Back to the Beginning

Enough with the random sappiness. There are three incredible waffle-related developments that must be addressed.

1. A little over a year ago, I mentioned in this post that the Aster Cafe in Minneapolis desperately needed waffles. It was a beautiful, quaint space that just needed something more, and waffles, I contended, would save it. Through a bizarre series of coincidences, my friends Matty O'Reilly and Tom Peterson, owners of the amazing 318 Cafe in Excelsior, Minnesota, have acquired the Aster Cafe, and I'm happy to report waffles on their delightful breakfast menu. You can order them topped with either fresh berries and creme fraiche, or with bananas and Nutella (omg). While there's still nowhere in Minneapolis to find a delicious sugar waffle, I'm happy to report that these will sustain me when I'm too lazy to make my own. I'm also very happy to report that when I say a place should get waffles, sometimes it happens. Behold, the power of blogging...and serendipity.
2. We're running out of Hagel Zucker, and I was trembling in my bones at the thought that I'd have to return to waffle making without it. But if there's a god, it loves waffles, and so it's all going to work out fine. Our friend Nikki, who was instrumental in our decision to go to Bruges in the first place, has been living in Belgium for the past year, and will be visiting next week. She very kindly offered to bring home a stash of Belgian pearl sugar for us. Waffle Guy and I laughed a bit as she said, "I picked up two kilos for you, so you should be set for a long time." Little does she know how much sugar we put in those amazing waffles.
3. Waffle Guy is THE BEST. I mean, we already knew that, but he's really, really, really THE BEST. See, I'm celebrating a milestone birthday in the fall, and Mr. Incredible decided that for my birthday, he would offer me the opportunity to share the magic of Waffle World with those who mean the most to me. And so, come October, we'll be taking my three amazing daughters and my highly cool mother to Europe. The plan at this point is to start in Amsterdam, then go eat waffles and ride in horse-drawn carriages and drink lots of beer in Bruges, and then venture into Germany.  I'm so excited that I'm not sure I can stand it.

Lest you think I'd forgotten the original purpose of my blog, I'm going to leave you with this: It's a good year for waffles.

I'm-a go eat one right now... 

Lessons From A Tourist's Photos: Erosion

image_3, originally uploaded by katherine.kunkel.

I saw the tiny canyon in the sand, carved of a tidal stream and surrounded by miniature cliffs, a perfect scale-model representation of the forces to which we all fall victim in our own time.

We are shaped by waters, blown by winds; leveled and smoothed and carved and designed until we reach our final form; intricate and weathered and true, if only we let those forces move us.

(Zeeland, The Netherlands, Spring 2009)

Lessons from a Tourist's Photos: Just Cross The Flippin' Bridge Already

Every now and again, I feel like I suffer from Late-Onset Adulthood. You know those days when you were learning your lessons and sewing your oats and stuff? I was AWOL then, somehow, locked up in my completely oblivious little mind, and so I never really grew up. Now I'm figuring out the things that the rest of the world learned at fifteen. It's a little bit awkward, although I'm proud to report that I've experienced virtually no acne in this bizarre and belated launch period.

For a very wide variety of reasons, I missed the years when most people are concerned about fashion trends or dating or the antics of the characters in the latest trendy television serial. I was too busy surviving. And then all of a sudden, everything changed. For the first time in my life, I'm beginning to understand what it means to thrive, and it feels amazing.

Except when it doesn't. 

Because sometimes, moving forward feels like a traffic jam. 

For example, four months ago, I quit smoking. Not like I quit smoking last year, or the year before that, or the year before that. This time, I really quit smoking. To prove it, I gained 15 pounds immediately. I'm not as young as I used to be, and the weight is proving to be incredibly hard to take off. I've never been overweight, and truth be told, I'm hardly overweight now. But looking in the mirror is so bloody frustrating that I forget that my new appearance is proof of a healthier me. I curse the hours I now have to spend at the gym, instead of celebrating the newer, healthier lifestyle I'm creating. I forget that just a few short months ago, I was a slave to an addiction that I wasn't sure I'd be strong enough to escape. I beat it, and it was easier than I thought. Victory, right? Except for those pounds. 

