Scenes from Falcon Ridge '09

Dave Chalfant, Katryna and Natalya Zuckerman who played guitar with us on our mainstage set.


Tom, Elle and Jay


Sierra Sumpf, Big Yellow writer holding her excellent new CD



Nerissa and Dan Navarro




Evidence of the weather on my boot.




Our kids were big fans of the henna tattoo tent.



My mother and Jay.


Jim Henry and Tracy Grammer at the Heart and Soul workshop.




Kris McCue, who took most of the above photos. I love her.

"Crazy Love Vol 2" is on the system in this internet cafe in the Adirondacks where I'm typing right now. Did I mention that the high point of Falcon Ridge was the Paul Simon workshop? And in particular dancing with Susan Werner to "That Was Your Mother."

On my drive in to town, on my iPod came that Cat Stevens song "On the Road To Find Out," which sounds like the beginning of his spiritual quest which culminated with his conversion to Islam. Then, when I walked in to buy my coffee, "Hard Headed Woman" was playing. How weird is that? So I suppose I might say a few words about musicians who are compelled to be seekers.

I'm on vacation with my family. When I get around my family I wish I weren't a spiritual seeker. It's not fun. I resent the fact that I want to go deep all the time. I want to be an easy person and I don't feel easy all the time, especially when I have to deal with all the annoying mind-tangles that crop up when one is wrestling with one's essential sense of self as often happens when one gets around one's family of origin. Then I get into this, "I'm on vacation, why can't I relax" thing.

The only thing I have found to help with this is a rigorous gratitude practice and and equally rigorous practice of laughing at myself.

Jay is learning to walk. He took 18 steps in a row on Sunday night, and since then he's gotten more conservative. 18 steps forward, 3 steps back, or something like that. We are all learning to some extent.

Music, Part One

[Note: the writers of this blog are on vacation with no high speed. Can you believe it? we are writing and taking phtographs, so check back as this entry and subsequent ones evolve.]

We arrived at Falcon Ridge on Friday morning, Katryna and Jay and Katryna's daughter and I in one car. Tom, Dave and Katryna's son and Elle drove out later in the afternoon. Katryna and I were still bleary from a whirlwind packing of our respective houses, complete with kids’ blow up beds, favorite stuffed animals, ukuleles, our own guitars and paintings and books and CDs to sell, bags and bags of organic produce from our farms, kites flying from the back of our car, the full catastrophe of two families in full swing. One moment I was frantically swabbing my filthy kitchen counter with a dirty sponge, trying to make our house habitable for our kind George Harrison sitters, and the next we were on stage with Dan Navarro, Tracy Grammer, Jim Henry, Jon Veznor and the Falcon Ridge House Band. The day was cool, slightly damp as days at FR have been lately, but the fullness of spirit we have come to know and love was replete in the faces of the colorfully clad friends on the field. I had handed Jay to my friend Kris McCue who was making him giggle and encouraging him to walk, when my parents appeared off the side of the stage. My father grabbed his namesake and beamed into his grandson’s face. I started to cry and didn’t stop for the whole workshop, which was entitled Heart and Soul. What better, I though, for the heart and for the soul than a dose of music?

This is the question I’ve been holding in my mind all week; it bobs up and down like a buoy on the tide. Why does music cut through the detritus of life––all the small stuff we sweat–– better than any other medium (for me), or any other spiritual practice? We all know music is a language, but why is it so universal, so true? And is it universal? When one is at a place like Falcon Ridge, it certainly seems that way; but then again, festival-goers are self-selecting. I do have a friend who proclaims that she is lacking in “music buds” as some pitiable individuals are missing their taste buds, or sense of smell (though there were moments yesterday when I was trudging through the manure-soaked mud near the Port-o-Potties when I thought it might be a good thing to be missing one’s nose buds). Anyway, my friend doesn’t get music. She doesn’t hate it, or go out of her way to avoid it, but she doesn’t see what the fuss is all about. She wouldn’t be the one to hand you a mix CD that she’d labored over, carefully deciding the sequence and exactly which songs you, as her dear friend, just HAD to hear.

I’ve had many friends who have made me such mix tapes, and some of them (the tapes as well as the friends) have saved my life. I have been such a friend. During one period in my early thirties when I was living alone, I made it an exercise to try to cycle through my entire CD collection on an ongoing basis. I had one of those tall CD shelves that holds about five hundred CDs: ten shelves which each held fifty. I would put the first CD on the top five shelves into my CD player which held five CDs and press shuffle. That would be the morning’s soundtrack, and some day’s you’d get Beethoven, Dylan, The Indigo Girls, Moxy Fruvous and Smashing Pumpkins. The next day, the Breeders, Golden Smog, Sonny and Cher and Wilco. Sometimes I’d get the soundtrack to Guys and Dolls. I felt like God was my DJ.

But my life has changed, and I don’t have the time nor the freedom to listen to music like this. For one thing, once I got into a relationship with another person, I found that I preferred talking to him with no soundtrack to distract us. I found the company of a real person was more rewarding than the virtual relationship of my old and new friends the CDs. And then I had a child who had very strong opintions about what she wanted to listen to, and we now use our CD player mostly for Dan Zanes and our HooteNanny disks.

Falcon Ridge is an opportunity for me to have soul-feeding, heart embiggening music in my life, and these days it sometimes does take a gargantuan packing of the car, reorganizing of my family’s life and moving us from one part of the state to another in order to get this.

(to be continued...)

The Couch We Can't Get Rid Of

My parents bought it in the 80s. It was our first and last foray into the world of sectionals. It had two sections! One was a three-seater, with respectable arm rests on both sides, and the other was a kind of love seat with a missing arm rest so that you could make an L shape between it and the larger piece. The only thing wrong with it in our teen-age minds was that it was white. Because given my entire family's proclivity towards spilling beverages (or really, anything) it wasn't white for long.

My parents spent certainly more than the couch was worth to recover it in forest green. And we moved the smaller section so that it faced vertically toward the TV. What a revelation! You could sit and watch TV with your legs out in front of you! The problem was, only one of the five of us could sit that way, so we three girls fought constantly about who got the love seat. I usually won because I had a boyfriend and argued that love seats were for LUUUUV.

