you fix and bring me food.
on hunger, and allowing ourselves to be nourished.
In another timeline, the end of three years of divinity school might have felt like a dove being released into the open air.
For me, it felt like a crash test dummy hitting a brick wall.
I was exhausted. And when I’m exhausted, the little lies tend to weasel their way into my brain. In my life, these tend to look like impossibly long to-do lists and sleep debt and Amazon carts.
But especially Amazon carts.
This is a sampling of things I thought would fix me this during the month of June:
curtains for the bathroom
a ceramic planter with tiny jaguars on it
a rattan tray that goes on top of the toilet
a lip stain that’s been chasing me around on Instagram for months
an essential oil that is supposed to smell just like a different, more expensive essential oil (it does not.)
Dear reader, if you’re wondering whether or not these things helped – they did not.
By the end of last week, I had a bunch of lovely things in my home and a big rumbling hungry ghost in my belly.
Only today, when I begrudgingly sat down to sit in the quiet, did I start to emerge from the hurricane.
There’s a poem that came to mind by the poet Rumi (we’ve talked about it before). This is the first stanza:
A shout comes out of my room
where I’ve been cooped up.
After all my lust and dead living
I can still live with you.
You want me to.
You fix and bring me food.
You forget the way I’ve been.
You fix and bring me food.
In the middle of my hurricane of self-destruction and avoidance. When my belovedness slips my mind and I spend money on stupid things trying to make up for all this lack lack lack. In the middle of all of this, you fix and bring me food.
This feels like the Divine to me.
Embodied. Patient. Purposeful. Nourishing.
Eat something, the Divine says. You’ve been in there so long. You’re so hungry. Here’s something that can actually help.
I imagine God going into the kitchen. Turning on the stove. Adding oil to the pan. I imagine the quiet sizzle, the slow heat. All of these simple, patient acts of care. I imagine God preparing all this nourishment for us and walking it up to our door, hoping we’re open to it.
You fix and bring me food.
This week, a shout came out of my room, as it has a hundred times. (These days I feel like I see-saw from open-hearted to cooped up by the week. As Ezra Klein said a few weeks ago, “I don’t know how to hold all the feelings, even all the thoughts I should have in a day.”)
Finally, a shout came out of my room.
This week, the Divine fixed and brought me food, dropping tiny nourishing things into my life to remind me that I’m alive.
A gardenia, lovingly picked by one of the congregants in my church, delivered in a tiny plastic cup with a wet paper towel. So aromatic you could smell it three rows up.
Feelings so big that I couldn’t ignore them anymore (a difficult gift for a person who loves avoiding big feelings, but a gift nonetheless).
A good hard cry.
A surprisingly cool summer night, spent sitting on a blanket watching community theater.
My dog, whose entire day consists of napping and loving and going for walks.
You fix and bring me food.
The Divine does the patient work of care because our alive-ness is worth it.
May we emerge from our rooms, no matter how long we’ve been cooped up.
May we eat what is real and nourishing, and may we be satisfied.
Thin Space Cowboy is a reader-supported publication written and created by Lindsey Kelley. Click here to subscribe or gift a friend a subscription here (if a friend sent you this email—tell them thank you!). Have questions? Requests? Reply to this email to reach me directly!