Tidings of Comfort and Joy

While we are all so wrapped up in the presents we are
giving to gladden hearts at Christmastime, we might pause to think
of that other side of giving that means much more in every home—the giving of our ourselves.  The Christmas Present, after all, is only a token
of our feelings, and more important are the daily contributions we each
make to the happiness of those near us.

  -- House and Garden, December 1938

This dark, cold and wet December morning the annual feminine tug-of-war between hope and experience begins in earnest.  Let’s get it right out there: this month is a hodgepodge of conflicting emotions, overwrought expectations, exhaustion, and an unarticulated despair that runs so deep we’re afraid to acknowledge it, never mind admit it.

Instead, we express the stress through tears, tantrums, bitching, moaning, screaming, sniping, migraine headaches, overspending, overdrinking, and overeating for the next four weeks. Are we making merry yet? Suddenly Ebenezer Scrooge becomes the most maligned and misunderstood figure in literature.  But even old Scrooge’s Christmas turned out miraculously in the end and so will ours if we keep believing.  

Recently I went back to peruse the meditations I originally wrote about the Christmas season in Simple Abundance which was published in November 1995.  (Thankfully, it still finds new readers each week; maybe you’re among them and how grateful I am for your company!)  Quite frankly, I was surprised by how nothing has changed since I was the mother of a young daughter and a freelance writer trying to carve out a life of contentment with work that could pay the bills. Then I was living Simple Abundance, experimenting with its fundamentals (as I’ve always been my own Research and Development Lab), not just writing about it.  As I was learning how to use the power of Gratitude, Simplicity and Order to ground me in my daily round, so that I could be open to the Harmony, Beauty and Joy surrounding me, the results seemed miraculous.

They still do.

I’ll never forget the Christmas memory of my 8 year old Katie rushing into the kitchen after her Dad had taken her to the lighting of our local town Christmas tree.  Her cheeks were flushed with excitement as found me in the kitchen taking out a pan of gingerbread and she was jumping for joy.  She had been asked to push the button to switch the lights on. “Can you believe it, can you believe it!!?”   Since her Dad was the mayor, I could believe it, but kept that explanation to myself with a wink and a smile.  Finally, the only way she could describe it to me was to throw her arms wide and say, “Mommy, Mommy, you just had to be there.  It was Simple Abundance!! It was Simple Abundance, I tell you, Simple Abundance!!!

What do I cherish most about this memory?  Let me count them all and may the grace of Gratitude bear witness:  My little girl was happy and healthy; she used the words “Simple Abundance” for the first time and truly knew what the expression meant for her and me.  Her Dad had taken her to the event; I had a delicious holiday dessert waiting for us all.  As we sat around the table and shared the adventure of the day we knew that all we had was all we needed at that moment.  We were grateful.  We were happy. We were blessed. At that moment, all we had was all we needed.
 

Now I think of the SA principles as my Divine Graces, always present in my life, but unable to intervene unless I ask for help.  I keep forgetting this truth in the day-to-day frantic rush, but just as you need to flip the switch on for the electricity to work, we need to ask for help. Specifically. Asking for help is a woman’s toughest personal challenge, at least it has always been and continues to be for me.  But we cannot circumvent the Laws of Heaven and earth, though Providence knows we try to every day. So I’m going to suggest that you join me in a little holiday season experiment.  Let’s invite the Simple Abundance “Graces” to get us in the holiday mood and show us just how “real” their Divine assistance is, here and now.  But we need to ask, specifically, for what it is we need.

Cole Phillips

“Good cheer is not limited to Christmas carols, but can be made one of our gifts to the family all year round.  I don’t mean that we should all be Pollyannas, but ‘a merry heart doth good like medicine.’  We give of ourselves by example and by our presence as well as by our presents.  If we are jittery and irritable it is communicated through the whole household whether we will it or not,” the editors at House and Garden reminded their readers in 1938.  “But we can give courage and encouragement, sympathy and advice.  We can contribute so much to the sense of well-being and of security by own attitude and actions if we give a little thought to them, a little more thought perhaps than we give to the choice of our Christmas gifts, that we can create that atmosphere in our home.  The things we do and say mean so much more than all the dolls and hobby horses and streamlined electric trains.”

So today Babe, let us be grateful that we don’t just know this truth, but through Grace and asking, we can both live it and gift it this holiday season and beyond.

Sending dearest love and blessings on our courage,

XO SBB

Joy to the Girl

Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.                                                                                             --Barbara Holland

And we’re off, as a sprinter to a starter pistol for the holiday season.  In anticipation, perhaps you try to jolly yourself by buying all your favorite magazines which display picture perfect Christmas spreads that simultaneously excite and then diminish your Spirit before you even turn the page.  No one used to love curling up with a fresh pile of monthly magazines and a glass of cheer better than I, but I have given them up, especially the “Best Christmas Ever” editions in an annual effort of self-nurturance.  Why?  Because I know from personal experience, that they are not true, Babe.  And that is why I feel I must bring a little full disclosure and “Joy to the Girl” this month and that Girl, is you.

“Christmas comes but once a year.  Don’t ever say that to a cookery journalist,” the renowned English food writer Elizabeth David (1913-1992) begins her classic holiday essay collection Elizabeth David’s Christmas.  “Cookery journalists know different.  For them, three times a year would be nearer the mark.  First, around mid-August, when they must work on the recipes, at any rate if they contribute to a glossy monthly.  They’ll probably be color photographs to cook for and supervise as well.  The next round comes about the end of September when the articles have to be written and something original—well, anyway, different from last year—dredged up in the way of advice about when it’s all cooked for real, although not without notes being made for next year’s stint.  In between the delivery of the monthly article there will almost certainly be another couple of Christmas pieces to write, for a weekly, a wine merchant’s newsletter, a Sunday, a daily.”

I have to confess that annually re-reading Elizabeth’s depiction of Christmas through the New Year makes this one of my favorite holiday rituals because her wry and truthful insights always triggers a smile and nod in agreement to this ultimate confession:

“If here and there in my account of a cookery journalist’s Christmas a note of desperation is clearly audible, I don’t make apologies.  Christmas, at any rate, the way we are supposed to celebrate it nowadays, does tend to unbalance people, particularly those people responsible for the catering, the cooking, the presents, the tree, the decorations….Commercial interests being what they are, however, we are unlikely, in any foreseeable future, to be spared the annual orgy of spending, the jammed streets, the frantic shoppers in the stores, the whole circus of…the season of the Great Too Much…[which has] also become the Great Too Long.  A ten-day shutdown, no less, is now normal at Christmas.”

There we have it in a gilded nut shell game:  the season of the Great Too Much for Great Too Long.  Not to worry. Doesn’t it feel good just to acknowledge the truth?

Back to those glossy magazines:  Is there a woman with soul so dead, that never to herself has said:  “I wish my life could look like it was out of a magazine once.” Well, it can, Babe, if you have a home décor stylist, a wardrobe and prop stylist, a hair and makeup artist, a photographer and a slew of assistants, for a two day shoot which will appear as a spontaneous Christmas article in a year.  I’ve been very flattered to have been featured in two glossy Christmas magazine spreads and while it is fun to gaze back in astonished amusement, I’ve always felt a bit guilty about keeping this secret; rather like the signs on rear view mirrors that read “objects may appear larger than they really are”, those glossy magazines should come with the warning, “No perfect lifestyle pictured in this month’s issue is real” and then we’d all be on the same page.

You see, our continuing problem which few magazine articles deal with honestly is that real life is a series of repetitive crises that arise every day sucking all the oxygen out of our emotional bandwidth. It’s been this way since the first Nativity.  Can you just imagine for a moment the irritation felt by Joseph and the exhaustion and trepidation of his young wife Mary, as they packed the donkey for the mandatory tax trip to Bethlehem? You can just make out the very human grumbles, if you put your ear down close to history:  “Of all the times to have to go and pay taxes, a pregnant wife and no money…the Romans, well, just let me say, this would not have been my plan had I been asked.”

Most days this is what I truly love about the human experience—that we all share it.  The rest of the time I’m trying to cope.  Still, nothing we’re doing or facing or fearing or worrying about is original.  Somewhere, at some time, some woman has pondered in her heart whatever troubles us.  When I can stop the centrifugal motion that has me swirling in anxiety long enough to put the kettle on, I can take a deep breath and ask Mother Plenty first for grace and second, joy for the girl.

Learning to live in the present moment is part of the path of joy.  When I was writing Simple Abundance, I was doing that every single day for five years in the compartmentalized space it took me to write every meditation.  I was so focused on the good I had to find in every day that there were no distress notes.  The miracle of SA is that because I was so committed to it being a happy book for both of us, even though that period of my life was difficult and fraught, there isn’t a sour note in it or between the lines.  Blessed be the Great Creator.  

Looking back, I understand now that the book knew so much more than I did (creative projects always do), I just had to get out of the way of Spirit and show up for work.  And because I had only so many hours in the day to write, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of a bad thought during that time.  Let me write that sentence again, so we both understand what I’m trying to say:  I could not allow myself the luxury of a bad thought.  If I was feeling sick or depressed or frightened, I'd say:  “You can think about that tonight. Not now.”  And of course, after spending a day focused on Gratitude, Simplicity, Order, Harmony, Beauty and Joy, all I wanted to do at the end of the day was give thanks for my curated contentment.

So let’s forget the reality of the rest of the world for a moment which is always doom and gloom.  Many of us unconsciously create dramas in our minds—in part because we’re copying or reinforcing the constant dramas playing out in the 24/7 "Breaking News" culture we exist in.  I’ve gone cold turkey on the news.  

For when we create dramas in our minds—about our finances, our health, our children, our grandchildren, our relationships, our work; when we set ourselves up to expect the worst from every situation, our brilliant subconscious never lets us down.  Trust me, Babe, few of us have the ability to go from zero to 100 and the ecstasy calibration, but imagine a tragedy (or see someone else’s nightmare playing out before our eyes in real time on the television) and we’re already there, ready for personal close-up. And we know that when we expect the worst from a situation it becomes a self-fulling prophecy.  Inadvertently, we become authors of our misfortune.  

This holiday season I would love for us both to learn how to stop the cycles of drama and experiment in trusting the flow of life and the goodness of Spirit.  What if for the next 28 days, we were determined to experience a contented, drama-free holiday? Whether our children are going to be with us or not, whether the money seems tight right now, whether this is a “first” holiday after a death, divorce or displacement, let us ask for serenity and contentment.

This is how I’m starting:  each morning I’m praying for one day’s portion of Grace and a respite from crises.  I’m asking for “Joy for the Girl” and I’m giving thanks already for my holiday miracle—I’ve got several that give me tingles and there’s a holiday miracle with your name on it as well, Babe.  I’m writing my letter to Santa (we have been so good this year!) and my prayer list to the Great Giver.  Let’s suspend our disbelief and take that leap of faith.  Begin today recording in your Gratitude Journal, not just what you’re grateful for today, but all the wishes and prayers you yearn to come true tomorrow.  First the gesture, then the Grace.  After all, what we do we have to lose but misery and lack?  Sign me up, please.

