Baking to Newness

It feels a little like baking muffins. Strawberry banana muffins. In a tiny kitchen. Where he keeps bumping up against me and grabbing my waist and making me laugh so my hands shake and I can barely crack the eggs. And no one else is awake yet but they will be soon and they'll know. They'll know that here, in this sacred space, around our scarred, scratched table, they are safe. Some of the muffins will be charred around the edges and others will be sticky-sweet in the middle but they will still know, our friends will. They'll know that we care, me and Jesus. That we want them to smell nice things and see pretty colors and smile a tiny bit, even though it's the much too early morning after a much too long night.

That's what dreaming feels like to me. MLK dreamed of singing and Jesus dreamed of healing and I too dream of a world that is not, and my heart breaks with longing for it.

So I bake. I bake to singing and I bake to healing and I bake to newness. I cream the slowly melting butter of my slowly melting heart. I cream it with the sugary sweet toddler smiles that whisper "tomorrow will be here soon indeed." I crack my misconceptions of God and the world and myself and crunch the shells for good measure before tossing them in the trash. I haven't finished the recipe yet; we're still experimenting. I don't mind. Sometimes just being in the kitchen is enough.

I want both of us to start singing like two

Travelling minstrels

About this extraordinary existence

We share,

As if

You, I, and God were all married

And living in

A tiny

Room.

-Hafiz