Omi cake

By Conrad Beaubien 

No surprise that in the French language the word grace is feminine, la grace. To me the word’s significance is also somewhat like the Spanish “la elegancia” elegance in life, a somewhat allencompassing gesture of the sublime, a treasure token delight of the senses. It just is.

Soccer players can carry grace of exertion onto the playing field; the bow of a canoe breaching calm waters has elegance; boisterous and strident geese sliding onto Pleasant Bay are elegances in time—instances of beauty captured in the flick of an eye. And it’s that flick of an eye, impossible to contain, has us wanting to express the wow factor…je ne sais quoi, the extra.

While the word grace is also commonly used in religion, as in I remember occasions of Father Divine sentencing this sinner in the confessional booth to a repeat run of Hail Marys as only the beginning of his to-do list, which was no doubt why at that point and going forward beyond my early teens I took a pass on religion, acquired a beret and was saved by the songs of Leonard Cohen.

Most importantly I believe that grace is about receptivity, it is about the yin, about receiving. I mention all of this because, while I can only speak for myself, I realize in past months I have seldom nurtured grace in any way, lost track of it in lockdown; dishes in the sink and long johns drying from the shower rod are times that tell me that something is missing; but just the other day an occurrence came to nudge me to what grace truly means.

A friend stopped by my way, decked out in pandemic costume de jour, facial covering and all. She was on a mission to bring me a sample of a pound loaf, fresh out of the oven. She said it was her mother’s recipe and called it Omi—German for grandmother —cake. I mean that in itself can add light to an otherwise uneventful day, but there was extra. Extra in that the carefully wrapped sample had been placed in a tea cup. That tea cup was accompanied by another that held samples of home-baked cookies. Each cup came with a saucer on which was added a small paper doily. The final touch was a small handful of flowers that quickly found their way into a discreet glass vase. The gift was intended for me only but it wasn’t long after when my friend said her goodbyes that the setting on the table seemed to invite others from the past to sit with me for tea; tea that I would make and pour from my Royal Dalton teapot that had sat unused for awhile. The moment stirred reminiscences of tea rituals I have enjoyed in past through times of thick and thin, but also it was a reminder of the feelings they had rendered in common—the calming, gentleness, a mothering that life sometimes offers unexpectedly especially in moments of distress.

I recalled a time when, in the midst of a major house renovation with debris everywhere that the loneliness of a rainy autumn day was enough of a pile-on to just want to quit; quit as in forget about it okay? For some reason the image of a tea setting in my English grandma’s south facing kitchen on a sunny day in June came to me. Somehow a linen table cloth and Belgium lace curtains and fine bone china and those little sandwiches people serve at teas came as flashbacks of comfort.

I was then prompted to clearing a path to a little round table that sat against unfinished drywall and I moved it by a window; searching through packed boxes I retrieved a tea cup and saucer, red cotton table cloth and then boiled the kettle. I quickly ventured outdoors to cut some grasses and a small branch with bramble berries on it. It wasn’t long after pouring from a flowered patterned tea pot, and where a peanut butter and banana sandwich and a tin can cum vase with greenery stood in for a fancy, that the hard cold rain suddenly quieted.

The room transformed into apparent sunlight and it was then that I was reminded that moments like this were more than about objects, they were about nurturing, about opening to caring for ourselves especially when we are alone.

Later on the recent day of Omi’s cake I went to find my donkey friend Thunder down in the paddock below a rise of hill. As I walked towards him I made the connection that many of us tend to segregate the yin and yang within us, the balance of male and female that inwardly coexists, something we unconsciously draw upon as we navigate through life. Grace is about receptivity, being open to receiving, to creation and it is creativity that has kept me alive through many life torments.

The Omi cake—the grandmother cake—was a gift that I gladly received along with the delicate beauty of made-in-England Tuscan china. There is no gender to prove here, but to simply recognize that nurturing and healing is accessible to us by being open to receive. And yes, Thunder is surely here in my life to help me remember that even a no-fuss kinda guy like him yields easily to receiving and a grounded nurturing is what he offers in return. Most powerful of all is that the female in all our lives is true to the mother of all—Mother Earth. Ancestral people knew it; they honoured and held ceremonies to celebrate that fostering. Today I am blessed to have two china cups and a donkey to remember that la grace is a female word, and also what it means to be nurtured.