Explorations of Nancy Wastcoat: Gardening Souls

By Nancy Wastcoat

A dozen years of life-altering events bring Nancy to plead for her father’s help -- a move from a comfortable lush Chicago suburb to a small town in the high desert of Utah, the birth of a second set of twins (making her a single mother of six kids within seven years,) major surgery, the death of her mother, divorce, house in foreclosure, and desperate thoughts of suicide.

It was her father who knew enough to refuse her request: “Look, Nancy, if I support you financially, I’ll have to treat all your siblings the same. It will never be enough. And it will create animosity and dependence and that’s not good for either of us. You’re a smart girl. You’ll be fine.”

It could go either way: giving up in despair or a sudden final realization that she alone has to raise herself and her children. “Okay, what do I know about myself?“

Her response makes all the difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781435777446

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Explorations of Nancy Wastcoat

Gardening Souls

Nancy Wastcoat

Copyright Information

Copyright © 2022 by WiseGuides, Inc.

Photography and text by Nancy Wastcoat.

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the authors. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short exceptions in a review.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-4357-7744-6

First printing, April 2022

Everyone and every experience I have ever had

has become an integral part in growing me into the me I am now.

And so with deep gratitude, I dedicate this writing

to my ancestors, my parents, my siblings,

my children, their partners, their children;

to Mike, to teachers, friends, fellow adventurers, pals,

to colleagues and clients;

to Pacha Mama, Great Spirit, and Guides in so many forms.

Maybe you don’t realize the impact you have had.

I write to tell you that YOU have created me.

Nancy

1. Introductions

Voice

Hello, dear Readers,

Let me introduce myself.

I have been with the author of these writings since before her most recent incarnation through John and Babbie Wastcoat.

I am the Being whom Nancy calls Voice and am probably the most ethereal of the narrators in these stories. I remind Nancy who she has always been. What needs to be resolved this time. What will transform in the world because she is here. I speak in dreams and insights, and, for very important situations, loudly, clearly.

I have been with her always, quietly in the peace-filled flowing times, audibly during her hardest moments, when she has forgotten. I warn her, issue cautions, and offer premonitions and insights into the nature of who she is. I challenge her with big questions that guide her quest, her life.

Nancy returns this time to continue her journey of discovering, sharing, evolving. Remembering. Of understanding forces beyond the visible. Perennial patterns seed her soul garden and sprout in her earliest years. She immerses herself in fearless exploration of beauty and embrace of Nature. She traverses the bridge between the worlds of matter and of Spirit with a vague sense of not-quite-belonging to the material world. She learns for the sake of learning, developing physical and mental agility and love of self-competition. Travel feeds her curiosity. Photography holds beauty and memories. Rebellious seeds against restraints, constraints, also root and sprout early. No rules hinder. No permission needed or wanted. Does she recall from her previous visits the diverging paths, detours, steep hills, precipitous cliffs? When she remembers, this Being Nancy is a Saiway—a vertical channel of light between Spirit and PachaMama—as are all humans when they remember who they are and why they came.

Within these writings, Nancy shares some of these moments, her insights and questions. Despite her endeavors to get it just right, her writing will bump up against the limitations of chronology and sequence, the limitations of discrete words in this impoverished English language, the structure of pages and chapters and books. These human constructs are needed at this time, to share with you the story of a life. But they are insufficient to tell the story of light. So as you read, be prepared to skip around, to hang onto an unanswered question, to keep the dogs of Earthly logic at bay. Instead, soak in the story and its rhythm. Its intent.

Together we journey toward agreed-upon learnings that continue her evolution during the human adventure some call life. For us, when she re-members us and remembers the before and after, it is the timeless adventure we call light.

Voice to Nancy: pay attention. Stay present. Instead of fearfully running away, turn and look at the message. Invite me in. I am with you always, and always have been. I come at the speed of thought. I can help you unsnarl messiness, as I did when you were in deepest learning years…though you called them the trouble years.

I will answer any question you hold, give you any guidance, and will not force my way in. You call. I respond.

Sometimes you forget, neglect these seeds, and go back to sleep. The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you

Don’t go back to sleep!

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep!

People are going back and forth

across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,

The door is round and open

Don’t go back to sleep!

― Rumi

Wisdom Keeper

Greetings, Readers,

I am Wisdom Keeper. In this game of life, I play the role of Nancy’s Elder Self who sees at once the whole timeline of Nancy’s being on Earth.

I am here to provide an alternative perspective to something she is pondering or experiencing. Unlike Voice, who shows up most often in vital turning-point moments, I show her how to ask a question and hold it gently in her heart. And when she does, I respond to those questions when she is willing to listen.

I am also here to weave—for her and for you—a tapestry to accompany this current incarnation narrative, something to strengthen and emphasize what she has learned on this journey, something you might find useful as well, as you travel alongside her across these words and pages. And beyond. Nancy’s life … all human life … can be seen as a tapestry filled with joys and sorrows, shadows and lights, learnings and forgettings, miseries and enlightenments, fears and courage, contractions and expansions. She has learned each cannot exist without another. The yins and the yangs define each other. Good cannot exist without bad, beauty without ugly, sacred without profane. We exist only in relationship.

