“We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.” C.S. Lewis

Greetings Dear Ones!

A few days ago, I reread my private journal all the way back to October. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I have stopped gritching about certain things and begun gritching about new things that once seemed too distant to be gritched about then. I’m taking this as a sign that I am making some sort of “Progress.” Progress or no, things are definitely NOT turning out as expected. (“Why should you expect otherwise?” says Prudence.) As a seamstress who is often just as much about “stress” as “seam” I would have to say the Stress occurs because things come apart at the “Seems.” Things are rarely what they seem—on the farm, in the shop, especially in the bowels of a small dog insisting he does not need to venture out into a cold, dark morning to relieve himself. One must be vigilantly discerning. “Spring time will be soon enough for that,” says he, scuttling back under the bed covers in a cloud of something regrettable. “Talk to me again in April.” I know better than to take things for granted but I can’t help it.

Take Winter. It’s not done here. Spring lasted three days and then we got a surprise half inch of what a local farmer calls “poor man’s fertilizer.” It looks as if the angels have been baking and got sloppy with the powdered sugar. “Why is it called ‘poor man’s’ fertilizer?” I want to know. “What kind of farmer are you?” she wants to know, astonished at my ignorance. I shrug sheepishly but persist with the curiosity.

“It makes the grass green,” she gruffs.

“By making it white? Is this like when I wear shades of mulberry and can pass for dead?”

“No, Silly,” she says fondly, “because it brings extra nitrogen down through the sky and puts it on the grass. You’ll see; the grass will be extra green soon.”

“Umm… doesn’t the grass always look extra green in spring?” I decide NOT to ask aloud. I just scrape the poor man’s fertilizer off my car and the brown, lucky woman’s fertilizer off my boots and go to work.

At the shop, it’s mentoring day. My student is frowning. She doesn’t want to admit that she hates the dress we are working on but I can tell the way I can tell a Jack Russell needs to go outside. Her back is stiff and shoulders tight. She is clenching something. She chose this wool—a luscious plum gabardine gifted to the project by a local benefactress. She chose this pattern—a loose-fitting flared dress, semi-fitted through the waist with princess seams. And she has worked hard on tracing, cutting, pinning, fitting, basting, stitching… But with each step she grows more exhausted, more deflated. I can tell things are not going well. When we make something we love, we gain energy. The scissors, the thread, even the needle, now appear impossibly heavy for her hand to lift. “I thought it would be… different…,” she admits finally, sagging over the cutting table. Her beautiful sea-green eyes well up with waves of guilty emotions, threatening to capsize the entire project.

“Chin up!” I insist. “You didn’t come here to make the perfect dress; you came here to learn to sew! This is all part of the creative process, which goes something like this: First, you have a vision. Then you work like hell to make it come true. And then it DOESN’T. So you want to quit. What happens next is when the true Creative in you is born. You must ask yourself, “what next?” and then try that.

She sniffs and smiles. Cautiously, she pets the fabric like it’s an animal she is afraid of. What’s next? She shrugs. I can tell she wants to quit. We are definitely at stage 4.

“Is.. too grandma…” she says, not knowing the word for “frumpy.”

“You get to decide,” I say, holding firm. “But we must make Something. We owe it to this fabric and ourselves. If you still hate it at the end, we can donate it to a charity. Maybe someone needs to attend a train-wreck and this will be just the perfect item they are searching for. But we cannot donate it like this. No one wants to go to a train-wreck dressed in scraps. It must be completed.” She giggles tearfully. I pause, seriously tempted to launch into a bunch of well-intentioned but overly-wordy cheer-leading but miraculously, I bite my tongue. She needs Silence. And I need to let her suffer, as a butterfly, to claim her own wings.

I hem three pairs of pants while I wait.

“Let’s cut it around the middle and make a skirt,” she says. There is the pleasant ring of something metallic in her voice—a bit of spring, a thin coil of steel maybe? It sounds like a Decision. We both smile with relief.

I load my lips with pins and then try to speak through them as I work.

“Mumphines a fing mmmm ah eee mphs uumm ing,” I say.

“Eh?” A non-native speaker of English, unable to read lips with pins in them, she does her best to understand. I put the last of the pins in the garment and say it again.

“Sometimes a thing just needs to be its own thing. If we listen to it, it will tell us. This dress is saying to you ‘I would rather be a skirt right now!’” She laughed and agreed.

“I hear it!” she says with eyes that have returned to sunshine at low tide.

When we have the freedom to create anything we want—in other words, not for the pleasure of a client who is paying us to make his/her/their vision-version—there is an active participation the artist must do with her substrate. Most things don’t actually wind up being quite how they start out. Somewhere there is a Greek word that means “the thing becomes its destiny” but neither she nor I speak Greek. I am left thinking Creativity is the embrace of the Unexpected and the willingness to make a dance partner of something we dislike.

We make the dress into a skirt. Her face softens with pleasure as she watches herself twirl in the mirror. The people attending a train-wreck will need to search elsewhere for their treasure. This skirt now wants to go home with her and be part of her life from Sunday mornings at church to village dances, perhaps even just cozy nights by the stove. She and the skirt have found each other, become family, and will see each other through.

Transformation is such a beautiful thing to witness. So beautiful, I wanted to write and share it with you. I know you have struggles like this too. I know that with Unexpected results—regrets, delays, mis-cuts, twisted stitches and micro-griefs that simmer in our bones until they boil over, saturating our hearts—our Creativity is just asking for us to dance with it in new ways. We, dear Menders, are those who wrestle daily with the sweet and bitter alchemy of turning thoughts into things. Once we learn how to perform our magic, using the dense matter of physical things combined with skilled physical actions, we begin to understand that we can do it any time, anywhere, and in any way we choose. We learn that anxiety, in and of itself, is not dangerous. It is merely a signal of something yearning to transform. Bravely, we free ourselves to seek New visions, to change course, to redirect—not for the purposes of avoiding suffering, but in the pursuit of True Fulfillment.

For me, it is the miracle that never grows stale. I get so excited, by my Mentee’s success, I do something Unexpected. Something Wild. Something I haven’t done in years. Something I cannot believe I am admitting to you now. A bit of green wool calls out to me from my stash. It whispers hoarsely “Nancy… your inner Matriarchal Woodsprite would look so great swaddled in Moss, with brown and tweed accents, vintage buttons, a slender waist and a flared skirt… Create! Defy all reminds you to be Unmagical or Practical. Make something no one else has made before! Grab your magic wand and thimble! DO IT!” Two hours later, I am staring moodily into the mirror at all the sex appeal of what can only be described as pure “Hermit Granny.” The waist is not as slender as I had hoped, nor is the skirt nearly as flared as Prudence’s nostrils. I have created a swamp-colored dress that looks you right in the eye and says “This woman can cook you a pot-roast you’ll never forget.” Sigh… Just point me towards the nearest train wreck!

Keep Mending, Dear Ones! With all the love in your hearts and no fear of the Unexpected, keep dreaming, daring, dancing, and Doing.

With Sew Much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. I think, if I ever design a fashion label, it will be called “Hermit Granny Woolens.”