I believe people can have their “time” in life; I don’t know if it is common or rare. It happened to me – for a while, every book I wrote was a best seller, praised, and successful.

Almost everything I did worked out, it was kind of magical, and the world just came together for me, at least in my work.

That period was a gift. It transformed me, opened me up. Once you have your time, it never really leaves you.

I am not famous or successful in that way now, but I feel my time has come around again, and I feel successful and necessary. I feel successful in a different way, the feeling is more inside of me than outside this time.

Right now is Maria’s time, and it is a joy to see it. She has no interest in being wealthy or famous, and as of now, she is neither. But I have had the same feeling watching her as I had myself.

She seems at the height of her energy, confidence and creative powers. I believe there are wonderful things ahead of her, she is rising up.

People love her work – her fiber paintings, her gorgeous quilts, her new fiber paintings, her potholders, her posters, stickers, new placemats. She is almost shockingly efficient and well organized, doing 1,000 things by herself when two or three people would typically do the work.

And she shovels manure twice a day cheerfully and with style (she often does it in her wedding dress and Thrift Shop European boots.)

She has a gift for creating, organizing, and lately, even marketing.

She creates, sews, labors, tracks social media, ships, keeps track of scores of transactions and taxes, gets hold of stickers, plant envelopes, knows the postage and shipping rates inside out, and manages lots of e-mails, wool, shearing, yarn, barnyard animals, she posts on Instagram, her blog, her Etsy Shop.

She works hard, day, and night.

She worries about money, taking any time off, her customers.

She frets that she is charging too much (which she never does) and she stays in touch with hundreds of people who love her work. More than once, I’ve seen her give her work away to people who love it but can’t afford it.

She takes videos, photographs, designs Vulva stickers, and writes daily on her much-loved blog. Whatever she does, she does well.

This week, it feels like she is soaring.

She sold all of her yarn, all of her potholders,  she sold the first batch of her stickers, she sold a bunch of placemats before she even finished them, she just got a bunch of posters, new stickers, postcards.  She sold a fiber painting. She plunged into placemats and a new quilt.

The new normal.

I feel like it’s her time, her moment. Superstitious people say it’s bad luck to say that about someone, they can too easily be jinxed.

But my life has taught me just the opposite. What Maria needed was not to be ignored, but encouraged, not just by me, but by the growing number of people who love her work. When you see someone come into their time, cheer and shout, and make a lot of noise.

It is never bad luck in my mind to recognize courage and accomplishment and creativity.

I don’t know what her future is, it’s impossible for me to know. But the present for her is precious and affirming.

I have no idea how far Maria can or will wish to take this; I’m not a seer or a psychic. I’ve had the pleasure of watching her grow and evolve these past ten years, and it is the pleasure of a lifetime.

And I can assure you that she will go as far as she wants to go. There is no cap on the gifts that I can see.

There are some important messages to be gleaned from her life: Endure, persevere, never give up on your dreams, work hard, and then, harder. Define yourself, don’t let anyone else do it.

We are both among the broken children, who somehow failed to get or be given the message that we are good and blessed with gifts.

So we figured it out by ourselves, and with one another.

I am older than she is, and at a different stage of life. Somehow the two of us blend and balance each other. There are so many places where we connect, some where we can’t.

If you haven’t been following her story, I recommend it. It’s a beautiful story in so many ways.  If lifts the heart and speaks of hope and humanity.

You don’t need to be rich or famous to be successful, and live a life of meaning.

Maria has taken fear and pain and, almost magically, transformed it into beauty, meaning, and art. No one has ever been able to knock her down or keep her there for long.

Check it out.  This is Maria’s time. Her blog is Fullmoonfiberart.com Her Etsy Shop is right here.