Offering

This summer, bless our landlord's kindness, we received a new, beautiful kitchen. The week before the demolition, I boxed up the cabinets and pantry and created a safari kitchen on the back porch - tubs for washing and rinsing dishes, a grill and crock pot for cooking, and a table for drying and storing our things.

It was a living experience of gratitude - I've never been so grateful for a sink - as well as perspective, for I know millions of people throughout the world not only wash their dishes outside but also carry the water for cleaning.

It's a gift to have hands that can do physical work - that can wash dishes, cook a meal, carry water, hold a baby, vacuum a carpet, weed a garden. I think of something Carl Jung once said - "Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain."

While I don't know that Jung was speaking of physical work (I imagine he was speaking about creative play), I find his words to be equally true in this context. When my mind races, when I worry, when I find it difficult to focus, when I read the news - either weeping or shaking in anger - I think of the wise words a woman once said in a Gathering Ourselves group: "Can I do the next loving thing?"

The next loving thing is done through our hands.

Offering by Karly Randolph Pitman

No, it is not luck or magic
that fills the fridge with
fresh aioli and baked yams.
It is hands, just like yours,
that chopped the tough red
hides and stirred the olive oil.
It is not luck or magic
that smooths the rumpled sheets
or waters the withered morning
glory vine. It is your hands,
or another's – hands creased
with dirt, hands marred
with sweat. Tired hands.
Aching hands. Sorrowed hands.
Hands that woke
to a worried body and yet
warmed themselves as you
washed your face at the sink.
Hands eager to do what hands do:
to carry love from heart, to mind,
to body, to world.

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With a grateful heart, Karly