A Package of Small Things

I'm writing this down because I've already forgotten this twice this year for weeks at a time, and I really want to remember this. 

Maybe because I am prone to forgetting, post-chemo post-menopause post- parenting, post-psychotherapy post-everything. But maybe it is the kind of psycho-spiritual learning that involves sitting with a handful of unanswerable questions over and over for an entire lifetime and remembering,  forgetting, remembering and forgetting all the possible answers.

I'm bored with the way life feels when I forget this, and I feel a deep and reasonable hope when I remember. So here I am writing it all down even if it doesn’t quite make sense, and sharing it, just in case others are in the process of remembering and forgetting something essential too.  

And of course, it all emerged through dreamtime which is probably why it is so hard to remember.

In April I had this dream that filled me with relief and joy that lingered for a good week or two afterwards.

I am saying goodbye to a dear old friend, a sculptor, at the airport.  He makes ginormous sculptures; public installation pieces and he is carrying one on his back as I leave him at the departures desk.  I decide to hop an airport transport van to return. I slide open the passenger door and the van is filled with children. All are sitting  buckled in their seats with big piles of little toys. The kind of toys that come out of piñatas, or Crackerjack boxes or Kinder eggs. The kind that are often a little dangerous, too plastic, and quickly breakable. Bubble wands, green paratrooper guys, balsa-wood-rubber-band-powered airplanes.  Toys that are strangely delightful because they are only intended to last so long, tiny toys designed only to get a child through a restaurant meal or a three-hour car ride without screaming.  Small things, delightful in their smallness.

An old Greek man is driving, pleasant and insistent. "Get in! Get in!" he issues the friendly command. "We will take you all the way home!"

 "What delightful ride!" I  think to myself just before I wake.

After that dream I felt a big weight off my shoulders, my mood buoyed by paying attention to small, engaging temporal delights for several days in the dream’s wake. Thinking about the ways my mission in this world is to stay small but impactful, creating spaces that responsive to the transitory needs of the moment, yet enduring.

Like this guy:

a tiny little toy man, with tie and glasses, next to a stylus for scale

He came out of some long-ago cereal box or illegal chocking-hazard chocolate egg and started traveling with us when my husband and I were still career building and child-free. For twenty-five years or more he has lain in a coin dish or stood resolutely on a windowsill next to a few pretty rocks. He keeps sticking to us, moving with us from home to home.

He is adorable and I love his uprightness and his persistence.

I shared this dream of a van ride of tiny toys with one of my dream circles, on a day when all the participants were fresh out of dreams, and they were able to help me understand why the happy aftermath of this dream had lingered.

I’ve said goodbye to big back-breaking projects intended for the wide-scale public. Perhaps it is time to ride all the way home engaged in small, impermanent but pleasing little things.

If I was a noblewoman in 11ᵗʰ century Japan, perhaps I would have dreamed of the delicacy and ethereal beauty of the spring cherry blossoms. But I was born in Minnesota in 1964 , into an era of  “Just one word: Plastics!”  listening to Simon and Garfunkel singing "coo-coo-ka-choo Mrs. Robinson" while I played with adorable little disposable prizes from ten-cent gumball machines in front of the grocery store.  The dream seemed to be asserting that the joy I feel in many, even too many, small engaging things maybe as essential and important as any single big herculean effort.

"Small things come in packages!" My auditory memory summons up the broken idiom in a croaking Yiddish accent: A compliment from a kind old Jewish man to me as a short young actress, in his second or third language after he saw me perform in a Yiddish theater comedy.   I knew he meant that he meant “Good things come in small packages!” but the thought of just being a small thing in a package felt more comforting.

A relieving compensation for the constant capitalistic cultural demand of "more, bigger, louder, faster!"

I have instead devoted myself to tending to the many small bits and pieces that I have learned, that I can share, preserve, and pass along. I can generate more through the joy of small and temporary projects, than having to assume the burden of one big life-changing, identity-defining or world-transforming action in the public square.

Small things matter.

More that we are allowed to consider. More than the culture around me asserts, more than the anxious scarcity mindset that calls on me to consume, acquire, stockpile.  Small things matter more than big houses, big cars, big vacations.  The mythologies of capitalism and supremacy work hard to convince us that we must only do big things for big rewards, or we are worthless.

But small things come in packages:  The power to heal ourselves and others, to connect and enjoy and support each other – such relational transactions emerge from a million small things. The tapestries and canvases I stitch while I work require hundreds of thousands of accumulated micro-gestures. Aggregations of many tiny things matter deeply to me, far more than big things.

a petite point stitching project composed of many many small stitches

So, why can’t I remember this?  What will it take to extricate myself from the temptation to devalue the many small things I do well, and sometimes even impeccably, and release the drive toward big things that the culture demands to consider our contributions relevant?

I’m not making a big dent in anything. I’m not going to “make it big” or have a big impact on the world.   I haven’t wanted it or pursued it and couldn’t handle it anyway. Maybe “making it small” is absolutely a legitimate path.

I do have a package of small things that I've built and created, that can effect – I hope – some good impact in their own way, for myself and others.

"Maybe" – I thought after this dream –  "I need to learn to really trust my love of working with lots of small things.” Small groups. Brief consultations.  Short essays instead of long books. Tiny projects that I pick up for a time and lose track of and that resurface again later. Maybe I need to just love and enjoy these things, tolerate the anxiety that comes from this diversification of my efforts, and the small remuneration I receive from each project, that for the past two or three years has combined into just enough. It can be hard sometimes, there is a lot to juggle and keep track of, but the truth is I am happiest when I commit to the healing and the joy I find in this over-full package of many small things.

And banish any temptation to start thinking that I should be getting bigger.

But then – taxes were due, along with a bunch of tuition and school expenses and some big home repairs hit and suddenly without realizing it I'm back on the BIG bandwagon, searching for MORE, as if big is the only way to have enough.

The joy and faith in the efficacy of cumulative small things, all packaged together faded, overpowered and erased by financial pressures -  until the grounding commitment to the power of small was completely forgotten. And there I was, casting about in my brain – against my instincts and beyond my limitations – for some way for something to hit big. The many small things I have accomplished felt insignificant,  ineffectual, silly, a woo-woo waste of time. The unconscious cultural worship of bigness possessed me once more, allowing hopelessness, powerlessness, and fretfulness to crowd back into my self-talk – even though I know none of this generates anything good for anyone.

Until I had another dream:

There are tiny little flecks on the chest of my sweater over my sternum. They look like tiny little sticks, maybe thorns or burrs. But when I look closely, I see they are teeny tiny whole people like our little toy man with his glasses and tie. A whole village of tiny people sitting on my heart. I want to get small and explore the village and understand what is most important to them. I suspect they hold a key missing piece of the collective puzzle.

I shrink down, to  look at the world from their scale, but wake up before I talk to anyone.

Later in the day, remembering these little folks is still strangely comforting. And when a client canceled an appointment - I decided to sit with  the dream a bit more and draw the last glimpse  of this mini-world and the tiny ones on the horizon before waking.

(I can’t draw but here it is)

 I write for a while in my journal:

Little people, like burrs or seeds, snagged on my chest, above my heart. Tiny little hooks, that catch onto me, don’t let go, and that snag my attention.

All day I've been "hooked" by the desire for little rewards little reassurances, comforts affirmations. I've checked my phone way too many times to see if anything "good" has come in through email or social media – but no big, wonderful surprise.  The" snag" sits on my chest me, hard to shake.

So instead of externalizing, I suspect it may be necessary to get small enough to listen to the tiny people... as my dream suggests.

I closed my eyes to sink into meditation, and imagined what might have emerged next if I had continued dreaming:  

I see in my minds-eye the tiny people walking ahead of me on an increasingly narrow path, scouting ahead for me, leading the way, around a sharp turn that I cannot see past or beyond.

But they are just the right size to negotiate the tiny ledge that goes around the bend toward whatever comes next. They seem calm, steady, not distressed by whatever they can see, that I cannot. I'm supposed to follow their lead and put my faith in the efficacy and power of the small ones. I forgot but they have reminded me.

Around the blind corner I imagine a place where I am doing enough, have enough, give and receive enough, share enough, work hard enough. I recognize when to rest, when to work, and I trust the unknowable flow of things, with the tiny ones scouting things out just far enough ahead to offer a little bit of  reassurance.

I should know better by now - I should be able to remember that "more" only begets a demand for even more still, and never creates peace.

What if I trust all the small things, the tiny gestures that build friendships, and communities and networks, and eventually cultural shifts, all the little seeds that I try to scatter about that may grow into trees and produce a little fruit, all the tiny projects that cling to me and travel with me from home-to home, the little pebbles that roll down steep mountains that may grow into boulders eventually. All the little gestures made by others, that alongside my own, as their power gathers, that could pull a swarm out of a death spiral, or change the course of history.  A million, nearly invisible, maybe overlooked small things may be able to lead us through a tight pivot, a sharp right turn toward a sustainable life where the most important metric is not “More” but "Enough.”

What if we share what we can however small, whatever we have learned that may or not be of use to everyone but might be extremely important to someone? What if we share the little bits we’ve got instead of stockpiling them or deciding they are insignificant or that they should be more, and bigger?

What if we believed in the power of small things to undermine mythologies of patriarchy and supremacy that insist that every gesture be big and grand to be appreciated and valued?

I’d like to go all in with the small things on my heart. I want to have faith in the power of every small gesture. The flapping of butterfly wings. The ant that steps out of colony-destroying rank and file. The tiniest variables in the causal chain that can generate unanticipated surprises, even miracles sometimes.

I am paralyzed and powerless when I look at the cruelty and consumption of oligarchs and authoritarians, when I consider the wealth and resources and infrastructure they control. I could never get big enough to make a dent in their supremacies. I will never make a big impact on our national and cultural pathologies.

I can do small things. I can commit to sharing whatever small things I might have found in the packages that were addressed to me.

I don't want to forget this time.  

I hope that I will not be seduced, yet again, into yearning for a single, dominant, categorically big and sweeping solution to my personal challenges or our collective ones.

I hope that when I revert to my first cultural language of More and Bigger, that it won't be for long, that I won't become hypnotized by the stories I learned in childhood about the power of giants and fall again into forgetfulness. I want to remember that it won't be one hero, a savior, or white man with a spear who vanquishes dragons for us, and certainly not a good guy with a gun.

There isn't a single story, and there isn't just one way to respond to threat and challenge. There are approaches other than trying to dominate the dominator.

I’m not against any one strategy: bigness may have its time and place. I’m just against there being only one strategy. I’m thinking some about all the small and forgotten strategies, All the bits sitting dormant, the tiny forgotten, undervalued, obscured, atrophied and suppressed strategies of personal and collective care.

It won't be a single issue, one good idea, or an evidence-based cure that will get folks through or tend to those who fall. It will be millions of small generosities continuously exchanged, back and forth, circulating among small and delicate networks that millions of people will construct together from the millions of small gifts they have at their disposal.

Sigh.

Oh, to put my faith in all the small things, and to remember this time.