Dear reader, 

If I owe you an email, a text, a letter, thank you for your patience. My inbox needs some sort of business specialist to organize it and make me a to do list, and my to do list needs a babysitter to make me do everything. Thank goodness today from 12-2EST we have Admin Hours in Landscapes where I am known to tackle a task or two.

The ecosystem of my business is changing rapidly and I am doing my best to keep up. I spent the week alongside Katy transforming Common Objects and opening our doors Saturday and Sunday for a soft landing. A soft launch. A scrappy entrance into the world of physical commerce.

It took Katy four coats of cream paint to cover the deep purple, red, and lime green walls. It took too many hours to build the ikea shelves for the studio area. We are still waiting on our custom shelves to arrive that should have been here weeks ago, which has caused me more panic than I’d like to admit.

This whole endeavor has been a huge practice in patience and gratitude. So much of what I teach in the form of quilting is anti perfectionism, and yet I find myself raising my standards beyond what I can reach when so much is out of my control. This has caused a lot of freeze and discomfort this week, when what I really am longing for is connection and celebration.

We have been in the shop every day since last Monday, and will head down there again shortly. The biggest change for me is not being home for long stretches of time while working, when for the last decade I have mostly worked from wherever it is that I live. And for the last seven years that has usually involved my dog June sitting next to me.

This past week really showed me how much I rely on my pets for co regulation, my home for break times, mid day baths between teaching and writing, the list goes on.

Once we’re up and running I will not be there every day. We will be open four days a week to start and experiment with things, and open up extended hours around holiday shopping times.

I think where most of my discomfort comes from is the unknown. This could be said about anything I do, but especially with the shop. Not knowing how it will be received, how it will do, and especially how I will balance it with my other streams of income, especially teaching online.

While teaching has been my primary job for the last ten years it has also changed and shifted greatly in terms of how much it takes to fill a class, and how many people sign up for things. In many ways this shift is what prompted me to want to open a physical space and generate income in a new way.

Even when I crunch the numbers, this little shop can’t make what teaching online once did. And a paycut isn’t exactly in the cards with my debt and cost of living. So, I feel into the discomfort. The pit in my stomach. The wondering how to do it all but not do too much that I burn out rapidly.

The question of hiring comes in. We’ll already be gone the weekend after we open, do we find someone to put on payroll? Do we take the hit and be closed for two days? I have so many questions! I continue to walk the line of having done this before and it feeling so incredibly new to me.

I return to one day at a time. Today we will put together shelves for the closet, pick out rugs for under the tables, and make sure everything has a price sticker on it. I’ll make categories for the goods in the online shop and edit things to look nice. Tomorrow I will do my best to stay home and relax before the full sprint to our opening party on Saturday.

I am eternally grateful for this opportunity to try something new, and I am wildly uncomfortable. These two truths can live alongside each other, and just for today I can be ok with that.

→ I am so pleased to share that my daily prayer book Look About You is coming out as an audiobook on December 1 with North Atlantic Books

Originally written and self published by me, cover design by Alyssa Natoci and edited by Jacqueline Suskin

→ Loved this episode of Off The Grid with Bear Hebert, who I have learned so much about pricing my offerings from

→ Common Objects Grand Opening Party is this Saturday in Traverse City, MI

CLASSIFIEDS : 

Meditate & Create with live sound healing, free via zoom. Join us for guided centering in creative community.

Book a classified ad for next week here 

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I'll leave you with this special photo of me and Katy from pride a few weeks ago taken by Jes Ryan