A Daily Dose of Art for November 12
“Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo is one of my most favorite poems that I return to often. (I love that the Poetry Foundation link includes an audio file of Harjo reading the poem!)
I’m using “Perhaps the World Ends Here” as one of the elements of my morning ritual this week. (You can see my simple Morning Ritual for Creative Souls here.) I also use this poem during my One O’Clock Central practice which I do most days and wrote about in Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life.
Today I took some time to copy the poem by hand into my journal while listening to Harjo read to me again and again and again. It’s always interesting to see what captures my attention with each reading or while I’m writing each line.
Each time I return to the poem I bring a different version of myself. That’s one reason I love rereading literature, revisiting visual art, listening to favorite songs and albums multiple times over the course of a week or month or year.
The gifts art bestows on us are endless.
Here’s an excerpt from Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life about the poem and my One O’Clock Central practice:
While sitting at my kitchen table thinking about these questions, the poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo came to mind. In the poem, Harjo centers the kitchen table as a metaphor for a transformative space where life’s cycles unfold—children become adults, raw ingredients transform into nourishing meals, grief spirals into healing, and individual experiences cycle into shared stories through the rituals that occur around this gathering place.
As I contemplated the intersection of this poem, the kitchen table, and time, I began to envision a spiritual practice that would honor time’s spiral nature. What if I sat at my kitchen table at one o’clock every afternoon (okay, most afternoons) to witness my relationship with time? Like seasons returning with deeper meaning, this daily practice would allow my kitchen table to welcome all of me—all of my work and confusion, ideas and frustrations, hopes and disappointments, dreams and failures. Each return to the table would build upon previous understanding, like a spiral staircase ascending to new perspectives.
“The world begins at a kitchen table,” writes Harjo. “No matter what, we must eat to live.” Stacey Balkun reads Harjo’s poem with attention to this cyclical spirit. She reflects on how the kitchen table is a domestic space, traditionally considered a woman’s space, but it is also a place where life’s rhythms manifest. Where minds meet to argue and further ideas, where mothers prepare meals in endless cycles of nourishment, where countless poets shove aside dirty dishes to capture not just events but the underlying patterns of existence.
Perhaps the table—as represented in Harjo’s poem, and my actual kitchen table—could be a concrete representation of time’s spiral nature. The next day I showed up to my kitchen table at one o’clock. I returned day after day, each session building upon previous insights. Through experimentation and a willingness to play with time’s cycles, I tried to grow my sense of wonder and connection. When limitations appeared, I imagined expansions. I asked God to poke holes in my perspective—to grow the possibilities of what time can be.