To everything (turn, turn, turn)

There is a season (turn, turn, turn)

And a time to every purpose, under heaven

--Song by Pete Seeger

Greetings Dear Ones!

When I heard what my dear niece did this week, I told her mother immediately that she would “wind up in the blog.” And so it is. But before I “N-Bell-ish” this tale, I beg you to keep in mind throughout that Rabbit is an extremely clever young woman. Do not let the following events change your mind on that fact. That’s what makes the story so darn funny. If she were a total nincompoop, we might hear a tale such as this with compassion and perhaps a little pity. We might smile forlornly, weep a little, and then make a pious donation to a relevant charity devoted to fostering such souls. We would not roar with laughter at her folly, like her mother and I did. (We are only a tiny bit horrible—not that horrible.)

No, dear Rabbit is the type whose name appeared regularly on her school’s “Student of the Month” billboard during her Senior year of Highschool. She is an extremely competent veterinary technician who regularly assists in surgeries and works full time while maintaining straight A’s in college. She’s artistic, musical, kind and capable. When her favorite sweater developed a large hole in the arm, she knew she could fix it. The hole developed right along the underarm seam, which is often sewn with a chain stitch these days. For those who might not know what a chain stitch is, it’s a looped way of sewing that means if you cut one of the loops and pull it just right, the whole garment opens up just like a bag of dog food. (Most feed bags are stitched closed with a chain stitch.)

Rabbit got out her needle and thread and went to work. Her stitching is beautiful, just like her mother’s. (Her mother and I used to spend many hours in our youth doing counted cross stitch samplers. Such were the idylls of growing up in a land before video games…) Rabbit sewed with great concentration for a long time to close the vast hole that had opened up. She used tiny, even stitches that melted beautifully into the knitting—this hole would never open again, so small and perfect were those stitches. When Rabbit gets focused on a task, it gets DONE. She smiled happily, daydreaming as she worked, lost in “the zone” of satisfying handwork. Finally, she stretched upwards and announced that she was finished. She showed her mother, who admired her work. “Aunty Nancy would be so proud,” she said. Rabbit beamed and slipped the sweater on over her head. She put one arm in a sleeve then looked momentarily confused. Something was wrong. She couldn’t get the other arm in the other sleeve. She wiggled and struggled, growing more desperate and confused. She looked down. What the hell was going on??? Suddenly, she saw the hole in the sleeve below her, still open… What? She had closed the entire armhole from armpit to shoulder! She had completely missed the actual hole, which was lower down on the sleeve.

“THIS is why I could never be a seamstress,” she announced flatly, throwing the sweater on the floor.

For those of us whose “New Year” has gotten off to a wobble, I find this story oddly reassuring. (Especially the part that ensures job security for the likes of me!) How many of us have had a January like this so far? We think we’re on the right track. We think we know what the situation calls for. We have the tools, the talents, the drive—and we enjoy the work immensely until we discover we’ve actually made a total hash of something quite simple. Now what?

When they called to tell me what had happened, I tried to console my niece by saying, “It’s OK, Rabbit. I’ve done plenty worse. You know how you avoid mistakes like that? You have Experience. You know how you get Experience? You make a lot of mistakes like that.”

Everything looks different when it’s turned. It’s not easy to picture things simultaneously as they are in front of you, and as they would be, turned right side out again. Many’s the time I have put dress sleeves on backwards, twisted the linings of coat sleeves, and even shortened the same sleeve twice. I swear, sleeves are like savvy cattle who know damn well where to go, know it’s time to go in, but just don’t want to yet so they wind up trashing the barn instead.

Anyone can plow on in a forward direction once they get started. But Turnings—of sleeves, or socks, hearts, or cattle—these are the things that reveal true Mastery.

Take socks. “Sock heels” is my current metaphor for January. Recently, I was sitting with a fabulous young knitter who whipped up an entire cap in just an evening. “You should do socks,” I said, “You would love them.”

“I don’t want to have to turn a heel,” she admitted. “That looks hard.”

“It’s not. I don’t know why people are so scared of that.” Many people have variations on how to turn a heel. Here’s how I do it: After knitting in the round the desired length from the top of the sock down towards the ankle, I divide my total number of stitches by three, then continue knitting only one third of the stitches. The other two thirds just rest. We’ll pick them up later. First, we just knit a tiny, tight square. That’s all. Later, we’ll pick up stitches along the edge, add them to the ones that have been resting, and go on.

Turning oxen is kind of similar in that one boy has to stop, or slow down a lot, so that the other guy can walk around him. Even driving a car around a tight corner at speed, we need to pump the brakes to navigate the tension between centripetal forces and centrifugal impulsion.

Turning any kind of corner involves Pausing.

When we turn something inside out to fix it, we first need to pause. What is it we are fixing? Where do we want to turn? What needs to be mended and what doesn’t? And most importantly, what kind of snacks would best sustain us on this journey? It takes a moment to reorient ourselves to a new angle of the familiar. Pause…. Focus….

It never hurts to take a moment to think about how we are interacting with our environment and how it is interacting with us. (As I type, my environment is a whopping three degrees of F that’s cold outside.) How can we join the flow? Especially when we feel frozen? What are the signs that we are on the right path? Where can we look around us for guidance rather than trying to push things through or force our way forward? I very much believe in “inspired action”—action that is prompted by those little voices in our heads reminding us to do things like bring an umbrella, stock up on windshield washer fluid, don’t eat that thing you found in the back of the fridge… and so on.

Sometimes, we don’t feel like moving forward at all. Instead of fighting through, perhaps we need to rest. So many of us have ambitious goals or nagging obligations that we feel we must accomplish in order to get a new year/month/season off to a fresh start. But if there is anything I have learned from my work as a seamstress, it’s that turning a new corner requires more thought, more pause, more intention that one might assume.

This January has a strong sense of retrograde to it. Some of us feel thwarted, some feel stuck, some feel dissipated in odd ways. Lately, I feel like my energy is like two inches of water all over the cellar floor. There would be so much power there if it could be contained and focused but it is going in so many directions that all I am making is a sloppy mess. If I’m not careful, I might accidentally sew a bunch of armholes closed. Or even worse, leg holes. (This reminds me of the woman who once brought in all her husband’s boxer shorts and asked me to sew the front openings closed. She wanted to force him to sit down when he peed!) It’s time to pause, find my inner Stillness, maybe invest in an industrial shop vac. “Oh, Goody!” says my inner Grundalina, who wants to leave the mess and go back to bed for a winter’s nap.

Then I remember the Turning of a Sock heel: just do about a third of the work with clarity and focus. Let what’s on the other two needles rest a bit. Keep going with what needs to be managed now. The other things will catch up and be woven in beautifully in Divine Timing. Not everything needs to be done at once. This is my Valediction forbidding Perfectionism.

The beauty of learning how to turn things around is that humility makes experts of us. There is great joy in learning we can always start again, wiser, when we are ready. Our planet has just turned a great corner in the vast darkness of space. We are headed back towards the light, the warmth—though it does not feel like it yet! We are on our way, even with one armhole sewn shut and the other tied behind our back… STILL… “Turning, turning, we’ll turn round right!”

Keep turning, and resting, and Mending, dear ones! Thanks for your Good Work!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy