Heaven is a Belly Button Moon

This was a perfect summer evening: 75 degrees with a breeze. I walked the goats, Lily and Ramon, through the green field with the sun setting in a flair of coral clouds on one side and a gaggle of geese flying across a huge full moon – Lady Sky’s belly button – rising to the other side. I felt perfectly squeezed, like an orange been juiced or a washcloth wrung – since I’d just been to a 2.5 Core Power hot yoga class. The gifted and inspirational instructor had used an image that stuck with me. He had said to relax our butts into the matt in savasana like a cool stone dropped into honey. Never mind my butt, I want to kiss like that. I want to live that way… like a cool stone dropped into warm honey, because it requires that I slow down and appreciate the sweet surroundings. My kids used to tell me they imagined swimming in a large pool of vanilla pudding. It’s remarkable they grew up without food obsessions. I’m hoping it’s partly because I taught them moderation and that sugar isn’t evil. Well, it can be, but if you tell a kid they can’t eat sugar, they’re going to grow up and they aren’t just going to imagine a swimming pool of pudding – they’re going to build it!

But anyway, there I was with the goats, looking around at the awesome beauty and I cried with gratitude. I felt like a soft serve dipped in chocolate wonder. Life is delicious!

Last night I danced on my kitchen table on the Unitarian Universalist altar. Wait. I better back up. When I was asked by renowned polar bear artist, Barbara Stone, to create a dance with the theme of “family” for an event she was having at the church, I immediately thought of the kitchen table. Well, more specifically, I thought of how at Thanksgiving my grandma, Mutti, would pull several long tables out of storage and push them together in the living room (because she and Papa didn’t have a dining room in their little house and the kitchen only sat about five). She would set the tables with white cloths and beautiful dishes. When everyone had gone to bed I would sneak out with a blanket and pillow and sleep under the table. It felt like a tent, but too, the table seemed to be alive with anticipation of the upcoming celebration. For the purposes the dance, I flung myself around my own sturdy kitchen table that I brought to the church.

I named the piece “Memories of the Kitchen Table” because another memory dear to my heart is when my mother would return home from a long day of teaching, my aunt would return from school, my uncle was home from the Navy, my grandfather had just come home from a long day at Public Service and we would all gather at the kitchen table while Mutti served dinner. She occasionally pulled up a chair, but she liked to serve us. I was the only child present, so I didn’t want to be asked too many questions, but I loved to observe. I can’t remember much of what was said – I lived there from the ages 2-10, but I remember the camaraderie and sense of union.

While this event at the church was artistic and not religious, it was spiritual, as Barbara related the amazing tales that led to her original art works and a harpist played and Jeff Stone, Barbara’s ex-husband, recited poems and played Celtic tunes. I celebrated the memories of the table and did what connects me most to the divine: I danced.

Heaven is a cool stone, warm honey kiss, the tall grasses brushing my legs as I follow the goats, the white disc moon and burning sun disappearing behind the blue mountains. Heaven is the warm evening breeze and the magpies eating apples from the big tree that shades my front porch. Heaven is the hummingbird that mistook my red shirt for a flower this morning and buzzed in my face; it’s the last year with my old dog who helped me raise my kids; it’s the yoga instructor’s voice lulling us deeper into our hearts that expand if we let them, bigger than the moon or the sun, so big that we know for sure that war is an illusion and peace was all there ever was.