When my parents developed some better taste, I inherited both pieces sometime in the late 90s, and this couch moved up to Massachusetts where it sat in my music room and on which I wrote all the songs from Play, If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now, Love and China and This Town Is Wrong. My good luck songwriting couch. It's the couch where I've taken countless naps, eaten many years worth of meals, made out for the first time with my husband. It lived in the writer's room of my current house and many other writers graced it with their fine muses.

Did I mention it kind of smells?



Here is the couch in 2004, a few days after Kerry lost the presidential election. We were having a party to cheer ourselves up and agree to work for peace and love our Republican friends and relations despite our deep grief and frustration. Katryna is about 20 days away from giving birth to William. The dog is the late great Cody, Tom's Australian Shepherd.

Speaking of Tom, he has never liked the couch. "Please please please get rid of it!" he begged me. We were given a fancy Pottery Barn couch when we got married, and at this point the larger sectional moved to the music room where it once again functions as the TV watching nap-taking couch. Also, Elle's favorite thing to do in the entire world is to take its eight pillows off of it, build a fort with them and generally toss them all about the room, jump on them and rip the stuffing out of them. (More on that anon.) The smaller sectional has migrated all over the house we now live in; at one point it was on the third floor in our impossible-to-access attic office space. For several years I used it as my primary life coaching couch (say that 5 times fast.) (This is the main reason Tom hates it. I make him move it every few years.)Up until last week, it had been relegated to the front porch where one of the writers who comes to my weekly groups favored it as a spot to write poetry. When I begged Tom to let me bring it back indoors so that I could have a spot in the kitchen to recline for breastfeeding Jay, Tom said, "That's like asking, 'can I bring tangible depression into the house?'"

A few weeks ago we noticed the wasps. Tom was washing the windows when he got stung. We monitored him carefully to see if he had developed the allergy that makes one stop breathing, and kept our eye on the hospital across the street to make sure it was still there just in case we needed to rush him over. He was fine, but we decided we couldn't live with a wasps' nest right next to our front door. But how does one destroy a nest that is inside of a couch?

Answer: spray it with a ton of toxic chemicals.

Actually, we still don't even know if this is accurate, as there still seem to be some wasps hovering around the couch, which Tom dragged in several stages to the side of our house where it rests as of this writing. So what should we do? We can't take it to the dump; even if you ignore the tremendous environmental irresponsibility of throwing away a gigantic piece of furniture, how mean to the good disposers of garbage to leave them with a possibly active wasps' nest?

We can't freecycle it for the same reasons. Our friend Alice said she'd come by with her truck and take it, but really. How?

Meanwhile, both of us inexplicably developed a tenacious fondness for the remaining sectional, even though, as I said previously, our children have ripped open the fine workmanship on the upholstery and Jay is now pulling pincer-grip sized fingersful of asbestos-like filling and attempting to eat them.



So we have rejected the option of buying a new couch. Instead, I had grand visions of re-upholstering the couch myself, rending it thus:



But because I have a book which I should be writing now instead of blogging about the couch we can't get rid of, I opted to take the strange extra pieces of material that inexplicably cover the armrests and make a patch which I sewed by hand onto the cushion like so:

Viva le divan!

Pillowface Dog

Here is Elle's new Pillowface Dog which I made so she could have a pillowface at school naptime. Reports come back daily that she is among the non-napping crowd, but no one seems to mind. I tried in vain to felt the ears. Apparently this kind of yarn (worsted weight? It's from a sheep farm called Christopher's in Maine and I bought it in 1991) doesn't felt. Alas.

"Wanna Be a Star Then Suffer"

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
-William Butler Yeats

I can't stop thinking about Michael Jackson. I know I'm not alone in this, though I have so far avoided most of the pipelines of infotainment that hurl tidbits, stories, photos at us about the now deceased King of Pop. My main sources of media are NPR, the New Yorker and the New York Times, so I know that Jackson had to pay royalties to the African pop singer Manu Dibango for "borrowing" his phrase "mama se mama sa ma ma coo sa" for "Wanna Be Starting Something."



Other than that, those three sources of media aren't giving me what I really want to know, which is why that perfection of a child turned into a perfectionist who turned his razor sharp powers onto his own body and mutilated himself, and (perhaps) harmed other young people along the way. Also, like the rest of the world, I am fascinated with his three kids, and I want to know all the stuff enquiring minds want to know, like what was he thinking when he dangled his baby off a balcony (this clip was shown about fourteen times on CNN and MSNBC last Sunday when I was trying to enjoy some cable TV in my hotel in Durham while I was on the road and away from my own children for the Eno Festival. I can't believe how exciting the promise of cable TV always seems and how unsatisfying it always ends up being.)

Michael Jackson's seems to be a cautionary tale to parents everywhere: do not exploit the talents of your child! Do not tell them they are ugly! Do not wince when the boys' voices start to change, ushering in the end of those pristine golden soprano notes and your own golden nest egg! ("Just look over your shoulder, baby! Ooooooo!") And would that he could have turned his overly critical eye onto his music and come to the same conclusion WB Yeats did in 1912: that it would be better to walk naked than to tarry with those who had turned his songs and himself into mythologies. Would that he could have loved himself––his true self.

Speaking of mythologies, today, I felt like I'd stumbled into one of the early fables about the Buddha. On our walk home from school (yes, she started school!), we came through the park and paused to enjoy the beautiful day. I let Jay out of his stroller and he climbed up my leg, took my hand in his left hand, and with his right, reached for Elle's hand. The three of us walked a good fifteen feet––by far the farthest he has traveled on his own little pristine soles. Elle pointed to a tree she wanted us to hang out under, and we sauntered over. I smelled a strong odor and hunted around until I found the carcass of a squirrel. Elle ran right over and said, "Mama, what's that?"

"That's a dead squirrel," I said. I resisted the urge to grab her away from it and instead let her come close and examine it from about three feet away.

"How did it die?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, though it looked as though it had been mauled. There were flies buzzing around it, and as I said, it stank.

A few moments later we passed by an extremely old woman sitting on a park bench with her daughter, who was also quite old. The two of them admired our children and it turned out the old woman's son (the other woman's brother) had the same name as Jay. "So this little one will be a world famous neurosurgeon and all-around wonderful guy too!" the younger of the old woman squealed. I smiled and agreed, though I don't care so much about the neurosurgeon part.

And then we saw an old friend of mine whose arm was in a splint. She'd broken her collar bone, she told us, as we stopped to chat, but Elle couldn't get it out of her head that she'd broken her arm, and I didn't bother to correct her. We didn't see a beggar, but other than that, we pretty much got the tour of the "four passing sights" the young Siddhartha Gautama witnessed on the outing his father had famously tried (and failed) to choreograph into being free of the suffering of humanity. Like the Buddha's father, Jackson's dad, for perhaps different reasons, wanted his son to stay a boy. Don't all of us parents have a little part of us that wants to keep our children innocent children forever?

I didn't think too much of this coincidence until tonight, when, while putting Elle into her crib, she interrupted her nightly "Story About My Day" right around the part where we'd eaten breakfast to ask, "Mama, why do people die? When are we going to die? I don't want to die. I don't want you to die."

"Oh, sweetie," I said, hugging her and stroking her hair. "Everybody dies."

"Does this crib die?"

"Ye-es," I said.

She was silent for a moment and the sound of an ambulance siren punctuated the evening. "No," she finally said, shaking her head as if to say, "silly." "Cribs don't die. But do amimals?"

"Yes, they do," I said as gently as I could. "It's too bad, but they do. Everything dies eventually."

"I don't want them to!" she said.

"I know. I don't want them to either. But here's the thing: there are a couple of ways we don't die. One is that when we die, like that squirrel that we saw? We kind of melt into the earth, little bit by little bit and become part of all that is. And the other thing I believe is that we all have a soul, which is the part of us that is aware and the part of us that loves. It's the part of me that loves you no matter what. And that will never ever ever die, sweetie. That part is part of God, and God doesn't die, so that part of you won't die either."

She liked this. "The part of me that loves you won't ever die!" she shouted. "And Jay, and Daddy, and George Harrison, and my stuffed amimals and my blankies!"

We cuddled some more and she said, "Mama, how do you break your bones?"

"Huh? Oh, like Maria?" [Our friend with the broken collar bone].

"Yeah. How do you break your arm?"

"Well, sometimes by not being careful enough, or having an accident or something. We try to be careful, but we can't always help it. And if you break a bone, it's okay. It usually heals pretty well. But it's good to be careful."

"I'll be careful, but sometimes I'm not careful, like when I fall on the ground."

"I'd say you're pretty careful. But we still have to watch Jay, because he's just a baby and he might fall and hurt himself if we're not watching him."

"He won't fall!"

"You're probably right. But still. That's why we close off the stairs for him."

I kissed her goodnight and we made a date to have breakfast together the next morning. And then I came down and wrote some more about Michael Jackson. I think the reason I'm so consumed with thoughts of him (besides the fact that I can't get "Beat It" and "Rock With You" out of my head) is that he represents the ultimate in fame and stardom, a path I once thought I wanted to pursue. Then again, when I was fifteen, I thought "Wanna Be Starting Something" was "Wanna Be a Star Then Suffer," which as it turns out was prophetic, if not for Jackson, certainly for myself.(Calling Dr. Freud...)

The Buddha taught that life is suffering; that the cause of suffering is the constant wanting and grasping state of mind; that there is a way out of suffering and it involves the Eightfold path which is a middle way between excessive consumption and complete self-denial and asceticism. I'm no Jackson expert, but just from passing by the tabloids in the supermarket I can see that he seemed to vacillate between both extremes: the Neverland Ranch on the one hand and anorexia on the other. To see him, even still images of him, in later life was to see a haunted person. His face, in my mind, is the quintessential face of suffering.

And yet, the world did take his coat and has worn it and will continue to wear it. I downloaded “ABC” and “I’ll Be There” and played them last week for Elle as we drove up to church. She didn’t like “ABC”––she prefers the several versions of alphabet songs she already knows––but as the first notes of “I’ll Be There" sounded in our car, I said, “This one’s sort of a lullaby.” She listened for a few bars and said, “Mama, I want you to sing this song to me before I go to sleep.”

And right afterward, “Rock With You” came on. She sang along with every single lyric of the chorus, right on tune.

I wanna rock with you all night/Dance you into day
I wanna rock with you all night/Dance the night away.
-M. Jackson

There’s something preternatural about the clarity of a child’s voice singing adult lyrics, something eerie about hearing my own daughter singing along with the post-adolescent Jackson juxtaposed with the school-aged Jackson whose vocal talents pretty much define the term “preternatural” (and who was singing pretty mature lyrics, too, I might add.)

I closed my eyes and said a prayer right there: “God, please bless these children––all the children–– and keep them safe from the evils of the world. But may their protection rest inside of their own sweet little selves. May they find that inner strength, because there are not walls high enough to keep it all out: the tabloids, the carcasses, the concepts of mutilation and––yes––the sex offenders. Just be there with these children. Let them know You are present. Let them know they are not alone.”

If you should ever find someone
new, I know he'd better be good to you
cause if he doesn't, I'll be there.
-Berry Gordy, Bob West, Hal Davis, and Willie Hutch

Maybe “I’ll Be There” is an appropriate sentiment after all.It's a pretty generous description of unconditional love. I just wish Michael had felt it for himself.

United Breaks Guitars

I heard this story on NPR yesterday. Here's the video which has gone viral. I consider myself infected.

Felting Update

In 1992, I was working as the Assistant Dean of Students at the Madeira School in McLean, VA. That's a really fancy title for "Glorified Secretary And Well-Paid Babysitter of 40 Teenage Girls." To give you some perspective, the women the Dean of Students hired to be our shared secretary became the Dean of Students herself the following year when both the former dean and I left for greener pastures. She--the secretary turned dean--also taught me how to knit, which was pretty much all I did in the dean's office, other than sign girls on and off campus, call the taxi company to get rides for girls, organize trips to the mall and occasionally hire indie rock bands (that the girls hated) to play at the spring formal. But I digress. The point is: I learned how to knit once, and now, thanks to my efforts at blogging daily last March and Amanda Soule's wonderful book The Creative Family, I am a knitter again.

Here is a sweater I knit circa 1991:


Here's another:


This last one, the cardigan, was knit for Katryna, but it was too huge for her so she gave it back to me. OK, truly, the problem with the pink sweater was that it was just a gigantic, unshapely mess of a thing. It looked kind of like what it was: a novice knitter's sweater that only a doting grandparent would wear, or one that one's attractive sister would politely received and then stick in a drawer, never to be worn. So I decided it would be perfect as a felting project.