And so the cycle continues. I get so caught up in beating myself up about my newest challenge that I forget to look at the challenges as the beautiful, educational, important journeys that they are. I look at the present, and convince myself myself I'm stuck here. I look at the future, and find it a bit frightening.

But I forget to look at the past, and see how far I've progressed. I forget that it doesn't matter how long it took me to get here. The point is, I arrived.

Organization is another weak spot for me, and tonight I found myself once again working much harder to clean my house than I should have had to work. If only I'd emptied the dishwasher when it was finished, I thought, then dirty dishes would never have piled up in the sink and I could have spent that time mopping instead. In a fit of frustration, I finished the dishes and went to bed for some cathartic time spent looking at photos of happy things.

That's when I found the picture of the bridge. This bridge over Germany's Mosul river was so striking to me, in part because it was ominous and cold and threatening against the springtime sky. From down below, it felt like it must be scary to cross it.

And that's the thing about bridges: you just have to cross them, whether they're welcoming and quaint or easy and current or big and cold and frightening. It doesn't matter what the bridge looks like, really. The point is to find out what's on the other side. 

Here's hoping the gym is fun, over there.

Abundance, or The Place Where Nothing is Wasted

Above the alley at the home we share, Waffle Guy and I embarked on a grand experiment: a rooftop patio garden. 

For him, the garden appealed to his practical side. "It'll pay for itself in one basil plant," he mused as I tallied up the cost of the seeds I'd purchased. 

For me, the garden represented catharsis. To keep a plant alive represented proof that the struggles of the last several years of my life had given way to the sort of gentle day-to-day rhythm that allowed a person to remember things like sunshine and water. 

And so one day I tenderly planted seeds in tiny peat pots and waited eagerly for my efforts to bear fruit. 

It took awhile. And I made lots of mistakes along the way. For example, I left my little seedlings out on the porch while I went on vacation, subjecting them to the fierceness of May in Minnesota. Despite a hard frost, nobody died.

I left my extremely promising lettuce sprouts on the lawn in my backyard, where a newly adopted dog was altogether thrilled to poop on them. Grossed out, I returned the lettuces to the earth. It all worked out, though, as my tomato plants took up much more room than I'd alloted them, and the loss of the lettuces allowed four massive tomato varietals to take residence on my patio.

And then there's the Hanging Pepper Planter Saga. Turns out, those thriving plants I planted in it were not, in fact, the peppers I thought I was planting. The good news is that green and yellow beans grow extremely well from hanging planters. Who knew?

I've over-watered. I've under-watered. I've over-fertilized and forgotten plant food entirely. And somehow, my garden decides again and again to forgive me. 

I spend altogether too much time thinking about the fact that my patio is alive, now. When the Deepwater Horizon story broke, my stomach tied itself in knots every time I saw a picture of an oil-covered animal. One day, while sitting near my little urban garden, I realized that growing my own herbs and vegetables means that no one has to truck them to the store for me. It was comforting, somehow, that those plants reduce my use of fossil fuels. Even if the change was a small one, it was real. 

And that's the thing about planting anything, isn't it? You scatter the seeds of all of your new ideas, and somehow, against all odds, some of them grow. And they change things. And they're real. 

Just like that. 

I can't take credit for the metaphor, but I feel like using it puts me in good company. Jesus and Emerson and Thoreau and perhaps thousands of other great minds have noticed how tending a garden reflects tending to our own lives. 

The other day, upon locking ourselves out of the house, the kids and I lounged in the hammock in my little rooftop Eden and snacked on the beans that had grown where we'd expected peppers. I recalled a period of my life when being stuck in such a situation would have been a highly stressful thing. Instead, I was actually having fun. 

