“Thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find—Nothing.” –Aesop, “The Goose with the Golden Eggs”

Greetings Dear Ones!

Me and zippers are at it again. One customer alone dropped four anoraks on me this week—all of which need new zippers. If there’s one thing I have learned about zippers, it’s that when someone comes in and tells you one is broken, they are almost always Right. But when they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always Wrong. People have no idea how to fix zippers but they will stand there and tell you what they think you should do—something I find hilarious, vexing, and endearing. “Why don’t you try this at home? Why drag it here if you know so much?” Prudence wants to know. She should talk. She’s a fine one for telling other people how to fix everything. She knows exactly how other people should conduct themselves—how they should eat, how they should drink (they shouldn’t!), and how they should never dance the tango at a bus stop.

One man was so intent on watching me replace a pulley that I had to be careful not to snip off his nose with my pliers as he hovered inches above the coat. He was dictating as he was observing, as if he were leaving some sort of audio memo to his future self from the part of himself that already knew how to fix the problem.

This is a Thing I have been noticing a lot lately—that we are so often Correct about something being Wrong but we are stymied by how to fix things. Sometimes things are going wrong so slowly that we don’t even have any idea they are running amok. One day, we wake up far off course, bewildered by the state of chaos in which we find ourselves. Sometimes, things are going wrong for the “best” of reasons…

Take the Egg Lady. She is a sweet soul who adores chickens and wanted to have a whole flock of twenty-four heritage breed birds. A few years ago, she built nesting boxes and an avian palace and fussed over her hatchlings.

“Why have so many for just one person?” friends asked her.

“Everything on my little farm must earn its keep,” she said. “These chicks will produce enough eggs to pay for their own food with the money they earn. And I will get to eat the leftovers for free!”

It seemed like a charming plan. In no time, the chicks became pullets and began to lay. The egg lady had no trouble finding customers who signed up for “egg-scriptions.” They adored having fresh eggs delivered to their doorsteps. The chickens earned plenty of money for treats as well as sacks of grain. Everyone thrived. The customers were so happy they told others, who asked if they could sign up for fresh eggs too. The egg lady had just enough eggs each week for all the new customers but that meant she could no longer eat them herself. That’s Ok, she thought. She could eat oatmeal for breakfast. She likes oatmeal.

Then a few chickens went missing—perhaps a hawk strike, perhaps a fox. One died of a mysterious illness and had to be buried in the garden near some rhubarb. The hours of sunlight in the day began to fade as autumn came on so the chickens no longer laid as many eggs. (Chickens lay according to the light cycle.) The day came when the egg lady was busy filling her cartons with eggs and she came up short.

“Oh NO!” she thought. “My poor customers! What shall I do? I know… I’ll stop at the co-op on my way to deliver the eggs and just buy what I need to fill out the cartons.” She only needed three eggs and she knew the co-op sold eggs singly. On the way to her deliveries, she stopped at the co-op and the smell of breakfast sandwiches grabbed her by the nose and led her to the heat lamps where wonderful vegetarian breakfast burritos were sunning themselves like plump (vegetarian) seals on a beach. She had not had time to make oatmeal that morning, so she bought herself a burrito. With the Egg money. It was delicious. She had forgotten how amazing scrambled eggs with cheese and onions and peppers could be.

That week, she had to buy three eggs. She put one store-bought egg in each of three of her cartons—of course they were free-range and local and of the highest quality, just like hers, so she didn’t mention it to her customers. The next week it was five. Soon, she was having to buy a dozen. The daylight dwindled, her own chickens were going into rest mode and she was now hooked on weekly breakfast burritos from the co-op.

Unfortunately, with a bird flu raging in other parts of the country, the price of eggs skyrocketed, meaning that the eggs from the co-op then cost more per dozen than she was charging for “her” eggs so she began operating at a loss. While she couldn’t afford to eat the eggs from her own chickens, she was ever so happy to continue pounding down the local burritos. Yes, at an ever-increasing loss.

“What if I take this to its logical extreme and come to a point where I have no eggs at all? I tell no one; I just drive to the local co-op, buy dozens of eggs, hand deliver them to my egg people, pass them off as my eggs yet charge them LESS money than I pay, and then wind up destitute over this enterprise? Do I need to get a side hustle to pay for this side hustle? How will I feed the chickens?” she wondered frantically. “Surely this is not a good business model…”

But how to fix it? Does she raise her prices? Does she confess the truth? Does she cancel everything and let people go back to buying their own damn eggs wherever they choose? She agrees that the situation has become unsustainable, not to mention absurd. The egg lady is in a quandary because she hates “disappointing” people. (And chickens.) So she chickens out. She buys eggs on the sly, and eats store-bought burritos with money she doesn’t have.

