Bubbie Cru’s Sweet and Sour Meatballs

Passover is coming

Time to Prepare

The holiday asks we welcome our Ancestors

The holiday asks that we tell our story

The holiday says that we speak and eat from our history

Shopping, cleaning, cooking

Shopping, cleaning, cooking

It can feel like things to check off our to-do list

It can feel like tasks we just do mindlessly

Moving from one job to the next

It can feel like a slavery to rules that no longer feel like ours

Yesterday I pulled out the big pot and thought of my mother

Thought of my mother no longer here, but never far away

Bubbie’s Sweet and Sour meatballs are always part of the Seder meal

And now it was my time to make them

To make them by heart, no recipe needed.

Using my hands to mix the meat with the eggs

Gooey between my fingers

Like a child at play

Swirling tiny balls in the palms of my hands

The hands that held onto my mother’s fingers

As she lived and as she died

Somewhere along the way the telephone rang

the telephone rang and 

I moved away

Moved away

From the mindful practice of ritual

From the mindful awareness that the past and the now are one

My mind jumped to the next thing to cook

the next thing to do

the next call to make

And there I was back in a constricted place

Back in a space of doing

Without noticing I moved away from that open space

of Awareness

The space of oneness with my mother

Her mother

And all the mothers before her

All the way back to Egypt

Hours later

As I was running around in the small circle of my Life

I smelled Bubbie’s meatballs cooking in the oven

Through awareness I was given a sensory gift

It brought me back to my childhood kitchen

My young self surrounded by the sweet smell of my Mother’s cooking

Life tasted mindfully can offer us gifts

Offer us gifts

Gifts that our soul crave but our minds do not know

minds do not know

but answering yearnings 

that flow from the heart