“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.
