Unearthed thoughts in my silence with soup

Dear Marion

I’m doing the thing we talked about, the eating in silence and solitude thing..

I’m sitting on the wooden floor

Just inside my own front door.

The door is flung wide, wide open.

The floor is a little uncomfortable, but I can smell the jasmine, I can watch the bees – 

see them gather their evening meal from lavender buds and pollen-heavy trees.

I don’t have my bowl on a table – 

It’s on the floor, where I sit by this door.

With each mouthful I bow deep, leaning forward

Scooping up some broth, my gaze, distant, outward.

The air is ripe with impending rain,

This sitting is arduous, but it’s a comfortable pain.

When I lift up the noodles, with my chopsticks, 

I remain bent over longer.

Slurping in broth, I quell the hunger.

I realise, I am bowing to my life,

paying homage to this home,

this portal of brick and stone.

I am in humble prayer to that which sustains me

This food, this floor, this roof, this door.

On the fear we feel in our hours of silence and solitude:

Why don’t we eat like this all the time? I know it’s less comfortable. But still… what else…?

There are a lot more questions than answers for one. I can’t control the world outside, the temperature, the community raucous… it all just is.

But so are the tiny twittering birds, calling in the dusk. Eating takes longer this way. It seems to take an age – it’s true though, life moves slower when all of us is involved in doing just that one thing.

Eating soup. Folding laundry. In the moment, we live eons.

All the things I am a little bit afraid of come to visit.

Thoughts of not finishing work on time, even though I rarely miss a deadline…my art…. will I ever find it…..babies… anxiety about less actively preventing the will of life…our workshop and travel dreams…is finding balance a rouse..?

But then I feel quite ‘eh’ about it – like it will just all work itself out. It will because it has to. This, it dawns on me, is one of my core life philosophies. I believe it with every particle in me. Doubt of ‘how’ often covers me like goosebumps. Doubt ‘that‘ doesn’t even exist in the whispers between the hollows of my bones.

And then all of a not-so-sudden, the little worries drift away, like ghosts departing after their haunting, and I feel peaceful again. Just me in this garden, with my soup. Resting in trust.

Is it crazy to think that Nature wants me to succeed, wants us to succeed?Those of us that see her, really live with her, call out to her and know all her names? I’m honoured to acknowledge that way of life in myself and stand proudly among many I know who live by this same principle.

Surely Nature, in her infinite expansive wisdom knows that only a populace of people who place her wellbeing above all else can sustain her? It is ultimately in her best interest that we be fruitful. 

I scoop the last of my soup up out of the bowl. It’s a miso rich mouthful.

I gather up the bowl with its little chip and blue porcelain spoon. Crosslegged I rise to standing. This time the wooden floor creaks more than I do, as if her planks of pine are saying to me, “time is finite for both of us.”

I realise on this wooden floor, I am literally standing on the tops of tall trees, rising from the shoulders of giants.

And so –  who will one day rise from my legacy? Who will find form in the life I have built, the oxygen I have exchanged for energy?

May they find a sort of sanctuary in my sacrifice, in the words penned from my woods, read off the torn pages of my spine. 

Feature Image Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash