Awash with kittens and books.
(From Saturday)
The rain is pouring steadily as I sit in my studio, and I can hear cats thumping around in the roof. Somehow all the cats on our street have pegged the empty space above the ceiling in our studio/kitchen as the ideal place to give birth to their kittens. They then raise them until they are big enough to get into trouble and move them to a safer, less gravity-vulnerable location. So there are a lot of little mews and squeaks, some claw scraping, some thuds.
Today is Saturday, our busiest day at Shekina Garden. We eat community lunch together and later in the afternoon, have a devotion circle. Lately a lot of friends and travelers from around town have been coming to eat lunch with us and many people have been sticking around for the circle in the afternoon. Today I’m sharing. So the wet, gray morning is lit from within as I think about what I want to share.
Yesterday I went to my friend Naomi’s house and we cooked together with our friend Fon. The rice paddies around Nay’s house are brilliant green again, the stripes of the earth around the paddies a deep brown. Everything is beautiful, everything is alive. Ants are alive too, and trying to take over our houses and bite our children. Fire ants are the downside to the rain filling the earth and turning it green. There is drought in much of Thailand, as well as in our beloved California and even my home in B.C., Canada. We don’t take any of this rain for granted, we’ll take the ants and the mosquitos. I am thankful for the rain.
So we cooked. Fon ordered us around the kitchen and we sliced banana flowers to make salad, and chopped vegetables to make stir fry and curry. Then we sat and ate together and I was glad I had skipped work to meet with friends and cook.
***
(This morning.)
Saturday was beautiful. It’s our most beautiful, busiest day. Many people came for lunch and the devotion circle afterward was inspiring as people discussed the words manifest, incarnation, and atonement, and we talked about God’s love as evidenced in the incarnation.
The cat has moved her kittens to the grandmother’s house next door. The grandmother next door is already overrun with stray kittens that she has taken in. They like to break into our house in the evenings and steal Wookie’s food, so we have to padlock the door downstairs (there is no other way to keep it closed) and the other night I accidentally padlocked the door while Chinua was in the bathroom and he had to climb out through the window. Our upstairs is not connected to our downstairs, you know, so all the doors are separate and when we go out we have to lock three doors.
Today I have an early, two-year-old waker who is eating cereal opposite me at the table. A lot of it is on the table and some of it is making its way into his mouth and belly. He woke up saying, “I’m hungry Mama, can I have some pizza?” Which was odd. He settled for cereal.
In work, I am finishing up with my big commissioned hummingbird painting, getting ready to send it off to my friend Linda in California. And now I turn to writing for a time. I’ve decided to self-publish my novel, A Traveler’s Guide to Belonging, and that should be coming out sometime in early fall. Finally! I’ve been waiting on agents for months and finally decided, no more. Let’s do this, I believe in creating things, making them as lovely as possible, and then making them available to the world. I’m not waiting on someone to do it for me any longer.
The tree outside is again covered in white flowers and after I'm done with this post, I'll work on revising the first book in my fantasy series. I’m over the moon to be working on fiction again, and especially fantasy--getting up in the early hours of the morning to enter the world I’m making and write about all that people are doing in that world. I think you’re going to like it. It’s a lot of fun to work on this book. I get annoyed when I have to leave it.
Our life is made of books, actually. The kids read for school, they read for play, they write books, I write books. I read books to them in the evening, read alouds from school. Sometimes I don’t get finished until 9:30, and then I read myself to sleep. People ask me how I find time to read. Reading is my obsession, and I have transferred my obsession to my kids. Kai and Kenya count down days before their favorite authors release new books. We are swimming in books.