The secret is doughnuts.
This morning before opening his eyes Marc said “the secret to couscous is doughnuts.” I guess he’s started remembering his dreams. He told me that in the dream a friend was cooking dinner “on a frying pan you could walk out on.” There was a fire in the middle of the huge pan and they stood near it surrounded by food cooking in waist-high piles, like laundry piles. And the chef explained that the secret to getting the couscous soft and fluffy was to use doughnuts.
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In my dream a crone stood in the dark holding a glass, the contents of which was separated into the dark on top and the light on the bottom. And she said the secret was to use jam to keep them apart. Then I looked down at her feet and there were large metal buckets there, and as I looked at them the containers grew bigger.
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My last post made Marc sad. I didn’t mean too, I didn’t really think about how it feels to read that your love is lonely. I didn’t even really think of the loneliness in that way. Because I am in love with this life. Especially these days which are filled with new love and so much bounty and friendship and music; fuel for an epic burning up of old rotten stuff from the past and for a bright new future. Far from sad, recently I feel able to say truer things, and I feel fat with words, and with daily pleasures like making egg-in-a-hole for breakfast while listening to records.
Men and women who have always known they are the parenting kind will know this other kind of feeling that exists quietly below though. A feeling inside that is a bit like having an alien in you, something that rolls around with the moon each month and feels things of it’s own volition, and knows that the possibility of a certain kind of creation is counting down.
Making an altar to that feeling as I thought about in that last post meant for me witnessing and releasing my attachment to what will happen. Celebrating and honouring the alien, as well as the possibility of becoming the crone.
In fact, making an altar to yourself and to your loneliness is honouring all the types of woman that are laughing and haunting in the shadows beyond the old Virgin, Mother, Crone crew.
Maybe we will hatch a little life of our own, maybe we won’t.
But we will definitely keep hatching astonishing new moments.
The containers we fill with delight and kindness and sorrow and life can, and will, keep getting bigger.
And I think the Crone and the Chef are right: the secret to being sustained, and to seeing the light and dark clearly, is all in the doughnuts and jam.
The secret is all in the sweetness.
The secret is jam.
