“Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently,
until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.”
~Martha Postlewaite
I’ve loved these words since finding them online a few years ago…they are our “motto” at Wisteria & Sunshine this month as we clear and wait with the New Year. But the truth is, I clear and wait…and the song of my life falls into my hands-notes at least, or bits of melody…but I still try to save the whole world. Or I can’t stop wanting to. And my mind and heart are often so tangled with it all. I get clear for an hour or a day, then I am in a tangle again. We live in deeply difficult times. And I don’t think we saw it coming, not really. Even if we are awakened to it, our world isn’t. A war is looming, some are breathing the smoke of it and seeing the fire, but it isn’t a war we are all united by, there are no wise leaders, and no home front. Tho’ we are trying…we are trying.
These are the tangles that keep me from posting here regularly…and make me retreat to the peace and emptiness of our upstairs rooms to write my scraps of ideas on bits of paper, shuffle them around, try to find the rhythms and containers to help me better save the world or clear or wait. It is good work and needful. I’ve chosen the booklets for the year and placed them in my Daybook. I’ve spent some time chronicling the holidays in my Winter Diary and will soon begin hand-stitching a cloth cover that is calling to me to come into being. A pattern of posting and attentions to home and earth is weaving for Wisteria & Sunshine. A path ahead for Make Do & Mend the Earth is beckoning, at last and will soon come into being. I’ve no great plans for my shop or my making there, but feel something new on the horizon. It can wait. There is so much to do already and that is part of the tangling.
I wish life could be simpler. But it can’t be for me while the world is on fire. I will keep trying to simplify all that I take in, my work, the ways I keep my home and shop and live. But I woke up this morning understanding that life won’t be simple for a long time to come. I need to accept that and get on with all that I know is my part…what is mine to do. There won’t be a rhythm for my being here, or on Instagram or Make Do & Mend, that is clear after all of my stopping and starting the past few years. I have a tendency towards perfectionism, especially with arrangements of all sorts. But also a deep longing for what I know is our womanly way of rhythm and seasons. I also woke up this morning knowing that I might have that, naturally, if I had a Juniper life. But our lives now are nothing like life in the 16th century and I am going to let myself off the hook of trying to find a lovely pattern for everything. Just enough will do.
The berries and ivy I gathered in our winter woods were found amongst tangles of invasive weeds and briars. That is what life feels like to me, in this century. I will keep trying to gather the beautiful pink berries and earthy ivy in my days and my mind and my heart and twine them into posts here, whenever I am called here and can manage it. It is a joy and a comfort, to have this circle (all our circles, everywhere!) of warmth and connection in the midst of everything else. May they flourish.
Cathy January 17, 2020 at 1:30 pm
Hello Leslie. I am reading and excerpting every day on my Another Perfect Day 365 blog Judith Orloff’s book, Thriving as an Empath–365 Days of self-Care for Sensitive People. She addresses issues such as what you are feeling. What is going on in the world is much too much because we are exposed to more than I believe we were ever created to be. There was a time when we only knew what was happening in our own village. Now we are being called out to care about the whole world without the means to do so! Much TOO much!
Lesley January 17, 2020 at 1:58 pm
So true! And how good that you are sharing from a book that is helping you. I’ve been working out ways to be in the world enough for my work and to help with all the troubles, but not expose myself too much to it all. It’s tricky. I don’t know if you read at my Make Do & Mend the Earth, but I just posted there and it is somewhat related to the too-muchness. We’ve talked about living on a village scale there…it really is a key to so much.
I always appreciate your comments here. xo
mel January 25, 2020 at 8:37 am
I’m very behind in my blog reading….entirely because I’ve found myself doing what you have done, and retreating to my notebooks and scraps of paper and nubs of oil pastels to find some peace and rhythm to it all.
And, as you say, there’s no orderliness to it, no exact point-to-point, but a spiral and an ebb and flow which is as it should be and trying to force things into an external time-frame just isn’t working.
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure that out! But reading what you wrote here is a gentle affirmation of what’s been percolating for some time in the back of my mind.
xoxo