cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
“The biggest thing our heritage provides us, is that we don’t divorce our body from our emotions. The problem with that is that we also feel the weight of it in our body faster than our brains can process it.” – Dr. Eliza Bast, describing the Latinx experience I sit in Poulsbo, beside the bay, where Coastal…
Read More
I am sitting in my car outside a speak-easy bar in downtown Fort Worth. I am mesmerized by the sound of rain falling methodically on my windshield. Because I am twenty minutes early and nervous, I pull out my poem and scan the words, trying to memorize any phrases I have forgotten. As a young woman…
Read More
Daoyou Feng, 44-year-old woman Xiaojie Tan, 49-year-old woman Hyun JungGrant, 51-year-old woman Yong Ae Yue, 63-year-old woman Sun Cha Kim, 69-year-old woman Soon Chung Park, 74-year-old woman
Read More
The truth is like a lion: let it loose and it will defend itself. —Saint Augustine Autumn leaves crunch under my feet like a forbidden Kit Kat bar. And yet I keep walking—far away from the noise of the day. I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to feel. I want to heal. Scars on…
Read More
I was ten years old when I traveled with my mother, brother, and grandparents to Throckmorton, Texas, to spend a few days with my mother’s grandparents. We drove for three days from Ohio and stopped at tourist places along the way. Carlsbad Caverns astounded me. It was as if the “bigness” of the world was…
Read More
“Mally!” He said, excitedly, “It’s a girl!” My husband broke the news to me after delivering our baby himself as the doctor stood a step away, coaching him on what to do. I couldn’t believe it; a second girl! Almost exactly 19 months earlier, I had given birth to our oldest daughter. We knew her…
Read More
Cradled and held close to his chest, my entire body lay completely limp, my arms and legs dangling from the strength of his arms. The image came quickly to my mind as I rocked in a white wicker rocker on my front porch with tears streaming down my face. In silence with no words, I…
Read More
Today, I am present to my sense of participation in an impossible game. Addressing racism and biblical justice as a faith leader and woman of color is a place of relational compression. Everything is constantly squeezed, and I can feel the bones and weight of my competing responsibilities creaking and cracking. In the middle my…
Read More
Somewhere between Kobe, Covid and Killings, we lost our ability to play. Sitting outside of a makeshift emergency room, I asked God,” Is this what we have been reduced to?” Question after question, and no answer came.
Read More
Joke to him and to me he’s there she’s not seen I’ll tell you the stories of eyes not blue here in your backyard You know I am You’re here in my driveway This is my land
Read More