Setting the Table: Vol. 26
mercury retrograde, the grief of becoming & the seam between versions
Every Thursday, I'm setting the table for your weekend…a little collection of reads, recipes, fun things, and whatever else caught my eye this week. It's the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want. NOT a to-do list…just really sweet possibilities.
Well, shit. These past couple of weeks have been a doozy for sure, but I believe *fingers crossed* the fog and clouds are giving way to the sun…to the light. Things have started to work themselves out or shift to something different (funny how that happens) and it’s all starting to feel a little lighter. And then I read somewhere that Mercury was in retrograde and well…I don’t even know what that really means, but I feel as good as ever to lay blame on that planet…who invited her anyway? She doesn’t even go here.
And speaking of Mercury…I’ve read so many accounts from women all over the world this past month of some bizarre kind of collective hormonal situation. Some had no period…some had two in one month (it me!)…and some poor souls have been riding out a month-long one that apparently just decided to set up camp. I genuinely want to know what is happening in the cosmos right now and who approved this particular assault on women… we would like a word.
Oh, and Amelia came home last weekend, so I know that helps…she didn’t even know all the things I’d been carrying…she doesn’t need to…but the first day back, that little peanut stayed glued to my side and literally cuddled up beside me. Which, honestly, these days…totally isn’t her default…but good gracious, it was EXACTLY what I needed (and I think what she needed, too).
She’s gone to karate camp this week, and every afternoon, she comes out absolutely lit up…so freakin’ excited to tell me how she broke a board, won the ninja star throwing contest, and officially got a white belt. The physicality is working for her, the kicking and the focus and the discipline, which might also explain why we’ve been bingeing Cobra Kai as a family in the evenings and we are all absolutely in it. And because of my fragile emotional state…I’ve cried at this show more times than I’d like to admit…that Johnny Lawrence has got me in a chokehold.
This weekend, Millie goes to her first-ever sleep-away camp, and I am both thrilled and terrified for her. I truly think she’ll love it…but I guess there’s that chance she won’t, and I’ll have to be there for the latter, if so…but I’m really hoping for that life-changing experience that I hear waxed-poetic from former camp-attendees all the time. I want that for my girl.
Guys…I have GOT to get my head on straight before next week, because I have a pop-up. A FIRST for The Freckled Fork, fully outside my comfort zone, and I’m stoked! I’ll be making MY food…freckled southern comfort with a sidecar of sass…but this time entirely plant-based and vegan, in honor of my friend Rob’s birthday. Rob just said goodbye to his mom a couple weeks ago…she had been fighting cancer for years, they knew it was time, and they were there with her, holding her hand when she crossed over. And yet, it still fucking sucks…losing a parent is losing a parent, no matter the age, no matter the circumstances, no matter how ready anyone thinks they are. Words can’t fix that…they never could…but what I know in my bones…is that food can carry something that words simply can’t…food is comfort and a salve for a grieving heart. That’s what I’ll be doing next Thursday for Rob and for the Catskills Cocktail Club community. I’m so grateful and honored to do it.
Also, we have our first two retreat sign-ups, and I am THRILLED. If you’ve been thinking about it, come. Come hungry, leave held. Link is below…
Sunday’s post is a mystery even to me right now. I’m writing anyway because I need to get it out, and sometimes that’s the only reason that matters. Maybe it’ll find someone else in the messy middle as well.
Let’s set the table, friends. ♥
THE GRAZING PLATE
(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)
stop assuming!
LOVE Teodora’s writing, and this time she’s writing about the stories we build about other people and then respond to as though the other person built them too. The mistake is not that we make assumptions, of course we do, but that we mistake our interpretations for the truth and then act accordingly, sometimes for years. Watch what someone does, not what they say, and especially not what you’ve decided they mean. Patterns over moments…actions over explanations… “believe what you are shown.” Woof…emotional déjà vu (the story that keeps finding you)
Hannah writes about the invisible wall…the freakin’ one I’ve been dealing with over the past few weeks: one old belief, one fear, one role you accepted before you knew you were allowed to refuse it, that doesn’t stay neatly in any one part of your life but moves freely between all of them, dressed up differently each time. “If you’ve spent years believing your needs make you difficult, that belief doesn’t just politely stay inside your relationships.” Emotional déjà vu, she calls it: when a new situation reaches an old part of you before you’ve even understood what happened. She offers five clues for spotting your own wall…all five are staring me right in the face.Everything Is an Experiment
It’s the Year of the Fire Horse, and my girl Anjali shifted how she’s holding every decision she made: not as a verdict on who she is or whether she’s on the right track, but as an experiment. You run it, you collect what happens, you adjust. “Either the experiment works or it teaches you something, and both count.” LOVE the mid-year audit…and in a particular moment when I’m trying to analyze my own attempts and failures and give them all the necessary reframing needed to move on to the second half of the year, in earnest.
