Queen Anne has not gotten the memo about saving herself.  She is rampant, bodacious – wanton, even – covering the meanest abandoned lot with a sea of white heads nodding “Yes, yes!” to any summer breeze that will carry their flourishing a little further onward, toward a foothold in next summer’s warmth.

You see the Queen Anne’s Lace, and you just want to pull the car over onto the shoulder of the road, and wade in. I recommend you do exactly that, but please, not on the Interstate.  And wear your long pant, and socks.  We don’t want you getting poison ivy.

“I offer every fruit and flower
And every kind of healing medicine
And all the precious things the world affords…

All the sweet and lonely forest groves…
Lakes and meres adorned with lotuses,
All plaintive with the sweet-voiced cries of water-birds
And lovely to the eyes, and all things wild and free
Stretching to the boundless limits of the sky;

I hold them all before my mind…
For I am empty handed…”

    Shantideva, Offering of Material Things Not Owned by Anyone

Not every one enjoys this sort of thing – looking through an empty jar to discover a flower from long ago.  But I think you do.  And even if another, braver artist could take you farther into the glass, until you recognized the part of you where the tangled, wilted petals belonged, I can still say, “I did my part.”

When we tuck things away, they take on the shape of the place we hide them.  This little piece of symbolic reality is so obvious, it hardly bears stating, but I need to be reminded of such fundamental facts on a daily, if not hourly basis.  It is as true about memories and pains as it is about silk and cardboard.  What feels difficult from outside yourself may simply be a hurt or a fear that has taken on a difficult shape somewhere inside.  You don’t have to show anyone else, but you can trust yourself to look inside the box.

Aline kept the box from her green alarm clock.  She filled it with loose glass beads – copper seeds, crystal tubes, the remnants of a strand of chunky ruby-red faceted ovals – all saved for the purposes of an unknown day.  On top of these shiny, vagrant beads, she nestled blossoms sewn from white silk ribbon and yellow french knots, curling their soft petals against the rigid cardboard sides.  Distracted by other, more pressing fancies, Aline could let them wait.  Time, heat and moisture shaped their drooping tendrils into the perfect square of the little sarcophagus, silently recording each passing day of inattention.  I don’t know when Aline last held the ribbon flowers in her own hands, rekindling their tender memory – but it was a long, long time ago.

This is how I found them.  As soon as I lifted them from the box, the silk rustled back to life, and spread itself into the light, giving itself air, blooming once again.

“It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and—without even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

Thanks, everyone.  Today is better.  And P.S.  I love today’s picture.  This treasure is very old piece of perforated paper embroidery, courtesy of the antique eye of Deb Opyd of Relics Peoria.  You should like her Facebook page.  Really, you will.

I try to remember that I might want to come back and re-read this blog post someday in the future.  Do I really want to remember how today hurt me so much, how it felt like a re-run of summer camp, where over and over  I learned the lesson that there is no place for me in anyone else’s plans?

The problem is that whether I write about how today feels or not, I won’t forget.  Each failure accumulates, a granule of silt from the Difficult Period, leaving trace elements in every part of me.  That is how I come to be myself, for good or for ill.

One thing I won’t do is turn my back on some emotional, unappealing part of me.  The whole picture has to be included to make sense.  I wish this involved more success and recognition for my sweeter side.  On the other hand, undreamed events and things might be the means for me to fulfill what my life is meant for.  And I guess the disagreeable side of me, non-compliant and uncooperative, stands ready to handle the rest.

It has all been sacred.  Each little moment – not just the ones your wind around your finger and slip onto the cotton wadding in little white cardboard jewelry boxes, to preserve until such time as the Future (which never comes).  Even as you fold and ruffle, the threads unwind and unravel behind you, just out of reach.

These laces were already photographs.   They were simply waiting to be seen in the right light.

Aline Leasure Hopkins folded up these zippers and elastic one day, and packed them away where life’s small things go.  Then, she moved to Madison, Wisconsin to live near her son, Edward Hopkins.  After she died, Ed kept boxes of her things in the middle bedroom of the house he shared with his wife, Kay.  Kay gave me one of those boxes today, marked “Sewing Trimmings.”  And there I found the zippers and elastic, just as Aline had laid them aside, to use another day.

The story here is that I want to keep trying.  It is true that there are plenty of pictures of old spools of thread on the internet.  But I have only this one, here, to mark my momentary hope that something beautiful could happen without any interference from me.