Honey

IMHO, there are a few days every summer that sort of pour out across your life just the way that honey pours out of the jar -- slow and sweet and golden.

Today was one of those days for me. I slept in until almost 9:00. I got up and ate whole wheat toast with peanut butter and -- what else -- rosemary honey -- and some watermelon. I went outside and worked for hours in the garden, coming in, finally, covered in sweat, red as a beet, and as content as a clam.

I took a shower, clean, safe, cold water that poured all over my body and in between each hair on my head, and then -- ah! -- Son and D-I-L brought Grandson over to stay with me while they went out for a bit.

I got to thinking about the hours that women spend with babies -- their children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews, their friends' babies, random children in airports. It's been years, and years, and years, well more than thirty years, since Son was a baby. And, yet, the rhythm never changes. It's like a song you can begin singing in the middle or a stitch that you pick back up as soon as the needle's in your hand. And, it's honey; it's time out of time. It's some of the sweetest time you ever get to spend.

Grandson is beginning to sit up and -- in a family of wordsmiths, the sweetest gift of all -- beginning to talk, sing, laugh. I told him stories about brave people, because he will need to be brave and stories about coyote, Trickster, because he will need to be creative, and about how much I love him, because all babies need -- and, of course, deserve -- to be loved.

It's funny to have spent so much time this weekend on babies. Saturday, a woman who works for me and her husband had the naming ceremony for their daughter at their temple. I'm not much on monotheists, but it was touching to see men I know from the business world wearing yalmukes and prayer shawls, to hear my associate chanting Hebrew, to watch her husband hold his daughter and gaze at her with so much adoration.

Part of me thinks it's cruel to bring babies into such a fucked up, polluted, empire-ridden world. And part of me looks, as I suppose old women have always looked at babies, and thinks, "You'll do better. You are the hope of the world. May the Goddess guard you. May the Goddess make you strong. May the Goddess allow you to see what I cannot see."

But, in the end, it's honey. It's all honey.

May it be so for you.