Psychic training, violin and fashion design. These are not the academic subjects I’d have chosen for my 13-year-old daughter. But she’s begged, pleaded, found the money, found her teachers and organized to work the lessons in between her writing, farm tours, waiting tables and math lessons.

According to my conventional academic upbringing, these courses are electives, those unimportant little blow-off classes that suggested school administrators supposedly understood how to instill fun in learning.

For Ula, they’re the real deal. They are the seeds for a self-defined life, where creative passion couples with life skills in such a way that she forges her own unique path. For me, they represent a window of freedom…

And she takes them seriously. Too seriously, I fear. The frown on her face as she stomps around the house moving from French darts to tarot cards is worrisome.

She crawls into bed beside me one night and heaves a giant sigh. I jump to the first conclusion that pops into my mind.

“You don’t like these things as much as you thought you did?”

I hope this isn’t true. Her intuitive gifts have been bubbling to the surface since she was a little kid, creating anxiety as she picked up on other people’s feelings and emotions and confused them with her own. I see her now learning to sift and separate and keep herself grounded while helping others.

As for fashion, both the girls (in spite of their flannel-clad parents) have a fascination with drape, line and color. Fashion design, for them, is empowering. It’s putting skills and knowledge at their fingertips so that they can bring their visions to life.

And violin? Aaaah….The violin. I love every little plucky sound that comes out of it. I stopped teaching her to read music when she was little because her eyesight was so poor, she couldn’t discern the notes on the page. That’s all different now. Her Dad and I both feel there are few greater joys in life than being able to pick up a musical instrument.

I value these studies as critical to her education and development. They are of her choosing, she has done nearly all the legwork to make them happen. I really hope she doesn’t suddenly decide she’s not interested.

But it’s the opposite.

“I don’t want to get it wrong,” she begins to cry.

This year, she has chosen her teachers. And when it came to psychic training and fashion design, she had to work to get them. Kate, a professional fashion designer, comes into the cafe regularly. Corbie, a professional psychic, sits every week at the counter. Ula chose them as her mentors years ago. She had to build relationships with them, convince both of these women, who are not educators by trade, that she was serious enough about the subjects to be a worthy investment of their time. I thought I helped her organize these classes this year. But as I reflect back, she has been setting them up for nearly half a decade.

The subjects aren’t easy. It’s fun to shuffle and fiddle with a deck of Tarot cards. It’s another matter entirely to memorize all 78 cards, then integrate them with one’s intuition, then learn how to help a client frame their queries in a constructive way …all without growing overly invested in a client’s emotions, all while learning the ethical rules of practice.

It’s fun to buy clothes at Goodwill to mix and match, or tear out seams to re-make them to fit better, or to chop up scraps to sew doll outfits. It’s another matter entirely to study how a piece of fabric drapes over the human body, how a tiny snip at a precisely measured point will enable that fabric to bend to a curve; how to draw an article of clothing from imagination and then bring it into being in three dimensions. I

It’s fun to practice holding a violin and pulling the bow across the strings. It’s another matter to learn to tune it, to find the notes along the strings, to teach one’s fingers to respond to the written notes on a page.

“I’m worried I’m going to disappoint them all,” Ula starts to weep. “I thought I’d be good at all these subjects. I’m bad at them.”

There’s the rub. The catastrophe of perfectionism. How did my daughter come to this?
She didn’t get it from me. I’ve often joked with Bob that the secret to my success has been just enough egotistical hubris to squelch my inner self-critic. Books get written because I (perhaps mistakenly) assume that people will want to read them. Podcasts get recorded because I just assume someone will listen. Crazy business decisions happen based on my own unique style of analysis, and we charge forward with the smoke and mirrors of my convictions. Sometimes things go really well. But I’m wrong with frequency. Products flop, sales flounder, customers complain, money gets wasted. And then I learn something new, and that’s just the most exciting thing ever, and I try again.

“You know that you have to commit to being bad at something in order to get good at it, right?” I tell her. She knew this when she was little. She desperately wanted to ice skate. So she suited up and charged across our neighbors’ pond, flopping and flailing and smacking down the whole way, until she could charge and speed around the ice, weaving in and out of all her friends and neighbors. While other kids stayed safe, clung to chairs and avoided falls, Ula crashed and tumbled and learned to skate. I remind her of this. She couldn’t become a decent skater without being a horrible skater first.

“If I don’t get it right, they’re going to be upset with me,” she sniffles. Ouch. I don’t know where the perfectionism worked its way into her psyche (actually, I kind of blame her dad for that…but that’s a story for another day), but there’s the one I’m guilty of: The disease to please.

“You aren’t taking classes to please them!” I bark at her. “You’re taking classes to learn from them! You’re supposed to be wrong, to not know things, so that they can teach you! Being wrong is a right!”

How did this happen? How could any child of mine care so much about people that she worries more about making them happy than she does about learning and growing?

And that’s the moment when I should climb out of the bed and go stand before a mirror. Only I can’t. It was hard enough to hobble up here as it is. My body is so beaten down from this particular season that it takes me several minutes to unfold and loosen my feet enough to walk. The books and knitting projects are heaping up next to my bedside table, because I’ve been too wrapped up with my work to let my mind drift off to them. And work is about my sense of obligation to my family, to my customers, all of whom I love so dearly, I don’t want to let them down in any way. …. Just like Ula doesn’t want to let down these teachers she has come to love so dearly.

But lying here on this bed with my child, I am so tired. She wants to talk. She needs to talk. Yet long days make my eyelids heavy. I may have fewer formal lessons to teach in the morning, but there are so many lessons to teach as she cuddles beside me right now —- About honoring our need to learn and to grow; about our right to be wrong, to ask questions without fear, to try and fail, or, in my case, to rest…all without worrying about whether people will feel let down by us. We have to trust that we are good people at our core, that we are on a good path, that we are worthy of love, even if we don’t always meet others’ expectations. Because when we do, we ask, we challenge, we learn, we rest, we heal, we reflect, and we help everyone around us do the same. Then we start the process all over again. And this is how we make a life of our own design.

Folks, this is be my last podcast/blog of the season. It’s time for me to wind things down, to live a little more privately and begin the process of recharging my batteries for next year. If all goes as planned, The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow Podcast will return in spring of 2021. But, thanks to the support of my blog patrons, all the back archives have been restored to public access for the next few months. So now you can re-listen to back episodes while I’m hibernating!

All of these podcasts happen with the support of my patrons and Patreon.  If you’d like to support my work for as little as $1/month, please head on over to the Shannon Hayes page on Patreon and sign up. You’ll have access to exclusive content, including chapters from my novel-in-progress, Angels & Stones. I’ve taken my inspiration from Charles’ Dickens and serialized the book for your reading pleasure. The chapters from the previous years’ postings are all up there, and we’ll pick up with season 3 of Angels & Stones in January. That said, my first post in January will include all the chapters from the previous seasons, so if you’re coming late, don’t worry! We’ll bring you up to speed before moving forward.

Our family has always celebrated Samhain on October 31. It is a day when we give thanks for the animals who give their lives for our health, and it is a day when those who have gone before us are believed to come back for a visit.

This year Samhain falls on a Sap Bush Saturday. We would like to use that day at the cafe to honor the dead. We will have a Samhain altar set up there. If you are in town and you wish to add a photo or artifact of your year to the Samhain altar, please come by and do so. All prepared food sales from that day will be donated to the family of our long time regular customer and good friend, Ron Cleeve, who passed earlier this month, to help offset their medical expenses.