Pumpkins seeds and onion skins

It's one of those ordinary mornings. Grant plays OPB in his room, I hear him shaving in the bathroom. Bill the cat is following him everywhere and jowling at him. I'm drinking coffee with cream that has slightly turned, making the flavor pleasantly sour and pronounced. The coffee mug is a soft jade green, or grey green. Almost milky in it's semi-transparence.
Nick and I would play this game walking around the neighborhoods, in the same season, almost a year ago. Every house we would identify the name of the paint color.
"Hushed mustard."
"Retreat evening blush."
"Stereotypical pink."
Playing this game with my coffee mug I assert, "bluey-sage," "opposite-of-crimson."
Maybe I should have my students do this.
Megan the tarot-reader.. why did she come up in my thoughts? Ah, VOICES.
We spoke about Milla Prince and her strong voice. I remember teaching over the summer and feeling my soft voice in my throat. Voice of authority. I remember Ted yelling at the students to listen to me and how weird that felt. To have a loud voice advocate for me because my voice wasn't strong enough? Why do people need to be yelled at to be heard?
Milla Prince didn't yell, but she had a captivating ability to hold her audience. Speaking from a reverberating place.
"Singing lessons," I had told myself. Years ago I took a single singing lesson from a man. We were going to work on trade. He needed illustration work for his band and offered singing lessons in exchange. Our first and only lesson was breath work. Blowing over paper, blowing out a candle. Projection of the breath and by extension, the voice. Authority. Amplification. A super-power. I remember hearing a radio show about a sociologist who wanted to test the"ten-thousand-hours-to-mastery" theory. Her goal was to create the "loud sound" she heard from professional singers. She worked with a voice coach who kept telling her, "you're so close, keep going." Eventually it came. It clicked. A "My Fair Lady" moment.
I think of all the work I do and how much of the teachers in my practice encourage continuous singing/conversation. In a radio segment I just heard African-American cook and culinary historian Michael Twitty says, "having conversation with the utensils that you use as if they're your friends, as if they're your allies in the act of making your food."
Speaking. Voices. Amplification of our intentions. Manifesting our will into the tactile realm.
Another thing Megan and I spoke about was accepting the role of the inconclusive.. allowing the process to be in itself, the piece of work. Letting the wheel of fate spin.
"Leaving My Father's House," a compilation of women's essays spoke in the introduction of feeling uncertain in it's final stages of publication. I want to quote her on this. I just requested the book at the library.
I feel a big part of person and my writing holds this quality. Uncertainty. Process-oriented. Thoughtful rather than conclusive. It's been a challenge accepting this in myself because there isn't a place for pondering in the world. Pondering happens inside. In the kitchen, in the cooking pot. Not on the table or on the serving plate.
It's awkward.
The voice. The words. The thoughts. The world is made from a linear method of completion. It's not for the soft. The coffee in my grass-cream colored cup is triumph. I did not use the word patrilineal correctly... I need to put socks on, it's cold in the house.