The long smooth slice down the body of the pomegranate, and how I always do five of these in even measure. How the pom breaks open in my palms and the jewels clank into the bowl. How the arils burst stain onto my fingers. The slow, steady work of this.
The way a fruit like this, so built for holding, simply falls to our feet when it is ready for us.
Pressing a stamp down onto to a postcard. The tiny scribings we make with our hands and our tools. and how we send them to each other across the land on a small rectangle. How we receive this.
How tea blooms, yielding all of itself to the water. The pouring. The stirring. The serving. The serving, especially when we mime our loved ones to show that we have observed their rituals in this. The serving, especially when we have prepared it for ourselves.
When a pen runs out of ink and I hold it, aware that it can no longer serve its purpose, but conflicted, and mournful. How I think of everything it helped me build, and how small my world would be without tools like this.
This meme-format is going around Twitter (“What’s something that feels _____ but isn’t.”), and as I was preparing pomegranate, it popped in my head with the word sacred as the fill-in-the-blank. I know in some cultures, under certain scenarios, a couple of these things actually are sacred, and I know that there is a very good argument that all things are sacred. But I tried to focus on things that felt heavy with it, to me.
rarasaur 