Greetings Dear Ones!

For more than a week now, I’ve been scrambling to get the barn clean, the house clean(ish), the various larders stacked for critters and sitters. In the shop, I’ve been working frantically to get the racks cleared of all items needed by imminent deadlines. Others will have to wait. “I’m going away for a few days,” I explain to customers, “and when I get back, I’ll be right here, sewing, but I won’t really be completely functional for a few days more.”

I don’t tell them the whole truth, letting them assume I am going on some sort of eccentric “vacation.” Little do they suspect I am trembling creature with frayed wings who knows she is about to go through a crushing metamorphosis, utterly dissolving, never emerging as the quite the same being on the other side. I have no idea who I will be five days from now but I know she will be vastly Improved! I’m heading off to PDB music camp in Groton, Massachusetts. Scottish Music: It’s colorless, odorless, tasteless, invisible—but it is the most powerful drug I know. You can drink a large glass of water while 140 exhausted people play Adam Sutherland’s “Road to Errogie” in ascending keys all through the night and feel completely drunk for five days straight.

This is the week, each February since 2007(?), where I stop playing “Seamstress in a Shop” and get to play another favorite game: “Head Cook and spud-scrubber to an unruly tribe of fiddlers.” Music and food go on round the clock. I indulge all my fantasies of Kitchen and Community. As a dear friend says, I get to be “the pot” that holds all the ingredients together—the One who knows on which day we are supposed to eat the carrots and where we keep the band-aids. Being The Pot is a job I take extremely seriously—with a large side helping of Panic. I enter with lists longer than a roll of toilet paper and 450 pounds of potatoes, hoping that’s enough tatties to satisfy 140 people nine times. (There are nine official meals, not counting midnight chili and second breakfasts.) Then, pretty much NOTHING ever goes exactly as planned and I emerge five days later dazed, with burned arms, wondering what to do with three quarts of cooked oatmeal that wasn’t eaten. I’m also walking on air, radiantly exhausted, triumphant and in Love—madly in love with every person who helped in the kitchen or made life better for someone else simply by playing a snappy jig in E minor while we tried to figure out how to light the stove again. And because I never do anything alone there—we have a team, a tribe, of the most amazing humans ever to chop, scour, slice, sauce, and sauté who come to play with me. I love them like a pot boiling over!

We abandon the standards recipes and every meal becomes a version of Stone Soup, with the villagers contributing ideas and spices. One guy says we need to add garlic to the mac n’ cheese and guess, what? It’s incredible. Everything is better with garlic! (Except maybe fruit salad…) I’ll never forget the year we discovered the magic of smoked paprika, or the year we decided to have all the onions chopped on Friday—a tradition that continues.

This camp is one of my February love stories. The best love stories of all often start off as pure accidents. Some random impulse seems like a great idea at the time and twenty years later, you look back and realize the path forked there, in that moment, and life was never the same again. It started off as a sleepover weekend in my former home for some advanced fiddle students and their teacher. And well… so many years and mashed potatoes later, It’s a THING. It’s a Love that outgrew that space, and then another space, and now it is in a Big Space, becoming a Big Thing. It turns out that Love grows pretty big when it’s fed.

I look back through the coils of Time and marvel at that tension that exists in every creative endeavor—between envisioning clearly what it is we wish to create and allowing Magic to surprise us of its own accord. This camp is mostly born of Magic, of Happy Happenings and Joy-scream Connections —and a big willingness to chop onions, “chop” tunes, and serve each other the craziest, rarest sort of Beauty.

One of the things I love best about this camp is that it has never been about increasing the financial prosperity of the organizers. Any “profit” is redistributed so that more than a third of the attendees have access to generous scholarships and subsidies. I think the whole purpose of organizing as a society is so that we can make room for the Disorganized. They are some of our BEST people! The young, the passionate, the gifted, the talented—these are not often people with a lot of financial stability. In the wider society, the financially stable often have contempt for those less well off. Not here. Some members need help with dorm fees and food costs and get it because their community Values them and their contributions to the music, the scene, the “vibe.” It would not be the same without their energy, their ability, and their forward trajectories that ensure the survival of this culture decades from now, after most of the financially viable have gone to take a nap in the dirt.

And so, I get a LOT of kitchen help! All the scholarship folks work—washing dishes, prepping food, cleaning messes, and deciding how much corn goes into corn chowder. “Should we roast it first? Let’s try it.” Every year I witness a new round of Initiation and Transition. It’s a blessing to welcome the Fresh Eyes and “discovery” of people coming to the camp for the first time and to see those who have been immersed in this Love for years bobbing to the surface and emerging as new leaders and tradition bearers. I celebrate it all.

When I say I “love” something or someone, what I notice in my body is a vast sensation of Gratitude, like I just got fed warm, creamy of mushroom soup that took ten people to make from scratch. I am Full and grateful to be here. Grateful for the music. Grateful you showed up too, to be part of the sharing. Kitchens are the heart of any home. In the PDB kitchen, some feet are running to get the potatoes we forgot to serve (how could we forget them? They are everywhere!), some are tapping to the melody they are playing, some are dancing, some are running in circles trying to remember where the smoked Paprika got put … These feet, these moving feet, they are the heartbeat –pumping mashed potatoes, music and magic out to the wider world, one ripple at a time. The work is harder than haying season on a farm but I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I feel so humbly privileged to be an Eldress in this tribe. They don’t always see me at my best but I can show up as I am and feel accepted. I wish everyone had a place like that!

I notice how I have grown, as a result of feeding this Love. When I examine my motives for giving up my personal time and energy, the anatomy of Awakening goes something like this:

Unconscious me: “Hmm… This [hard job] just needs to be done. Who’s going to do it? What? Me?? Oh God… Why the hell would they put a nut like me in charge?”

Ego me: “I can achieve Great Things here! Watch this! I will do a great job so that everyone knows I have done a great job and they can talk about me and tell me and others what a great job I have done. Whahoo! Me! Me! Pick ME! Psst…Let’s not mention the raw eggs, the burned lasagna, or the soup I managed to set fire to, ok? Let’s pretend everything is Perfect.”

Evolving me: “Where have I felt fully Alive and Connected today? What can I offer in service to the Music, the Muse, the People & Purpose here? I don’t care what it takes or what I look like in the end… We all have our jobs to do. We can’t all master reels in the key of F. Someone needs to make a decent vegan tomato bisque as well. There is room for everyone. That’s what community is about.”

In creeps the notion of Ubuntu, the Nguni Bantu word that loosely translates as “I am because we are.” Desmond Tutu describes it as a state in which one’s “humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in others… I am human because I belong, I participate, I share.” That a Scottish fiddle camp evokes these South African values, the deeply Golden principles of goodness—of hospitality, compassion, generosity, and friendliness just goes to show that people united in Love and Purpose don’t need labels, creeds, borders or definitions. They just need to Live, if only for a weekend, in shared Respect for All that Is, while Co-creating.

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed about Love is how it changes us. It asks of us Life’s most interesting questions: Who or what are we devoted to? How are we willing to suspend our personal comforts and trade them for the richness of our Spirits? What are we expecting from the sacrifices we make? Who are we willing to become? Are we willing to let a love grow so big that it is Unmanageable, requiring larger Vision, more Inclusion, outgrowing us so that we can surrender to a mystery bigger, finer, and more powerful than anything we could ever imagine?

One thing I know for sure, Dear Ones… Love is something you Feed.

With sew much love (and potatoes),

Yours aye,

Nancy