“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.” Alan Watts

Greetings Dear and Darling Ones!

There is so much to be thankful for… Rather than panicking about how my house is a mess and there is not much in the larder except all the dirty potatoes I have been digging out of the ground and the number of impending guests expecting a Thanksgiving meal in twenty four hours’ time is fluctuating between thirteen and seventeen and all those potatoes need to be scrubbed but not as much as the inside of the shower does only I need to put up a sign telling the city folks that the septic system can’t actually handle nine showers a day and those who feel comfortable doing so should definitely pee outside as often as possible…. But I can’t start on all that until a young customer gets three pairs of his grandfather’s hunting pants altered to fit him… So! As an Artful Procrastinator, I’ve decided to plop down next to a warm dog in front of a cozy fire and dilly-dally-scribble a bit about how GRATEFUL I am! (Especially for warm dogs and cozy fires)

I’m especially grateful for my dear Crust-omers—those who help me earn my daily crusts as a seamstress. They are an endless treasure trove of inspiration and delight. I am continually fascinated by their stories, talents, abilities, and the gifts they share with our community. I wonder how anyone but a lucky seamstress would come across so many wonderful souls? It’s been an incredible blessing for someone who is new to the area and needing “connections.” Always, no matter what crisis occurs, a customer will turn up in the shop who is especially skilled in that very thing! Airline pilots who do farrier work on the side, educators, carpenters, electricians, blacksmiths, lady-entreprenuers with good accounting advice—I meet and need them all. It’s as if the angels are sending me Helpers all the time. Through our service to one another, we become the answers to each other’s prayers.

Last week, it was a young arborist who needed a suit altered in a hurry for a friend’s wedding. An arborist was JUST the thing I was wondering how to find! Not far from the barn, right over the new path to the meadow, was a deadly “widow-maker” where a giant cherry bough had snapped and gotten hung up in the crotch of a dead Ash tree nearby. The bough was suspended, waiting to fall, maim or murder anyone who might pass under it, including Gus or Otie, the Jersey steer-oids who might bumble around beneath it. It had to come down but it was about forty feet in the air and there was no way to reach it with a ladder and felling the dead tree out from under it was also potentially lethal. I needed a Climber!

He came out last Sunday and made short work of the issue. He was up his ropes, in his harness and pulley system with a practiced grace that had me spellbound. As he was getting his ropes organized, I asked “Aren’t you afraid to go up there?”

“Absolutely,” came the confident reply. Then he grinned impishly. “I hate heights!”

“This is a remarkable choice of work for someone who hates heights,” I said.

“Precisely,” he admitted. “I like to challenge myself. Being a tiny bit scared helps keep me extra safe. I take nothing for granted.”

His matter-of-factness blew my mind. Within minutes, he was swinging his way higher and higher, smoothly and professionally, with a fascinating economy of movement bordering on reverence, he was above the broken bough, cutting it free. It swung loose, crashing into and splintering the dead tree holding it up, then fell and smashed one of the only sections of fence I have standing on the whole farm.

“Sorry about the fence!” he shouted from the treetop.

“No worries!” I called back, laughing unexpectedly, suddenly giddy that he was safe. Everyone was safe. I could exhale. That limb was down. We all will live to build another fence one day.

Afterwards, we spend as much time in the kitchen sipping tea and coffee and telling stories as we had outside. (He was a sociable Climber!) His knowledge of trees and botany and Nature is vast and infused with a deep and poignant spiritual resonance. When he talks about how to take care of all the ailing trees on my property (which have been choked with vines and neglect for many years) he uses words that convey the emotions of the trees. “Those cherry trees are not happy,” he says. It’s true. There is something about all the cherry trees in particular that looks listless and forlorn. They were the first to lose their leaves and stand shivering at the edge of the meadow. He tells me about all the arboreal survival tactics they are employing and the infections they are fighting. He can identify all the scars and stories each trunk reveals. He can see that the damage started about forty years ago or more, probably by someone’s attempt to create a pasture around them that disturbed the delicate balance of forest mulch and fungi around their roots, which have since been clogged with grass. Who knew that grass can compete with trees in ways that make the trees struggle? When he talks about how bacteria in the soil send signals to the tree and vise versa, his eyes light up like sparks on a brush pile. “Energetically, biochemically, it’s all connected. It kinda blows your mind, doesn’t it?”

“Sometimes living is just a matter of surviving,” he says. “Your cherry trees have been surviving. Somewhere in there is a slow death but it might take another twenty years for them to succumb. It just depends on what the load is that each one carries.”

“That’s just like US, isn’t it?” I say.

He nods thoughtfully, with a sorrow that is way too old for one who has just turned thirty.