This tapestry is held by a frame of soft, healing shades of blues and greens of nature onto which Nancy places shiny words of deep gratitude for all that inspires, transpires, and expires in each story.

The tapestry is a living thing, as ever-changing as life, breathing in and out, as space-time is, expanding and contracting. A body of stories we continue to weave second by second, year by year, decade by decade, capturing for a moment the essence of being: exploring, learning, opening to every possibility, teaching, guiding.

While reading this work, imagine that we four — Voice, I — Wisdom Keeper, You — reader, Nancy, — are together creating this tapestry, for she would not exist without you — weaving richly colored warp, weft, and bias threads of experience. Along the horizontal the fun, joyful, rewarding aspects. Along the vertical, the heartbreaking, distressing, confusing aspects. Intertwined along the diagonal are the positively stated learnings gleaned from each event from the eyes of an observer-self. From our eyes to yours.

This tapestry is different every time we look at it, a delicately swaying web in the constant transient movement of our observation. How do we capture a story so it has life — transitory and powerful—adding to the great encyclopedia of every story ever told?

How do we define a moonbeam? How do we hold it in our hands?

Babbie Anne Burton Wastcoat, aka Mom, aka Mooie

Hello dear family and friends,

My, there sure are a lot of you! How did that happen?

Oh. I remember.

A couple months after I married John on June 11, 1938, I wasn’t feeling well, and, sure I had the flu, went to the doctor who blithely announced, My dear! You are pregnant. Amazed, I asked him the same question: How did that happen? I grew up with adoptive parents, very Victorian, rarely speaking of emotion, never speaking of sex. In fact, I always wondered if they even ever saw each other without being fully dressed.

John and I had seven children within fourteen years. But then we lost our Johnny who drowned at age two, and who is with John and me now. Our other six children had twenty-six children, and, at last count, those twenty-six children had forty-five children. Adding spouses and all stepchildren as well, we have grown to about one hundred thirty as of December 2020.

Yes, upon reflection, I’m pretty sure that’s how there got to be so many of you.

Nancy, our third, is a sparkly, dark-haired child after two blonds, born in Durham where we were stationed during part of the war. Very early we witnessed her athleticism. At six months she could pull herself up on the crib rails and learned to bounce and fall, bounce and fall. Her petite, strong body, her intelligence, curiosity, and gregariousness were enchanting. Except for that one year, when, in 8th grade, she needed to rebel, we remained close friends, golfing, playing tennis, planning parties for John and me, being friends with our friends.

Watch for me to occasionally respond to the questions Nancy had wished she could have asked me back then.

Me, Nancy Incarnate

For many years I have been conspiring with narrators from beyond this limited space-time dimensionality, creating fables you find here. The writing’s evolution has become a yummy vegan-soup series of non-linear thoughts, stories, events, rememberings. As the stories gather lives of their own, oozing from the depth or leaping joyfully into consciousness, each story clamors for attention, inclusion — pick ME, pick ME, no ME!! Each branches into something more, like willow trees surrounding my childhood ponds, branches and leaves becoming nests for new ideas yearning to be free of constraints holding them in unconsciousness.

So, dear Reader, you may find an enchanting, or, depending on your preferred organizational style, a puzzling lack of order, creating space to choose, contemplate, consider: What does this mean to me? How do I relate to that? What insight can I gather to try on for my own life? What feelings does that story evoke in me? What could I add to this living Tapestry?

To my siblings: Remember, this is how I see it, remember it, felt it. All memories are flawed and incomplete, each an individual expression filtered through experience, temperament, place in family constellation, and so many other factors. Each of us has our own filters and we can debate endlessly about whose version is true. Or not — whatever we mean by truth. We each, I suppose, have a tiny slice of whatever truth we share. I believe that’s why story-telling gets even better when members of the same family or groups share their own versions, enriching the picture.

The Arc of the Journey

Birthday Reflections, March 9, 1999

If there is just one human story … we go out and we come home … it must be the quality and the joy of our journey that matters. Our journeys occur with each breath, each hour, each day, each lifetime. On each foray out, everything we meet mirrors back to us something that we already are.

Do we lose parts of ourselves on our journeys because we don’t recognize the mirrors as mirrors; or do we gain and re-member parts of ourselves? That must be the definition of quality … to what degree do we recognize our mirrors?

Our explorations on our outward journeys reveal us to us—-that is why we quest, or not. Some of us are searching for a reminder of more expansive, whole selves; some of us seem to be satisfied with a safe, contented stasis, a lifetime for rest and relaxation … this time.

Beginnings

Mom

John and I are living in Camp Butner in Durham, North Carolina, with Tony, age four, and Polly, age two. John is an Army officer, an aide to General Parker. When our third child arrives, there is no room in our thin, army-issued house. We name her JoAnne, for John’s sister Josephine, and my mother, Anne. On day three, John comes to the hospital. Looking at the baby, then to me, John says, She doesn’t look like a JoAnne. Let’s call her Nancy.

A fortunate choice — Nancy means Grace or Favor.

My early memories of Nancy include her preference for men over women. When a woman put her hand on Nancy’s highchair tray she slapped it off. When a man did the same she allowed him to keep it there.

Nancy arrives fearless and curious, earning her the nickname Snoopy. That name sticks for life, and expands to include Mike or Mikie, taken from the children’s book, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

After John goes overseas from 1944 to 1946, I leave Durham, pregnant, herding three barefoot —I forgot their shoes — sniffly, raggedy kids on the smoky, stiff-seated train through Washington, DC, on to Chicago and Lake Forest. My adoptive parents, Oliver and Anne Burton, have left Chicago and their fancy building at 1448 N Lake Shore Drive for the expanse of the Lake Forest countryside. They have bought a house and a gentleman’s farm on six hundred acres, leased two thousand more, intending to keep me, their only child, and their grandchildren close. And when John returns from Europe, he is offered a job in Ohio, but instead is forced to take a position at Burton-Dixie, along with the other men in the family. He does not thrive there.

2. The Scrapbook of a Magical Childhood

Nancy

First early image: I am standing in the railroad station, knee high to tall green legs milling around the same-green-colored train, searching for Dad’s face. As clumpy airplanes fly noisily over, I wave Bye bye, Daddy.

And another: my second birthday. I get a baby doll, name her Emily. Polly and I each hold an arm and walk with her outside at our Lake Forest temporary rental home.

While Mom is in the hospital for her usual two weeks of rest after a birth, Dad is in charge of waking us. Instead of Mom’s gentle good morning kiss, we are rattled awake with Dad’s one-fingered notes playing Reveille on the small piano in the upstairs hall outside Polly’s and my bedroom.

I am five when Babbie Anne arrives. Looking at her the first time, I somehow understand she has come from somewhere and for some reason I have forgotten. I want her to remind me when she has language, so every day I climb into the crib and whisper into the baby ear, Remember. Remember.

When Johnny is born I asked to have his crib in my room. At age one and two, he often takes one of Wendy’s canes and walks hunched through the hallway, chanting in a creaky voice, I am an old old man. I whisper remember to Johnny and Connie too. It doesn’t work. But years later, Connie gives me a little stone engraved Remember.

At ages six-seven-eight-nine, I am equally at home high in willow nests, tall trees sailing in the wind, steadfast oaks and maples, as I am with feet planted gently in the dark moist soil — all connected, roots and toes intertwining. If I stay here, will I grow roots and leaves? I am enchanted wandering through wooded spring ponds in Tony’s too-big waders.

Resting on a fallen log, rich with decay, I hear trillium pushing not-silently up through the soil seeking early light surrounded by spring peepers and calls of baby crows in their rookery, and the mysterious noisy abundance of creepy crawlies. Curious. Who knows life within the soil, mosses, emerging flowers? I want to be beak-to-beak with Crow and Bittern as they chat amiably on the post-and-rail fence near the ponds and surrounding the horse pasture from which Peanut and Beau love to escape.

I learn to be homesick by age three. Maybe it starts when I am standing by the front window, Tony next to me, watching Mom getting into a strange dark green car. Where is Mom going? She is being kidnapped, he cruelly replies.

Homesickness continues as Dad drops off Tony, Polly and me at Lake Forest Day School on his way to the commuter train to Chicago. I cry every day unless Tony or mostly Polly stay with me until the first bell rings. Then I stand tiptoe by the big windows in the large junior kindergarten room watching Dad’s train pass by, belching pillows of coal smoke into the bright sky. Until I am nine Polly comes with me to my friends’ birthday parties. At Susie Smith’s house, I read her comic books, that at home are forbidden. And then pretend to be sick so I don’t have to sleep over.

Even through homesickness, I like school, my friends, and some of my teachers. In Junior Kindergarten, Mrs. Mulkhey chooses me to be Miss Mouse in the play parents come to. I sit in a little tent, and suitors call on me. Mr. Squirrel comes by: Hello, Miss Mouse. Will you marry me? Noooo, I reply. You are way too big. Mr. Cat comes by. Miss Mouse, he says, licking his lips, Will you marry me? Noooo, Mr Cat. You will eat me.

My senior kindergarten teachers, kind sisters Mrs. Nord and Mrs. Wilgus, will come to my wedding. But I don’t like Miss Henschke, who pulls me by my hair out of the first grade classroom to sit in the hall when uncontrollably I can’t stop making the pig noise Tony just taught me. Out of twenty-one students in our class, from junior kindergarten through 8th grade, there are only five — then six — girls and seventeen mostly strangely odd boys. Mrs. Cahill in second grade calls the boys bad apples. Miss Ostland in third won’t let me write numbers in my newly mastered cursive even though I dreamed how the night before. Most hateful was that at the end of our daily hot lunch she made us pick up and EAT the Brussel sprouts we had not-so-secretly dropped onto the floor under the lunch tables. Mrs. Burgess in fourth is mean. Mrs. Spohn is the most feared and disliked teacher in the lower school. We build up dread of her strictness and forced-time multiplication tables over and over, until we can recite them all in under nine minutes.

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I love the smoothness and rhythm of words when they magically come together into a story, a poem. I love learning their origin. That they lead to poetry. For example in first grade

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