What are your five happiest holiday memories?  I’d bet they are all sensory ones.  The fragrance of pine, oranges and cloves; hitting the high note in “O Holy Night”; lighting the menorah; the first bit of warm gingerbread; the twinkling lights; an ornament long forgotten hanging again on the Christmas tree; the appreciation of sending and receiving a beautiful card with a special message; a secret Santa gift from the one who loves you best, baby.  Weave together all those colorful threads and you have a warm, beautiful tapestry of contentment.

Once upon a time you believed that Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa was the most magical time of the year.  It can be again.  I believe the real holiday miracle is that it allows the mystical child slumbering in each of our souls the chance to be reborn every year, awakening a sense of wonder that even eleven months of grown-up doubt, derision, discouragement or disappointment can’t snuff out.  All that’s required of us is that we take tiny steps to believe.

Believe in what?  How about starting with the notion that whatever you can see, hear, taste, smell, touch and wonder at which brings you contentment this time of the year is a wink from the Universe that you are loved and cared for, and that everything is going to be alright, maybe different from what we hoped or prayed for, but alright.  Babe, I have no monopoly on faith, I just know that when I believe, even if I’m not sure just exactly what I’m believing for, I’m better.  I pass it on for what it’s worth. 

“Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited world was like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections and hopes; grouped everything and everyone around the Christmas fire: and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete,” Charles Dickens reminisced in a charming essay, “What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older” written in 1851.  

“Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands!...Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy, to your shelter underneath the holly!  We know you, and have not outlived you yet.  Welcome, old projects and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us.  Welcome, all that was ever real to our hearts.”

Welcome, Joy to the Girl!

Sending dearest love and blessings on our contentment and courage,

XO SBB

Pilgrim and Pioneer Mothers: Courage to Weather the Winds of Change

Woman must be the pioneer in this turning inward for
strength. In a sense, she has always been the pioneer.

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In November 1929, just one month after the famous stock market crash which set in motion the Great Depression, an editorial in The Household Magazine encouraged their readers to take heart and have courage as they faced the unknown.  

“Thanksgiving Day was meant to be something more than
a mere period of time between Wednesday and Friday of the last week in November.  It may be something more than a holiday, or it may have none of the characteristics of one.  What it is depends on the state of mind.

The number of things for which we may be thankful has nothing to do with the observance of the day…ThanksGIVING or thankFULNESS.  There may be a world of difference between the two…”

By the third Thanksgiving of the Great Depression in Novemer 1932, American homemakers and the women’s magazines they read had passed through the same desperate psychological stages a person experiencing profound loss endures—shock, denial, anger, bargaining and great grief –before settling in for what is often the longest stage of any traumatic change—depression.  A new Democratic president-elect, Franklin Delano Rooseevelt, was getting ready to take over the White House, but it would be another few month before FDR’s rousing Inaugural Address which reminded Americans that "all they had to fear is fear itself.”

There would be seven more lean Thanksgivings of economic uncertainty followed by five years of world war.  How did our grandmothers and great-grandmothers drag themselves out of bed to make biscuits for breakfast?  An image of my Kentucky grandmother rolling out dough in her salmon-pink chenille bathrobe has come to represent grace under pressure in the archives of my heart.

My Grandmother, Lucy Lyttle Donnelly White

You might be approaching this Thanksgiving with dread for the future and sorrow for what is happening now.   When deep discouragement comes, I comfort myself by thinking of the long line of heroic women who came before me—not only those in my family, but every woman settler, explorer, adventurer and homemaker who tamed wild lands and wild times around the world.  I particularly love to meditate on the first band of Pilgrim women.  There were 18 women on the Mayflower, and although none of them died during the crossing from England to Massachusetts, by the time of the first “Thanks Giving” meal, a year later in 1621, there were only 4 women who had survived the brutal winter, spring sowing and autumn harvest.  Four very tired women who needed to take care of 50 men and children daily.

With the men almost entirely focused on building houses and the village, the women had so many chores, they performed in shifts.  For aside from cleaning and cooking, there was plowing and planting, preserving and putting away, caring for livestock making soap and candles from tallow (animal fat), tending the sick and creating herb medicinals.  There was so much work that they lived on one portion’s grace and if they didn’t drop down dead with their hand to the plow or wither away in a nighttime sweat from a succession of diseases contracted on the voyage, they took it as a sign that God meant for them to go on.  And you know, they were right.

I love the bare bones simplicity of this truth.  Sometimes in life, all we can do is put one foot out of the bed and then in front of the other, literally.  I figure if you wake up in the morning, you’re meant to go on—continue at what you’re doing, and ask Heaven to show you what you’re doing wrong, if you are.  Since God knows we’re not meant to manage alone, Providence will be there to help if we ask for it. 

Or instead of our Pilgrim Mothers, I’ll meditate upon the legacy of our Pioneer Mother Mentors, such as Margaret Reed.  Here was a woman who enjoyed a charmed life of comfort and culture with a lovely, large home in Springfield, Illinois.  But one afternoon in July 1846, her husband James, who was a wealthy furniture manufacturer, came home for tea and told her to get ready they were headed West along with their 4 young children and her ailing mother.  There was gold in those California hills and he was going to get this share!  You can imagine the conversation they had before the weeping and wailing, slammed bedroom doors and walls of silence.

Much of James Reed’s success in persuading Margaret lay in his promise that she would travel in unsurpassed luxury and style, with all her prized possessions.  He kept his word.  Never before had a covered wagon been built like the Reeds’ and never would one be built like it again.  Two stories high, with a sleeping loft, it was outfitted with spring seats just like the best stagecoaches with an iron stove, velvet curtains and her cherished organ.  Her children dubbed it “The Picture Palace Car.”  It was stocked with six months’ supply of the best food and wine money could buy.  As the wagon pulled into formation with the rest of the Donner Party to head West, it was difficult not to stare, gasp and feel envious.

The tragic saga of the Donner Party is the most indelible tale of triumph and despair ever written in the history of the American West.  Twenty-five hundred miles away and only two days from safety, 31 men, women and children were stranded for an entire winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains by a succession of the worst blizzards on record.  Out of provisions and starving, some members resorted to cannibalism in order to survive.  

But Margaret and her children were not among them.  She kept them all alive on snow, bark, and leather broth until James, who had left the group to ride on ahead to California seeking a rescue party, returned.  The fact that her family did not perish—physically or spiritually—had absolutely nothing to do with the worldly goods she had counted on, for the wagon and all it carried had to be abandoned along the way because it was too heavy and cumbersome to travel through the mountains.  The possessions that saved Margaret and those she loved were of Spirit—her wits, her faith and her courage.

These are the same gifts all women are endowed with.  We are born with a blessed DNA—the genetic code of resilience,  strength, ingenuity, creativity, perseverance and determination.  Our Destiny, Nature and Aspirations are Heaven endowed, so why wouldn’t we be given the wherewithal to fulfill them?

So this Thanksgiving week as you go about cooking and laying the table, as you make preparations for gathering together with friends and loved ones, whenever anything happens that triggers the feeling of angst or distress, take a deep breath and silently ask yourself a few questions as I do when I’m experiencing a panic attack.

    Is my family safe today?
    Is there a roof over our heads, today?
    Do I have to chop wood to keep warm, today?
    Today, do I have to carry water in a bucket from a creek 2 miles away?    
Did I have to shoot the turkey for our meal, today?

One of my favorite quotations is from the Ladies Home Journal in October 1932.  “When money is plenty this is a man’s world.  When money is scarce it is a woman’s world. When all else fails the woman’s instinct comes in.  She gets the job.  That is the reason why in spite of all that happens, we continue to have a world.”

Thank Heavens, somethings never change, Babe.  This Thanksgiving week, just remember we are the Homefront.
 
Sending you dearest love, a prayer for your peace and plenty and blessings on our courage.

XO SBB

O Pioneer! Willa Cather’s Kitchens

These coppers, big and little, these brooms…and brushes,
were tools; and with them one made not shoes or cabinet work,
but life itself.  One made a climate within a climate; 
one made the days--the complexion, the special flavor, the special
happiness of each day as it passed; one made life.

                                               -- Willa Cather ( Shadows on the Rock, 1931)

Many writers have been in exile when they wrote of a certain time, a certain place. Nothing soothes the broken heart holding the pen more than ritual, reverence and remembrance. Edith Wharton archly channeled the frantic yearnings of a poor girl dying to be rich on the fringes of New York society while Wharton was in residence on the French Riviera in 1905. James Joyce captured the dank, dreary despair of turn of the century Dublin from Paris in 1914.  Ernest Hemingway portrayed the tempestuous bravado of the Spanish Civil War and bull-fighting matadors in a Mojito fueled decade writing five novels, a play and two collections of short stories while in Key West, Florida between 1929 and 1938.  

But, arguably, few writers have ever come as close so brilliantly in conjuring up the soul’s sacred sense of place as Willa Cather, writing about America’s amber waved prairies from the last place you’d ever expect to find her:  New York’s Greenwich Village. Twenty years before Gertrude Stein was lamenting “the Lost Generation” meaning the self-exiled expatiates on the left bank of Paris, Willa Cather went where no woman and no writer had gone before, becoming a pioneer of American fiction writing about holy hunger—food and love, home and away, the sacred in the ordinary, the secret altars where women pray in their kitchens.

Willa Cather

Here is what is so astonishing to me:  Reading between the lines of Cather’s prairie fiction, the in-between is so deftly disguised; cleverly concealed, flour finger stains still on the apron.  

Now imagine with me. In the very early morning Willa goes marketing; she loved to treat herself to fresh raspberries, brioche, French Camembert cheese and chickens sold by a particular Italian vendor.  Then after returning home to a second floor apartment at 5 Bank Street, Greenwich Village, with the superb groceries for her cook, she’d seize her solitude and in the space of two to three hours every day, while also working as the managing editor at the muckraking tabloid McClure’s Magazine (think National Enquirer), she wrote three novels in five years—O Pioneer! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Antonia (1918) which captured forever the true grit and gumption of the Nebraska Territory frontier immigrants—largely Scandinavian, Czech and Polish homesteaders.  The harsh and acerbic critic H.L. Mencken declared, “No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Antonia.”

And while Cather’s pioneer novels could teach how prairie dogs build their underground society or how to kill rattlesnakes in the back garden with a club, what touched readers was Cather’s uncanny ability to blend the siren song of wanderlust and courage in the face of unimaginable hardships with the salvation of food, home and family, with such grace and in prose as sparse as the treeless desert of dust, sky and sun she left behind.  Willa Cather believed that homemaking and homesteading “are activities which build a space where souls can thrive and dream—secure, protected, related, nourished and whole” and she made believers out of even the most jaded sophisticate.