Today I picked cilantro, and looked forward to grinding its seeds to make homemade curry powder, and I was overwhelmed at the perfect efficiency of my garden. A few pots, some soil and some seeds have reminded me that I belong here, on this Earth, in this place, and that nothing that's led me here has been wasted. 

On Fires and Forecasts

Sitting by a fire at the cabin on Big Butternut, Waffle Guy fell uncharacteristically silent as he gazed into the flames.

"Where'd you go?" I asked.

"Nowhere," he said. "Just thinking about fire."

"What about it?" I prodded, concerned that he was about to reveal a dormant pyromania within.

"It's fascinating. You can't predict it, really," he said. "I mean, you can predict that if you light something flammable, it will burn. And you can predict how wind direction might affect it. But you can never even begin to imagine what shapes the flames will make while the fire is burning."

He moved a bag of marshmallows to make room for me at his side.

"It's so complicated," he said. "It's like, we can sort of predict the weather. We can predict a storm, and know where it will hit, and we can tell whether it will be hot or cold. But no one can tell you what shapes you'll see in the clouds. Except with a fire, it's right there in that fire pit. It's so small, and it's so complicated."

Evening sun set the scarlet tops of distant cumulus clouds ablaze while sparks popped from burning oak logs, and I knew that we, too, were beautiful and random and complex and unscripted. I thought about predictions: We will never know what shapes we might take, but we know that there will be love.

Light from Within, and a Waffle Quote

Okay, so the quote is not even kind of about waffles. It's about love. Which I guess means it IS about waffles, because they are the food of love, but I digress.

Check it:

"Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky."

That one comes to us courtesy of our friend Hafiz of Shiraz, the 14th century Persian poet who made his European counterpart, Chaucer, seem like a staff writer for USWeekly. Google him, and you'll find a wellspring of poems and quotes and musings that will soothe your soul. Guaranteed remedy for a bad day.

I've been on the receiving end of a love like that, and I can tell you that it's a life-changing thing to experience. It's easy to think that our resources are finite; that we cannot love without first receiving love; that we all eventually run out of steam. And to a degree, that might be true.

But there are people out there like Waffle Guy, or like my children, or the Waffle Dogs, or some of my dearest friends. There's a sort of person who has an endless capacity to let their light shine, and when you're lucky enough to encounter one of them, it lights you up, too. I'm wondering if those people, like the sun, are fueled by some mysterious and powerful internal reaction that generates light enough to warm and nurture the world. What's the difference between those people and the rest of us?

For the next 24 hours, I'm just going to pretend that I'll never run out of energy. I'm going to try to love like I can light the sky, just for a day. And I'm not going to expect a thing in return. I'm not looking to turn into Mother Theresa overnight. But I am curious.

I'm wondering if there's a spark in me somewhere, just waiting to be fueled.

Waffling on Self-Worth, or the Recovering Perfectionist's Manifesto

They're treacherous beasts, those little voices in our heads. You know, the ones that say things like, "You'll never be good enough to be a professional surfer! And by the way, you'd make a crappy physics professor and an even worse maid! Oh, and while we're at it, you can just forget about being an astronaut, punk. We both know that cardboard spaceship you built when you were seven was the least inspired craft in your neighborhood!"

When those voices get chattering, I tend to forget that I don't necessarily want to be a professional surfer, and I've always hated physics, and that my cardboard spaceship actually kind of rocked in an avant-garde sort of way. Instead, I fixate on the fact that I'm Never. Good. Enough. And it gets in my way.

I'll pick up a new hobby, and quickly abandon it on the basis that it's not going so well. "You'll never be any good at gardening," those little voices will say. "It's been five whole days and your seeds have not yet germinated. Give up now, Plant Killer!!!!!"

And I will. I'll be so afraid that the seedlings won't ever grow that I'll stop watering them. And then they don't grow. And then, as I feared, I discover that the little voices were right. And I believe them more, the next time.

Sometimes the voices aren't little. Sometimes they're real. A rather pesky know-it-all who exists on the perimeter of my life decided last weekend that I'm an unfit dog owner, based on several entirely incorrect assumptions she'd made and never bothered to verify. And so, armed with her sense of self-righteousness, she went on a campaign to stop me from adopting the dog for whom I've been searching for several months. I live in a vibrant, lively home. My children, Guy and I are physically active, financially secure, conscientious people who make decisions carefully and live our lives well. We bring our dogs everywhere we go; we diligently monitor their eating and pooping habits; and we shower them with love, affection, and organic training treats at every opportunity. So why was it that when a voice said, "Kate's not good enough", I stayed up for three nights, wondering if I'd made a mistake? Even when there was indisputable evidence to the contrary, why did I try to make myself believe her?

I have a tendency to believe the worst about myself. I jump on every little bit of evidence that I'm a crappy writer, a bad photographer, an awkward conversationalist. While deep inside I often beam with pride at the compassion and kindness that I've managed to teach my daughters somehow, there's always a question, just below the surface, of whether I've also messed them up. Is it possible, I wonder sometimes, that I'm just too dumb to notice all the millions of things I'm doing wrong?

Sometimes I like the fact that I'm a pretty thoughtful, reflective person. I'm proud, sometimes, that I have a gift for being able to see and understand every side of an issue, and that I'm not bound by a rigidity of spirit. I'm good at learning, and good at changing, and most days, I like that about myself. But then there are the days when I find myself wondering if I'm not nearly as smart as I think. What if it's not that I'm reflective, after all? What if I'm just so slow that I have to dwell on the things that are easy for everyone else?

As I'm writing this, I'm beating myself up for being narcissistic and self-absorbed, because honestly: Do I really think anyone cares about all the stuff that goes on in my brain?

It's enough to drive a girl crazy.

Tonight, I cried really hard because I turned in some photos a day late. They were late because I was so afraid of turning them in, because I convinced myself that I'm an artistic joke. When I finally sat down to look at my edits, I got so anxious about my worthiness as a human being that I decided to skip dinner with a bunch of people who I really like. Ah, Anxiety. You're a marvelous liar.

I've decided that I've had enough. Because while it may be true that I am a procrastinator and an artistic amateur and that I tend to be a bit neurotic and kind of flighty, I'm also smart and funny and kind. With a good editor, I'm an amazing writer, and with virtually anyone's writing, I'm a pretty good editor. I'm loving and compassionate, and once you've earned my trust, I'm a very loyal friend. I listen without judgment, and for the most part, I choose my words carefully. I love my children, and I show them that at every chance I get. I'm silly and playful and I laugh all the time. I love traveling because I adore learning about people who are different from me. And I like that about myself.

I will no longer fear that I am inadequate. I will live for the things I love, and love the things I live for. I will notice that, despite my fear of the outcome, I had a great time editing those photos. I will transfer the seedlings that are miraculously still sprouting in their starter-packs on my deck, and I will pat myself on the back for trying, every year, to add life to the world in whatever way I can. I will write and think and talk and laugh, and simply stop worrying about the voice of my own anxiety, or the voices of anyone else, for that matter. I will only listen to the voices of those who truly love me, and only listen to my own voice when it comes from a place of love.

I will be proud of the fact that my children know they are loved.

And while we're at it, I'll take a minute to feel some gratitude that I am curled up in my bed, by the love of my life, while our new dog and the Waffle Hound snore contentedly at our feet.

It's a gift, this life I have, and I am done packaging that gift in my own fears. And, despite the nagging little voice that's telling me that people will only think that I'm self-absorbed and small if I write about that, I'm going to challenge myself to defy those fears publicly, just in case I find that I'm not the only one who struggles this way.

I'll write about it here because, well, it's been three months since I've written, only because I have feared that I have nothing real to say.

But you know what? Writing makes me feel alive, even when it's scary. And from here on out, that's what it's about.