take-root

The maker’s joy

Learn by little the desire for all things

which perhaps is not desire at all

but undying love which perhaps

is not love at all but gratitude

for the being of all things which 

perhaps is not gratitude at all

but the maker’s joy in what is made, 

the joy in which we come to rest. 

Just a thought from Wendell Berry today. 

The way we spend our time, our rhythms.

I’ve made note of it before, and I’ll make note of it again:

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, grass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. How? Where? When? Why?

I thought about Georges Perec’s words a lot when I was in graduate school, which I officially finished a year ago today. How swiftly a year passes, and yet it’s held so much. 

Here’s something. 

Image by Emilie Lindsten. 

Being frank

Once people share time with wonderful meal, they can be frank with each other.

This has got to be one of my favorite lines from an email I’ve received thus far (as related to Kinfolk, at least). I got this from a Japanese fellow who is hoping to get involved in our community in some way. He wrote to tell about an event he helped organize that presented new dishes and plates (beautiful, delicate, handmade Japanese ceramics) to people who had lost all of their dishware in the earthquake.

Powerful and inspiring, while I sit here frittering away the time in front of a computer, listening to the rain outside.  

Belonging

And this is why it is so dearly important to make places where people feel they belong:

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is.

East of Eden, John Steinbeck