I love this Egg Lady.

There is a part of her in every Artist I have ever known. This is the part filled with old mis-beliefs that if we tell the real truth, the thing we most need or want to say… that we might hurt someone. (This is assuming that we “know” what might cause hurt. We actually don’t.) We try to “magic” our way out of things, even though that magic puts us in hoc. We take on too much, spread ourselves too thin, and then refuse to admit what is truly going on. What does it take to trust that when we are fully honest, we are also our Kindest? It does our fellow humans a grave disservice to think that they will not believe Science—that chickens do not lay all year unless you mess with their lighting. All Natural things cycle: flowers bud, bloom, fruit, then go dormant—and only in that order. When we live close to the land, we live according to Nature’s Laws. We are NOT a grocery store. “Instruct the Ignorant!” brays Prudence. “Teaching farm truths to city folks is not just showing them respect it is a spiritual work of mercy.”

She is disgusted with the egg lady.

When pressed, the Egg Lady feels both accountable and resentful in twisty ways that are complicated by her refusal to face Truth. She thinks she is doing the best “for her customers,” but IS she??? I have my doubts. I think she is just trying to Look Good, which is just a way of disguising shame. At their best, these eggs are wholesome farm-fresh eggs, but at their worst, they are just Lies, destined to be hard boiled or fried. Prudence makes haste to “Counsel the Doubtful and Admonish the Sinners.” (Her Spiritual works of Mercy contain no actual mercy.) She is so invested in being Good that she becomes monstrous, bitter, and cruel. (Then she can never apologize because she cannot acknowledge that she has not been Good.) Ironically, she keeps trying to be Good in the same misguided way the egg lady does—both of them without actual reverence for What Is or genuine mercy for those they purport to love.

With her mouth full of breakfast burritos she should not be buying, the Egg lady tries to tell us that she is ok with her “funny little sacrifices.” She was raised to be “Unselfish.” Like Prudence, incandescent selflessness is her gold standard. I rebel. I think incandescent “self-less-ness” is one of the most selfish things we can impose on others or ourselves. It bleeds us dry in the end. If we have no “self” then we become reliant on others to supply whatever “us” they permit to exist and it’s usually not much, unless we rob them. This is nonsense. What is the good of counterfeit selflessness that, taken to extreme, causes one to lose the farm? Who says that her customers deserve her eggs more than she does? I want to bop this lady over the head and hug her all at the same time.

Pleasing people can become a trap. I say this as a member of the service/artist/artisan world whose livelihood depends on customer satisfaction. I say this as one who is similarly addicted to pleasing and over-giving. I have observed that many of our fellow “Creatives” feel an intense sense of noblesse oblige to share their gifts, their joys, their talents relentlessly—to the point of accidental depletion, exhaustion, and poverty of every kind—including the poverty of ideas. Worst of all, they don’t find their gifts worthy of protection from other distractions. It’s not wolves but well-meaning “customers” we let in to rob the hen house. There is a woman whose novel I cannot wait to read but it does not get written because she is over-busy-fied with a myriad of community-building hobbies and distractions taking her off course. These are “worthy things” yet that make her operate at a loss. And until we get that novel out of her, we ALL lose. We lose the best of HER. Likewise, there is a musician whose rough tracks I have been listening to with breathless awe for ten years now. He still doesn’t have a CD out yet. He fritters his eggs away by laying down back-up tracks for other musicians.

Sometimes the act of “becoming” begins with the act of “overcoming.” Saying NO is a form of saying Yes. Sometimes we need to hold on to a few of our precious eggs to nourish our own spirits. They cannot be for sale, especially if we don’t have them! Thinking we are blessing people with sacrifices they never asked us to make is just plain silly. But we all do it. And “giving” to them deprives us all of something Greater.

As we Mend, may we remember to nourish ourselves. May we give, yes, but Self-fully rather than Self-less-than-ly. May we not sell out on what is most precious to us. If we are to be true Piece-makers and Make-Peacers, restorers, healers, sewists, storytellers, and lovers of every kind, may we remember to be humane—both to our chickens and ourselves as members of the Natural World. It is unnatural to bloom incessantly without rest. Fall is coming. The harvest has been great but so is being fallow, getting small, returning to the earth to rot a little and renew.

Now, Dear Ones, how would you like your eggs—scrambled? Fried? Boiled?

Or… GOLDEN?

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy