Greetings Dear Ones!

Spring may be in the air—it’s not yet in the barn. Each morning I go out to check and there are no little boing-ing things bouncing around in tiny wooly coats and shiny new hooves. This morning, a giant clipped-off toenail of a crescent moon, was sneaking along the horizon just before the rising sun. It was late and it knew it. Even the moon is slacking here. It reminded me of myself as I hurried to check the ladies in waiting. Waiting they were… for breakfast. They heaved themselves to their feet and I could tell that all their stories were still inside them.

I sigh. Serve hay… chop wood… fetch water... Living in a Zen koan is not as peaceful as it sounds sometimes. I am wracked with a passion deprived of sensuality. I want to bury my nose in fresh fluff and inhale a mixture of milky breath and that “new baby” smell. I want to hear a voice the size of a thimble calling for its mother. I want to watch tottering first steps turn into boisterous, impudent dance moves. I am sick of lifting up their mamas’ tails the way one lifts a lid on a pot on a stove to see if it has bubbled yet. I am here to tell you that watched pots never boil. Apparently, watched hoo-hahs don’t either.

In my longing to see what I want to see, I blind myself to all that is. How tragic to miss all the tiny miracles slipping in from the margins! I remind myself to peel my eyes. At the spigot where I draw the water, a determined little crocus opens up a yellow cup. Next to it is a tiny family of blue flowers whose names I do not know. They have come, as if by magic, from the mud that was trampled and torn by last summer’s weeding and ripping of rogue vines, some of which had (literally) climbed in the kitchen window and reached around for some salt and pepper so they could eat the rest of the house. We tore back those vines and discovered bricks beneath a six-inch crust of topsoil. Then we removed all the bricks to dig a trench so that we could have an endless supply of mud on paws coming in the door and getting everywhere, including on furniture and in sheets… (just kidding, it was to put in a drainage system). All the while, I had no idea that a tiny capsule, containing the genetic code for Beauty, was working its way to the surface—a hidden benediction from the past, a blessing from the former Gardener who chose this darling for this spot. And now it blooms. It turns its little furred eyebrows to the sun and sips with its toes the drizzle left as my full bucket splops. It’s time is Now.

All around me, I can feel the pulse of New Miracles making perennial journeys through tight, dark canals that thread us to the Past. By a pile of scree pushed up by the plow, a quartet of jonquils is just getting ready to unbend their necks and release a silent Yellow yell. There is a reddish mist in the upper branches of the cherry and apple trees as they break with a rash of new growth. I wonder if it aches a tree to stretch and grow from the inside out and burst one’s bark at the weak places? The part of me that is part tree feels such an ache.

In the shop hangs a large collection of Blessings and Promises in colorful folds all along one wall. Unlike a crocus or an oak, this fabric is not locked to any genetic code or pre-determining. It can be anything it needs to be. The Potential is wide open. All I know is that it almost certainly will not be what it was intended to be, as there is no way of knowing what the original purchaser envisioned. Her daughter bequeathed it all to me when her mother died. Certain potentials have a shelf-life. The plans and dreams for this fabric have gone to the Great Beyond with the woman who called them to her, then dispersed them like seeds on the wind. The fabric hangs now, uncommitted, in a silent row of stories waiting to be drafted then donned. They are dormant as crocuses, until the exact Right Conditions appear.

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This is as far as I had gotten with writing this week’s blog when a lamb (of course) went and ruined all of it by being born. (Ha!) Just as I am bleating about the anticipation fatigue—boom, here he is, trailing glory, like a much anticipated guest who thinks it’s fine to arrive so late to a party the hostess doesn’t know whether to bop him over the head or reheat the borscht. (Both must be done at some point, I suppose.) He’s a large singleton ram lamb full of a sense of swagger and adventure. We’ve already had to modify the jug [pen] he shares with his mother because he keeps escaping to visit his aunts. He’s off to see the world!

Immediately, I call my shepherdess friend. She wants to know what color he is. “He’s black,” I say, “Coal black, down to his skin, which is also black.”

“That’s impossible,” she insists over the phone, not able to see him. “His mother is an Ivory Muskit [pronounced “mooskit” i.e. off white] and his father was a Moorit [brown]. There is not gene for black there… He’s not black.”