Felting is easy. This is what you do:
-throw the garment in the washing machine. Make sure the washing machine is clean! (Make sure there have been several washes since your last load of diapers, for instance.)
-set your levels to run both a hot and cold rinse, and set your level at small, or low, to save water. (And don't take up felting if you live in Arizona or California or anywhere there's a water shortage.)
-add some earth-friendly delicate soap, or Woolite.
-repeat three times, or until the garment looks felty.
-shape the garment when wet: this is your first and last chance to make it look the way you want!

I was hoping the pink sweater would shrink so that it hugged me nice and tight to the body, but instead it just turned into a small version of its former self: baggy with sleeves that now wouldn't cover my wrists.

Oh, well. It's cozy.

Next up: Elle's lunch bag! Her first day of school is Thursday!

Before...


and after!

Grandmummy's 102nd Birthday

Photo by Katryna Nields

The Summer Day


Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?


Mary Oliver

I am breaking my "no faces of my kids on the blog" rule today for a couple of reasons. First, because this is a picture of Elle two years ago, and she just seems like a totally different person. Second, and more importantly, because today is my grandmother's 102nd birthday, and I just love this picture of four generations of oldest daughters, oldest children.

My grandmother is a phenomenon. We always knew she would live past 100. In the 70's when Willard Scott celebrated centenarians on the Today Show, we'd all nod smugly and say, "I can't wait till Grandmummy gets to be on." She discovered yoga in her 60s and spent the second half of her life traveling the world: Russia (USSR then), South America, India, China on several occasions, including in 1972 post-Nixon's visit when she discovered acupuncture and began seeing an acupuncturist once home in her native New York. She took me to Greece when I was ten. She took Katryna to Kenya when she was ten, and she took all of us to Paris and London at various times. She spoke many languages; in fact French was her first. She was a dancer and actress and continued performing until the beginnings of Alzheimer's slowed her down in her mid 90's. She loved modern art, theatre, the color of tomatoes, strangers––she was famous for regaling New York cabbies–– and often befriended single gay men, inviting them to live rent-free in her apartment's spare room in exchange for household chores and company.

She is complicated. And wonderful. And we are every bit her descendants. In Elle, I see all sorts of her complicated, wonderful, adorable traits. We just sang happy birthday to her, Elle in the tub, while my grandmother was shown a picture of us as we sang. I was told to say who I was several times.

My grandmother went to Smith for her Freshman year and then spent a year at the Sorbonne. Smith wouldn't accept the Sorbonne's credits, so my grandmother dropped out. One of my relatives will have to correct me here, but I think she then opened a hat shop and hung out in Greenwich Village to support her acting and dancing, but that might be my fantasy version of her life. At any rate, she lived with her parents until she married at 35, which was of course shockingly old in the early 40's. She had my mother at age 36 and my aunt Sarah at age 40. This turned out to be a hopeful omen for me while I was starting my own family in my late thirties and early 40s.

So as a tribute to my grandmother, I spent the day reading my Anusara yoga teacher training manual and fretting about my gadgets. Here is a litany of my woes:
-My iPhone has a scratch in the top of the screen and needs to be either fixed, which will involve me living without a cell phone for several days or weeks, or replaced; either way I will have to drive to Holyoke Mall, which I hate.
-My classic iPod which I sent away to KingiPod.com thinking it needed a battery replacement turns out to need a whole new logic board. This will cost me upwards of $140, not counting shipping. A new machine is $250.
-Also, I'd sent KingiPod.com my antiquated iPod Mini which I'd tossed in the kitchen table drawer in 2004 when its battery died, in the hopes that it too could be replaced (I had been told at the time that they were discontinuing the thing and thus weren't making replacement batteries. Turns out they do make a few, but KingiPod doesn't service minis.)
-My digital camera's lens broke
-My MacBook's hard disk is completely full, so full that Microsoft Word stopped working just as I was trying to send our book proposal to our agent, so I had to send him the doc on Google docs and then I had to buy a hard drive, which I still haven't figured out how to work.
-My ancient and beloved Beatles watch broke when I absentmindedly took a shower with it on.

Though my woes are somewhat less severe than oh, 99.98% of the population's, I still feel frustrated by all this. I get this awful sinking feeling in my stomach, tightness in my jaw and an angry tingling in my chest every time some element of my kingdom of technology fails me. And I hate that when I have so many delightful events, work, projects, people in my life that I have to spend time addressing the broken iPods. Do I have to? No. I can live without all this stuff. But I hate the waste. I hate that I bought it to begin with. I get mad at myself and tell myself I am a stupid consumer. The stupid consumer in me shrieks, "Things shouldn't break! Things cost too much! They always break one month after the warranty is up! It's an evil conspiracy!" This does not bring me inner peace or allow me to be helpful and loving toward others.

So I've been trying to work with the malfunctioning of my gadgets as a spiritual practice. Questioning the thoughts, I find that maybe iPods are supposed to break as soon as their warranty is up, and that maybe that's okay. Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world that my little pieces of metal and lithium and God knows what else predictably turn into litter. After all, a tiny device that contains my entire library of CDs plus podcasts, photos and audiobooks––which at one time filled 8feet by eight feet worth of shelf space in my house and now fits in the palm of my hand is a miracle! Once, we were all amazed by it. Now, we all have at least two and toss them in the bottom of our knapsacks. (This was why my digital camera's lens broke. I have since bought a little sack for it, made from recycled plastic bottles.)

Maybe the real cost of an iPod is not $250 but more like $600 over the course of its lifetime. Certainly anyone who is awake to the food activist movement knows that the real cost of $2.50/lb chicken that lived for a mere 49 days before it was slaughtered is far more when you factor in the environmental and social costs. Things should break. Things should cost so much. Things DO cost so much; more than we pay up front.

This is my habitual dilemma: wondering to what extent I should be accepting life on life's terms (that iPods break and that if I want one I am going to have to devote way more money and time and attention than I might like, but it's worth it to me to enjoy the gifts of music and wisdom it can give) or try to change the injustices of the world (in which case, I'd probably come to the conclusion that iPods are just a part of the corrupted system and refuse to buy one; or I might instead lobby Apple to make longer-lasting, more easily fixable machines). Along these lines, when do I accept that my daughter's tantrum is just a phase in a normal three-year-old's development, and when do I move in to lend a hand? If I move in too often, I have been told, she might equate "have tantrum" with "get mom's love" and that might be BAD. But how can I just leave her alone with her painful feelings? That doesn't feel right either.

