight for alignment. The more I struggled, the more things shifted out of place. (How much more metaphysical can we get?)

4. A little voice said, “pssst… excuse me…but this is not working. You cut the fabric strips the wrong width.”

5. “Shut up, little voice,” said I boldly, “I am going to make this work. I cannot be bothered cutting new strips. That took me a whole ten minutes of life and I am NOT going back there.”

6. “But LIFE is a Spiral Path, Dear One—it’s time to return to the beginning and begin again,” said the Gentle Voice. “There’s even a C.S. Lewis quote about this very thing!”

7. “Be GONE, Little Voice” I bellowed, hunching closer to my task, unwilling to admit defeat. “I got this. I’ll be fine.”

8. For forty-five minutes, I laboriously inched and squinched (that is a word in Nancyland. You get it by combining squeezed + pinched) my way along the cord, begging to the two edges to meet peacefully next to the cord.

9. Occasionally, things slipped out of control and I stitched right over the cord. (A big no-no.)

10. I had to use tweezers to make it perfect.

11. After nearly an hour, I was trembling, nearly blind, and bathed in sweat from having nearly caught my fingers in the needle several times.

12. I had to face reality. This was Unmanageable.

I HATE REALITY. I want to kick it in the shins. Especially when it is not the reality I wanted. Grundalina stumbled off in search of cookies. The inner teenager slammed doors and used curse words she’s not allowed to use. Prudence lectured. The inner child sobbed. She wanted to play something way more fun than “Let’s be a seamstress” today. Underneath their caterwauler, I heard the little voice whisper, “Do the Right Thing. You’ll feel better.”

So I did. And I did.

The moral of the story—for those of you who do not detest such things—is:

Help yourself out. Check your facts, REAL facts, which sometimes involve measuring things with sticks with numbers. Be clear about what you are attempting to do. Seek help or collaboration. Very rarely is any one of us the wisest or most experienced in the room. LISTEN to that help. Especially when it comes from within.

Our lives, our little daily lives—I’m NOT talking about revolutions or governments or corporations--but our own daily little tiny lives, demand great courage and actions that sometimes don’t have the luxury of endless thought or research or committee meetings for all concerned. Sure, we are going to be hasty and make mistakes. We are going to leave the house without socks on, reverse the vehicle through the garage door without opening it first, and pour orange juice instead of milk in the coffee. “Mistakes you can repent at leisure,” sniffs Prudence haughtily. Usually, as soon as we realize we make a mistake, we try to fix it.

But sometimes we don’t.

And that’s when we deliberately choose something Bad. That’s the moment we could choose something that builds the Courage Muscle instead.

My customer will have no idea I wasted fabric, as we had plenty (thank Heaven!!) I will not charge him for the wasted time. But a crime has been committed: Against myself. I ignored my own inner voice and robbed myself of at least an hour’s pay and my own self-respect. This is not petty theft. I knew what I was doing was wrong and YET I CONTINUED. I thought, in my narcissism, that if I willed it, it would turn out ok. It didn’t. AND I KNEW BETTER. Respecting ourselves means listening to ourselves tell the truth, then believing what we hear.

Being willing to say “I am not doing very well; I know I could do better,” is one of the most validating things we can do for ourselves—if we mean it honestly and are not brokenly trying to shame ourselves, or cajole others for pity. If we cannot listen to ourselves in little ways, how can we listen in bigger ways? How can we build trust in ourselves? If we cannot hear our own voices, how will we hear the voices of others and realize that we are the same? How can we build unity in our neighborhoods, communities, nations, and world if we don’t realize we are fundamentally the same? This is step one towards treating each other as proper equals.

With horror and astonishment, we look at the misdeeds of those in power and say “they should have known better.” Well, they did. We say “they should have done the right thing.” Yet they didn’t. Some still won’t. They have incredibly flabby Courage Muscles. (And shirts with no piping…)

I’m sad. I want them to fix our world. But then I sit down to make a shirt and realize I ain’t got a mere “mote” in my eye. I lie to myself every day. I say I will clean out the fridge and exercise and play my scales and practice the fiddle and harp and fight tooth decay and that mold that is under the sink…. And I don’t. I pretend I can handle things I can’t. (Like when I thought it might be a good idea to put two hundred pounds of chicken feed on a sled to get it down the icy hill to the barn and it left without me.)

Eventually, I was proud of the shirt I made for that man. It looks beautiful. He will never know the struggle I had with the piping. I’m glad I had the humility to start over and make it better. It was worth it.

Most of us will never get the chance to live our messy lives out there in the open on the big screen for others to judge (And there’s a mercy! I’d have to scrape my boots for sure.) But in the quiet of our little workshops, we can be in dialogue with those soft, little, inner voices—the Crickets of our conscience—who tell us how we could rise up and be Magnificent in the tiniest of ways. As a dear friend put it recently, “If enough of us were half-decent raindrops, we could get together and make a drink for a new flower.”

Most of us have one of Prudence’s maiden aunts in our heads, crying out “Enough of your half-assed-slap-dashery, you Wastrel!” We hear it directed at ourselves; we shout it at each other. This is not the message. Go deeper. For there is nothing like hearing that sweet little Cricket whisper “You are Enough. You are a Unique and Precious Being who is dearly loved. Share that—that which is the best within you—with this aching world.” If you can’t hear it for yourself today, then hear it now, from me, an unknown, obscure fellow Slacker in a little shop in a little town in a little state in a great big hurting country. If an angry leader can say it to a mob of murderous lunatics, I can say it too:

You are so dearly Loved. Thank you for doing your best—especially when no one sees the cost but you. Gentleness will be our strength. Get your courage muscles ready—we have a lot of Mending to do.

Yours aye,

Nancy