Take and Taste a Circle

No straight lines are to be found in the natural world. Everything that really exists follows a series of curved shapes to which the logical products of the human mind can only ever approach tangentially - flow, once again, reduced to a series of points. Leonard Shlain has pointed out that the only apparently straight line in the natural world is that of the horizon; but of course that too turns out to be a section of a curve. Even space, as it turns out, is curved.

“The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World” by Iain McGilchrist

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Dear Alex,

What grants me the privilege to write? Is it wisdom or experience, a rarified imagination, voice imagined?

And since nothing is truly new under the sun and things done will be undone again, why do you bother from weeping skies and cross revive an old song that “seizes beauty and sets her free”?

We are all writing, writing all the time, even in dream. We loop in language that writes with transparency on every furrow and flash on skin. Syntax is cosmetic. Most of your personal narrative is inscribed on the life of another.

When I am writing my presence on the consciousness of another, I am opening up my globe - that circle of village feeding my evasions and ego - to the wind, hummingbird and crack in bell, intruder and friend. There is no linear logic to buffer this high risk of self-exposure in our constant writing and rolling in flesh.

About two summers ago, I was on the spiraling script to doom. I was eating mainly take-outs and pre-packaged lunch and dinner Mondays through Sundays. Local eateries responded to my routine phone orders with the same question that cycled into auto-pilot answer: Do you want the usual, yes?

The usual turned aberrant in the making from decades of homemaking evasion. I had scarcely cooked and never baked. When preparing to dine with guests at home, I would pour pre-ordered meals from Styrofoam containers onto my ceramic serving plates to look more hospitable.

In the vertigo of solstices when my tongue and imagination were numbed with MSG, I tumbled to a halt at Eugene Peterson’s writing about the life-redeeming impact of home-cooking on dinner conversations in “The Pastor,” one of the few books I have read unconstrained from cover to cover. He wrote on me so I could recycle tonight for you the words.

Take and taste a good day, an exuberant meal passing through palms and psalms, fingers flipping forms and tapping keyboards. All of one piece. One pie of a banquet.

Yesterday evening, my senior neighbor with her two small grandkids rang my door bell, sharing from their garden a bowl of hand-grown plums round and abound in the re-writing of my summer. My hands stretched in circles on fresh dough to bake bread for them.

Their generosity grants me the privilege to write.

Yours, Kate