Willa Cather as a young girl

Born into a prosperous Virginia family on December 7, 1873 and the oldest of seven children, when she was just nine Willa was plucked from a genteel upbringing by her father’s decision to join his father and brother in Red Cloud, Nebraska.  It was as if she’d been dropped into an ocean of rough, shaggy red grass from a space capsule, and quite frankly, she never got over the shock of it.  As far as her eyes could see, there wasn’t a tree, bough, leaf or a blade of green grass.  She would later describe her prairie surroundings as an event that erased her personality, while it forged her character, as she came to see the relinquishment of Old West country ways by the second generation of immigrants as spiritually threatening.  “The generation now in the driver’s seat hates to make anything, wants to live and die in an automobile, scudding past those acres where the old men used to follow the long cornrows up and down,” she wrote in 1923.  “They want to buy everything ready-made: clothes, food, education, music, pleasure.”  

What makes this tart opinion so fascinating, bewildering really, is that Willa Cather had been in Greenwich Village since 1906 and she would live in New York City until her death in 1947.  Her prairie years were few, between the ages of 9 and 15, including a stint as a mail pony girl, delivering the post to her few and far between neighbors.  But these years informed her art all her life, particularly because she found spiritual refuge—her sense of belonging—by spending her mornings with neighbor immigrant women baking or butter-making.  “My mind and my stomach are one,” she told an audience in 1925:  “I think and work whatever it is that digests.  I think the preparation of foods the most important thing in life.  And America is too young a nation to realize it.  It makes musical discords in the cooking.”

Is it any wonder that Antonia in My Antonia doesn’t want “to die and stop cooking.”

This is a lovely thought for those of us who will be doing a lot of cooking in the next couple of weeks.  “I have never had any intellectual excitement more intense than spending a morning with a pioneer woman at butter-making and hearing her talk,” Willa Cather confessed, unless perhaps it was when she was pouring over a recipe, for while she wrote of food, she was more often writing than she was cooking.  Although she would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for her novel One of Ours set during the first World War, many believed it was because she did not win one for My Antonia.  

As you create the rich autumn hues of gracious plenty on your Thanksgiving table this year, may you know much contentment and a sense of peace.  “The farmer’s wife who raises a large family and cooks for them” expresses “the real creative joy…which marks the great artist.”  Always remember, never forget sweetheart, women are Artists of the Everyday.  You are an Artist of the Everyday.

I always loved Willa Cather’s wisdom in pointing out that “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame."

Hold fast to that moment, Babe, hold fast to the benediction, bend your knees and acknowledge that blessed are you among women to know that moment and give thanks.  Cherish it.  “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again,” Willa Cather confessed to console. For the writing that breaks the heart holding the pen only soothes the soul of she who turns the page, when writers find the strength to write not about what they love, but what they have lost.

Sending dearest love that you and yours may know peace and plenty and always, blessings on our courage.  

XO SBB

November’s Abundant Gifts: Grace, Gratitude, Reverence and Remembrance

 How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one [month] loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

(With gratitude and love to)
W.B.Yeats

November is the month of grace, gratitude, reverence and remembrance.  Four precious weeks to recall how blessed we truly are, even if we don’t particularly feel it at this moment. But November loves the pilgrim soul in you Babe, and longs to erase the fretting from your frazzled face and world-weary heart. 

 To begin with, personally it’s the month my most precious blessing, my darling daughter was born, and she became my greatest Life’s teacher. Formed beneath the depths of my heart, she is the only one on earth to truly know me from the inside out.   Her eyes were the first to reflect back my beauty. She gave me glimpses of a woman I’d never known before. In truth, we gave birth to each other.  But to make her proud, I had to push way out of my comfort zone to become myself and I’m still becoming. I believe it was our karmic pack; a sacred contract.  Ancient wisdom believes that children not yet born choose their parents for the lessons that they need for their souls to grow in this lifetime.  But I think it’s the parents who need the lessons.  I also believe that the oldest and wisest soul in the world belongs to the baby who was just born even as I as I write this. Yes, here’s the Heavenly conversation:  “That one, your Woman down there, she needs to be broken open so that she can fulfill her destiny. She’s got a lot to learn.  Will you help me?”  And the next thing you know, he or she is on the way, straight to your heart and changing everybody’s world.

Life changed in profound ways when I became a Mother, especially after knowing the grief of losing another child before birth, which had happened two years before.  So the best night’s sleep I ever had was the night after Katie Éireann was safely born. I was an older first time mother and my pregnancy had been difficult; I was on bedrest the last eight weeks.  During that time, I kept company with one of the great loves of my life, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.  We didn’t know whether she was a boy or girl, but if she was a girl I wanted to name the baby “Yeatsie.”  Personally, I don’t believe dead poets should matter to live husbands. But her father would only let me go so far and we agreed on Katherine and then he let me add Éireann as a middle name (even the Gaelic spelling, not realizing that I was naming her after mna na hEireann which means the “Women of Ireland.”) 

When I invoked my first prayer of thanksgiving, I asked for the blessings of the women of Ireland who had gone before, including my cherished Irish Nana.  I prayed for her to be everything I believed I was not:   Brave, beautiful, courageous, compassionate, candid, eloquent, generous, full of Grace, healthy, honorable, passionate, protective, strong, soulful, a storyteller, a woman of wit, wisdom and wry. A wordsmith.  Poet and artist.  But most of all, I prayed for her to be Herself.  There is nothing like holding your baby for the first time, unless it is watching them become a person you so admire that you shake your head in wonder, amazement and gratitude that somehow you were blessed to share their lives. 

Katie Éireann was safely delivered two days before Thanksgiving and I was deeply grateful that she’d been born into a generation of girls who would not be torn apart by the fraught and very raucous feminist movement of the sixties and seventies when the pointed finger wanted to know if you were feminine or a feminist? It was an angry, uncertain and frightening time to be a woman in this country.  But girls born in the eighties had a right to choose the life they wanted to lead—to work, to stay home, to do both, to have control over their own bodies, to love who they loved and to become the woman they were born to be.  What a legacy of love from generations of women who had gone before as true pioneers.

November brings unexpected gifts, too: an extra hour of sleep as we turn the clocks back, even if it’s dark at both ends of bedtime.  Learning to comfort ourselves through Life’s dark moments is the essence of November.  Learning to trust that night must end is a lesson from which none of us get a free pass.  Learning that it is truly darkest before the dawn is not just a scientific fact it is an essential spiritual law.  I wish I could change the curriculum.  I would. There must be a reason I can’t.

Maybe you feel drained, depleted and discouraged today.  Anxious and frightened, too. Maybe you’re frightened for the future to reveal itself and scared for our children’s and grandchildren’s future.  Alarmed for our country and for our earth. But the priceless blessing is that our country is already great and our most precious gift is the right to vote. The Mothers and Fathers who have lost children, the sons and the daughters who have lost parents so that we might vote deserve to be honored and remembered for their courage by our act of reverence, remembrance and bravery at the ballot box.  Don’t throw that gift away, discounting or discarding this freedom because of its superficial packaging.  Choosing not to choose is the ultimate betrayal of yourself and all that you hold dear.  

                                        "Miss Liberty" from Hearst's Magazine, November 1917

Let’s be real for a moment:  it’s easy to be grateful when life hums—when there’s money in the bank, you’ve got a marvelous job, the romance is divine or your marriage is in one of its sweet phases and you’re healthy and so is your family.  But when you don’t know how the bills will get paid, or he doesn’t love you any longer; when you are reeling from a devastating diagnosis or the dream house which you just finished paying off, has been swept away a once in a century flood deemed “an Act of God” by the insurance company, “thank you” usually isn’t the phrase that immediately comes to mind.

At least it wasn’t for me (or isn’t always—the currents of awareness ebb and flow around here).  But after seeing and knowing the everyday grace of gratitude and the great peace that does “pass all understanding,” I know what I need to do, especially when fortune’s tumultuous cycles of change throw me for a loop.  I must stop focusing on what’s lacking in my life and bring my complete attention to all that I have—the “simple abundance” that surrounds us all.  Small acts of kindness heal even the deepest wounds; savoring fleeting moments of comfort restores serenity; keeping quiet when you want to shout and silently “blessing” what bedevils you is grace under pressure.  

Ironically, I’ve discovered through my own disappointments, that even as I’m falling apart, if I stop for a moment, I notice that it’s gratitude holding me together.  It baffles me, but gratitude’s most powerful mysteries are often revealed when we are struggling in the midst of deep, personal turmoil.  When we stumble in the darkness, rage in anger, hurl faith across the room, abandon all hope.  I've long believed that when we cry ourselves to sleep, gratitude waits patiently at the end of the bed, ready to console and reassure us; there is a landscape larger than the one we can see right now.

We are not the first people to hold our breaths on the edge of an unknown abyss, knowing that something dark has been unleashed upon the world and neither knowing what it is, how to fight it, survive it or overcome it.  In 1919 as the smoke cleared and the catastrophic reality of the first World War was apparent, Yeats wrote one of his most prophetic poems entitled The Second Coming:

             "Windswept" by Margaret Chodos Irvine

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. 

So being human, we turn away from not just the thought, but the poem and the prayer.  Babe, this is not the day we stop praying.  This is the day we increase them.  So put your head under the pillow or bake a pumpkin pie, but for the love of all that is holy, please vote this Tuesday, November 8th and give thanks for the honor and great privilege of this blessing. 

One month loves the Pilgrim soul in all of us and her name is November.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be reflecting on the courage of our Pilgrim and Pioneer mothers, women who pushed through hell and high water with grace, grit and gumption, the trinity of gratitude, in order to find their place in the world or create a new home on the range. Their legacy of love empowers us to reach deep within to cherish and protect all we hold dear.  May November be a month of grace, gratitude, reverence and remembrance for you. 

Sending you dearest love and a prayer for your peace and plenty.
Blessings on our courage.  

XO SBB

The Long Good-Bye: On Women and Ghosts

Does one ever see any ghost that is not oneself?
-- Marjorie Bowen

                   Twilight at Newton's Chapel, England. 

As All Hallow’s Eve approaches, this is the weekend I indulge in the spooky and strange, especially with much loved books and black and white supernatural thrillers, especially English ghost stories.  From The Ghost and Mrs. Muir to Rebecca, I cuddle on the bed with hot apple cider, popcorn and cats, as reel life is revealed one frame at a time. Pleasure perfected, especially if the ghost story includes houses which hold secrets, although every house tries to shelter the secrets of the women who lived there once and loved it, in the same way the home loved the woman.

The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen is a favorite for ghost stories, especially her goose bump short story Hand in Glove (1952). Bowen believed that the truly scary supernatural story “lies in their being just, just out of the true.”  One of my perennial Hallowe’en books is Alison Lurie’s collection of 9 eerie tales in Women and Ghosts.  I especially love the visitation to a woman who thinks she’s marrying Mr. Right by the ghost of his first wife.  If only the First Wives Club held séances! 
        
Perhaps women adore ghost stories because we have such a difficult time letting go.  Bring up the topic of ghosts at any dinner party and most of the female guests will be able to contribute an anecdote of a sighting or a haunting, usually set in old houses.