“Ok,” I say, and hang up, smiling. “You’ve given birth to a Miracle,” I tell his mother. “Everything is a miracle,” she says softly, licking him gently all over, even his tiny bum.

“Yes,” I sigh happily, “I don’t care what color he is--he’s just perfect the way he is.” She makes tender agreeing rumbles in her chest.

“That’s where you are wrong,” says the old ewe, listening from the other corner. “Nothing is perfect here.”

I look around at all the half-finished projects and the debris that still needs to be cleared away… What does she think this ought to be? The Ritz? “Well, I know…” I stammer, “I’m doing my best to get the place cleaned up. Don’t worry…”

“That’s not what I mean,” she says. “Perfect is a silly term. It’s not why we are here.”

“Don’t listen to her!” says Prudence, snorting to life from her perch in the back of my head. She is gravely alarmed by such heresy. “Perfect is why any of us is here,” she shrills, “so that we can judge ourselves harshly and compare ourselves to others and see what undeserving Slackers we are and Repent!” (I note with amusement that Prudence’s vocabulary has evolved from calling us sinners to slackers. This is a big step. Yay, Prudence. You are learning, old girl! Slackers are on the right path—they’re just slow. Slackers gonna get there in the end…)

The wise old ewe shoots Prudence a sharp look. “Tell her that perfect can’t exist for a damn good reason. We are not meant to be perfect. We are meant to be HERE. Perfect doesn’t work here. Perfect is for somewhere else. Perfect might be where we came from and where we might return—but there’s no sense of being Perfect now. How could we possibly learn? No, my darlings, we are not here to be Perfect. Don’t wish that on anyone. We are here to learn.”

She is resting on her sternum, with her legs tucked neatly out of sight, looking a bit like a hen on a nest, only sheep-shaped. Her name is Willow. I have been feeding her special grain all winter because her teeth fell out last year. Sheep lose their teeth as a function of age and don’t live too long after but she is going strong. She’s been going out on the new grass, gumming it for all she is worth. She seems excited to taste another Spring.

“We don’t always leave when you think we should or come when you want us, you know,” she says blinking slowly. “We have our own Time. Yours is not to control the hours but to live them.”

I bow my head… I’ve been in so much of a rush to get nowhere lately—mostly what I do is hold my breath and run muddled, from workshop to barn, to house, to garden, to workshop, getting less and less “done.” It feels so good to sit, expand, exhale. This week, there has been a wedding dress, a Harris Tweed jacket, ten pieces of toddler mending bombed out at the knees, a sick chicken, some long underwear, a lost bank statement, a biker jacket, some misplaced car keys, and a dog with an enlarged heart who could not stop coughing until I dropped everything and reported to the nearest veterinary clinic to hand over whatever money was required for him to feel better. Of course, he stopped coughing the moment I passed him through the open car window at the curbside appointment. (I swear he gave that vet a conspiratorial wink!)

A vast swirl of worries, anxieties, and things that make us feel crummy seems to be crushing a lot of us right now. We need good and proper Mothering. I tell myself it is Ok to be exhausted and to rest. It’s ok to grieve. It’s ok to not make progress. Sometimes simply maintaining our place costs us effort enough. We cannot force what is coming any more than we can prevent what is leaving. It is a time of Transition—and transitions are always full of unexpected blessings and annoying delays or challenges from all that is Divine and Feminine. It is these achings and breakings—of egg shells and membranes and soil and bark—that usher in the New Life we have longed for. It’s coming yet. With horn buds and eyelashes, it will come when we least expect it, even if we are tired of expecting it. And it might not look at all like we expect.

The temptation to skip publishing this blog is as strong as ever this week. But I want you to sit with me a moment—here in the quiet barn. Come…be still… The warm and sleepy newborn has a tummy full of milk. The other ewes, seeing we have no cookies, get bored and begin to nap. A busy bantam is making a nest in a hay feeder. There is a secret cache of free-range eggs hidden in the feed room. Song birds are pilfering nesting materials from the loft. In the meadow, a robin steals a discarded fluff of wool caught on a bramble. In vernal pools in the forest, tiny frogs proclaim their lust. What timeless miracles of mothering are happening where you are? What can you notice from your perch?

Miracles follow miracles and wonders never cease. Now is all we have. Drink it up. Refresh your spirits, Dear Ones. We’ll get back to the mending as soon as we can.

With sew much love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy