Water Horse Writing Studio

I’ve been writing in restaurants and cafes for years. Mostly I’m there for the clean table, to spread out my journal, books, pen, restroom, and access to food when I get hungry. I find I can depend on being left alone to write for as much time as I usually need, an hour or two, or if I am lucky and the place is not too busy and the server feels like I am a good bet for a generous tip I spend three or four hours. What I have noticed is that places that are good for writing are also good for drinking. The place I have been going recently has a large continuously running bar. No matter how early in the morning I go people are drinking. I try not to judge but it is a bit of a shock. This type of shock reminds me of nightmares I had as a child. The worst reoccuring one was based on the Peter and the Wolf story that has a common theme of a wild animal eating other animals or children whole. As I think about it now my facination with being eaten whole was not limited to nightmares. I loved the song “I knew and old lady who swallowed a fly”. The song goes ” I don’t know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she’ll die?” There is an apathy in the song that is disturbing. I think the point of the song is to mind your own business and that is what I try to do when I walk past people drinking alone at the bar on a Tuesday at 9am. I want people to mind their own business about what I am doing with my books and pens, but I have admit it is a strange place to do something seemingly private like writing. I think I am a type of sitting duck and this somehow keeps me awake and moving through the thoughts I am trying to express. When I feel full from writing I gather my things pay my bill and dash out. It doesn’t matter so much what I wrote, I just need to write. I wonder if it is the same for the folks at the bar. They’re fillng a need. As I leave the resturant I think about how few places nourish our basic needs. Whether it be for food, drink or a protective space to hold us while we digest. I have gratitude for the establishments and the people that work there who are truly servering others while also thinking we could do so much better as a society. I recently read an article on The Marginalian about an African Folk story around the theme of being eaten whole. I can’t seem to find the article now but it was about motherhood and existential angst. Could home be outside of our selves? How can we know something we are consumed by? I find it synchronistic that I have also been studying The Empress card in my new Tarot deck by Catrin Welz-Stein. Here The Empress is pregnant, her body a lush garden. It is full of the potential of love’s unfolding. Sometimes our minds threaten to eat us whole but the mind is is not and existential threat it is a part of us and we are inside the whole of being. God is not in us we are in god, always home whether we know it or not.