But “objects have ghostly emanations, too that attach themselves to their solidity,” the writer Dominique Browning tells us in her marvelous book, Around the House and In the Garden:  A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing, and Home Improvement.  “Things with drawers—chests, armoires, night tables, trunks—seem to be the most populated pieces of furniture.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been as haunted by other people’s ghosts as much as I have been by my own, especially when I open my unconscious catchalls.  What stuff do you have squirreled away in the scary space euphemistically known as “storage”? It could be under the stairs, in the attic, basement, utility room, garage, or Heaven forbid in a storage container.  If you’re really adept at camouflaging the depth of your despair, especially to yourself, Babe, perhaps your storage containers are half way around the world.   

“Penetrate deeply into the secret existence of anyone about you, even the man or woman whom you count happiest, and you will come upon things they spend all their efforts to hide,” the Victorian novelist Myrtle Reed confessed just before she died in 1911.  “Fair as the exterior may be, if you go in, you will find bare places, heaps of rubbish that can never been taken away, cold hearths, desolate altars and windows veiled with cobwebs.”

If you’re like me, what’s stuffed inside are symbols of all sorts, from the sublime to the ridiculous—touchstones that provoke every emotion known to woman:  letters, photographs, bank statements, lone earrings, locks of hair, one baby shoe, assorted baby teeth, menus, ticket stubs, orphaned keys, a fossilized rubber pacifier, forgotten rings, collars of long-dead cats.  In your bedroom more clothes and shoes that you don’t wear, than ones you do;  crowding each other and your psyche are the misbegotten “buys” that make you feel uncomfortable, fat, silly, or miserable, probably still in dry-cleaning bags or with sale tags.  And if your lingerie bureau has turned into a sock drawer, sweetie, it’s time to call the Ghostbusters.

A vibrational energy surrounds and attaches itself to every object in our homes, transforming them into palpable memories, both good and bad.  Often when we feel depressed but can’t identify the source of our distress, it’s because we’re sensing something we’ve hidden too well.  “A person speaks not only with the voice but with those objects she chooses to surround herself,” the superb writer Jacqueline Winspear reminds us in her detective novel Birds of a Feather.  “That photographs tell a story is well accepted, but the way furniture is positioned in a room tells something about its occupant; the contents of a larder reveal desire and restraint, as most surely does the level of liquid in the decanter.”  They all become ghostly receptacles for our “every thought, feeling, inspiration, reflection and wish.”

Too true. I sure hate to be the one to break it to us, but what’s ailing so many women, particularly myself at this moment, is the dis-ease of our daily round lurking just beneath the psychic surface of our lives.  The things stuffed in the back of your closet, the kitchen junk drawer, attic, and basement— is really the Past crying out to be buried, once and for all, or given another incarnation with someone new. Talk about the walking dead.  I think this is one of the most difficult lessons I’ve ever had to learn, but start thinking of storage as synonymous with sorrow, siphoning your precious natural resources—time, creative energy and emotion—and  you’ll find a new resolve to get rid of things.  Well, at least maybe you’ll be open to think about getting rid of things. Maybe. That’s progress.

For what’s really shoved in those unmarked brown boxes are scraps of shame, shreds of regret and shards of self-reproach.  Sins of omission and acts of self-sabotage.  Physical evidence of errors, lapses of judgment and cringe-worthy mistakes.  Emotional flotsam and jetsam from different periods of our lives, which haven’t even been acknowledged, never mind worked through, floating to the surface of our secret shoals of sorrow.  The only way I know this for sure is that I’ve washed up on the beach a few times.  But shipwrecked or spit out of the mouth of a whale, there is a point where the pain of the past becomes more to bear than the fear of the future.  As the Victorian poet Maria Mitchell consoles us, “People have to learn sometimes not only how much the heart, but how much the head, can bear.”
    
So Halloween seems as good a time of the year to start making the connection between what we stow away and what we stew over.  In fact, they’re probably in the same box.  One’s the issue, the other’s the artifacts.  Proof positive, for example, that once upon a time you were married to the completely wrong man for you.  But now you’re happily married to your high school sweetheart (thanks to attending your 40th reunion), so by all means keep the 1974 Wizards yearbook; but get rid of anything else that has to do with your previous marital incarnations, except legal papers.  And no, if you have divorced her father, your daughter is not likely to wear your wedding dress.  Sell it and buy a vintage bottle of Champagne to celebrate all the happiness you’re finally willing to receive and enjoy!

The sorry truth about women and ghosts is that the longer it takes us to acknowledge whatever fear, sorrow, slights, grief, anger, abuse, neglect, contempt, betrayal, deceit, projections, errors of judgment, lack of experience, bad timing, bitter failures, rejections, bungled efforts, whims of fate and just lousy luck we think we’ve packed away, all we manage to do, as Shakespeare tells us is “increase store with loss, increase loss with store.”

Spooky, isn’t it?  Still, you can’t resolve a problem or a situation that you won’t admit is happening, has happened once upon a time, or you expect to happen next week.  Our thoughts are like iron-mesh strapping tape.  When we secretly nurse a memory with highly charged emotion, whether it’s fear, grief, or anger, we open ourselves up psychically and start inviting in all manner of misery. In a word, ghosts.

                                   The bench around the apple tree, Newton's Chapel, England. 

This week I’m going through the inventory of containers that have been stored for seven years in England. I’ve have tried with every fiber of my being to hold on to the furnishings of my English dream, long after it became ashes, paying the equivalent of a mortgage to house boxes instead of myself.  The emotional pain is both sharp and dull. It’s like organizing an estate sale while you’re still alive; hovering like a spirit wanting to share the item's amazing history but prevented from the Other Side, mixed with distress that something you found priceless is now somebody else's bargain.

                      Interior, Newton's Chapel, England. 

For these containers hold all the things I’ve loved, collected over a lifetime and created a beautiful home for myself and daughter with: the antique beds and their William Morris canopies; the grandfather clock, the 17th century carved mirror that hung in the nave of Newton’s Chapel, the stunning sculpture of Sir Isaac Newton by the great English sculptor Graeme Mitcheson; the Arts and Crafts chandelier designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and created by the Glasgow Art School from his drawings.  I was such a lucky woman to be able to work with so many artists. I was so blessed to create such a home that cherished the past.  No more than now, I suppose, when I have to let go.  

                  Sir Isaac Newton by Graeme Mitcheson.

I never told you that gratitude had to be expressed with big smiles.  In fact, I suspect (hope) that the “thank you” offered in disappointment and despair are the most treasured because they are priceless tokens of trust, especially when trusting Spirit is the last thing in the world you want to do.  I know  (hope) that there is another home I will be led to and will love, but I also know that if I want to find it I can’t keep looking back anymore. Nor can you.  Babe, why do you think that poor Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt?  Because she turned back to look one more time at all she was leaving and losing.  The salt was from her tears. 

“Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things,” Elizabeth Bowen confessed in her masterpiece The Death of the Heart (1938),”One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.”  Bowen struggled her entire life to keep her family’s ancient Irish home Bowen’s Court; she had a nervous breakdown over unpaid bills in the 1950s. After she “recovered” she lectured and taught in the States to keep it going.  Finally she was forced to sell and then lived through it being razed to the ground.  She spent the rest of her life living in hotels or with friends.  I know I’m not at a new threshold, I just pray to move through this with as much grace and grit as the Swell Dames I so admire and Elizabeth Bowen did it in tweed suits, pearls and heels.  When I look up at the women who have gone before looking down at me I feel such a deep connection, “just out of being true.” 

So if you’re having to let go, move on and begin again, you’ve come to the right friend, who’s learned that loving and losing are both sides of our ghost stories—the here and the after.  I’m not going to tell you “they’re just things.”  I’m not going to tell you anything, Babe. I’m going to put the kettle on, get the box of tissues, and bring out the Irish whiskey reserved for wakes and root canals.

“I have tried to give away some of the things in my house that have ghosts; I think they would be better off somewhere else, and I want to be rid of certain memories,” Dominique Browning confesses, surely for all of us.  “the armoire that was part of a marriage, the carpet that was part of a love affair, the photograph that was part of hope, the bedcovers that were part of too many sleepless nights.  Begone.”

Offering a shoulder and one last look together.  Please let us remember in our prayers all who have no home and those facing the heartbreak we know too well.  May you be safe and sheltered in the loving embrace of Mother Plenty and may you soon find your path to the hearth waiting in your heart.  You have no idea how much I love you and how grateful I am for your calling me back into the world.  I’ll keep the stories coming.  We’ve got this far by not turning back.  We’re not about to start today.

Blessings on our courage.  

XO SBB

National Cat Day

"When you fall on your head, do you land on your feet?
Are you tense when you sense there's a storm in the air?
Can you find your way blind when you're lost in the street?
Do you know how to go to the heaviside layer?
Because jellicles can and jellicles do..."

- Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats (from the musical "Cats") 

I’ve been reliably prompted to remember that this is National Cat Day. Really? Isn’t everyday National Cat Day?

Apparently not.

Obviously, my social media content manager lives with dogs, who are always good and charming, which is why Nana doesn’t mind being dragged up a tree by one of her adorable grandsons, Connor (the size of a small moose) in pursuit of  (dare not speak its name aloud) a “squirrel” or growled at by the other grandson, a little rat terrier named Finn the Fierce who's holding a grudge because Nana is no longer allowed to bring any food treats when she visits.  No treats? Then, no tricks. 

Clearly, a cat is not a dog.

Finn and Connor, the grand babies. 

I’m a cat woman, which is not to be confused with an old cat lady.  Not yet, anyway. Always have been feline fancier or at least since I was 16 and found a tiny newborn kitten who had been abandoned on the street in the New England town where we lived.  I wrapped her in my scarf and carried her home and successfully begged my Mother to let me keep her.  Mom said I could, as long as I took care of her and I did, creating a bassinet out of a basket by my bed and nursing her with a special formula from the Vet with a doll’s bottle every hour for weeks.  I named her Bébè and cats have continued to be my babies, with the exception of my own darling girl, who convinced her Mother into expanding our family at least twice.  Her last kitten, Mikey, ended up living with me years after she’d grown up and eventually traveled to England where we lived together in Eden.  I would write in Newton’s Chapel, he would wander and yes, nap under the boughs of an apple tree.

Mikey, age 17, in England. 

Until the day arrived when we couldn’t and all I cherished was suddenly lost and became forsaken. So two weary travelers unexpectedly landed on my beloved sister’s doorstep in California. That was 7 years ago.  A complete karmic cycle.  Last year when my first children’s book The Best Part of the Day was published, my creative collaborator, the artist Wendy Edelson (www.wendyedelson.com) so beautifully illustrated our English idyll, transforming sad memories into wistful remembrance.   A conjuring trick for sure.  Bless you, Wendy.

When I write about cats, I am writing about love and when I write about love, I must write about my sister Maureen O’Crean.  For as long as I’ve known the incredible woman she grew up to be, the plight of homeless women has been her personal and passionate cause, beginning early, probably with all the homeless bride dolls or headless Barbies tucked in safely after their travails (at the hands of the evil, only older sister.)