THE UTENSILS
(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)
Prescribed Burn
Last Sunday, I wrote about the literal cave I crawled out of in Oaxaca, in the small village of Teotitlán del Valle, led by a sha-woman who asked nothing of me except that I breathe. What came out of that cave was not what I expected…less like healing, more like burning away to reveal something new. And the metaphorical cave I just realized I’m tucked away in requires the same kind of renewal and reset…I didn’t even know I had crawled back in here, but here I am.
And if any of that resonated, I invite you to join the Wahe Crew and me for a Fall Equinox retreat in the Catskills this September…September 10-13th in Andes, NY. Join us!
Read it here →
Register for the retreat →
THE VESSELS
(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)
the grief of becoming
Kiki writes about what happens to your sense of home when you’ve left for good, and the heartbreak of knowing you can’t return to the version of the place that held you, because the place has kept going, the people have kept going, and the version of you that lived there has been replaced by someone else entirely. “The people have had days without you”...the grief she’s describing is not specific to crossing a border…it’s the grief of becoming someone new while still missing who you were, of knowing certain doors are just not going to open the same way again.I Thought I Had Done the Work
Dr. Heather England is a therapist writing from inside the patient’s seat, which is a lovely, vulnerable spot to be in. I love her perspective on the other side of parenthood…about the shock of realizing that the wound you thought you’d treated was not actually the wound, that the coping strategy you mistook for your personality is still running the show…still showing up as the laughing emoji you send when you want someone to know you’re not upset, still shaping the friendships you form and the ones you back away from before they get too close. The childhood pattern she thought she’d outgrown showed up in something that happened this year, and she had to start over.This Is What Becoming Looks Like from the Inside
Jenae on the gap between who you are becoming and who you appear to be in the meantime… which is a gap nobody prepares you for and rarely talks about in the thick of it. I, too, have found myself walking around the city with my AirPods in but nothing coming through. She talks about the double life of being genuinely in process while presenting as generally fine…about ending up back on her parents’ couch and realizing that wasn’t regression, it was a seam…the place where one version hands off to the next. Yes, girl…MFing YES.
THE GLASSWARE
(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)
if you don’t spend enough time getting to know yourself, you’ll end up absorbing everyone else’s definition of you
Rosie writes in the register of someone who has recently returned from a long absence from herself…if there’s a vacancy where your self-knowledge is supposed to be, someone else’s version of you will move in. Not through force…through vacancy. The work, getting actually acquainted with your own preferences, rhythms, what you reach for when no one is watching, and nothing is required, is slower and stranger than it sounds when you say it quickly. She doesn’t rush it…neither should you (I mean…me).Before I Forget: I Think We’re Never Meant to Do This Much
LOVE this piece from Hailey…this list…I saw myself in the whole thing and in so many lines… She’s writing an inventory of what we’ve collectively agreed to normalize, and asking whether we ever actually agreed or just inherited it. I think about this ALL the time…especially right now when I feel the weight of everything I’m holding…which of these things were handed to me…which did I pick up on my own…which I can put down because no one asked me to hold them in the first place.
THE NAPKIN
(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)
everything you thought was drowning you was teaching you how to swim
This one is long…but SO good. From inside the heat and the ceiling fans and the mangoes ripening too fast on the counter, and it spirals slowly through nostalgia and grief and what resilience actually looks like from the inside. "Brushing your teeth after your heart is broken. Answering texts when you're sad. Doing the dishes while grieving. Continuing." She writes about childhood boredom as proof that time once belonged to you, about what adulthood steals first: not innocence, not joy, but the feeling that there is no urgency. And the line she ends on is the one lingering still: "The water was never trying to kill me. The water was teaching me."
THE DESSERT PLATE
(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)
Writer’s block & another lap around the spiral of receiving vs striving
Lisa Marie sat down with writer's block and turned it into a poem, which is honestly where I found myself a couple weeks ago when I put out my first poem since high school…sometimes it's the only way to make sense of the jumbled words in our heads. A stream of consciousness about what happens when you write what you feel like writing instead of what your strategy says you're supposed to write. The image she lands on: a woman reaching and reaching for apples from other people's trees, not realizing she is the tree. "She began to grow roots, to become planted firmly. She did so by grounding in, not by reaching and striving."
Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3
xo, Jess
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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