Once again, it probably comes down to "the wisdom to know the difference." And interestingly, I am usually able to accept her tantrums as developmentally appropriate and also be with her while she's having one, without shaming her or losing my own temper. Today, I have little wisdom for iPods, the crumbling infrastructure that is my gaggle of gadgets, but I do have this: When I sit with my breath and calm my own system, clarity eventually returns and some direction comes to me, either to act or to wait a little longer.

We mothers these days are so hard on ourselves. In the course of three days, five different important people in my life said something to the equivalent of, "Nerissa, you have got to stop beating yourself up!" Tom says I was always hard on myself, but I feel like it's more pronounced since motherhood, particularly being the mother of two, and why should this be surprising? If a person has some tiny unresolved perfectionist tendencies to begin with, motherhood is a flagrant opportunity to completely bash oneself with recrimination. Because isn't motherhood (or fatherhood) the ultimate testing grounds for the nature versus nurture debate? (And of course parents represent the bulk of the "nurture" part of the equation.) Isn't this where we have the most difficulty setting our boundaries? In the case of mothers who carried their kids in utero, this separation from one to two is literal. A helpful mantra for me in all this is, "Well, the story's not over yet." Maybe the kids will turn out all right, but we'll be putting some pennies in the therapy jar just in case they don't.

And the great thing about Inquiry is that when I take some parental action and then immediately worry about its eventual ramifications, like for instance, how I've just bribed Elle with the promise that I will get her a Krazy straw if she does what I want all day, including take a nap, and then have some self-critical thoughts about my behavior, I get to ask, "Really? Is it really true that because you bribed her she will never do anything from her own volition? Have I really corrupted her in some damning way?"

And doesn't love count for anything? My grandmother was a five-foot tall fire cracker. She had a temper that flattened people twice her weight. She and my mother could argue for years about the same issue (often, which was better, New York City or the Washington suburbs.) In the early years of our career, she would arrive in a taxi to our gigs in the seediest clubs in Soho and then call one of us to tell us how terrible we were. She wanted us to be cabaret singers, I think. Or maybe tap dancers. Once she said to me, "Well, at least you're pretty, because you haven't got any talent."

And we love her so so so much. In a way, I love her more for her struggles with her daughters, with Smith College, with her triangle pose, with the artistic path her granddaughters chose. And when I breath myself to calmness, when I unite with my inner divinity, when I follow Mary Oliver's gorgeous advice to be "idle and blessed," all of life is as easily lovable as that girl who was an older sister in 1909 and a frail, tired, intrepid yogini looking out of her seventh floor window in New York City tonight.

Small Queen of the Earth

Queen Of The Earth, Child Of The Stars
by Leela Grace
On the night that you were born, I looked out the window to the sky
And the brilliant stars sang to me as you uttered your first cry
I looked down into your face and saw stars shining in your eyes
My small queen of the earth, child of the stars
I held you in my arms and sang you to sleep
And your face shone so bright, I could not but with joy weep
I knew with every passing hour my love for you would grow more deep
My small queen of the earth, child of the stars
As you opened your wide eyes and held my gaze with your own
I could see, with aching joy, you dancing from me when you’re grown
But wherever you go, my darling, know you’ll never be alone
My small queen of the earth, child of the stars
Leela: lead vocal, banjo
Ellie: harmony vocals
(© 1998 Leela Grace, BMI)

To hear this amazing song, click here. I was so happy and amazed to find Village Harmony paying our church a visit last Sunday, and when they performed this song, I was rendered a weeping mess for the rest of the service.

Thank you, Grace sisters.

The Shoulds and the Tao Verse 17

When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.

If you don't trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!"

Tao Te Ching, verse 17 (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

I am reading a wonderful version of the Tao specifically for parents by William Martin. In his translation of the above verse, he writes, "You can control your children through threats and punishments/and they will learn to fear./You can control your children by praise and reward/and they will learn to look outside themselves/ for approval and worth....Or you can love and guide/without controlling or interfering/and they will learn to trust themselves./If your child fails at something/merely express your confidence/in their ability to handle the consequences."

The first few lines of Martin's verse generally describe the way I parent, or the way I have been, anyway. Big cereal bars are the most likely candidate for reward, with watching an episode from our Curious George Goes Green DVD a close second. Withholding one of those two carrots is our most usual form of punishment, though we do use the occasional time-out (trying to be extremely neutral about times-outs because we don't want Elle to connect quiet time with punishment. When we give a time-out, we try to emphasize our own need for space when we get disregulated. Who knows if she understands what we're talking about, but it makes Tom and me feel better.)

But as I wrote in a previous post, I am trying to get away from my habitual pose as Cheerleader Mom. I keep asking Elle, "Oh, how does that feel when..." When you put your toys away, when you make your brother laugh, when you have a tantrum. The answer is invariably (and interestingly) "Good."

Today at lunch she was filling me in on her morning with her babysitter.

"I played with her really well, Mama. I didn't even have a tantrum."

"Wow," I said, nodding. "What does it feel like to have a tantrum?"

"Good," she said, munching on her sugar snap peas.

"Does it feel...like a lot of movement, or does it feel still?" I persisted, genuinely curious.

She chewed some more. "Um," she thought about it. "It feels move-y and still. Both."

"I know what you mean," I said. "That's how it feels to me sometimes too."

As readers of this blog know, I am trying to slow down. I am trying to live in the margins a little more and not so much in the print. For years, lunch was the time in the day when I watched a DVD or listened to an audio book, under the theory that I should not waste time and that lunch was a great opportunity to fill my mind with some external source; to feed my intellect as I was feeding my body. When Elle was a baby, I ignorantly propped her up in an exersaucer with a handful of puffios while I sat next to her on the floor in front of the TV. Together we watched a ton of left-of-center documentaries like The Corporation, Born into Brothels, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and the like. It wasn't until I was watching a biography of George McGovern and some footage came on of atrocities during the Vietnam war and I instinctively covered her nine-month-old eyes with my hand that I put an end to this practice. But even recently, I have plopped her in front of an Elmo DVD or SuperWhy while I read articles from the New York Times as I chomped on my carrots and edamame.