Sadly, at no time has her work been more needed than now.  Women find themselves and those they love in unspeakable terror unexpectedly and through no fault of their own.  Physical, emotional abuse and peril are only a paycheck at bay.  May you never know this nightmare personally.  But many women have, including me.  Being a best-selling self-help author didn’t insulate me from needing to find the courage to begin my life over again, but the love of my sister, daughter, friends and cats did.

For over a year, Mikey and I slept in her bed and shared her bathroom; I wrote Peace & Plenty in a corner of her living room; he dozed safe and warm on her sun porch; we feasted at her delicious table and the three of us snuggled safely on her couch watching good triumph over evil in reruns of crime dramas that I missed while living in England.  

But there’s even more love in this grateful celebrating of all creatures great and small and the heartstrings that bind us to each other.  Every Wednesday and Saturday for that year, Mo drove us to the Hermosa Beach Animal Hospital and the care of Dr. Steve Liebl and the compassion of everyone who works there, until the last sorrowful journey.  Mikey’s little soul managed to stay with me until the morning I finished Peace & Plenty.  Mikey was 18 when he passed and ascended “Up, up, up past the Russell Hotel, up, up, up to the Heaviside Layer” (Cats).

Of course, I swore I would never get another cat.  If I wanted another animal, someday I would have a golden Labrador, when I had the little farm … but a dog is not a cat. Then a few months later, we blissfully went out on errands and bumped into a kitten rescue adoption table, loitering with clear intent, waiting for me. It was a Heavenly setup. I’d been living alone in the apartment next door to my sister and it felt as empty as my heart and life.  There was such gleeful gratefulness as kittens and their new owners found each other. All of the kittens were quickly adopted except three from the same feral litter.  Suddenly I said I would take two to keep each other company.  Hmmm, that would leave the runt and they’ve never known any love except with each other.  So sad, to break up the little siblings….Perhaps you could help us find a good home for the baby….?

I promised to find them all a good home.  I did.

So this is a heartfelt thank you to Maureen, Kate (who begged me to let her have a “kitten of her own” named Mikey), the Hermosa Beach Animal Hospital (www.hah-vet.com) and to all those who care for the animals we love; to all those who rescue abandoned, mistreated and discarded animals; and especially to the shelters who keep the animals alive so they can someday fill empty hearts and lonely lives.

This is a great day to listen to the incredible, happy musical Cats with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics from the poet T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats originally published in 1939.  Cats the musical is now celebrating its 35th anniversary and a fabulous memory prompt. It’s helped me remember a time when I knew what happiness was.
May the memory live again.

Lucy, Maddie and Charlie in their "habitat" 

Blessings on your fur ball cuddles. 

PS. So my official baby is named Lucy. Maud.Montgomery. She’s a Jellicle cat.  And soon it will be time for the Jellicle Ball, come one, come all.

XO SBB and (Lucy, Maddie Grace and Charlie)

Hands to Work, Hearts to Flight: Amelia Earhart on Needlework and Aviation

I have learned from pleasant experience
that at the most despairing crisis, when all
looked sour beyond words, some delightful
“break” was apt to lurk just around the corner.
                                                            -- Amelia Earhart

It’s been said that fortune favors the brave, but Providence also attends the well-prepared and some of the most prepared women I know—women I admire who possess repose of the soul—have taught me that a well-kitted out sewing box is excellent training for adventures both close to home as well as far-flung fantasies.

This was the message that pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart encouraged in an interview for the popular women’s home arts magazine Needlecraft in May 1930, at a time when America was still reeling from the Wall Street crash six months earlier which plunged Main Street as well as the money men into the Great Depression.  With everyone’s nerves shaken and overwrought, America’s first modern heroine spoke about the connection between needlework and flying.  She wanted American women to realize that their dreams might be curtailed or detoured by the economy but that some of the best dreams begin at the kitchen table while darning socks, or continued in chairs by the fire while hooking a hearth rug.  Just make sure you have a copy of Modern Aviation nearby the sewing basket. 

“An interest in needlework doesn’t exclude an interest in aviation,” Amelia reminded women readers who were thrilled to know that she always packed “her little housewife, a small black box filled with a wonderful, large collections of all kinds, of threads, a few needles and scissors” on all her flights.  One rarely knew the delights of down-time if you weren’t prepared or expecting them.

The creative artistry of handicrafts has always been a part of women’s domestic daily round for centuries. It’s only in the last fifty years that what was once esteemed has been made to appear as “cultish” as hand work were demoted from being every woman’s accomplishment to the personal pursuits of a lucky few: women who had “time on their hands” (clearly an expression coined by a man!)  One of the reasons the clever Martha Stewart built a home based empire is that she was savvy enough to be aware that vintage serenity which had fallen through the cracks of frazzled modern living could be revamped and beautifully packaged.  

Hand work in all its many varieties was high art for Victorian women who began sewing at an early age. For Amelia Mary Earhart, born in Kansas in 1897, part of the last generation of young Victorian women as well as the first generation of “modern girls”,  life’s rich tapestry meant learning to excel in many pursuits.  The intimate and intricate soul craft of creating gave outward expression to countless women who often felt strait-jacketed by the expectations of a rigid society.  But they soon discovered that their exasperations could be calmed by the “Home Arts.” 

So many different crafts were part of their daily round: weaving, basketry, bead craft, needlecraft (embroidery, tatting, cross-stitching, lace making, smocking) sewing, knitting, crocheting, quilting, rug hooking and leather craft) as women found harmony, confidence, self-determination and a sense of accomplishment.  When you peruse magazines during the thirties and forties you also discover that everyday handcrafts extended to pottery, stained glass, ribbon craft, paper craft (decoupage, collage, marbling, paper cutting, scrapbooking), bookbinding, framing and carpentry.  Whereas our great grandmothers blended meditative crafting into their everyday, can you imagine for a moment what they would say if they could time travel to an aisle at Michaels—it’s enough to bring on an attack of vertigo or “vapors” requiring regular doses of Lydia Pinkham’s “tonic” for frazzled nerves. 

 Still, our great grandmothers were wise enough to realize that meditative hand work enabled them to create and maintain boundaries and were enterprising enough to form Ladies Gift Guilds in which to sell their wares bringing in much needed income when times were very tough and money was tight.  

“The woman who can create her own job is the woman who will win fame and fortune,” Amelia Earhart reminded them as she went from aviation record setter to a savvy and successful author, speaker and business woman; admired, respected and loved for her entrepreneurial instincts as well as adventurous “brand” which included a dazzling array of products including shoes, clothing, luggage, airplanes and automobiles.  

I think the great secret that artists of the everyday know is that when other people see that our hands are busy, they often give us a few moments grace from their requests. The pause that refreshes and restores. What the rest of the world doesn’t realize (and we shall never tell) is that when our hands are busy, our minds can rest and our dreams can soar.

Amelia Earhart confessed that “Courage is the price that Life extracts for granting peace.  The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things.”  And for “modern” women, myself included, who forget that courage is best nurtured in small snatches of contentment, we might be missing on some of the best adventure training possible, not to mention the wisdom of the ages.  The next time the fabric of real life seems to unravel before your eyes, turn away from the nightly news and get busy with your hands, so that you can serenely sort out where your heart wishes to pick up the next stitch. 

After Amelia Earhart was tragically “lost” to the world in an effort to do the impossible—circumnavigate the globe—on May 31, 1937—and transitioned from history into icon, Eleanor Roosevelt observed that “She helped the cause of women by giving them a feeling that there was nothing they could not do.”  Amelia Earhart’s courage and creativity was a catalyst for dreams in the hearts of millions of women around the world.  She was and continues to be one Swell Dame for us all.

Sending love and fond wishes for some much deserved  well-spent moments this week, and always, blessings on your courage.

XO SBB

The Thrill of Thrift

There is a satisfaction in seeing one’s household prosper,
in being both bountiful and provident.
--Phyllis McGinley

I don’t know a woman alive who doesn’t get a thrill out of thrifting—the finding of the perfect item at the perfect price.  But thrifting is so much more than a bargain bagged at a garage sale, flea market or on eBay.  For centuries, thrifting has been the heart of the homemaker’s honorable estate and a sacred trust that included the right apportionment of her personal and domestic resources:  time, creative energy, emotion, industry, strength, skill, craft, and labor; the management of property of all kinds, including money; the exercise of prudence and temperance; and the distribution of charity to those less fortunate.

In other words, all those homespun virtues necessary to keep a family healthy, prosperous and secure were contained in the Heavenly boon of this one expansive word.

But to truly understand the reassuring and redeeming spiritual qualities of thrift, let’s clear away all the old, hackneyed cliché cobwebs that surround this marvelous quality.

Let’s begin by what thrift isn’t:  parsimonious, frugal, mean, scrimping, paltry, shoddy, stingy or cheap.

What thrift is:  bountiful, generous, compassionate, vigorous, growing, abundant, blooming, copious, healthful, efficient.  Thrift is practicing the art of elegant economies, such as gratitude, simplicity, order, harmony, beauty and joy (interestingly, all the six graces of Simple Abundance).  Thrift is thriving, increasing, expanding and plentiful.

We can trace the role that thrift has played in the English household back to the 13th century bard Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.  Probably the earliest meaning of the word thrift was “the condition of one who thrives” or being endowed with good luck, good fortune, wealth and health.  But what made thrift such an honorable aspiration was that its bounty was not conveyed by celestial benediction or favor of the Crown—but rather through the everyday choices made by prudent housewives who were neat, clean, industrious, imaginative, honest, clever, enterprising and generous.  Women who found the mystical in their mundane rituals of their daily round and cherished their bounty of the everyday.  

Illustration by Coles Phillips.

The invocation of thrift was considered as crucial to a bride’s happy marriage as tossing rice, releasing doves or wearing something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.  Beginning in the 16th century, English nuptials introduced the custom of the bride’s father or guardian slipping a silver sixpence coin into her left shoe as a harbinger of wealth and protection against want.  The symbol of the sixpence represented the “reward” due to those drawn to the honorable estate of matrimony.

Intriguingly, “thrift” is also the name of a charming English flower, a pink perennial that blooms from April through September which flourishes in rocky crevices, requiring little soil for sustenance while acting as a barrier protecting the marshes from the ebb-and-flow erosion of the sea.  As a metaphor for our own reconsidered economic lives, the metaphysical boundary of thrift protects us from the ebb and flow of the emergencies.  It enables us to create our own protective barrier to cushion us from want and distress through our savings, or, the “Margin of Happiness” as the Victorians called it.  Fabulous name that makes you want to have or start one immediately.  

Without thrift “there can be little solid domestic happiness,” the Pulitzer prizewinning poet and essayist Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978) tells us in her Sixpence in Her Shoe (1964) written as an answer to Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique published the year before.  “For thrift is neither selfishness or cheese-paring, but a large, compassionate attribute, a just regard for God’s material gifts.  It has nothing in common with meanness and is different even from economy, which may assist thrift.”

Phyllis McGinley is a woman after my own heart.  She loved being a wife, a mother, a homemaker, an author and a poet.  She reveled in combining all the facets of her daily round in her writing, working on her poems, essays or books while a pot of stew or soup simmered on the stove.  And she saw no contradictions in combining all the aspects of her life into a tapestry of contentment—from meeting her husband’s train to being celebrated at a White House reception.

Phyllis McGinley on the cover of Time Magazine, June 18, 1965.

In her inspirational essay “The Pleasures of Thrift,” she describes how passionate thrift is the guardian of domestic bliss:  “Meanness inherits a set of silverware and keeps it in the bank.  Economy uses it only on important occasions for fear of loss.  Thrift sets the table with it every night for pure pleasure, but counts the butter spreaders before they are put away.”

Becoming a novice in Mother Plenty’s Order of the Hearth enables us to create a sustainable lifestyle protected from life’s storms, as best we can.  “Thrift saves for the future because the children must be educated and because one must not be a burden in old age,” McGinley tells us.  “Thrift keeps the house painted and the roof in repair, puts shoe trees in shoes, but bakes a jar of cookies for neighborhood children.  It is never stingy…”

Illustration by Coles Phillips.

What I adore about McGinley’s view of thrift is that “it has to be a personal joy which every housewife must work out for herself” by first examining what are her authentic extravagances.  Do you love to cook?  Then quality knives, organic chickens and virgin olive oil might be your affordable luxuries—but through your prudent meal planning, the chicken will stretch to three delicious suppers and the fresh baked sourdough bread accompanying your homemade chicken noodle soup doesn’t have to be made in your kitchen.  The thrill of thrift invites trade-offs not trade-downs.

“Everywoman has to learn to be thrifty in her own idiom.  Her economies must be like her luxuries cut to the shape of the family budget or the family dream and they must never descend to indignities.  Thrift implies dignity,” Phyllis McGinley reminds us.  “It might lie for one person as a thing so small as properly balancing her check book or for another in something so large as learning to make all the draperies for her windows…And, like laughter or sachets in bureau drawers, it is a pleasant thing to have around the house.”

I believe that once we approach thrift not as a straight-jacket of “can’t haves” but as a homegrown remedy for contentment and creativity, this ancient art can not only boost our morale, but increase our “Margin of Happiness” and that, after all, is why we seek the sacred in the ordinary.

Sending love to you and yours and always, blessings on your courage.

XO SBB

A Studio of Your Own

The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make. 

--Simone Weil

"Artist of the Everyday" by Harrison Fisher (1877-1934) 

During my flush years, I enjoyed the great delight of being able to collect works of art which I discovered by casting a very wide net ranging from local high school art exhibitions to major auction house events, both here and in Europe.  This was an enormous source of pleasure for me; buying a young artist’s work always brought great joy to both the artist and myself and bidding on paintings that hadn’t seen the light of day for decades at Christies and Sotheby’s was a thrill.  I rarely attended the auctions in person, because I’m a stay in the background kind of gal and a novice art collector.  

I never really bought art and collectibles for investment, which was a good thing because my few “investment” purchases—those “sure things”—were eventually expensive losses which left me shocked and incredulous.  But the things I bought for love and beauty—the art, antiques and collectibles—still remain with me long after I needed to sell them, imparting in their fading traces valuable lessons and precious memories. 

One of the paintings I rescued from oblivion was “buried” in a Sotheby’s 1998 catalog for “Important European Paintings.”  These catalogs were usually filled with portraits of ancient Italian cardinals in their Roman Catholic red pomp, exotic looking women with long dark hair, rounded bellies, translucent Harmen pants and gold coin necklaces dripping between their abundant décolleté.  And let’s not forget the still life paintings of long tables displaying  mounds of dead animals, fish, birds, furs and antlers.  Just the type of cheery sight you’d love for the breakfast nook.  If you’ve ever wondered where many of the world’s cloying cultural clichés come from, look no further than the salons of European painters during the 18th and 19th centuries. 

There was one painting however, the memory of which still makes my heart flutter: an oil on canvas entitled A Studio of Their Own, painted in 1886 by a mysterious Elizabeth Pillard.  It depicts 9 Victorian women behind closed doors in an art studio painting a black man dressed as an African chieftain.  I had never seen anything like it—it was amazing and literally brought to life a slice of women’s history so vibrantly. The camaraderie of the women, the “buzz” of creating, the feeling of liberation and escape was exhilarating. It was a small picture in the catalog and I hadn’t learned yet to read “the fine print” such as the painting’s size before bidding, so imagine my surprise when it required three strapping men to carry it into my small suburban Maryland townhouse which I shared with my teenage daughter.  The canvas was five feet square and with its massive silver grey wood frame, the painting ended up being over 7 feet long and 7 feet high.  It was enormous and there was only one wall in the house that could display it, barely.

"A Studio Of Their Own" by Elizabeth Pillard

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed my daily sojourns with these ladies and I relished my feeble attempts to unravel the mystery of who exactly was Elizabeth Pillard? Was she English or French? Where, when and how did she paint this gigantic, fascinating studio portrait? It had to be in a woman’s art school; this wasn’t something you dashed off on the back porch after hanging the laundry, like the marvelous American Victorian painters Lilla Cabot Perry and Mary Cassatt, whose days consisted of “housekeeping, painting and oyster frying.” 

Well, I was on Elizabeth’s trail for several years, never finding out more about her than this one painting, until the trajectory of my life changed and Studio had to be  sold again. If any of you ever come upon the backstory of Elizabeth Pillard, please drop me a line and let me know.

Virginia Woolf was only four (1882-1941) when Elizabeth painted A Studio of Their Own, but artist studios were popular subjects during the decades of Virginia’s formative years and she was born into an English intellectual family. For many years the influential art magazine, The Studio, first published in London in 1898 (which championed the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau) carried pages of advertisements for studios for women artists. It always seemed to me that at some point Virginia Woolf might have seen Elizabeth Pillard’s painting in an exhibition and the seed of a title for her A Room of One’s Own lecture and essay published in 1929 could have found inspiration in Elizabeth’s brushstrokes or women artists like her.  The famous quote of Virginia Woolf’s that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” originated from that lecture.

Illustration by Cole Phillips (1880-1927) American artist and illustrator

Since time immemorial the essential ingredients for women to create seems to be private space and money and you won’t get a fierce argument from me, especially since for a few years I was blessed with both with Newton’s Chapel. The time and space to hear the end of your own thought is priceless. However,  I’ve learned that idyllic conditions come and then go in our lives in a spontaneous cycle of disruptive and dynamic change. Granted, once we enter Paradise, we hardly expect to be evicted, but nothing stays constant except change. And change has to be disruptive before it can be dynamic.  Lord have mercy I wish I had learned that lesson early on but I’m just making peace with accepting it as I write now. However, I think this insistence that we need all the perfect conditions before we can birth a dream, create art, a new business or more importantly a life we feel passionate about living is a subtle but sophisticated form of self-sabotage.

So is it lack of time, space, creative energy, emotion or money that you feel is holding you back today?  Bet you that there’s a least two out of three that has you rooted in discomfort and discouragement, because Babe, I know those days and those days know me.  

But if we’re completely honest, if I force myself to pull down the yellowed, muslin scrim of memory, to return once again to the most creative time of my life, when I was 44 and considered a failure in the eyes of the world, but a mother who didn’t want to be failure in the eyes of her magical 9-year-old daughter and began writing Simple Abundance out of a desperate need that I couldn’t even identify, never mind articulate; if I return to my side of the bed, the Washington Waldorf School parking lot, and my passion for women’s writing which had fallen through the cracks of social history—then I begin to understand the wisdom behind the English historian Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgewood’s confession that “Discontent and disorder [are] signs of energy and hope, not of despair.”

However, thank you God, that Heaven operates on a “need to know basis” and that when I began writing SA I didn’t need to know that there would be five years of showing up on the page, no publisher, thirty rejections, no money, no encouragement, just the Great Creator’s call to learn how to spin golden threads out of desperate need. What miracles could be wrought, Babe if we can just learn to give thanks first for the desperate need before the golden threads?  I think that is the secret of Life.

For truly, the space in which a woman needs to create is safeguarded within her imagination, to be hidden in the crevices of her heart and vouchsafed by her soul until she births her first or next dream into this world. I hate to be the one to break it to us both, but sometimes a woman finds her destiny in between sobs, staring at a blank wall, in the same bed she took to escape it.  So let’s have a lovely cup of tea before we begin again.

Blessings on your courage. 

XO SBB

Life's Unexpected Curtain Calls

May you respond to the call of your gift and find the
courage to go follow its path.

-John O’Donohue

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “spiritual journey”? Many people immediately think of difficult lessons, painful realizations, heartbreaking sacrifices or the frustrations and abject loneliness of unanswered prayers.  I call these my “intimate conversations with the ceiling.”  But difficult lessons and unanswered prayers are part of Life’s required course, so it’s easier for me to search for a tiny Divine hallmark in a challenge or difficulty, much as a jeweler might mark gold or silver.  

When something happens that hurts or throws me, particularly when I’ve prayed long and hard for a certain outcome and it doesn’t happen, after the sharp intake of breath, I’ve learned to say defiantly: I’m calling you a blessing. I’m calling you a blessing. I’ll repeat these words aloud for as long as it takes for me to slow down my racing heart and restore my balance. Then I’ll probably muffle a scream and not give a whit who hears me.  But since I’m always alone when I have these reactions, the only One who matters has heard.

This reframing and renaming of events and outcomes was taught to me by my beloved friend, the Irish mystic and poet John O’Donohue (1956-2008) and is so eloquently expressed in his last book To Bless the Space Between Us.  “The creation of the individual is a divine masterpiece.  We were dreamed for a long time before we were born.  Our souls, minds, and hearts [were] fashioned in the divine imagination…One of the fascinating questions is to decipher what one’s destiny is.  At the heart of each destiny is hidden a unique life calling. What is it you are called to do?” 

I was born into an Irish Catholic family which means I was born into a world of black and white and veils of one kind or another. Every Sunday, religiously, as one would say, we went to Mass. However, after the Latin Mass and frankincense were exchanged for American English and folk music in 1965, I felt as if I had been born into the wrong side of the aisle. I found peace in the mystery, wonder, beauty and awe of ritual; reverence in words that I might not understand, but responded to in my heart and soul on the deepest level.

Of course, I attended Catholic high school during the mid-sixties, when the word “vocation”—from the Latin vocare—meaning “to call”—was frequently heard and synonymous with entering a religious community; always suggested as the first choice for a life path.  This was extremely distressing because I really wanted to be an actress.  My life was to be in the theater or the movies.  Good gracious, I had a dozen stage names by the time I turned 12. Then, like most teenage girls at that time, I also knew that someday I would be swept off my feet by a handsome man, get married, have a big family and live happily ever after in Great Neck, N.Y.  

I must confess that although I was dead set on becoming an actress, I found the notion of being “chosen” by God very magnetic, even hypnotic.  I also thought the nuns' black-and-white habits incredibly romantic.  How much I was influenced by Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story (1959), I can't really say, except that Sister Luke pushed every emotional button I had.  Hepburn was playing a young woman who enters the convent to become a missionary nursing sister in the Belgian Congo during the 1920s.  She is so certain of her path, until she isn’t and you just know what’s coming even when you don’t.  I just love watching favorite movies every decade or so, because it’s always a different film than the one your Younger Self remembers.  I wish one didn't have to grow older to become wiser, but there you have it.

Audrey Hepburn in "The Nun's Story" (1959)

Well, as I stated emphatically to my parents and Mother Superior, my life was going to be on the stage.  The way I figured it, the theater was about as far away from God as I could get.  Do you want to know how to make the angels laugh?  Tell Heaven your plans.

So I went to New York and discovered that there was The Actors' Chapel at St. Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church. Hmmn. Then I traveled to London seeking my fame and fortune and found The Actor’s Church at St. Paul’s Covent Garden (Anglican).  I also discovered that the theater and church share a passion for language. I love the language of the King James Bible (1769 version, please, I’m very modern), the services of Morning Prayer (Book of Common Prayer 1928, thank you) and Evensong. I love ending The Lord’s Prayer with “For Thine Is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory. Forever and Ever” and never forgetting that All Things Come from Thee, O Lord and of Thine Own have we given Thee.  I felt safe.  I also thought I stashed my spirituality into a box that I could handle.  I kept the Divine Mystery at bay. 

Obviously, I did not become an accomplished actress. Rejection, self-doubt, financial insecurity and public criticism are all part of an actress’s daily round. I briefly became a playwright and wrote a one woman show about Sarah Bernhardt which was panned so virulently I took to bed for a week. So I became a theatre critic but couldn’t do that for very long because editors don’t really want raves; flops inspire such creative turns of phrase.  It’s so much more colorful when you spew derision instead of encouragement. Break someone’s heart with your words?The poisoned pen really is sharper than the sword.  But all artists “spread their dreams under your feet” (thank you, W.B. Yeats) and I could not “trample” on another soul's dreams.

One of my first casting call photos circa 1972. So serious, so dramatic, so wide-eyed.

Then I stepped away from the footlights and was blessed with a beautiful baby girl I cherished and I got the role of a lifetime as her mother.  When she was about four, since I had never left her overnight, I asked her father if I could have a week-end away to collect my thoughts.  I really had visions of a hotel, sleep and room service but then someone told me of an Episcopal convent which conducted weekend silent retreats.  Perfect. The moment I drove into the convent grounds it seemed as if a spell came over me; by the time I walked down the hushed stone hallway to enter the chapel, I knew I was home.  It was very unsettling.

After a silent weekend spent praying and working besides the cloistered, contemplative women who had answered God’s call so dramatically, I felt compelled to finally try and reconcile the irreconcilable.  Yes, I confessed to God that I had been called and I turned away from Heaven’s request to serve.  But now I had an even greater calling, I was a mother.  I had been entrusted with a precious child to safeguard as best I could.

On Sunday, at the conclusion of that life-changing week-end, the guests were invited to speak to one nun in a confessor role about anything that was troubling our hearts. We were to unburden ourselves. A beautiful nun about my age sat with me in the convent garden bathed in the golden sunlight of an exquisite Indian summer day.  I shared with her that I believed I had been blessed with a spiritual calling and I had said “No” to God.  My sorrow was not that I had taken the path that I had, but that I did not possess the courage to even consider, never mind pray, about my true vocation.  Now it was too late because my path was resolute:  I was to be the best mother that I could be. Oh, yes and I wrote a bit, too.

Sister was silent for a few moments with her eyes closed and her hands together.  She sighed.  And then she asked me to look at the families greeting each other and coming together after a weekend apart.  Look at the smiles.  The hugs.  Hear the laughter.  Take in the bliss of their connection and communion.  She confided that there were some Sundays when she wondered if she could not have served God better in the world as a wife and a mother.  Then she asked me quietly:  “Why do you think that you have not already answered God’s call?  God needs mothers.  God needs writers.  There must be some special work that only you can bring forth into being.  Perhaps, my dear, your convent is the world.”  

“The notion of vocation is interesting and rich.  It suggests that there is a special form of life that one is called to; to follow this is the way to realize one’s destiny,” John O’Donohue reminds us. However, “the faces of the calling change” and so we must play many roles during our lifetime.  “To be born is to be chosen.” 

Clearly I've always been enamored with a certain kind of look. "The Authentic Self is the soul made visible."  (photo: Eric Van Den Brulle).

And who knows?  The role in Life’s drama that frightens us the most, may in turn lead to a gold star on the dressing room door and a dozen unexpected curtain calls, not to mention a favorite pew in the Actors’ Chapel. 

Blessings on your courage this week, darling readers.  

XO SBB 

ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING: The Butler Did It

"Girl Scholars on Parade" by Harrison Fisher (1875-1934). Fisher was an American artist and magazine illustrator who captured the "Gibson Girl" American style of beauty.

Virginia Woolf once observed that the challenge of every writer or speaker was not to change the world but merely provide each reader or audience member with one provocative thought to write down, put upon their mantel and mull over. One life-changing thought is quite enough for any of us to take in on any given day.

As a true believer in bibliotherapy, audiotherapy and cinematherapy, I’m often asked who/what are some of my favorite writers, books, music, movies and so I’m delighted to send you to my favorite “Enquire Within” resource which seamlessly and artfully combines all my secret Rx for frazzled nerves—Jesse Kornbluth’s brilliant cultural concierge service known as HeadButler.com  (@headbutler).   

Full disclosure: Jesse’s been a friend for the last 20 years, but that doesn’t mean his writing doesn’t regularly dazzle me with peacock green admiration on a weekly basis, especially after all these years.  Reading Jesse’s blog is as close to having a private tutorial by an Oxford or Cambridge don as I’m ever going to get (“don” – an esteemed British university professor, preferably “Oxbridge” as over-the-pond academic insiders call their ivory towers.)  

But I’ve got Jesse K. and HeadButler and my personal professor/curator always sends fascinating new-to-me historical, social and cultural missives which I delight in following to coax the muse for a happy hour or two of homework. That’s because JK doesn’t just drop the whole story in my lap. I have to click.  I have to follow the clues to be creatively rewarded. What’s a writer’s favorite part of writing?  Research! Jesse encourages me to consider the wealth of usually overlooked “Great Old Stuff” books, films, music, history that I’ve forgotten or don’t know and wow! now I do and you will too, as well as thank me for sending you to a writer’s writer for the high-brow low down.

One of his recent posts was about the Victorian writer Anna Sewell’s masterpiece—Black Beauty—or “Black Beauty, his grooms and companions; the autobiography of a horse ‘Translated from the original equine’” published in 1877 and for the last 140 years, considered  a children’s book about horses, particularly for girls. 

However, Anna Sewell, who was invalid for most of her life, only began writing her one and only book at the age of 51, inspired by her love for her family’s pony “Bess” and passionately distressed over animal cruelty.  Anna dictated the story to her mother (the Victorian "juvenile" writer Mary Wright Sewell) from her bed over five years and died just five months after it was published. Black Beauty became an immediate publishing phenomenon and international bestseller (it’s now sold over 50 million copies in 50 different languages). While considered a children’s “classic”, Anna wrote it to reveal the truth about the inner life of animals—their loves, losses, joys and suffering—as well as their poignant, unbreakable connection to our own lives, particularly for the adults who were in charge of their destinies—the grooms, stable hands and the hansom cab drivers holding the reins and snapping the whips. Perhaps she did realize before she died that she’d written more than a successful book—Black Beauty—inspired an international animal welfare movement that changed the treatment of horses—but writers rarely understand the emotional impact of their words.  They just hope that somebody out there thinks one of their thoughts worth putting on the mantel for mulling over.

                                                               ANNA SEWELL 

Jesse also has included with this post the most beautiful clip of the best cinematic version of Black Beauty ever, the 1994 American version by the amazing Caroline Thompson in her directorial debut (her screenwriting credits include Edward Scissorhands, The Secret Garden, The Addams Family and Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey) with the compelling voice of Alan Cummings as “Black Beauty”.  (This is after all, an autobiography of a horse) and Head Butler included convenient links for both the book and movie. 

Spoiler alert:  I cried at the clip and then watched another 6 times. Then I cried some more and ordered the movie. But they were good tears, tears of relief, after the heightened emotional tension we’re all feeling again this week. Sometimes in the “new normal” in which we live, we just need to be reminded of an old-fashioned story with a happy ending.   That we are spiritually connected to one another and to the animals we share our lives with and this kingdom of Earth.  If you’ve ever loved an animal and been loved by them in return, then you know what real love, grown up love is supposed to be and feel like.   I certainly know what movie I’m watching this week and what book I’m eager to read again, especially since I’ve learned there is no such thing as a children’s book, only books for grown-ups old enough to be told the truth.  Also, I don’t believe in coincidences but I do believe in mystical chains of chance.  Those of you who have read last week’s blog about “Gleaning” will be able to read “Between the Lines” with me. 

And Ludwig Wittenstein? (1889-1951), the illustrious Austrian born, British intellectual's intellectual considered "arguably" one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, who spent his entire life pondering the connection between “logic” and metaphysics (yet still only published one book, one article, one book review and a children’s dictionary).  To discover that Ludwig Wittenstein was reading Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty as he was dying? This I did not know and it feels like a marvelous mystery waiting to be explored.

So here’s to a provocative connection worth mantel mulling as well as mystical connections worth pondering over a good bottle of wine. Be still my beating heart… And boundless thanks to Head Butler for, once again, putting me on the case. 

Blessings to you and yours and may you discover something wonderful this week that's new-to-you!  Please share it and let me know.

XO, SBB

A Bounty of Goodness: September’s Season of Gleaning, Gathering In And Letting Go

Autumn, season of earth’s maturing…asks
that we prepare for the future—that we be wise
in the ways of garnering and letting go.
                                                 
                                         — Bonaro W. Overstreet (1947)

As the daylight hours decrease and the air turns crisp, we’re reminded that it will soon be too cool to take leisurely strolls through our ordinary Edens, although I’m sure the original Paradise had four seasons!  Searching the back of the closet to unearth the scarf we bought on sale late last winter, we suddenly fast-forward to a few weeks from now, coat wrapped tightly around us, face muffled against the elements, already grumbling about winter.  In thirty seconds we’ve already tossed away the gift of these gorgeous autumn days without opening it.  Probably because Life’s true gifts always arrive at our door wrapped in brown paper and string.  

“Nature has been for me, for as long as I can remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure and delight: a home, a teacher, a companion,” Lorraine Anderson writes in Sisters of the Earth.  Finally, so it is for me, which is funny considering that I spent my teenage years trying to run away from a small rural New England town, and then when I could run anywhere in the world, I chose to settle for over a decade in an even smaller English hamlet because of my love for an ancient stone cottage, an apple tree and the miraculous turning of the year.

If you’re familiar with my work you know that the sixth Simple Abundance saving grace is “Joy” and that on the Simple Abundance path of Gratitude we are urged to be willing to let go of struggle in order to learn some of our life lessons through joy. I must confess that in the last few years, I’ve often wondered who in the world wrote this pink book, for when I take my backwards glance, if I’m honest, while the easiest spiritual lessons for me have been happy ones of delight, wonder and utter amazement, they’ve been too few and far between the ones learned on my knees and damp pillow. But I’m not alone.  Poets, philosophers, mystics and saints have been pointing the way towards joy for centuries, in spite of their own human disappointments. 

