The Sunday Slow: Blooming Tables

I tend to neglect my wellbeing when I’m feeling overly stressed or taxed. I like to hole up, lick my wounds, eat less or more depending on the day and it’s usually left overs or snacks. I know it’s these times when I need to anchor into my rituals even more… they pace me, keep things flowing with a nurturing rhythm that reminds me of what matters.

Flowers for the dinner table does this for me. Going outside, the sunshine, the blossoms and the searching heal, renew, calibrate. It’s what I love most about the Blooming Table.

I hadn’t picked flowers up here in Idyllwild in the entire time I’d been here. I spend half my week here in the cabin and half my week at my mother’s house. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she has been in need of some major financial rearranging, resource building and presence. In truth, tending to all of this has left little energy to just Be with her. Which intuitively feels more important than anything else, but has taken a back seat to making sure she is able to have access to the financial and legal resources we are all going to need in place going forward.

So when I return home to the cabin for some rest, quiet and work it often looks like me collapsing on the couch for a couple of days before I remember what my name is. During that time, it’s leftovers, super easy gluten free sandwiches and breakfast out at a diner Jon and I like to go to out here.

This last couple of weeks, I regrouped considerably. Cooking more, tending to myself more, slowing down past the point of exhaustion to really pay attention to the world around me.

To that end, I went outside, and foraged for some dinner table adornments. Idyllwild, is an alpine forest given to a lot of dryness in the last few years. Not much in the way of flowers, but still there is so much that grows here. One of the trees I love most, second to the Jeffrey Pines which smell magical, is the Manzanitas. their bark is a glorious marbling of ash tan and deep red wood, smooth and hard, with small round sage green leaves and very small pink bell flowers that sticky with nectar.

The bees love them and the contrasting in all those colors always draw my eyes.

So here is a bit of love for the dinner table. A connection to the beauty of outside, a symbol of attention to this space where my love and I gather to eat our meals, and a return to the rituals of well being.

Have a gorgeously slow and gentle Sunday!