What is the Safety Pin Cafe?

"In the right hand, in the right place, a safety pin is common magic."

The Safety Pin Cafe began as a story. The original medicine story. Since it was first written, I have shared it in storytelling venues under a Fall sky in a tent on land that was my first space of safety on beautiful Whidbey Island. More has been added to the story. The characters have grown, aged, given birth, and magic has blown other characters into the borders of myth where time is timeless. In the writing and telling of this story, I find remedy for an illness not easily treated with prescription medication or mainstream protocol. My life is a testament to the medicine of stories; sometimes the symptoms and circumstances in the civilized world cry for the wild remedy of myth that live across the borders.

“We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.” - Neil Gaiman (from The Graveyard Book)

The Safety Pin Cafe is both a virtual container of stories and an invitation to others to recognize the vital lessons story has for all of us. Story cannot be contained, but it can be shared.

February, 2015 Chinese New Year Celebration at The Safety Pin Cafe

What's next?

After a wonderful six years of growing community on Whidbey Island, we are spurred, by many reasons (difficulty with mold, a forest that has given us messages with each successive winter wind storm, reality checks on our physical limitations), to simplify once again, and hitch up our vardo.

UPDATE, November 13, 2016

We thought the spur or the boot was meant to hitch us up for a long-distance move, but that just goes to show you sometimes it's just ... here to there. Instead of a far and distant journey we find our place slightly off center (as has been so often the case) and are parked on the edge of the gravel parking lot where we have been for these going-on-seven years.

We have created small and meaningful talismans to dangle over our golden wagon door, made adjustments to our relationships to this land and the people who continue to offer us shared space. And as my dear friend Liz wrote this morning, "Your Mom has been very busy." She was referring to all the safety pin news she is reading about, as the simple and powerful common pin gathers the magic of solidarity here and there and perhaps, everywhere. The Safety Pin Cafe, this blog, began as a story at this time four years ago. I was not feeling well the mold and damp of a Salish Winter does that to me. But, it was a day a duck could love and that was image for story telling that would not separate feathered kin from those with tea cozy hats and secret names. A safety pin would hold unlikely moments and slippery message together. Here, To read what happened.

The virtual cafe and gathering place is slowly and steadily becoming something more. Stay tuned. Wear your safety pin, and keep your body tuned for a new version of reality.