Some years later ...
The six saimin bowls were stacked as they always are in an upright pillar one bowl nestled into the other. With time the nicks had grown but I never replaced them. My company, and family, never minded. As a living philosophy I kept to Ma's original spell, "People don't come to visit my things; they come to visit me." I think it a spell because in her lifetime those sorts of people were the only ones to visit her. My thick tea mug was emptied of the strong sweet chai, morning was bright with a spring sun and only the hum of my computer broke the quiet. I'd been up for hours stitching the small pouches that would hold a bit of magic and a few words. There was a birthday party later today but something needed to be stirred together for dinner first.
Soup? Rising to consider what I could fill the bowls with I ran my small hands along the side of the pillar remembering most of the occasions which left the nicks or chips. Lifting the top bowl a thin but growing crack etched from the lip to about midway. "Can you live from a cracked bowl?"I thought aloud. The image of Max, godfather, rose from the bowl like the genie of Aladdin. He said, "I know a story that might answer that. Care to hear it?" I smiled at the question then laughed at how stories come to a storyteller. "Let me fill my tea cup, Uncle. And you?" Max nodded. He was always ready for tea with a story. "I would love to hear that story."A funny thing happens when you step through a door you once shut with determination, intending to leave it shut for all time. Perhaps it's particularly funny if you are blessed with the genes of drama which the Gods and Goddesses chuckle at and say things my mother once told me, "Wait until you have children of your own. Then. Then, you'll know what I mean." The thing about the way the Ancestors work is they don't tell me off so much as put me into the in between places where I experience all options at the same time. Like one of the nicks or cracks in my saimin bowls some of the soup seeped into the fissures. But the soup didn't taste any different because there were imperfections. Or did it? Six saimin bowls were plenty, I remember the Costas twelve children. Dinner was from the pot. You had a spoon, hunger and the laughter. Bowls or plates? They never used 'em.
Ever live from a crack in a bowl? One option: create magic, common magic. Rub on a memory from the past ... a safety pin shows up. Grow a few more gray hairs, and feel the humanity of aching bones that creak under the pressure of history and your ancestors will show you a way through time. The cracks like Pele's gaping holes are making room for something yet to be. I was mixing metaphors and time with no regard for logic. "Pele is messing with all those faulty foundations ... mix those metaphors Pale. It's a necessary activity!" Max and I both knew the slow moving planet was better named "Pele" as our Island ancestors reckoned the goddess of fire and earth-making was truly offering--no demanding-- everyone alive get back to basics.
I sipped my tea and waited for Max to take a good slurp of his. He was not so much a sipper as a man of gusto. I was now nearly 80, and still the kahuna showed up as if I were his young god-child. The birthday was less than four hours away. Company and family would show up soon. What story would come to fill the cracked bowl I wondered.
This is the story Max had for me. It wanders, may be familiar to at least one of you, it is the great arc. Time travels.
When you have read that story link here for another journal entry.
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