Sunday Brunch

An onion from the garden, sauteed slowly with home-grown thyme, oregano, and garlic. A dash of salt and pepper. Parboiled potatoes of all colors, dug by Trinidad last night at dusk, sliced by Sam, now sizzling in pan. The eggs our chickens have recently begun to lay in and out of the hen house, hidden delinquent in potato beds, collected by two and four year old hands with eyes shining. A renegade kale that popped up in the onion bed is diced and added with feta from a local goat farmer, fresh basil and chopped tomatoes from the garden.

A side of bacon -- not local, but kindly grown. Unfortunately, I haven't found a local bacon I like!

For dessert, a crisp with local peaches, plums from across the street, and blackberries the boys picked with a friend. We'll probably add the indulgence of ice cream to that....

In Order To Find Abundance?

I am making a mess. Yellow plum juice squirts through my fingers and the pits shoot upward and land God-knows-where. Plum slime slides down my kitchen window and across the table. Thick stringy yellow splotches adhere to the "clean" dish rack, the bench and the floor. It looks as though an Irish Wolfhound has projectile vomited in my kitchen.

I am initially appalled at the mess. I had thought this would be "the fun part" of canning today. Now, I look around me and my nose wrinkles. I feel every muscle in my chest contract as I resist the chaostrophy I have created. I have to wonder.

In the backyard, Trinidad is digging a hole. He plans to make it big enough to trap some innocent adult who wanders past. He is covered with dirt to the extent that he appears to be some nationality that he is not. I ask him to sit somewhere other than the couch.

Why is Trinidad's mess liberating, a clearinghouse of structure and order in the name of raw creation? Why does he embrace this expansiveness effortlessly while I cringe to fling pulp in what was a tidy kitchen? Where has my youth gone?

An intimate once told me that he seriously questioned whether abundance was the order of the universe. Our relationship ended much sooner than I'd anticipated, and now I wonder if he's right. There is a certain chaos in abundance -- a running over, perhaps even a lack of awareness. In this moment, I can imagine abundance, remember the feeling of fingerpaint running down the insides of my sleeves in kindergarten, recall sensations in my body back in the day when it did not bear the responsibility of Clean Up Time.

Yep. The feeling's still alive. But now, I am in ebb, quietly stockpiling my energy to prepare dinner and organize the lives and household of a family of 4 or 5 (depending on who's counting themselves aboard at any given point). I turn the tide inward in the face of this mess, drawing it toward me in an effort to localize the chaos so that I do not have to stretch much to stow all in its place before bedtime.

I wonder if the Willow tree does this, too. I wonder if right now, as that majestic tree appears to grow effortlessly in abundance, it actually holds its water carefully, turning silvery leaves away from the sun. I wonder if the wide expanse of its limbs bear introspective cells that order its efforts by design, an invisible and soundless ebb that necessarily keeps the tree rooted in its skyward thrust.

Perhaps abundance is only a portion of the equation. Saying "half" seems too divisive, as if the word could be separated from its opposing force. Perhaps that force is not scarcity, but conservation -- care and awareness of the current life cycle we are offered, the totality of abundance and conservation equaling an ultimate sustainability.

In that view, scarcity is not related to abundance at all. It is a falling out of trust in presence and sustainability over the long-haul, the acrobatics of an ego self-entranced.

Hmmm. Just see what busy minds can create out of a mess....

We Can Work It Out

"Mom, I don't tell a lot of things to M that are really important to me, even though he's my best friend." Trinidad's face was solemn.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Well, when I tell him something really exciting that I did, he usually says he doesn't believe me or that he's done something even better. I just feel really sad about that."

"Is it that you would like to celebrate with him your new accomplishments and share what you're really excited about without him thinking that he or his accomplishment is in any way 'less'?"

"Yeah. It's just really competitive, and so I don't want to talk to him much even though I really like to do things with him."

"I think it goes both ways in being competitive, don't you?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Have you ever thought about telling him what you'd like?"

"Tell him what?"

"That you'd really like to be able to celebrate something special that you did and ask that he only focus on that accomplishment and not share anything he did for a minute?"

"Yeah!"

"Would you really like for both of you to have that kind of time and space for celebration?"

"Yeah! I think I will talk to him," Trinidad said and looked much relieved.

Yesterday, Trin did tell M just that. He told him everything we talked about and Trinidad said they also made an agreement to believe what the other said (or at least not to say they didn't) in addition to making space for celebration.

"And guess what, Mom!" Trinidad shared with a beam. "M said he was just opening his mouth to say the same thing to me when I said it to him!"

"All that about celebration?" I asked.

"Yep. It's important to him, too. And then we spent hours telling each other all the things we'd been saving up and not saying for so long."

Conversations

With Trinidad....

"Oh! That blue jay just caught a snake." Trinidad's face falls, then relaxes into calm. "Well, I guess that soon all the cats in the neighborhood will be over to catch the blue jays, and before you know it we'll have mountain lions coming through the backyard to eat the cats. They do come into town, you know." He's right about this.

"Mmmm," I say. "Two days ago, I saw an enormous hawk take a jay baby out of a nest in the tree across the street in front of M's house. That jay mama threw up such a squawking! The hawk flew it's dinner over to that big tree next door and ate it."

"What? There's a jay nest in M's tree? He thought it was too big to be a bird nest. He thought it was an abandoned squirrel nest!" Trinidad's whole body grows and tenses with the news. "I am so excited! I am going over there right now so we can climb up and take a look at it."

On tree climbing:

Trinidad told me this while we drove through country south of Roseburg. His words floated from the backseat like a meditation rising from the hot Earth, herself. I tried to jot down phrases soonafter, but I doubt I did justice to the poetry of his words in the moment, or the relief and satisfaction that I felt in his safety and meaningful pursuits.

"I know my foot on any tree," he said. "Each tree tells me which branch to grab and which limb to step on. Every tree is challenging in it's own way and every tree is easy in it's own way. The thing that is easiest about one tree is the hardest thing in another. They are individuals and I learn them while I climb. As I move up in the trees, I listen for where to hold and I know that the tree is guiding me in the safest way. Each tree moves differently and I must move with it, as only it moves. It teaches me something new every time. Each time I climb a tree it is like the first time, but we also remember that we know each other."


With Sam....

"I knew that was why the sky is blue," said Sam quietly after we read an in-depth explanation of atmosphere and light on the internet.

"You did? Why didn't you tell me so when I asked?"

"Because I wanted to make you think I was more like a kid. So I didn't get over myself."



~Sometimes, I think that "wide-eyed" is just my natural state.~

Belonging

"I want to go home," says Sam.

"Why?" I ask.

"I don't know. I just do," he says.

We return home, and both boys run to the backyard. The door hangs wide open behind them. With fixed gazes and hips set, they aim and throw rocks at a chosen target east of the pond. Over and over stones are hurled, then the boys run to retrieve them. I no longer watch the game protectively to interrupt if they threaten to pelt each other by mistake.

I stand quietly at the kitchen window. A bowl of blueberries sits on the table beside me with a bag of canning jars that someone mysteriously left on my step. The wind lifts tall willow branches into a dance of light, silvery leaves bending and stretching in the afternoon sun. For a moment, I choose not to think of what's for dinner, or anything else. For a moment, I only feel.

A surge of bittersweet belonging fills me. The boys are rooted here, a sense of place. This grounding feels healthy, coherent, integral. Yet, this land, too, shall pass. They will move on, with or without me. They will come home to me wherever I am, or I will bring this sense of belonging back to them when I come to visit.

Rooted. Countless generations behind me and one at the pond just ahead. The ache fills me. I have been alive lately with what I perceive as the rich reality of my relations. Colorful language, fiery forthrightness, and purposeful independence are the trademarks of my known tribe of origin. I masquerade as a post-modern hippie, but the Kool-Aid and jello that stained my cheeks as a child sitting riverside reveals my backwoods pedigree. I did not eat nutritional yeast until I turned thirty.

Part of me is becoming proud of what I once perceived as a "shadow" in my raising. My compassion stretches into celebration, a fierce devotion to the soul that pulsed in my mother and father's lineage despite poverty, alcoholism, and abuse.

My grandmother tells a story of visiting her grandmother in a hospital after her grandmother had fallen from a ladder picking cherries. The eighty-something woman had broken her neck. "What are you doing here?" she demanded of my grandmother from the hospital bed. "Those cherries are ripe! You get out there and get picking!"

I was raised on wild venison and duck meat, cheap grocery hamburger, corn from the garden, and canned green beans. Food translates to the soul of me. It is who I am. In everything my parents killed, harvested or touched I tasted the generations of hands that bore me into this world. The cans from the food bank, sheepishly accepted, tasted like wounded pride, and that, too, shaped me.

"Where did you get your faith in God?" Seda asked me through the kitchen window last night.

"Adversity, I guess. Funny thing to ask through the window," I said.

There are parts of my roots that the children barely recognize. Parts of Seda's roots as well. Where once I wished to hide what unfurls deep beneath me, I now seek to share openly but gently. Roots are, in their right, sacred. They can be damaged.

The understory is alive in me. Nothing to outrun, outrace, or cast off. It is my path into light.

There, my boys throw rocks under the sun. In our protected wilds, a small city yard consumes them. They belong.

And so do I with them.