We had one of those weekends that usually takes me three or four days to recover from. Friday Tom and I drove out to Boston with the kids and rode our bikes along the Charles, all the way to the Public Garden where Elle got to ride on the back of Mrs. Mallard. We had dinner at a great restaurant in Cambridge called Full Moon where kids have a playspace and grownups have a real menu. We spent the night with Tom's mother, and then on Saturday I had to be at a rehearsal for Revels SummersDay at 10am, back for call at 2:30pm and then over to Passim for our 8pm show. Katryna and I drove home, arriving at my house at 12:30. In between, and at evening's end, all sorts of breastfeeding logistics had to be co-ordinated. I woke up on Sunday, Father's Day, with a horrible case of the Shoulds. I should not be in such a bad mood, for starters. Also, I should not have booked so much to do this weekend (including a three-hour shoot for extra footage for the DVD we are making, scheduled for Sunday afternoon.) I should have planned on making Tom something special for breakfast. I should take care of the kids all day since Tom should get the day off, and I hadn't spent enough time with them Saturday. The tireder I got, the worse the Shoulds hounded me, like Hera's gadflies in the myth of Io. They persisted even though Tom graciously insisted I rest and even though we had a fabulous time at the shoot (we went to Town Farm and filmed the ducks, hens, goats and our four kids who marched around in the mud carrying little parasols.

By the end of it, Elle had one red foot from stomping around in a big puddle which made her red Mary Jane's dye run. She said, "Mama, I can have ruby slippers even when I'm barefoot!"





We came home triumphant with pizzas and Chinese take-out and celebrated all the dads. The kids played together in the yard with George Harrison, and I didn't even feel all that tired for a few minutes. But after we put the kids down, the extreme fatigue returned and so did the Shoulds. I decided to write them down--that if I could witness them, they might not bite me as badly, or at least I'd be prepared. I wrote them down, tried to find my limiting beliefs which mostly had to do with my fear of being alone ("If I am too tired, I can't be my charming self and people will leave me," goes some of the logic. Another version of this is, "If I take good care of myself by setting limits, people will leave me because I won't be taking good enough care of them." Then I brought the feelings into my body and did some breathing, thanked the gadflies and released them.

That night, I had the most amazing dream. I dreamed this fan of ours had taken hostage all the participants in a workshop Katryna and I were running at a kind of day camp for grown-ups. I walked in late and missed the drama; I was carrying Jay in my arms. Katryna filled me in. I was not told, but assumed the fan had a gun; how else would she compel everyone to stay and be afraid of her? Somehow I got permission to leave the building and get something from my car in the parking lot. On my way, I said to every single person in the parking lot (and there were hundreds, "Hey, _______ is holding everyone hostage! Call the police!"

"Yeah, right," everyone dismissed me. I found my car and put Jay down. He promptly disappeared, which in the world of my dream was a good thing: he was now safe. I got my cell phone and tried to call our manager, Patty, but the buttons wouldn't work. Frustrated, I went back into the building and climbed the stairs to the Art room. I told the instructors there that our fan had taken everyone hostage, and they believed me. (Artists, you know.) They rolled their eyes. "Yeah, she's crazy," they agreed (about the fan) and picked up the phone to call the police. Relieved, I kept climbing the stairs to the roof where theoretically the fan was herding everyone in order to somehow kill us. I found her and took her hand, calling her by name. "______," why are you so angry today?"

"Wellllll," she said, sounding a lot like my three-year-old daughter. "The last time you came to _______ [her state] you didn't stop by to visit us. You never pay any attention to me."

I was about to protest, to sputter with indignation about my two children and the fact that her town was three hours away from the gig, but instead I said, "Yeah, that's really disappointing. I wish I had more time to visit people. But, _______; you are going to feel pretty sad if you cause harm to these people."

Then my Zen alarm clock woke me up.

A few minutes later (it was around 6:30am) the whole household was awake. I was changing Jay's poopy diaper in his room and Elle was jumping up and down on the double bed.

"I have to pee!" she suddenly shrieked. A minute later, she was back, chagrined. "Sorry, Mama, but I tried to pee in the potty but I peed, I only could get to the bathroom floor, and I peed on my pants." Which she handed to me, soaked. I was about to express my disappointment when I remembered that verse of the Tao.

"That's okay, sweetie. You're figuring it out, and I know eventually you're going to always pee on the potty. But accidents happen. Just get a towel and clean it up."

"Okay, Mama," she ran off and returned with the damp towel. And I kid you not; the next thing she said was, "Mama. You listened to me today."

Jung would say all the characters in the dream were me, or versions of me. So the fan was me, pretending to have a gun when all she had was a lot of rage and threats. Mad that she wasn't getting enough attention. The participants in the parking lot who were dismissive of the threat were me, too, as was the uncooperative cell phone and even the disappeared Jay. And of course all the participants who were fooled by a mad person with only the threat of a gun.

Today I want to be a person who listens more than anything else. I want to be a witness to the hostage in me as well as the hostage-taker. And of course I can never know how the dream might have ended this morning before the alarm cut it short, but I can hope that the fan figured out on her own that she didn't need to be feared or despised in order to get what she wanted, which was just to get some love and attention anyway.




Top photo by Nerissa. All others by Kris McCue.

Amy Ray and Frances Crowe

"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings while the dawn is still dark."
-Rabindranath Tagore

In case your child ever breaks a compact fluorescent bulb and it shatters in thousands of pieces, DO NOT VACUUM! like we did. Instead, calmly take your children and pets out of the room and wait 15 minutes, preferably with the window open. Then, assuming you can secure your kids, return to the room and clean up the pieces using a piece of cardboard and a damp rag. Use sticky tape such as duct tape to get the smallest bits.

Then pray.

I absolutely hate that this happened today, and I hate that I was such a good little environmentalist that I replaced all the nice, friendly incandescent bulbs with harsh Soviet era CFBs. Is it really worth risking mercury poisoning to save the planet?

Well....This is exactly the kind of moral conundrum we parents are in, constantly. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, as it were. I used to make my own yogurt; now I save time but spend money and create garbage by buying it (Side Hill Farms yogurt, though, which is infinitely better than anything I've ever made. A local company, too, in Ashfield MA. Try it if you live in New England! YUM!!) As I posted eons ago, I would have loved to walk to the co-op to get my groceries, but when I tried it once with my two littlies, I almost died of a heart attack (the co-op is on a pretty scary artery; not to mention it's hard to load up on groceries when most of the real estate of your stroller is taken up with children.) So now we drive.

And usually, we drive at least part way to our local organic farm (Town Farm in Northampton which is on the complete opposite side of town from us). So we park in town and walk the rest of the way. At Town Farm, there are goats, chickens and as of today, baby ducks. Elle and Jay were entranced. Our friend Liz said she liked the yellow ones best. Elle liked the black ones, and I liked the ones with light brown feathers and black beaks. Not sure which ones Jay liked best, but he seemed to say, "Duck!" Elle and I are constantly on the lookout for Jay's first word. Sometimes it is "Dog," sometimes, "Dada" but always it is some version of "Duh." So who knows? Maybe it really was "Duck" today.



On our way back from the farm, in order to avoid traffic, I took the sneaky way across Main Street through the parking lot behind the Calvin Theatre. There was a gigantic bronze tour bus. Idly, I wondered who was playing, and as soon as I remembered, I saw Amy Ray come out from around the front of the bus. I rolled down my window.

"Hey, Amy!" I said, acting like a totally cool, casual, one-time-almost-almost-famous folksinger, myself. She came over to the car and peered in. "It's Nerissa Nields from the Nields."

"Oh, hey," she said. She's extra friendly and social. I have met her several times in the past fifteen years and she has always been warm and supportive and engaging. At South By Southwest, for example, she told me to go to Thaiphoon for Thai food, and of course, she was right.

"I so wanted to come see you tonight, but..." and I gestured to the back seat towards my kids––which is only metaphorically true. I actually have a writing group to lead tonight, but one could argue that in a broader view, I lead writing groups instead of attending folk shows with legendary duos because of my kids.

"I can see why you aren't coming tonight," she chuckled, waving at Elle and Jay.

"Have a great show," I said, driving off. We were trying to get Elle's hair cut, and as I pulled into a parking space across from Pam's Kickin Cuts, I realized that it really was true that I'd rather be right here, right now on this beautiful Juneteenth day with my little daughter and son than performing for a thousand loyal, loving fans at the Calvin."

I guess this surprises me a little. I remember in 2000 visiting my friend Melissa in Mill Valley, CA. She was pregnant with her first child and glowing with anticipated glory. She asked me if I wanted to have kids.

"I do and I don't," I said. For the previous ten years, I would say, "In about five years," whenever anyone asked me that question. My preparatory husband David felt differently; he always said, "In about a year," but the result was the same. So I said to Melissa, "The thing is, I am afraid that if I have kids I will love them more than I love music. And that I wouldn't be as engaged with my career. that I wouldn't love it as much. And then I might have to do something else besides music."

Melissa looked confused. "Well, then..uh...but that would be because you were happy with your kids. And if you're happy with your kids, who cares what else you do?"

I was ashamed to say this to Melissa, and I am embarrassed even to write it now (though my wise friend Judy says this is a perfectly normal developmental stage that twentysomethings go through), but my answer was that I thought I would be subverting my destiny; that I owed my music to the universe and that if I denied it, something essential would be forever lost! This was before I had the concept that God is a river that flows in a certain direction and that, by this theological perspective, it would be impossible for me to deny the universe anything the universe demanded. (Also, this was before I believed that it was okay, spiritually, to be happy.)

Frances Crowe, amazing local activist and legend in her time, came to preach at my church last week. I got to do the music, and I was told ahead of time to focus on peace songs. So I did nothing but peace songs: "Down By the Riverside," "Imagine," "S/He's Got the Whole World in His/Her Hands," "Redemption Song" and my new favorite, "May There Always Be Sunshine," a Russian kids' song that we have been doing in HooteNanny. Katryna figured out the ASL movements to go with it, so I taught it to the kids at my church (and the congregation) technically in three languages.

Poost svig-da boo-dyet sohn-seh
Poost svig-da boo-dyet nyeh-boh
Poost svig-da boo-dyet Mama
Poost svig-da boo-doo yah

May there always be sunshine
May there always be blue sky
May there always be Mama
May there always be me.

Someone in the congregation corrected one of my signs: I'd been doing "I" instead of "me." "I" in ASL is a fist to the chest with the pinky up, as in ASL alphabet "i" while "me" is pinky down, a closed fist. Perfect. That was me in the '90s, striving to get my music "out there"--but of course, I couldn't because I was close-fisted; it was all about me. That day in church, sitting at the feet of Frances Crowe (who, among other amazing feats, once put up an antenna in her backyard so that the town could get Democracy Now) I got to be a part of a whole, a big river of music that came before me, includes me and will keep on flowing downstream into the ocean, up into the rainclouds and back again. I'll take that.

Scenes from "With A Little Help From My Friends" benefit at Appel Farm

Pete Kennedy using uke to play slide:





Here are some images from the stage of Appel Farm Festival. I got to sit next to my favorite blues singer, Guy Davis. How I love him. Here's his tribute to the late great Odetta.

Human Billboard, Anusara Yoga... Oh, and Pedicure

Above are the necklaces my friend Jen McGlashen made. She sent me these and asked me to please wear them as a human billboard for her design. She also sent me a pack of cards with her website address which I stuck in my purse and always mean to hand out to people who compliment the necklaces, of which there are many. But I always seem to have the wrong purse when this happens. So here is her site: www.mcflashpants.com. Enjoy.

She's brave, my friend Jen. It's really hard to put yourself out there, I am continuously reminded. We have been working as musicians since June of 1991, which means as of June 7, we have been The Nields in a professional, yes-we-take-money--please--for-our-singing way for 18 years. Our first gig for real money was on that date (June 7, 1991--someone please alert Bruce Palmatier) at Trinity College where Katryna and I along with Mary McCormack (yes, THE Mary McCormack) sang two sets at a Trinity alum party.

I go back and forth with the whole putting-self-out-there thing. Obviously some part of me loves it. Why else would I be a professional musician, or for that matter, writing this blog? I love the connection I get when I go forward in life with my heart open.

