“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” –Parker Palmer

Greetings Dear Ones!

A tiny pixie, probably age 4, enters my shop with her slightly older (probably 6?) sister. The pregnant servant/queen who attends them limps as though glass slippers are hell on feet that have spread like cheap paint during her third trimester. She has a bag of palace mending she is never going to get around to before the next princess is born. She plops it on my counter with a heavy sigh. One look at her little ones and I can clearly see their fairy bloodlines. They have bright curious eyes that dart around the shop and curly ringlets of hair that squirm and dance as if they are made of horsehair and fiddle tunes. The little one is wearing wellie boots on the wrong feet and a grubby set of tattered satin wings that droop down her back. The Domesticated sister, who has her shoes on the right feet, is one of those very eldress-in-the-making types who announces in a stage whisper “This looks like the kind of place where we mustn’t touch anything.” She glares at her ward, then looks at me with exaggerated sweetness, clearly expecting some form of emotional Scooby snack for her prim reminder.

“Rubbish!” I announce. “I always let people play with my most dangerous toys. Have a pin cushion but be very careful—one drop of blood and you will have to stay here and iron with me for a hundred years.” (The queen looks at me swiftly and brightens.) The older one’s eyes widen as she silently accepts as if it is a hot coal the spiky tomato I hand her. The pixie ignores me and heads for the wall of thread. She considers it thoughtfully before making her decision.

“This is NOT a rainbow,” she states flatly.

“No, you’re right, it’s not. I have all the cool colors on one side and all the warm colors in another section and all the earth tones on another section. It’s not really a rainbow.”

“It looks like it should be,” she says disapprovingly. “It’s trying to be. It should be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.” Emphatically, she chops the air into segments as she speaks. She turns to her sister, who has already lost interest in the pin cushion.

“Betend I am a fairy and this is where I make rainbows to send out,” says the Rainbow Expert, attempting to climb onto my work table.

“You can’t touch anything,” hisses the Big Sister. (Prudence adores this big sister and smiles at her fondly.) We are all waiting for the queen to intervene, as the pixie plans her ascent. Clearly, the tired queen has downgraded her Mothering Alert levels to basics like poisoning, drowning, tooth decay and anything to do with naked flames—leaving an opening for a middle-management position to this aspiring sibling. She opens her mouth to take charge and before she can get the word out, the furious pixie stamps her foot and says in a voice that makes vines grow up the slender trunk of her neck:

“I SAID BETEND!!!”

Betend… Be…Tend… How much I LOVE that word. I know her speech will get corrected over time and she will start to say the more false version of this—“pretend.” But I far prefer betend. Betend is not about pretending anything. Children aged 4-6 embody the seriousness of such a concept. There is nothing fake or false or “practicing” about it. To Betend is an invitation to get so lost in the game you have no idea what “real” is—Real is what is swirling forth from the most magical, rainbow-obsessed center of you. You see with different eyes; you hear with different ears. In tattered satin, flight is possible.

Long after the magical family leaves the workshop, I dwell in the land of Betend. “Betend I am a Kind Old Crone who must magically do all this mending so I can bring sacks of grain back to the talking animals at the Land of Lost Plots…” I think as I sort through the basket of mending. I always know I am getting creative when I have no price list to go by. When people bring in wedding gowns, suits, bridesmaids’ dresses, pants to be hemmed—there is a price list for each of these things. I have done them so many times I know how long they will take and what the market will bear. The “creativity” ebbs and dwindles into deep grooves around protocols and best practices. Even complicated things become just “busy work” when one has done them hundreds of times. This family’s mending will require lots of ingenuity. Each snag, tear, or rip is as unique as the being who wore it and had An Incident Involving the Laws of Physics. There is no price list for this. I set a thimble on my finger, choose a pretty good color from my failed rainbow and get to work.

I think a lot about Being, Tending, Be-Tending. I feel my utter happiest around people who are Betending. To BeTend is not an act of artifice. It is not the “fake it til you make it,” thing. There is no Fake. I am not really “a Seamstress”—but I am a darn good Betender. I be here and tend to my customers and delight in the magic of the game other folks consent to play with me. I can hear my inner five-year-old-say ‘betend you are the customer and you rip your pants and I help fix them’.

I am not a farmer, I Betend to have sheep. I Be and I Tend. One of the lambs has taken up residence in the kitchen where he is Betending he is a dog. He has no idea how to be a sheep any more than I know how to be a proper farmer, whose animals reside in a barn. But here we Be. And we Tend. We show up and Play the Game and do our best. We deal with the bossy ones who try to micro-manage our roles. And it is ridiculously Good Fun most of the time, with the right attitude, beverage, or a damn good nap.

