A tiny Life?

I met Hilary Cooper-Kenny in 2012 when I visited her on my 50-state labyrinth journey. She created a  labyrinth in the backyard of her Kingsbury, New York home and described it as her "serene" place – in contrast to the busyness of her Crazy as a Loom (yes Loom!) Weaving Studio. 

I have followed her blog, Crazy as a Loom, ever since. Recently, I was leafing through a completed journal and found a scrap of paper stuck to one of the pages. On it, I had written "tiny life" Hilary blog post 2017. I must have planned to revisit it, but never did. I read back through her posts for that year and found the two words, embedded in a sentence among a page of paragraphs. .

 I have to stay grounded in my "tiny life," she wrote.
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Tiny life? Hilary? I wanted to dash off a very belated comment....
"What do you mean a tiny life? I love reading about your life – your looms, weavings, pots of hearty soup in the winter, visits from your grandchildren, the pets that died and the ones you adopted, your multiple cups of tea that keep you fueled and warmed in the 1790's house you restored, the friends who drop by, books you read, the (literal) headaches and heartaches, and the honesty that flows from it all."

Thankfully, I didn't need to read further than Hilary's next line for reassurance that tiny wasn't meant as a judgement.

"I like my life," she continued. "My day to day is productive, creative and mostly happy."

It's a life like most of ours, not lived out on the world stage, or even in the local paper (when there is one).
A life not measured by size or reach, but rather by authenticity. 

Perhaps when I copied Hilary's words I was wondering whether my own life was tiny, significant enough, worthwhile enough in the grand scheme of things – all those middle school comparisons that lead us nowhere, but to more tiny-ness. Two years later, I look at the paper and know what Hilary was saying all along, as she surrounded "tiny life" in quotation marks.

There is no such thing.

 








​                               I invite you to read Hilary's blog and check out her website.

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