other prayers
missive on the sturgeon moon
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
- Simone Weil
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
- Mary Oliver
It is snake season. Marigold season. Jerusalem artichoke and burnt hydrangea season. The season of crickets crawling, hopping, singing for one another. Of cool breezes, of sturgeon. Great lakes, rivulets of sun, goldenrod lined shores. A season for tending the overgrown garden and sandy wooden floors. A season to translate the fruits of summer into words. To pare back to what’s necessary.
a new form of prayer
An enormous, ancient white pine.
A breast cancer diagnosis.
A hysterectomy.
A birth.
What these things have in common… cake.
As I grow up, I am learning on deeper and deeper levels how meaningful it is to tend. To care for other humans (and non humans, too) in ways that are not unheard of, yet entirely unique. Back in June, I began a new sort of prayer practice, baking groaning & ritual cakes for my local community.
Rites of passage take place all the time. Many, especially those experienced by women, get overlooked or go unappreciated. I have found that by inviting ritual into my life, I am offered an opportunity to celebrate, even if it requires sifting through a pile of frustrations and heartaches to find that which is celebratable. This process opens me to the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary, even as I wade through fear of the unknown.
These cakes I’m making are infused with focused attention and intention. Prayers alongside nourishing ingredients. As many local ingredients/stories as I can source. Essences and rose petals and moon water and shells and apples and honey and rocks dug up from down deep in the earth.
Groaning cakes are an ancient English tradition that began in Cornwall and eventually made their way across the UK. Made to fortify both a birthing and a postpartum body (and spirit), while offering a ritual to honor the entrance into parenthood and familyhood. Each cake is as unique as the people eating it.
Recently, I made ritual cakes (similar to my groaning cakes, but made with slightly different ingredients based on the recipients perceived needs), for a woman with a breast cancer diagnosis. The intention of this cake was to celebrate her ability to ask questions, her intuition to not settle for a prescribed bath.
I have made cakes to honor a mother who experienced a hysterectomy, and a mother about to cross the threshold of birth. I did not expect my matrescence and postpartum studies to lead me here - at the doorstep of an ancient bakery of sorts. But when I pause and think about what this practice is - a combination of poetry, prayer, land communion, story, nourishment, and mother devotion - it is in fact the perfect practice for me. After all, I hail from a long line of kitchen witches.
I imagined my studies would aid me in facilitating virtual writing circles for mothers. Yet here I am, baking them cakes instead. I love a good universal chuckle. I'll be keeping you abreast of this process, as it's currently at the center of my creative practice. Below, a story about a beloved tree, and a cake made to bless it.
(For those local to southern Maine, please feel free to holler with inquiries. I would be honored to make a cake specifically curated to help ritualize your rite of passage. By acknowledging our rites of passage, we come to embody new levels of empowerment. Now is the time to celebrate.)
We gathered to honor Our Friend Pine, an ancient evergreen rooted in the southernmost tip of Maine. Photos cannot do Pine justice, immense enough to require at least 5 humans linking arms at the base (if not more). In my mind she is Mother Pine, a protector and a force all her own.
Will, Lore and I ventured to our friends’ home to assess what sort of medicine Pine might require. There is a tragic split forming at the base where one massive trunk decides to lean its own way. Further up, there are branches in need of removal, if Pine is to make it another 100+ years. Will knows his trees well, has worked in them and with them for nigh on a decade. He brought his knowledge to this afternoon picnic celebration. I brought the cake.
My daughter ran around the flower garden as we adults talked and laughed and ate. We talked of Our Friend Pine, the scenes that have played out underneath that gigantic canopy.
I made a cake with our most recent full moon water. With the essence of a similarly ancient bristle cone pine. With apple for wisdom and rose for love and caramel for sweetness. I brought marigolds to honor the life that has been lived and the life yet to come. The death within change that offers revival.
This cake was small and sun-shaped (so fitting). We placed it in a handmade ceramic bowl, adorned it with flowers, and sat it in the crux of trunks. I painted a prayer on a rock, two simple words - joyful longevity - and placed it alongside our cake offering.
When we act as stewards for an animate being or a place, we enter into a relationship of reciprocity. Stewardship can look like pulling strangling bittersweet. It can look like naturalizing a swath of lawn. It can look like planting pollinator plants. It can look like cabling a splitting tree and pruning unneeded branches. It can look one million other ways, but what I want to sing from the rooftop is how offerings of prayer are of great importance. How they are understood by beings with different levels of awareness than us.
This is the sort of world I choose to live in - one where trees understand my prayers and are grateful for them.
As always, thank you for being here. For making it this far. It astounds me, the number of people who reach out here and elsewhere after I send a letter, that I am not alone in any of these thoughts and inclinations, in this work of being a human and a poet. I am grateful to be walking this path with you. Below is a piece I painted with this community in mind. May we all find ways to make whatever it is our lil poet hearts feel called to make. May we support one another in this endeavor by any means possible.
With marigolds and phlox,
Kat
Oh, Kat, I can't even begin to tell you how much this sacred cake-making moves and inspires me. The doorways into nurturing the bodies of those within our circle are myriad; thank you for a glimpse into this practice, and for sharing your beautiful stories and art! My prayer today is not cake but instead a large pot of butternut squash soup, generously yielded by our hillside garden and destined to travel in jars to warm the bellies of a few dear souls. Cheers to creative practice transforming in the in-between space where it joins hands with real, thriving life.
Well this is perfectly fantastic. I love how you have stumbled into something that you've always been heading toward. Spirit food. In so many ways. Well done, friend. You keep becoming more of who you are, and I love watching your journey.