When I was a little girl in second grade, I found a fuzzy caterpillar one day on the playground. I decided to keep him as my pet and put him in my little fish shaped change purse. I put a little grass in there to feed him as I figured that would do the job of food and zipped up the fish. I remembered the little guy about a week later when I found the fish in my desk. I unzipped the fish lips to find something really scary. Much to my shock, the caterpillar was gone and there was just a bunch of fuzzy white threads wrapped up in a corner! It scared the hell out of me whatever it was and I quickly zipped...
I don't know about you, but I have been rearranging everything from the closet to the vegetable drawers, to the underwear drawers. I feel like the quarantine has caused us all to reshape our lives. To go through and literally reshape EVERYTHING. The world hit a big pause button, and I'm sure like most of you I felt busted flat in Baton Rouge. Totally alone. But then it hit me, I really wasn’t alone. I had my Sweet Bird family to call on. Literally. So after my little pity party I began the curiosity of who my customers really are and day by day, threw out the anxiety of the bad news, turned off the TV for good and got to work. ...
“Grandma, how do you cope with pain?” “With your hands, honey. If you do it with your mind instead of relieving the pain, it toughens even harder.” “With your hands grandma?” “Yes, our hands are the antennae of our soul. If you move them; knitting, cooking, painting, playing or sinking them into the ground, you send care signs to the deepest part of you and your soul lights up because you’re paying attention to it. Then signs of pain will no longer be necessary.” “Hands are really that important?” “Yes my daughter. Think of babies: they start to know the world through the touch of their hands. If you look at the hands of old people, they tell you more...
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. When WWII ended, my grandparents pooled their money together and eventually bought a beach house on the Jersey shore. It was there I learned about storms. I would marvel at the old whaling prints on the wall that my Grandfather collected, like the image above by Percy Dalton. Men in rough seas in nothing more than a dinghy it seemed. I could hear the waves many nights from my bed, the...
About sixteen years ago I found myself in times of trouble, okay, times a thousand it seemed. So much messy, unjust crap coming at me from all ends. I actually shut Sweet Bird down and went about licking my wounds and working on a resume for the first time in twenty years . One day I wandered into the garage where all my materials laid like a ship at the bottom of the sea. But yet, I sat down. Six hours later I emerged with a belt buckle, my first ever and on it, it said, "Release the Vision". I went in the house and threw the resumes away. This object became instantly a messenger from the mystery. Who even made this buckle? Why Mary? Why Release the Vision? I felt I had...
