The kitchen table

The moon this morning.

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us…but we can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold.

~ Audre Lorde

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.

~ Galway Kinnell

A crow on her morning mission.

I read a poem by Joy Harjo this morning.  It’s called Perhaps the World Ends Here.  It begins with:

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

And ends with:

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

You should be able to find it easily and fast enough if you do a search.  Someone referenced it, I think, in a newsletter I receive.  I don’t remember who or which email it was contained in.

Just after noon, at my kitchen table (which is also where I practice my arts and witchy spells and writing).

The poem transported me back to my childhood.  Some of my earliest memories arise from at or under my mother’s kitchen table.  Not the table that we ate at when we sat down as a family, but the smallish table that was in the tiny kitchen, backed into a corner and blocking the door to the basement (a scary place down below where toads could be stepped on and squished, and where a room nobody knew existed — a room for storing coal for the furnace — was found when someone knocked a hole in one of the walls).

What I was working on today.

The kitchen table was where we would eat breakfast, usually not all together in the same way we did for dinner.  Dinner was always served in the separate dining room where we could all fit at the table.  Counting Mom and Dad, there were usually six and then seven (when my sister came along, rather late) at the dining room table at dinner time.  Often more, with friends or other family joining us.  It could get pretty cozy (or crowded, if you prefer) at either table, in either room.

This morning’s beautiful sunrise that looked like a large and colorful bird with her wings stretched out across the sky.

The kitchen table was also the place where the adult women would cram in around it to drink coffee or beer (depending on the time of day), to chat and gossip, and to debate and discuss the important things in their lives.  Mom always had a tablecloth on the table, one that hung down far enough that I could hide under the table.  If I was very quiet and very still, I could sit there for hours listening in on all the women had to say, listening in on their laughter and tears, their joys and sorrows.  I would eventually be discovered and shooed away with a “Go find something else to do!”

Moving closer.

I wonder, now, if they knew most of the time that I was there and thought little of it.  I don’t remember most of the details of the things I overheard, but there must not have been anything particularly shocking about their conversations.  Otherwise, I’d probably remember specifics.  It seemed to me at the time, and seems to me still, that as long as I was neither seen nor heard, there was an unspoken permission to be there, allowing me to learn something of what it was like to be a woman in their world.

Hydrangea in winter.

I started writing Morning Pages again.  It’s only been a few days.  I’d forgotten how the practice of letting unstructured, uncensored words pour out onto the page stirs me to want to write.  Forgotten stories rise up from wherever they are stored within my body-mind.  Poetry, too, although that’s something I rarely share because I don’t really know how to write poetry.  There are different types of poems, rules and structures that I know little to nothing about.  Perhaps someday I will take the time to learn.  For now, I’ll meander and ramble like the creek that runs through the marsh.  Depending on the moon and tide it could be just a trickle that makes its way through the muck and mud, or a fast-moving stream overflowing its banks into the marsh grasses, or calm and reflective like the moments at slack tide when the water is neither coming nor going, rising nor falling.

The garden fence.

I often think that my writing and visual arts practices are a way of sharing my voice.  If you’ve ever had a speaking/oral conversation with me, you know that my words don’t come easily.  I talk as if there is a disconnect between my brain and my mouth.  Perhaps the disconnect is really between my heart and mouth.  One of the guest speakers in yoga class mentioned that the journey from heart to throat to mouth is a long one.  In my case, it not only feels long but also arduous.  A rocky path strewn with obstacles and detours/digressions and getting lost.  There are times — rare but they happen — when that journey from my heart to my throat to my mouth is smooth and easy, devoid of obstacles and stumbling blocks, but’s easier for me to say what’s in my heart in writing or through photography (and maybe, someday, through drawing and painting).

Pondering voice this morning, I also wondered what silenced my voice.  But that’s a different story, a different tack or course on the waters of life.

Another Prussian Blue project.  (Unfinished.  I’m still trying to figure out what else I might want to do with this.)

That’s probably enough from me and my voice for this sunny Wednesday that is usually wordless.  Thank you so much for stopping by and visiting with me.  Let’s meet out at the Point for sunset.  It’s a beautiful day.  Relatively warm for January.  Tonight’s sunset is scheduled for 5:11 PM.  I’ll be there early to take a little walk before we lose the light and whatever warmth might be left of the day.

Please be safe, be well, and practice gentleness.  It’s a good practice.  Even just a soft, gentle gaze can change the way life looks.

Zinnia in winter.

A few of the 10,000 reasons to be happy:  1,951)  Sunrise clouds that stretch their wings across the sky.  1,952)  Words.  I’ve always liked words.  1,953)  A Wednesday walk.  1,954)  Morning Pages and the practice of writing.  1,955)  Poetry that inspires and provokes or paints pictures of life and joy and grief and everything in between.

Out in the cold.