And some part of me doesn't. It is said that the number one fear in this country is public speaking. Not death, which is number two. More people are afraid of what others think about them than they are of losing their lives. I love public speaking, and if you asked me whether I'd rather have the love and admiration of million people or a million dollars, I'd choose the love every single time. Fame practically guarantees both kinds of millions; but it almost always comes along with the disgust of a million people. Or at least one person, and I don't love the idea that even one person might be offended by me.

For my birthday present, Katryna gave me a spa pedicure along with her presence and participation (namely, she had to sit next to me and chat and get a pedicure for herself while I got my tootsies tended to). In the picture below you can see the tops of my sweet kids' heads along with my pampered foot.



The pedicure is important because I have come to the conclusion (for the umpteenth time--this is not new) that I will not have lived a completely happy life unless I go through yoga teacher training. It's not so much that I want to be a yoga teacher, though I might. It's more existential than that. My grandmother, Margaret B. Tenney, discovered yoga in 1967 after traveling to India. She came back to New York City and began a practice that included standing on her head every morning, along with sun salutations and a bowl of yogurt and granola. (In two weeks she will be celebrating her 102nd birthday, so she's not exactly a bad advertisement for these practices.)

Yoga is not new to me. I had a pretty serious Ashtanga practice in the late 90's and continued to study different paths, spending time at Kripalu, doing prenatal yoga in both pregnancies. When I practice yoga, I am incrementally more grounded than I am at any other time of the day, even when meditating (trying to meditate, I should say.) This doesn't mean I'm always present in my yoga practice; I spend much time wondering when class will be over and what I will eat for lunch and how nice that other person's mat is and how I wish I could do a backbend like the guy in the tank top and how I probably will never be brave enough to do a handstand and how I hope the teacher is noticing how flexible my hamstrings are. Speaking of which, I once injured my knee so badly when I was trying to show off my flexibility doing a standing half-lotus with forward bend that I had to stop practicing for a month. Still. I tend to catch my mind drifting off the beam into its competitive, acquisitive, judgmental ways more quickly on the mat than off.

Plus, there's the sheer bliss I experience when and after I practice. The hard part is getting me on the mat.

Anusara yoga, the path I will be studying, is all about opening the heart, which I have been convinced for a long time is my life's work. The central philosophy is in line with my own: that God dwells within us as.

The art of Anusara yoga is a co-participation with the Supreme-not a practice of domination, subjugation, or control of Nature. The poses in Anusara yoga are considered to be "heart-oriented," meaning that they are expressed from the "inside out." Instead of trying to control the body and mind from the outside, the poses originate from a deep creative and devotional feeling inside. -www.anusara.com

It's not lost on me that this time around my intention began because I was in pain. My back hurt, so I went to the physical therapist who pointed out that I walk around in a slump. I wrote about it and one of you angels out there sent me a link to Esther Gokhale's lecture. I was forced, through pain, into my body: to pay as much attention to my small body movements as I try to pay to the small adjustments my mind needs to make in order to be as calm and happy and helpful as possible. And all I could think of was, "Yoga, yoke, embody. Heart forward. Be brave. Heart forward."

Do one thing every day that scares you, said Eleanor Roosevelt.

So here I am with my new pedicure which will serve as a bell of mindfulness every time I lunge forward from down dog. Of course I wish I'd chosen purple like Katryna did, but probably if she'd chosen Cancun Fiesta instead of Louvre Me Louvre Me Not, I'd have wanted the pink. (What a fun day job that would be, to come up with nail color names!)

I am really scared. I am going to be studying with the yoga teacher of my dreams. We have become friends recently, which is a whole other amazing, grace-filled story. I have mentioned a few times about my secret wish to do yoga teacher training, and she kept saying it would happen when it was meant to happen. And then in the space of a few hours we figured out a way to make it happen--this summer.

In a strange way, this is an even more frightening version of "putting out there" than speaking is, or certainly singing is. She is going to see me as an imperfect student instead of her strong, smart friend. She's going to see my pride, my competitiveness, my weakness––all the things I regularly try to disguise. I am going to have to show up with my body, in my body, with my heart open and forward, even when the last thing I want to do is move my body, be in my body, risk my own judgmental competitive thoughts. I am going to have to show up for the God within when I'd rather tune out and read Twitter posts or find some other way to slump in a chair. But what I've learned is this: I get to show up in whatever state I'm in, and I only ever have to work to whatever my own edge happens to be. I am pledging now to honor the tightness, to go gentle, to embrace the body that I have and work with what is, not what I think might be (given years of practice and some plastic surgery.) And whether or not my teacher loves and approves of me is ultimately none of my business.

And I don't fully know why my call in this direction is so strong. I believe and think empirically that it will make me a better songwriter and musician, a better coach and a better writer. Most importantly, I think it will make me a happier person which will infiltrate all my relationships, but maybe none of this is true. But my body says, "GO," and I've learned that the body knows.

A good friend just told me about a parenting philosophy (Vicki Hoefle who has a program called "Parenting on Track" ) that resonates with me. She said, "Instead of praising your child when she hits a home run or paints a beautiful picture, ask her how it feels to do this. That way she gets her affirmation from within rather than from an external source."

I love this. My inclination is to shower my kids with praise for every little accomplishment. I'm an enthusiastic cheerleader, so this happens all the time. But what if I inquired instead? What if I held back just a tad, so that it's not about me and my reaction but an invitation to curiously explore the feeling? That way my children get to find their own God within, their own North Stars, without all my editorializing. And then maybe, just maybe, they will not need to stand on a stage or look at their bank balance or be dependent on a partner to feel how fully and completely they are loved by God, by the planet, by their own miraculous bodies.

Update on Felted Pick Necklaces

Here is the ongoing evolution of the felted pick necklaces which are sure to make us RICH!





I still need to knit a cord for this. And then I have to take a giant leap of faith to see if it's true that if you cut into felt, your stitches won't come apart, for this needs a button.



I am making projects from this great book. Here is what I hope will be Elle's school lunch bag. I still need to knit the strap (my first I-chord!) and felt the bag. I can't find any #11 needles so I am going to use #10s and hope for the best. Also, I am going to try to find some waterproof fabric and line the inside. (If you look at the above picture sideways, you can see what the finished bag should look like: it's the middle picture on the book's cover.)

Jay loves his pillowface cat so much. When I give it to him he leans back and then hurls himself forward onto it, howling with delight.