It’s in the little things...
If you’re anything like me, you’ve found deeper meaning and maybe even found yourself in the routines, the rituals, and general domesticity over the past year - your family dinners, or walking your pet every day to get you both some fresh air, or Friday movie nights… Maybe you found yourself when you started baking bread for your partner or sister, or when you started gardening and found love in fresh fruit and flowers. I’d be lying if I said the past year has not been at least a little bit nourishing. Below are some excerpts and art that remind me to cherish the simple moments, however mundane they may seem. Enjoy! ♥️
Joy Harjo, Perhaps the World Ends Here
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.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
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.
“We shift pain into power the moment we remember our joy. Cooking an elegant dinner plated with vibrancy and beauty. Taking time to actually chew our food and being thoughtful to our digestive systems. Turning off social media and being graceful to our nervous systems. Deep breathing and being nurturing to our respiratory systems. Making love. Stretching in otherworldly shapes. Speaking kindly about our bodies. Resting. Playing. Jogging. Giggling. Hiking. Dancing. Bathing. Relaxing. The moment we do something loving, we execute highest experience of transmutation and immediately begin to create a new reality.”
— India Ame'ye
Franny Choi, What a Cyborg Wants
What a cyborg wants is to work perfectly. To simulate pleasure perfectly. To not cry at dinner,
forget to call back. To keep her skin clear. To keep the sheets clean. To reply-all when asked.
To get up at a reasonable hour. To stop smoking, or at least get it down to something reasonable.
To not worry her friends by worrying about her weight. To not be so afraid.
To not pick at her face. To have a face you can really trust.
To have the face of a pretty American, who makes you smile back when she says,
Right this way, sir. Or who makes you drool when she says, yes sir
I like it sir. What a cyborg wants is to be clean.
Reasonable. To wash her hair a few times a week. To not kill the plants. To stop trying to leave her friends
before they can leave her. To smile and mean it. To believe in heaven. To believe the humans
when they say they love her. To not want sometimes to watch them cry. To not want so badly
to be touched, badly enough to slice herself open, to trap a man in a corner,
to peel the skin from her face and not let him go until he looks.
Danusha Lemeris, Small Kindnesses
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.”
— Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise
“I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots.
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plated, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.”
— Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels: Essays
“On my windowsill when I got home, there was a tumbler with pink jelly in it, and embedded in the jelly, sliced strawberries and bananas... [my neighbour] cooks at odd hours. She must have made the strawberry jelly this morning.
When I buy baklava, which is not often because I eat too many, I leave a few for her on her windowsill, with a headscarf over them so the wasps don’t come. For these little gifts we don’t thank each other with words. They are commas of care.”
— John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters
Tell me what you learnt about yourself this year and what you’ve been looking forward to in your days ♥️