“Yep… We think life is going to turn out a certain way and then somehow it doesn’t. Certain messages fail to translate from our roots. We get confused. We get infected with something non-lethal but non-life-promoting. And then it becomes a matter of survival because we don’t realize we are carrying a nameless grief for The Thing That Wasn’t and all the time, The Wind is blowing and causing us to shift our balance.”

“WOW,” I say. “That pretty much sums up being a Seamstress, being a farmer, being a parent, being in any kind of relationship at all! It’s like that Instagram post that says ‘I used to think adulthood was one crisis after another. I was wrong. Multiple crises. Concurrently. All at once. All the time. Forever.’ They are all interconnected and related.”

He smiles ruefully and stares at the fire in the woodstove. We sit in shared silence for a few moments.

“Thanks for talking about this,” he says. “I think about these things but it’s hard to find people who share these ideas. I look around at the world today and shake my head. It’s not the world I thought I would be living in when I was a kid. I assumed things would be different. The biggest problem is that other people don’t see how Connected everything is. Everything we do has a direct impact on something else.”

“I know,” I say. “When I want the front of a jacket to fit someone better, I take in the back. Front and back are connected, as are left and right. You can’t take a bit out of one side of a circle without making the whole circle smaller.”

He grins. “That reminds me… my suit is now a tiny bit too tight! I didn’t want to mention it.”

“Bring it back!” I cry, as we say farewells.

I will feast on that conversation like a homemade pumpkin pie in the weeks ahead. He’s made me think. He’s made me feel. He’s reminded me how the most miraculous things are hidden right around us in the mundane, the ordinary, things so utterly accessible they become invisible. His youth, his skill, his enthusiasm for knowledge in general and his passion for trees in particular inspire me. My love of trees has no vocabulary. His does. It’s fun to listen to him. In daylight, I smile with motherly fondness at his attempts to unify his painful disillusionment and his joyful, idealistic determination and mold them into a meaningful vocation for himself. But at night, in the bleak wee hours of the morning, I am not so wise. The youngest part of me shares the ache he articulated so beautifully--of that Grief for the things that remain intangible, Unfinished. There is nothing so painful on this earth as a tree or life or Love which has been denied its flourishing and exists merely in survival mode. In a world torn apart by ignorance, we all share in the sorrow of things that “Shouldn’t Be” and sense the absence of the glory of things that “should.”

How can we fix this?

What is Love, truly, but the recognition of Connection?

EVERYTHING is connected. In a world constantly delivering both expectations and limitations, communication is only half the battle. Comprehension is the key. We can communicate all we want, but if someone is capable of understanding, it’s just chaos—like the customer who dropped off a pair of pants with the attached note: “take out at the wast.” I keep thinking of the phrase “to Know is to Love.” Loving and Knowing are as much in partnership as Loving and Serving.

I had another great conversation with a customer who is an electrical engineer. “All energy derives from polarity,” says he. Indeed—as profoundly evidenced by the state of our Nation! (From him I also learn that unplugging something is not the same thing as turning it off but that is a subject for a later date.) Our differences are both connective and explosive, useful or destructive, depending on how we harness that energy.

So how do we make the Connections? How do we ground the energy and use it productively? How do we use the beauty and mystery of existence as an endless source of vitality and renewal?

Gratitude.

Gratitude is the magic sauce that puts us in touch with the things that truly have value to us and helps us relinquish that which does not have that much value at all. We all find ourselves caught up in a frantic race for external recognition, relentless achievement, and Black Friday bargains, but the true essence of our lives is right here, right now. The sheer act of being alive is a miraculous gift. There is richness in each breath, each pulse, each experience, each precious moment of Connection. Sometimes we take things too seriously.

Maybe for a sacred moment we can choose joy and amusement, rather than the rat race spurred on by capitolism… Maybe on Friday, instead of rushing to the mall to clobber our fellow citizens who are competing for gimmicks and gadgets the way grass competes for micronutrients, we can rebel… we can claim our own Authenticity and look with clear eyes at the scars on a tree, a friendship, a country, or that weird uncle who isn’t going to vote the way you are in the upcoming election cycle. We can witness suffering and still find space for Gratitude. We can appreciate the profound simplicity of being alive.

We are not just casual observers. We are pivotal and causal. We are an integral part of the ongoing voyage of discovery and expansion the entire universe is taking with itself. Gratitude puts me in touch with Faith—faith that we can see this through, that there is always enough, if we share. (I just found out one more is joining us for dinner tomorrow…)

Well… I’ve made this essay as long as possible in order to stave off the scrubbing of floors and potatoes. Alas, too long. I hope you get a quiet moment to savor your own private Gratitude and the magnificent Work you do in Mending. I am thankful you are here.

With Sew Much Gratitude,

Yours aye,

Nancy