Another game I like to play is Betending I am a writer. On April 16th, I celebrated the third anniversary of this blog. Yet again, I thank my dear friend Emerald Rae who forced me to start the process! I promised myself that no matter what, I would not quit for three full years. I would reassess then. By then, I just knew I would be [____] (fill in the blank with anything sophisticated, organized, prosperous, thriving, well-behaved, always-know-where-the-car-keys-are kind of Successful you want) and able to look back on all I have learned with that Sage Composure of a Crone-done-good. I would be so much wiser and more practiced then…

Well… let’s just admit that… um, three years have passed…

In three short blinks, I’ve moved twice and traded a tiny cottage in the Enchanted Forest for one with three times as much land ten times as wild with a gazillion times more mud and chaos. I’ve opened not one but TWO businesses—teaching Music Together, and my own tailoring shop. I’ve worked as a subcontractor to a top-secret design firm. I try like hell to meet my own blog deadline every week. Mostly, I do, except when extreme grief, depression, or cunning car keys outrun me. How about that year when a pandemic hit… when dear souls departed without farewells, when both businesses all but failed, my shoulder froze, the weeds refused to spit out what was left of the farm, and our entire planet panicked about how it was going to wipe its bum. We thought we had seen the last of sanity and toilet paper in our lifetimes and anyone with a sewing machine got busy diapering faces instead of bums.

One thing I have noticed, after three years of this grueling weekly blog schedule, is that writing never gets easier. Neither does the need to do it recede. Doing it seems dreadful; not doing it feels worse. I thought I would surely quit after three years; now I remember that a traditional apprenticeship is seven--there being so much to learn and practice in any skill, whether it’s candle-making, blacksmithing, or discussing dung in undies. Ooof… I’m not even half way.

Secretly, I have longed for these three years to be complete so that I could end my promise to myself without guilt or regret, while proving I actually DO have the self-discipline to do at least 85% of what I set out to do. That much I can celebrate. But more than that, way more, I still want to find that sweet spot of authentic service where my own gift of Gladness—all the things that spark my heart or humor—might meet a need in someone else who wants to share that Gladness. That is where, I realize now, I have wanted to go with this journey all along. And it is still ahead…

To go to war weekly with the parts of ourselves who want to Create Something Useful in the face of crippling self-doubt is an extremely hellish but necessary form of self-care. You, Dear Ones, Fellow Creatives, understand all too well that Creativity is an act of Healing the part of us that was “domesticated” before we were six. It requires us to hear old voices saying we will never be good enough and stop up our ears like Ulysses, lest we be dashed upon the rocks of Public Opinion. Playing to public opinion causes us to sacrifice our hearts, our pride, sometimes even our gifts in order to assume labels that force us into genres where we can be compared. I have done that and felt bitten. I have leveraged gifts for praise and felt icky. I have held back and felt choked. I have been honest and felt Clean. Rejection is painful, especially from those we want to love us. I have learned that my friends are not necessarily my fans. That’s ok. Not just in politics, I have had to feel my way towards truly forgiving those who do not value what I value. None of us want to be “fixed”—we just want to be seen, known, Loved. I am here to fix pants, not people.

I do really want to alter this blog, however, and the three-year mark seems like a good time to do that. None of us learns to knit with the idea that evermore we shall churn out only yards of scarves in garter stitch. We all want to make Fair Isle, Fisherman’s Knit, or grubby lace of some sort—or perish trying. In order to improve my craft a bit, I need to stop being so slap-dash about it. It might need to take up more than dawn on a Wednesday. I see that grinding out endless, long-read, first drafts is exhausting and deprives me of time to Betend other games in my life. One game I would love to play is Editing this Stuff and Creating Something Jolly or Useful out of it—perhaps a slim volume the right size for propping under a rickety table leg, or something one might like to poke through in the outhouse, in the unlikely event one cannot locate one’s cell phone or a Montgomery Ward Catalogue.

No matter what, it shan’t be easy. There is a fierce unholy battle going on between our bossy, domesticated six-year-olds, who have paid close attention to Prudence and the Crabbit Ones, and our feral fairy five-year-olds who know that disorganized rainbows do need our help. This is a heroic and serious battle—many pants will be ripped in this fight.

Just DO it. That THING, the thing calling you from the center of your heart—that tune or song or mountain or film or book or painting or baby or farm or garden that stirs your spirit to Betend it—it is your call from Heaven. You must help with Creation. Answer it! We each have something precious within us that we must either share with the world or rob from it. Put your wellie boots on wrong, grab your tattered satin wings, and BETEND, my darlings, Betend with all your might. Hell, if I can, you can too.

Be well, my Dear Ones! Thanks for coming with me on this journey. I enjoy your company more than you could ever know. I am humbly indebted to you Sweethearts who “Like, comment, subscribe, share,” and bolster me with your faith and generosity. Thank you so much!

Let the Mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy