I walked into the magical coffee shop, thinking of so many things the rain helped slowing down moments, blurring lines from now and then. I love beautiful spaces. This little cove holds you, nestled above a trident of a turn about the river’s bend.
“I love this space.”
“Yeah,” the barista returns.
I realize I have said what everyone says when they come here, and say so.
“I’m sure everyone says that..”
“Oh,” she pulls out, “yeah, sorry. I’m having a day.”
“Oh, I get it, me too —”
“Dude,” she breaks the lines and her voice reaches out, “my Dad died.”
It’s father’s day. I am standing in front of a grieving heart on the cross-roads of a confused and grieving world. I am so aware of this in ways that I can only voice note to friends, rather than meme to the world.
“What’s your name?”
“Beth.”
“I’m Kate.”
“Hi.”
“Here is me not saying something trite to you. Thanks for your honesty, you didn’t need to share it,” I hold her gaze. She starts to tear and I don’t turn away. I don’t say a thing, and that for me is new.
“It’s a hard day to make hot drinks,” I offer, as a family of four walk in with two littles, giggling the word “daddy” that I can see run through to her bones. I quietly take my drink and sit down.
Coffee is a contemplation for me.
A few weeks ago, an understandably frustrated woman voiced to me her contempt about “white men” and I realized although there is a copious amount of nare-do-wells that have hidden their morality, but many, many, many of the same descriptions have made many decisions of sacrifices and family-first for my betterment, giving me my ability to sit here and type on a rainy Sunday. Good men. Good fathers, grandfathers and uncles. I will not pretend otherwise.
Family-first was something that felt really constraining in my 20’s and that was well-placed for me. It allowed me to severe some thought-ties that would have kept me from a decade of life-changing experiences. However, it also revealed to me how much I didn't understand about the subtle salvation of family, when it came time for me to partner.
I remember having an ex-spout out at me, “You expect me to turn into your father.” I mean, I don’t think I expected him to turn into my father, but I did expect him to rise into the model of father. We need the very real currency of maternal and paternal guidance to grow. Not every child receives it, but I don’t think that is grounds to discard or diminish its meaning.
There is too too much of “It’s not my problem” and “You are toxic” being tossed about today as answers. They are statements or observations, not solutions. It’s hard to grow in such acidic soil. Not enough nourishment. I have to safeguard my own mind from it. Not from being a part of active change, but of toeing the line of neutrality to ensure creation over unintentional destruction. Adding amendments to the soil versus uprooting everything, disconnected from the soil and its holding.
The faster the world spins, the more walks I have been taking in nature, listening for the much needed clarity and looking for the anchoring of place. The more I want to put down the idea of knowing, and the more I feel the call to create: space I have thought much, over the past years on the soil, the seeds and the birds. The soil holds the roots of the tree, and the tree homes the birds.
Nature has a balance that has been answering a lot of my questions with silence and curiosity. It has been allowing me space to realize my smallness and my greatness at the same time. I don’t want a surrogate. I don’t want to watch my birds on camera (although that is also fun), I want to watch my birds on a cold morning, or a warm morning and notice the difference.
I walked my dog this rainy morning before coffee and I stopped at the call of a catbird. It wasn’t the original bird obviously, but I thanked her. Because I remembered it was a catbird that changed my mind.
Life had gone how I had not planned, and I landed myself at a square one instead of the cruising and coasting that I had envisioned for myself. I was embittered. I didn’t know it, I thought I was right. I thought I was cheated and wronged.
I was sitting in a beautiful home that was opened as a sanctuary and I was mad. Thank God, I heard myself and it happened like this:
A catbird landed on a fence and looked at me, closely.
I saw her looking at me and a softer voice of mine said: If I was visiting a tropical place, and this bird was looking at me I would call it magic.
I realized at that very moment I was missing the point and all that was being offered to me. I realized I could hold disappointment and gratitude at the same time. I knew how, and I hadn’t been doing it. My heart broke— in a way that makes space for new flight-patterns of thought.
I made a very simple promise to myself: To notice catbird every day. She responded and started calling out to us when we would arrive home, or fly close to the window whenI came down for my coffee. To notice the common beauty, in the land that I was born on, instead of yearning for what was not, and to hold appreciation while keeping my eyes open to improvement, turned my heart back on and open.
Birds travel between earth and sky. They root all the way into the earth and soar through the ethers of spirit — they traverse the same balancing bridge that one walks as a woman.
I am re-reading Terry Tempest Williams book When Women Were Birds. It’s moving forward and backward for me in recognition and offering a new space where to share thoughts — not in the knowing but in the process of uncovering. The supreme exquisiteness of discovering beauty and meaning in our everyday lives.
When I think of what I want to be teaching or offering, it’s the space and process of the beauty of the human experience. My son is constantly asking me right now: “Why is there good and bad? Why is there both?”
It’s funny to have to answer those questions. Questions we are all asking. I used to think mothering was staving off the bad, and it is a bit of that. But it is really teaching them to walk though those brambles to the open sky of soaring. They will need to land again. It’s not a soaring out to never return. It’s a soaring up and a dropping down.
We know this as women, we envision grand dreams for our children, our parents, and our selves, and then our mind automatically click into the food schedule, the extra blankets, the activities of the journey. These innate inquiries are the art of our lives. Ins and outs, Ups and downs, Here and Now.
An art that can only be ethically inspired and lived not outsourced to AI. Just like every child needs parents to nurture them AND to rebel against. We carry that process of external and internal with us through our whole lives. The dropping and the soaring. The knowning and the Unknown. The child and the childless. The fathered and the fatherless.
It all doesn’t make sense until it is a journey that becomes our own. Womanhood is the same. It seems like something that can be dressed up or down, until you understand that you have one life, one body and it carries a universe of wisdom to be earned, learned and lived.
John O’Donohue wrote Blessing for his mother —
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
If you are a writer, creative, contemplator that remembers or has an inkling that we ARE here to create, not to consume, not to be cornered but to beloved, then you are invited into our online, creative salon Women & Birds.
Women & Birds: We are doing 3 gatherings, of women, words and wisdom. It’s a salon so that the invitation is circular, contemplative and creative. There are inspirations, writings (think journaling) and a harnessing of the season of good, while the world tips. We remember our roots + our wings. All of our circles are known to provide personal clarity and perspective shifting that results in creative, clear actions. Instead of scrolling, or spinning, we stretch our mind with readings and content that bring us back into our connection, our ancestry and our knowing. The curriculum will pivot to hold the flock that forms.
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“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy.
The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.” — Terrey Tempest Williams.
Come fly with us.
Changing my story about catbird, and appreciating her as much as I enjoyed a Myna bird on Hawaii, taught me to seek the magic everywhere. Do I think all land offers the same thing: No. Why would you ask an oak tree to do the same as a ti leaf? Neither can fathers be mothers or men be women, why ask them to be? Let our nature be what it is intended to its highest emanation and may we seek nourishment from good places, to supplement what our soil } soul is missing. May we receive what the land we stand on has to offer, and may we offer her reciprocity.
None of us come without the need for support. May we tend a kind eye to the humans that hold our hand, the fathers that do their very best, and the little boys that seek to bare the burdens that are not theirs to carry; may we love them even if they are not our own so they may grow strong and feel loved in a cold world, may the “slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mend your life.”
Happy Father’s Day — may we uplift all men to be the best of themselves so it may serve us all, one human family.
Swoop & Soar,
Kate
https://zebratigerfish.blogspot.com/2011/05/blog-post_10.html
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