“You will know you’ve found that place when you are aligned with a purpose that makes you come alive, when you feel Harmony between your Great Hunger and the needs of others.” –Dr. Tererai Trent, The Awakened Woman

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, we’ve reached that blessed time of year in Vermont where we are free to wear our flannel pajamas underneath our clothes and no one knows the difference. The days have been a mix of “jacket, no jacket, yes, jacket” and you might need a warm hat at one end or wool socks at the other but not both. The tree colors seem a little subdued but still glorious. There has been talk of a bear sighting in my neighborhood. According to 2022 data, Vermont has the most black bears it’s had in five years. Like me, they are eating all the summer leftovers they can get their paws on and getting ready for winter, though they have less firewood to stack.

Last weekend, I had the joyous and exhausting privilege of feeding 120-ish musicians for four days during the Boston States Fiddle Camp at their new home at Potash Hill in Marlboro, Vermont. It was a good excuse to dig up seventy pounds of homegrown potatoes for home fries (that were genuinely from HOME) and to use a few of my rogue pumpkins in soups. The pumpkins had sprouted from the compost pile, unplanned, unplanted, welcome but not invited—kind of like those people who show up to help you before you even know you need help and wind up being extremely useful. I sliced them in half (the pumpkins, that is, not the people), stuffed them with cherry tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and fresh thyme from the garden and roasted them very slowly in the oven until I could scoop out the soft, creamy flesh and puree it into a soup base. I added white beans that had soaked overnight and some spices and had a very nice vegan soup. In every way, the rogue pumpkins were a nourishing bonus.

The summer weather was such that some of the things I planted and worked hard at drowned or died and things I never planted thrived. My tomatoes were a disaster. I had a bumper crop of blueberries but couldn’t find the time to harvest them so the birds got them. There were pears but no apples or peaches due to untimely spring frosts. Is it not so with Dreams? As I look at back at past harvests in the Garden of Life, I see patterns of struggle that just led to disappointment, abundance that led to waste, and yet the places where “one thing led to another…then another…” became unexpected Blessings where my hungers were satisfied. Suddenly, I find that cooking at a fiddle camp or running a tailoring shop are the best, most nourishing things I have ever done. Why do otherwise sensible people hire me to cook for their music camps when I have no such training? Why am I running a tailoring shop? I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t part of my plan when I left college with an English degree, a passion for 18th century literature, and a desire to wear tweed every day. But here I am. A rogue pumpkin seed. I fell into a pile of shit and I bloomed. Nourishing others has become my Hunger. (That, and making sure their pants don’t fall down.)

Blooming, as well you know, can make one look like a Blooming Idiot at times. Such pain in the midst of “spiritual growth” is not insignificant. My temperament does not come equipped with a lot of what I call “Decision juice.” I love to dream. I have great visions. I can be people oriented OR task oriented but this requires a LOT of solitude or support in order to function around distractions. Put me in busy kitchen for fifteen hours a day where I am constantly bombarded with questions, demands, and queries when all the time I am wondering where the hell I last saw the garlic and… well… let’s just admit that I am no longer operating at my Highest and Best.

I was out of decision juice by 7:am when someone came in and dumped all the freshly brewed coffee and we could not locate more filters. Do I go to the store? Send someone else? Call the manager of the camp and see if they have any? Or just quietly go lie down in traffic? Only there isn’t any. It’s Vermont. Luckily, I couldn’t decide so I just kept cooking and someone else figured it out. I normally have a vast Vat of Patience but even that was running dry by the time someone said “All the things on the buffet table say ‘vegan’ do you have anything for vegetarians?”

“To put it mildly, if your soul was a pizza, and sins were toppings, your dough would be buried in anchovies,” says Prudence, my inner critic.

Luckily, my house-sitter canceled on me so I was forced to commute home each night to do chores, which always helps reset my cogs. (Everything is always working out for the highest and best!) Forty-five minutes of sitting in silence was unexpectedly healing. I arrived home numb and calm, went in the house to tend to the dog then returned to the garage to head to the barn.

That’s when I saw them.

