1000 Tiny Cups of Coffee

Delight Essay #1

Alert!  I’m dividing up my various writing interests into three supporting nourishments. One is the adventure of interfacing with now reality and the Great Change we are in. The other is tracking Delight in small friendly essays (inspired by poet Ross Gay) and the other is tracking and playing with Personality Framework stuff via Gene Keys and Human Design. They all have their own natural rhythm. The interface-with-now-stuff usually requires that I grow, unlearn, study and contemplate until new wisdoms emerge and can be language and lived.  The delights project is feeling a lot more regular and easy to get to and is kind of a yogic balance to the other one!  And the personality framework one is finding its own rhythm, as are we all. I’m glad you’re here.  P.s. Comments thrill and delight me.  I’m very new on substack and open to suggestions!

November 21st 2024, London, UK

1000 Tiny Cups of Coffee

I think I’d be okay with the possibility of a thousand tiny cups of coffee thru a day, a staccato, a warm espresso rhythm - a metronome at last!  All my life I’ve ached to know the secrets of proper discipline - by that I mean, the agency and wherewithal to consistently angle my sails towards true shores and the wisdom to not try and be the wind.

In a chilly flat in London I warm my empty and very tiny coffee cup between my legs between pours.  I get a voice memo from my gracious and a little bit glorious Italian host Stella (not her real name tho she offered no further details on the subject) to apologize for loud construction sounds going on.  In her Italian spiceball way she’d called to get to the bottom of such an affront and discovered they were cleaning the playground across the street.

I am a woman rarely at a loss for words.  But I struggled to find a way to effectively articulate to her how important those sounds were.  With a shattered ankle and a whole side of broken ribs I am still now, stiller than I have been in my entire existence.

So while it is late November London cold I leave the balcony doors open because. Because I need the drafts of life to reach me, more acutely than I have ever needed such a thing. I need to hear things to marvel at. I need to feel the machinery of existence churning along.  And because I can’t imagine a reality in which I miss listening to the drunkards late last night with brogues so thick and dialogue so melodic and quick that I spent fifteen minutes of my life certain that they were rehearsing for a play beneath my second story balcony.  

I would never want to miss the mystery of the random horse that ran through the streets the first night here. Back and forth, fast, mad clopping so that I fell asleep marveling at what he was up to.  On his way somewhere? Or away from? Did he need directions? I couldn’t get up fast enough to see him so I had to journey with him in my mind, racing madly through King’s Crossing just before dawn. 

Nor would I miss the different explosive murmurations of children at two different moments each day. The first one, terse, early morning cold, chatter sharp and withheld, the whole vibe is one of rebellious resentment as they pour from the T to their school.

But the next one, when they are released, soft afternoon holy warmth and ah, poets write songs about this sound, bards have always reserved a special ear for the golden movement of this particular cacophony.  The mass exodus from imprisonment, thunderous, nearly celestial in its madness, the Braveheart roar of hundreds of children scream-running dead into the arms of their suddenly unbearably precious freedom.