Nests and 9-11

Today is too important a day to not blog.
Sometimes I have no idea what I will write about until this blank white window opens and the empty void slowly fills. I would be remiss to not mark this date that still draws with it such pain. Today began much like it did 7 years ago, in some ways, and yet it was much different. The sky was clear, the air feeling like the subtle beginnings of fall when we learned raw hell was breaking out.
I need to replace the fear and loss with something more powerful but yet never forget the pain still so visceral.
What can replace such hatred but love?
Sounds simple and it really is. Love and kindness is far more powerful than we will ever know!
Sometimes I'm convinced that the simplest concepts are the deepest but most important to learn.
Before we can learn them, we have to connect the dots.
On that note I will share this.

Last night, on our way to Atlanta for an art fair, we dropped off a table I stamped for a dear friend of ours. He gave me this very old table back in July and asked my husband Jon to strengthen it's structural integrity with his skill and have me stamp it with mine. A true team of structure and surface as we went about making this table strong and useful again.
The name for the table is 'The Peace Table'.
Tables in particular, are furnishings that draw people and ideas together to share, be it nurishment or ideas.
Maybe they are synonomous.
One feeds the body, the other the spirit.

In another seemingly unrelated conversation with a friend today at the show, we spoke of birds and nests. My friend Holly Hambrick uses natural materials in her work and the subject of homes and nests arose. She told me how she'd just read in an old French publication how a mother bird smooths the inside of the nest she builds using her breast. The smooth contour of the nest for the eggs made so by the warmth and curve of the birds breast.
I got goose bumps.
It all came together.
I knew this would be in my blog.
It tied together everything so beautifully.

It's how we build.

We build from our heart.
We strengthen what's damaged, from our heart.
We make our home, from our heart.
We become whole by opening our heart.
So, a day marked by loss, a broken yet fixed table, and a birds nest.
It's about replacing the pain with what's in our heart.

So, on this forever memorable day, find love.
Open your heart and know that when you do,
the goodness flows in, the pain is eased, and what
feels broken becomes whole.

Abundant Blessings~
༺♥༻
Patricia