Conversations at the Kitchen Table #3
When the ordinary pauses long enough to speak
The door was open. The kettle was warm. And there’s always room at the table for one more.
Here, it al began; an invitation by Kim Williams, M.Div.
I answered, and was invited to sit at his metaphorical kitchen table, a conversation began—quiet at first, simple, almost ordinary. And then it grew.
Not a conversation that passes quickly, but one that lingers. One that moves deeper than most, where listening matters as much as speaking, and where presence—and even the pauses—carry as much meaning as the words.
See the previous moment in this conversation here.
And here…
Now, the conversation continues…
The Conversation, part 3
Be: I lower my eyes to the tea for a moment, watching the thin spiral of steam rise and disappear into the quiet air between us. His question lands somewhere deeper than thought, the way snow settles into the hollows of a field.
“When I stop performing…” I repeat slowly.
My fingers move along the warm curve of the cup, as if reading a language written in heat.
“At first?” I say with a faint smile. “Silence.”
“Not the peaceful kind people write poems about. The other kind. The kind that comes when the wind finally quiets and you realize how hard you had been leaning into it just to stay standing.”
I glance up at him then, meeting his eyes with a softness that speaks without needing words.
Outside, a loose flake drifts past the window, slow and wandering, as if even the winter air has felt the warmth of the room and begun to loosen its hold.
Kim: I sit with that for a long moment. The honest silence. The silence that arrives not as peace but as exposure ... when the storm you’d been bracing against finally passes, and you discover you’d shaped yourself around it.
I set my cup down gently. “There’s a tree I know,” I say, almost to myself. “At the edge of the woods near my house. All winter, it leans at an angle that looks wrong. Like something broke it young.”
I pause.
“But come March, it blooms from that exact angle. Reaches toward the light from exactly the place it was bent; full, vibrant, and unique.”
I look at her then, steady. “The silence underneath isn’t empty. It’s where the lean was. It’s where you find out the shape of what held you.”
A thin thread of light moves across the table between us, the first suggestion of afternoon shifting, winter loosening its grip by a single, quiet degree.
“What does the silence have the shape of?” I ask. “When you let yourself feel it?”
B: For a moment I do not answer.
His words about the leaning tree linger somewhere inside me, like a bell that has been struck but has not yet finished sounding. I feel a quiet sense of wonder at the image he chose — that crooked tree blooming from the very place it was bent. It touches something in me. Something old. Something true.
I look out the window again.
The world outside seems to have shifted while we were speaking. The light has softened. Warmer somehow. A subtle beam of sunlight slips between the branches, touching the earth with a gentle glow, as if the afternoon itself has decided to lean toward spring.
For some reason, I suddenly long to step outside. To feel that light. To see the tree he spoke of.
I turn back toward him. When our eyes meet, there is a brief moment — almost unsettling — where it feels as if he can read the thought that just passed through me. Or perhaps I only imagine it.
His question continues to echo quietly through my mind:
What does the silence have the shape of?
When you let yourself feel it?
I hesitate, then smile a little, feeling a faint blush rise in my cheeks.
“I’m not sure yet,” I admit softly. I glance toward the window again, then back to him. “Would you mind if we went outside for a moment? To catch some air… and maybe see that tree you mentioned?”
My fingers wrap around the cup again, almost apologetically.
K: I nod and begin to rise, reaching for my coat on the hook by the door. But something makes me pause, hand resting on the wool, not quite lifting it.
I turn back to her, just slightly.
“Before we go…” The words come quietly, almost as if I’m thinking aloud rather than asking. “Pretend for a moment that you know. That somewhere underneath the silence, the shape is already there… waiting to be named.”
I hold the stillness between us, easy, unhurried. Not a trap. An invitation.
“If you knew..., what would it be?”
A breath. The afternoon light has moved another inch across the floor, pooling now near the door, as if it too is waiting to go outside.
Then I smile, lift the coat from the hook, and hold it open, an old gesture, quiet and instinctive.
Outside, the air is that cold of late winter, loosening its grip. Not warm yet. But willing. The kind of air that carries the rumor of something green underneath it, even when the ground says otherwise.
I lead her along the edge of the yard to where the tree stands.
Leaning at its old improbable angle, the way it always has, as if it decided long ago that vertical was someone else’s ambition. The bark is dark, with the last of the season’s damp clinging to it. But along the lower branches, almost apologetically, almost without announcement, small buds. Each one is a small, closed fist slowly remembering how to open.
We stand beside it for a moment without speaking.
I don’t point. I don’t explain. I simply let her see what the tree has been doing all this time, quietly, without witnesses, without applause, bending toward the light from exactly the place it was broken.
The silence has a shape after all.
The conversation beneath a note slowly grew into a collaboration.
Those who wish to listen
are welcome to sit with us at the kitchen table,
and stay with the conversation,
with Be and me.
To be continued…
Thank you, this means so much ❤️ I’m grateful that you sense the care with which each word was chosen. 🙏
Always a pleasure to listen in.