A Mingled Yarn

I feel a bit like the old man in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” who kept saying, “I’m not dead yet.” Although for the better part of this year, it’s been touch and go.

After closing the physical store, the idea was to get rid of the remaining stock, take what was left after paying off the final bills and reopen as an online store carrying a limited stock of product I strongly loved and believed in. In addition, A Mingled Yarn would begin to hold periodic retreats and workshops with the first one planned for spring 2007.

A long-time friend who believes strongly in parapsychology sent me a note in early December saying she had a strong vision and premonition that I should “remain still,” not to make any plans or take any action until late spring of 2007, I was “to rest and wait.” I was especially to avoid any financial or contractual commitments. I smiled and wrote back that I appreciated the warning, but I was already in the process of developing the retreat and web site with orders, teachers, contracts, promotional materials and more underway.

Apparently, my friend’s vision was better than mine.

I began to have small obstacles tossed in my path in late November. By mid-December, the obstacles were becoming the size of boulders and in early January, half a mountain of problems landed on me with a some residual rocks, pebbles and slippery debris following in its wake. The retreat had to be canceled (despite a non-refundable site deposit); the product orders arrived after being 6 weeks late, canceled and non-returnable; and I found the elephant-sized debt load that had been swept under the rug when I wasn’t looking. My health, which I’d ignored when working 16-20 hour days at the shop, collapsed.

You could call it depression, grief or whatever you wanted but I was lower than the lint in an earthworm’s navel.

But I felt a strong commitment to helping my husband pull the debt load back from the brink of bankruptcy before checking out. One day, looking for something positive to read, I picked up a book I inherited from a dear friend who’d died the summer before I opened the shop. I thought it was a book on writing, since Dona was a writer who had them all, but it turned out to be a self-help book entitled Write It Down, Make It Happen. To stop the anxiety attacks by taking my mind off what was happening during the days, I began doing the exercises in the book.

There’s a lot of discussion in the book of “synchronicity,” or coincidences, created by our focus on a particular thought or image. And I took to noticing the ones happening to me. The author mentioned Julie Cameron’s classic, The Artist’s Way, so when I stumbled across a sale on the 10th anniversary edition two days later, I bought it. I’d had one of the original editions, but never completed the 12-week program. This time I vowed to complete the program.

I’ll skip all of the gory details, but suffice it say, things have begun to turn around. I’ve returned not only to fiber arts, but begun studying the visual arts I’d abandoned in college. The bitterness has left my mouth and I’m back on life’s journey.

I intend to use this online journal to let you know not just what I’m doing and how I’m doing, but what is working in helping me start over and dream again. I’d like to encourage you to feel free to comment and join in; to try some of the things I’ve found useful. We can support and help one another — which is the only way our species can survive life.

Meanwhile, to quote Mehitabel (of Archie and Mehitabel fame), ” Toujour gai! Toujour gai! There’s life in the old girl yet.”