Bear tracks! IN MY GARAGE! Wet bear foot prints on the cardboard walkway leading to my door! I was suddenly wide awake. I looked around the garage. I could not see the bear but the tracks were unmistakable. I could see the heel, the toes, the claws very clearly. It seemed like a smallish bear—probably an adolescent. I panicked and ran to the barn. Everything was calm there. I fed and watered everyone and returned to the house. I peered inside the garage. THERE WERE MORE TRACKS! I gulped and shivered. Where was my phone? Whom should I call? Everyone I knew who might be Useful was at camp.

I bolted to the door, slammed it, and looked out the window at the tracks. There were even more now! Heaven help me! What was I going to DO??? Wait… MORE tracks? I looked down at the running shoes I was wearing. From the top, they look like normal white trainers. I lifted a foot and checked the tread. Yep… I’d found my “bear.” These shoes, a gift from my ace marathon-running daughter, were fancy Barefoot shoes that left a trademark “foot print.” Who knew? Late at night, alone in my garage, I was living a scene straight out of Winnie The Pooh, when Pooh and Piglet find tracks in the woods and decide the heffalumps are after them.

So…This Bear…was a middle-aged woman with a high degree of imagination and very little Brain.

“It’s too bad you didn’t have my vintage Winchester to hand—you could have shot yourself in the foot!” said my dad, later when he heard the tale.

The moral of that story is all too familiar: As Taylor Swift sings it, “It’s me—hi, I’m the problem, it’s me!” I am the monster on the hill, slowly lurching towards your favorite city. No wonder my Instagram algorithm fills my feed with images of feral menopausal women who grow lots of herbs, live in the woods, and alarm the townsfolk. The tracks that lead to my door—the footprints I leave in my wake—these are the tracks of a monster. To turn and face them is to feel genuine terror. And Relief. And uncontrollable, side-splitting, chortle-snorting Glee. Carl Jung and Prudence nod from the shadows.

It’s ME. I’m the problem. It’s ME. Whew… (And also, “Oh NO!”)

I think of my dear friend, now home from her ordeal of brain surgery, who tells me she can walk just fine if she uses her hands.
“Your hands?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says happily, as if this is a great new development. “All I have to do is make sure I have something to hold on to. I reach forward, touch what is solid, use a hand rail or a walker, and I am just fine.”

I tell her the story of my “bear tracks.” She laughs.

“It’s a mistake to look back too much,” she says. “Reach forward. Stop running. Steady yourself. You’ll be fine too.”

On my last ride home from the camp, I think about all I have experienced and shared in the space of four enormously short days. I go to the scenes that warmed my heart the most: There’s little ginger-haired pixie, knee-high to a grasshopper, helping in the kitchen at the dish rack. Her favorite thing to do is to follow her big sister and put things away. The whole world is one fantastic Puzzle and she holds each piece carefully in her hands and she looks and looks until she finds out where it belongs. When she cannot reach, someone helps her and she claps and beams, then dashes off to get another piece of the puzzle from the drying rack. Soon, she will know where Everything Goes. (Someone should put her in charge of coffee filters next year!)

There is the gentle dispute I overhear between two young people in their twenties about whether a tune is Irish or Scottish, whether it requires ornaments on the down or up bows. Traditions matter to them. They want to get it right. It is to these we pass The Torch and they are fully invested, right up to the full measure of adorable, petty, persnickety-ish-ness. I look at them and if I blur my vision just a little, I can see them when they are eighty. Someone else will stir the soup then.

There is the “dance” where more people are playing in the band than dancing in the hall. There is the joy, the Harmony, the laughter sparkling from every face. And through it all…swelling and filling every heart and crevice…is the Music. We are here to live and breathe and play and Serve the Music. Gluten free, fat free, sugar free, dairy free, calorie free—it’s the ultimate Nourishment.

Hopefully, having such reverence for our own culture will give us the imagination and compassion to value everyone’s rights to such customs, music, dance, food and communal rituals of celebration. It is in these precious circles that we find a Home amongst the Home fries—whether we be Unplanned Pumpkins or tearstained monsters in disguise. We all belong. We all have our special place in the tribe. Ask the Ginger-haired girl. It’s true.

If we walk forward on our monster feet and use our outstretched hands—reaching, touching, cooking, sewing, writing, holding, dancing, playing music, grasping on to one another, we’ll be fine. I know we will.

And there will be soup for dinner!

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy