The to-do list this morning was completely out of control.

I mean this literally: I could not get a handle on this thing. Neither to wrestle it into total submission to my will, nor to prioritize just one item and work on it slowly. I had, as usual, strong and specific expectations, and when I could not meet them, unpleasantness ensued. (I feel like I have a post somewhere that addresses the function of expectations quite directly…)

The way out of the unpleasantness was to get some help from a friend, and to give some help to another friend. (Which is really also getting help, in a different way.) Simple solution? Of course. Hard—of course. It’s like I learn this fresh every time.

You may or may not be aware that I’ve been seriously studying herbal medicine for about the last year. Among the many reasons I love it: thinking through a problem, within* a framework built from both specific knowledge and general methodology, focuses my brain like nothing else. This morning I decided—or my body decided this was the thing she was able to actually do—to work through some practice cases. I started by thinking about a friend who is about to have inpatient surgery, and a long recovery once home. Several hours later, I’d made triptych #5.

The Threshold Project was on that uncontrollable to-do list. I had written it off for today. I’d written everything off for today that wasn’t a commitment I had made in person, to a person.

And then I started—not quite accidentally, but not with this outcome in mind, either—to combine my love for a dear friend with my knowledge in a subject area, and that produced… oops, a creation. A handmade item that requires some art to design and to craft. Three such items, actually; related to each other. A triptych.

It’s not visual art, certainly not my more usual wordcraft. There’s art and there’s craft to herbalism, though, and I experience medicine-making as absolutely creative work.

Not what I expected to be writing about in The Threshold Project. (And isn’t that part of why I’m doing The Threshold Project?)

“These things really do just come, if you let them.” Apparently also if you let you catch a break, and catch your own breath.

I’m speaking of “you” in the generic sense, of course—in the sense that really I’m talking about myself. And then I’m using that to get out of myself. Which action, engaged fully and in good faith, brings us (me) (paradoxically?) right back home.

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*Climbing around the outside of a known framework is good, too. Fixing things.

**These specific items are for someone, so I won’t go into more depth. If you’re curious, I’m pretty much always up for talking about herbal medicine generally. Text me. ;)