“I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering,” the glorious American poet and fourth Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress, Louise Bogan (1897-1970) insisted. “Surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy.”  And even in the depth of loss, anger and profound grief, the great Christian writer, C.S. Lewis titled his memoir of the soul’s longest dark night “Surprised by Joy” after the death of his new wife, wed late in his life.

One of my personal joys is collecting out-of-print country journals, especially from the twenties through fifties,  that track the seasons of our lives through observing Mother Nature’s and Mother Plenty’s journey through the year.  Today, when the Divine rhythm of life has been completely obscured by technology’s seasons of Silicon Valley, (although people have been complaining about “newfangled” since before the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution), I’m so grateful to have lived in the English back of the beyond where work began when the sun rose and finished towards the end of the afternoon, bookended by a pots of tea and other women’s thoughts on paper.   There was no more comforting ritual for me than coming home to the kitchen at day’s end, to the aroma of something delicious, slowly cooking in the Aga, then drawing the curtains and turning on the soft small lights. “Simmer down now Sugar,” the Great Mother would whisper, “simmer and settle down.  All will be well.  After all, tomorrow is another day.”  (When the Great Mother speaks she’s apt to sound like one of my favorite heroines. How about you?  Don’t you love it?  What wise woman do you hear in your head?)

Autumn October 1930 cover of Woman's Home Companion

We should have learned Heaven’s laws quickly from the seasons but it has taken us millennia and here we still are. “If the workings of cause and effect were everywhere as visible as in the world of seed and harvest, much human folly might reach a happy ending in wisdom,” Bonaro Overstreet observed in a little book of comfort, Meditations for Women: For Every Day in the Year A Day’s Worth of Spiritual Refreshment published in 1947 which is a compilation of twelve women writers’ monthly musings on the shape of the year. “A grocer, unlocking his store, exchanges a word with a passer-by, ‘Feels like winter’s coming and it’s going to be a tough one for a lot of folks—all over the world.”

I love the Old Testament’s story of Ruth, a young widow living with her mother-in-law Naomi, who was also a widow, which meant not just being poor, but destitute and homeless.  However, ancient spiritual law instructed land owners that any harvest which fell to the ground, as well as the four corners of each field were to be left for the poor and hungry to “glean” or pick up. Ruth would follow the harvests to gather up the bounty of goodness left behind as she worked for them both.   It’s a wonderful Biblical parable (Ruth 1 and 2) which reveals something new every time I read it.  

The subject of “gleaning” was an especially fertile source of inspiration for Victorian artists coming after the land was abandoned and families moved to the city to find work. One of the most famous paintings of this tradition is “Gleaning” which is often attributed to the Pre-Raphaelite English painter, Arthur Hughes (1832-1915), although recent art scholars believe it was another Hughes, either his son Arthur Foord Hughes, or nephew, Edward Robert Hughes.  But whoever captured the blessing of gleaning, it still speaks to us today. We need to pause and realize that our own hearts will always remain hungry, even if we are the honored guests at the world’s banquet, as long as we ignore our souls’ knowledge of any mother’s prayer and pleading to feed her children. 

 "Gleaning" often attributed to the Pre-Raphaeite English painter Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) but art scholars now believe was painted by his son Arthur Foord Hughes or nephew, Edward Robert Hughes.

But we also need to realize that “gleaning” is meant to be a blessing, however we may encounter it and all of us must in some way; whether we visit thrift shops, hunt for berries in an English bramble, refinish an rubbish bin table or depend on the kindness of strangers at a food bank because of unexpected circumstances.  There is no shame in the blessing of “gleaning”, sweetheart, only love, for if there is a Gift, then surely there must be a Giver and we are not alone.  As we reap and sow, we also learn to glean and then, give back.

This September I know that I must also glean in my private moments;  wandering through the golden fields of acceptance, grace and gratitude searching for my happy memories among the sheaves of wistfulness. Finally, time has done her perfect work and I am able to let go of regret and remorse, so that I can begin again. I leave yesterday’s English brambly apples for others. Today I choose to cherish my California dream of orange, lemon and lime trees, and hay, the fragrance of my future.  A citrus orchard next to a stable. There’s an apple in my pocket for the horse waiting for me to find her and bring her home to a new pasture. I do not know what tomorrow will bring, but I do know it includes a horse and where there’s a horse, there is a stall in a barn and a paddock and me.  Excited to be on my way again, and start a new life by cleaning up the barn. Oh yes, for if there is a Gift, then there must be the Giver eager to shower creatures both great and small with joy.  It makes me smile just to write these words.  Please believe with me and I will believe for you and we both know what happens when two women agree that something must be done.  
    
The world has always divided the kingdom of Earth between the haves and haves-not and it’s not going to stop anytime soon, so we must be willing and able to help each other. But the blessed Sisters of Mercy, the heavenly Saving Graces, and our Mothers Nature and Plenty, have been lavish with their hidden bounty left behind in our sad, lonely and abandoned places.  Still, it is up to us to distinguish between the bitter and the sweet, and to separate the wheat from the chaff, for all the goodness we can glean and gather in. 

Weeping may endure for even seasons of our lives, darling reader, but if we’re just willing to be open to receive, those clenched fists will unfurl and we can be surprised by joy.  My prayer for you this week is a new well-spent moment for your Gratitude Journal. Please share your joy with me and other kindred spirits by following the conversation here and on Twitter and Instagram. Blessings on your courage and sending my dearest love, 

XO Sarah Ban Breathnach

Back to the Future

Dearest Friends,

It’s good to catch-up with you after a longer than expected “time out.” I confess that I’ve been coaxed back by your enthusiasm and urgings for me to write more and take you with me, which has been a source of happy amazement for which I thank you profusely.  My prior reluctance to join in the whirl of social media up until now has also provided some unexpected amusement and benefits.  A few months ago my marvelous sister, Maureen O’Crean, asked you on the sly to send me surprise birthday greetings, safe in the knowledge that since I never visit Facebook or Twitter, I’d genuinely be surprised.  And surprise me you did, in wondrous ways.  With my birthday breakfast came a beautiful box filled to the brim with cards, long heartfelt letters and tokens of whimsy and deep affection, including a gorgeous “gratitude quilt” which made me smile and cry at the same time.  You’re simply the best!

You generously shared reflections of your own winding and rewarding Simple Abundance journey over these last twenty years; your life-changing discoveries with Something More a decade after I wrote it, and the sheer relief you felt having an honest, heartfelt, and private conversation without shame about a women’s complicated relationship with money in Peace and Plenty. Some of you wrote of the lovely bond that you and your grown daughters now share reading Simple Abundance together each day.  And I was thrilled by your absolute delight with my first children’s book The Best Part of the Day which introduces your precious grandchildren to the wondrous practice of daily gratitude (thank you to our glorious illustrator Wendy Edelson for her magic!)

Above all, you sent my favorite gift of all, prayers for my health and happiness. I truly believe that the gift of prayers by women for women is Heaven’s secret weapon because the spiritual electricity unleashed when we send and receive prayer literally separates the Light from the darkness. I still haven’t been able to read all your best wishes yet but I have felt them every day and so this past birthday has become a marvelous moveable feast, as I open one missive at a time and share the day with you in thought, thanks and prayers for your happiness. You are truly my Belle Lettres and the name of each one of you is engraved in my heart’s gratitude journal. Thank you my darling girl-friends, thank you!

What you shared with me privately and collectively has resonated deeply.  It seems that I’m not the only woman in the world needing to re-boot every aspect her life and wondering how and where to begin again.  It was a surprise, wasn’t it, to realize as we woke up from our Sleeping Beauty nap, that we were between the ages of 51 and 69 and with a lifetime’s expectations of how/and what we would be doing in our prime time abruptly cancelled.  Now that we’ve actually grown up to become “women of a certain age” we’re not quite sure of what we’re meant to do with our time, creative energy, passion and emotion. "Retirement" is what our parents did.  We don't know what the word means today, either because we're not ready or able to retire.  But with at least an additional twenty year active life span ahead of us (although I hope to convince you to see in a century with me) if it doesn’t include that adorable New England B&B or Napa Valley winery of our fortysomething daydreams, then what are we going to do?  

It's a question I've been asking myself, pondering upon and praying about.  How do I want to live my future?  I've started to call this opportunity our “sudden windfall” stage of life.  You see instead of feeling as if the rug was pulled out from under us, let's flip the unexplored and unexpected and become a domestic/literary explorer with me.  Let's believe we’ve all been blessed with an unexpected inheritance from an unknown Divine Great Aunt, who was/and still is, one Swell Dame: beautiful, bold, brave and a legend in her own time, who has a few important lessons to teach us. I’ve been rummaging through the attic of social history where Great Auntie’s mystical trunks have been stored. I’ve been compiling notes from her diaries and dispatches dashed off behind the front lines of the rapidly changing 20th century (along with those of her gal pals) as quickly as I can. And I’ve happily discovered there is amazing golden thread that runs through the tapestry of women I’ve long admired, from all walks of life; women who were flesh, bone and blood before they became icons and archetypes, both famous and forgotten. Their secret to not just surviving, but thriving, despite reversals of fortune was their inexhaustible courage and willingness to begin again.  They worked with change, they didn’t fight it. And they realized if change came once, it was coming around again. And this time they were going to be ready to catch the golden ring.  They learned to work with life’s cycles, changing even faster as a pre-emptive tactic to protect and preserve everything they cherished.  This Divine agent provocateur attitude comforts me enormously as I weave the woof and warp of our own “becoming” into a guide for this next, unexpected but glorious stage of our brilliant story.  As the incomparable Colette put it: “What a wonderful life I’ve had!  I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” 

Well, guess what, Babe? We do now.  

Being an Irish writer, I can’t really say much more at the moment but I do hope to have happy news for you soon.  In the meantime, while I’m trying to bridge the world of time travel as well as writing (both quill and digital), I need to ask your help.  Let me put it this way, I still have my training wheels on with the whole social media scene, and I’m only going as far as the driveway at the moment.  

But the people who love me (and that includes you!), tell me it’s time, and I’ve heard you, so here we go.  

Welcome to my new website – www.SarahBanBreathnach.com and my new blog “Between the Lines”--this is my first post. There’s also the announcement of my Swell Dames Club (which you’ll join when you sign up for my new mailing list).  My absolutely fabulous daughter, Kate Sharp, who has brought me into the 21st century, in such a beautiful and elegant way, has asked me to encourage you to follow me on Twitter (@simpleabundance), Instagram (@sarahbanbreathnach) and like my new author’s page on Facebook (@SBanBreathnach).

So thank you for spreading the good word and I’ll do my best to keep writing them.

Sending unbounded thanks for your love, support for my work in the world and those prayers! I return the hugs and blessings on your courage as we start a new adventure together.  As they say, let’s Follow, Tweet, Like and Share.

Dearest Love,

Sarah