Transitory ceremonies 

That we are all together through food is a simple idea. Food connects us as much as it defines us. Food moves across you and me. I drink your sweet milk and you drink from mine. I taste your memory but I don’t know what I see. I want to write you a love poem so we could share the table that carries our stories of feeling and touch. I want to lay the table with love that came to all of us before on the tables we knew every pore of. Can we feed on each other’s love? Can each other’s love become our own and grow into tomorrow? I want us to understand each other through our love, the love we carry in us laid out on the table in front of us to feed from. I don’t know if I can serve love today in our words. I want to serve love for tomorrow through the food we share. This may need to become more than a written table, maybe we can think of it as something we practice for a time in which we have learned to understand each other through the love we offer and take. I can read love in the food that you recall and share and I understand that your love is my love too.






A table was standing in the wide open of the house, and on it two empty plates. We go back together to the table that served meat, (dumplings) and rice, mangoes, tea. A steaming mountain of rice and meat so juicy it was dripping everywhere, tea floating in a big pot with a ladle to take as you please…

This table had been set for us far away, the table has forever been set and so it is also set when all of us come together. The table is familiar openly in disguise, disguised in the open, different houses had us learn differently, here we see everything. On this table we see reflections of everyone and everyone sees their own. We always came together and as mothers and fathers have come and gone before and fed their children off their parents’ hands, essence passed down changed and reshaped to fall today onto the plates in front of us. It is unclear whether we will be able to share without one plate but many bodies are carrying their stories, deep, in their hands, and they fall today onto the plates in front of us; the table is full.

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You pour some of the tea into the cup with flowers, (they are) beautiful and red so light in your hand holding a story. We wake up far away. We can still smell the clouds of boiling water making tea coiling through the house in our nose and we smell tea. Green ashy walls that were towering out from heavy earth and sunshine taking you into its arms. You were at home. Red petal roses in cool air on your grandmother’s hands on the table in front of us. Green ashy walls held your family. Red petal cups hold in them the sweet milk we share between ashy green walls, (red petal cups hold in them the sweet milk we share also between blue baby walls).

We know the tea of which we have been told that dark liquid is strong, the longer we sit the stronger it gets and small particles grow together floating on top the longer we sit we are together. Your aunts are drinking tea together, drinking together what has been infused with puffed rice when you join after your sleep to be together. It’s fun to drink. The clattering of their cups you heard through glass doors calling you to come and sip tea with them together, to sip tea feeling their care, they cared for you and you come to sip their love. You bring them milk soft and fresh and you felt comfort from your mothers hands through the milk into the cup you sipped their love from. We are sipping together, we all take milk and if we don’t we still sip tea.

You give me your milk. You move me many miles away back to myself and to my own baby blue walls, in circles we dreamt. I pour some of the tea into the cup with flowers pink in my hand holding a story. My mother is calling me to the living room where we all sit together sipping the love you passed onto me. After the long walk we sit together at the table, the hot clouds of tea diffusing us together in the house we’re all in. And here the cups are clattering too, in the kitchen through the glass sliding door, I can hear my uncle laughing cousins running and I smell the dark steaming tea, in it we see it all as our home, your house to mine and everyone before us, passing milk.

You understand me through the cup on my hands that is your cup too and I understand you through your cup because we took from the same pot far away with the steaming hot dark tea. Sitting together since then with pink and red petal cups in our hands holding together the stories and the love we share.



In the kitchen together we take off the mud and go to prepare our love we shared and we boild the water hot

The idea is and has always been to have something that we can build on for tomorrow

Prospective tea drinking

So in the kitchen we take off the mud from the towering walls grown from sunshine that left us warm

Here, a bit of




tea

transitory ceremonies…..




travelling/tea together