Alchemy and Coffee

I confess I’m glad the holidays have passed.

Perhaps you are, too – and for all the expected reasons.

 

 This doesn’t mean the days aren’t important – quite the contrary, perhaps.

But our busyness and expectations can obscure the natural rhythms in which we also live.

Some of us have been living within lunar cycles as much as we can now,

…punctuated by the birthdays of dear friends

…like Emily Marley Morales -- whose grandfather is home for the occasion from Red Rhino Orphanage in Kenya.

This photo was taken just yesterday.

 And we commemorate the passing of loved ones, too—like our dear friend Jeannine Benson

…because we need quieter remembrance

…and ritual

…whether we call it that or not.

“The rivers and mountains are Steve’s church,” Sharon Spiller says about her husband.

“Don’t get me started,” he answers when we ask him about fly-fishing in the Sierra or about the flies he fashions at a small table at home—near where Sharon keeps singing bowls and amulets.

And when you hear Steve describing being on a Sierra lake at dawn, you’re hard pressed to avoid using words like reverence and contemplation and solitude yourself.

“I think of it as alchemy,” Sharon says.

In this case, she’s speaking about a singing bowl in her hand, still amazed at how something like rose quartz can transform itself into such a sound.

 

You can hear Sharon yourself—this coming Saturday night at our second Red Egg gathering—when she chants with singing bowls to lead our meditation.

Not so long ago we wandered into the Blue Bottle Café in San Francisco.

 

And then we wandered into it again the next day,

…and the day after that,

…and then another day just for the helluvait

…and to guarantee that we had become habitués.

 And it really is alchemical, and consciously so -- from the bowls and piping

…and measured application of heat

…that becomes light

…that becomes the drip-drip-drip of this siphoning

…that becomes a cup that looks like this

…or this.

We don’t do commercials, but we like good theatre wherever we can find it.

And then, of course, the coffee spirits you away

…back to Reykjavik

…and Autun

…and Krakow where we were exactly a year ago today

…and to Ethiopia where one friend

…and then another takes you into her home

…because all around the world, coffee can be a ceremony, just as tea can be.

And then there is café life, where even in your own city you can be traveling again –talking with a perfect stranger about a book you haven’t heard about, but which now you’re going to read.

Or you can be as happily rapt in your own anonymity as a pilgrim on a dusty road.

All of this can sound trivial, even shameful, in a world where – as I type -- people are still digging with bare hands through rubble in Port-au-Prince trying to reach the cries of loved ones and strangers.

We have to be vigilant against our own estrangement.

We live within two rounds – the smaller rituals we create and the vast human and even cosmic cycles that go pinwheeling around us. Sometimes the vast ones seem so far beyond our comprehension that we avert our gaze in confusion.

But perhaps this is the test of ceremony. Does it leave us absent in the soap bubble of our own dream – as beautiful and childlike as that might be,

…or does it awaken and vitalize -- and in the end, connect us – with others, with the earth, with all the wider cycles that sustain us and in which we have our being.

Comments

[Harvey Scodel]

Wow, some very nice photos there. I would like to see a slide show of the world tour at some point.

[Harvey Scodel]

Correction to the link to my blog above -- sorry:

[Paula Huston]

You guys. . . what a blessing your blog has become to me. Thank you once again.