At The Table

In Spokane people called me the Welcome Wagon, the person people looked to for help settling into a new life in a new city. I reveled in the role and saw it as a sort of mini-ministry.

I could rattle off my list of favorite restaurants (Gordy's, Clover and Twigs, for those of you keeping score at home), family activities and outings, and useless and slightly interesting trivia.

For example, did you know that Bing Crosby's boyhood home, now the Gonzaga Alumni Center, had for the longest time a hole in the window where he had shot a bb through the glass? Recent beautification efforts have done away with the fabled remnants of a time gone by. And did you know that the crooner's Oscar for "Going My Way" is a part of GU's holdings? Pulling from my grab-bag of conversation fillers was all in a day's work as the head of campus visits and ambassador advisor at GU. Even after I left GU for the community colleges, I continued to acquire more Spokane tidbits to bolster my pride of the city called home by nearly 200,000 residents.  

Strange, not-quite-A-list celebrities like actor Craig T. Nelson and Broadway star Cheyenne Jackson hail from the Lilac City. Okay, Newport for the second one, but you get the idea. If there's an obscure tidbit that will spice up an exchange with a newcomer or a passerby, I had it at the ready. All in the name of making connections with people who just hit town for a new job or were suspended in place and time, sometimes not of their own volition. If someone started a job with our colleges, I made sure to host a dinner so a person could meet people like themselves. It was my quest to help them answer their own unspoken question, "Is it safe to be me here?" I mentally filled in the blanks for others without thinking that someday I would be the one asking the question.

It wasn't until I was on the receiving end of a connector's gifts that I realized what a powerful act of service it is to gather people at the table for the first time. Seven days into our new life in Longview, a colleague organized a dinner out with four couples, including my husband Rick and me. After a long, intense first week on the job spent drinking from the proverbial fire hose, I pushed myself past the impulse to collapse on the couch and changed for dinner. I had no names or faces to look for, just instructions to go to the Bistro (http://www.thebistrobuzz.com/) at 6:45 with reservations under the name of Ted.

Within a matter of minutes of being seated and exchanging names, we found commonalities in where we went to school, our fears and hopes for our children, our long-standing optimistic fatalism about the Cougs and the desire to make this town a better place.

Wine, beer and conversation flowed freely. I refrained (never again!) from busting out my iPhone to reflexively take pictures of my food as I am so wont to do at new eateries, especially if they are to my liking. And this one was. The osso bucco was a work of art, as was the the melodic manner in which the waitress sold the dish as a special, nay life-changing opportunity, not to be missed. The plating was nearly as dramatic as the polished promise of the chef's offerings. For me this was a tableau made in heaven. I went with the mussels and clams in a butter wine broth, but the men who fell under the spell of the menu whisperer were not disappointed. The gusto with which they dove in added to the vibrance of the evening. A toast was offered by eldest and most gregarious, and we felt a sense of welcome wash over us.

The Greek word for hospitality, xenophilia, literally means "love of strangers". I often strive to be the host and extend hospitality to others. The giving has been easy. The receiving, on the other hand, is where the opportunity for true spiritual practice lies for me. To receive graciously the gifts of another who is expressing a love of strangers in the hopes of rendering them no longer strangers in their midst, has been my challenge.

Until I could do so with unqualified gratitude and humility, however, I couldn't lay claim to have mastered the virtue of hospitality. On this Muscato and Malbec marinated evening, I came closer than ever before.  


 

Daring Greatly

My worldly possessions are in a newly built condo, awaiting my arrival in a new town six and a half hours from my current house. Before I leave the city I've called home since 1989, I'm compelled to take a picture of my walk-in closet, emptied and ready for the next inhabitant. The person who occupies this space will never know that this functional, fashionista's paradise is larger than the last place I lived with my birth mom in Korea, before I was whisked off at age 6 to be adopted by American parents.

My birth mom's few possessions--two metal rice bowls and chopsticks, a couple of pans and one change of clothes--were stacked on a rickety shelf attached to a rotting wall.  This immovable fixture took up half of the hovel we were forced to call home. My mom and I slept on our sides on the other half of the floor, lined up like Dominoes because there was no room to lie flat. We alternated whose back would be wedged against the shelf and who would face the outer wall. Our arms, crooked at the elbow, served as our pillows as we shivered through the windswept nights.

The image of that dirty den, and the haunting feelings accompanying that time period, remained buried deep in my psyche until I began prepping to move. My clean closet ala Carrie Bradshaw transformed into a Star Trek holodeck where images of my first life were superimposed on its walls. My mental slide show flashed me back to a life of scarcity, where I battled the soul-crushing effects of constant hunger, want and fear. A yearning to escape the endless sameness was outweighed only by my desperate desire to cling to my mom, the center of my steadily crumbling universe.

My life changed forever when my mom reluctantly relinquished me to worldly, teacher parents who would fill my stomach and mind with gifts from a horn of culinary and intellectual plenty. The promise of prosperity would be fulfilled but not without cost. It's always been easy to acknowledge how brave my mom was to walk away from a child she had worried about, and apologized to, for being inadequate (her words) for more than six years. But what I've never steeped in is the reality of a six year old's sense of emotional free-fall as she was stripped of her language, her primary relationship, fragile identity and street-savvy culture in one seemingly innocuous transaction--the transfer of custody from one party to another.

Not until I began my recent month-long farewell tour of lunches, dinners and parties with my current friends and colleagues did I truly process my dormant yet real need for transition from my third-world circumstances to my first-world, technicolor residency in the states. Our culture loves the before, or back story, so long as the after is triumphant or transcendent. I'm too young to declare victory on my social evolution, so there is no after just yet. Where I am, though, is at a place willing to acknowledge but not surrender to, my primal sense of abandonment, grief and ambivalence over the change that altered the trajectory of my life. I'm learning to ride a wave of liminality to a stronger place of self acceptance, and to have compassion for others in the grip of their own transitions.

In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown reminds us that "courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen” in a state of vulnerability.  “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness,” Brown continues.


I registered this blog with the intent to wax rhapsodic about the feasts of the senses and of the spirit in my new hometown. I realize that I can only begin to celebrate the abundance of movable feasts yet to manifest if I am unabashedly honest with myself about my shadow side and all that transition demands of me. 

"Numb the dark and you numb the light," Brown assures us. I have felt the dark, and now I embrace the light that is to come.