Pancake Photos

Pancake Photos: 

several years ago, and for reasons I no longer remember but probably only on a whim and to make my friends smile - I posted a photo of my Sunday brunch pancakes on social media. And then continued to do so for several years. There was no reason or significance to this other than the smiles and jokes that followed. My pancake photos became a way of saying hi to my friends, saluting my own particular weirdness, and something more as well...

it signified my connection to the world.

only I didn't know this at the time. 

Sunday brunch and the occasional diner at our favorite vegan restaurant became a tradition for my wife, and then ex-wife, and I. It was a thread through our relationship, binding, keeping us connected in a meaningful way. We could put almost anything aside and spend that time together, a soul match of company and food, we were friends with the staff and always felt welcomed. 

a loving atmosphere all around.

my pancake photos, for me, became a symbol of all that was right in my small section of the world. This all ended with the pandemic shutdown, life shifted suddenly for all of us, connections fractured, and I retreated to care for my ailing father. I'm happy to say that the thread remained between my ex-wife and I, in fact bound us tighter in many important ways. But it's taken me some time to recover from a series of loss over these past years, or maybe more that it was a reluctance to emerge back into a world that still felt in need of a true and deep healing. 

so I've been in retread for some time now.

quietly so, 

meditating, yoga, writing, and predawn walks immersed in nature.

healing. 

recent events in my ex-wife's life brought cause for celebration, and the thread of our connection brought us once more to brunch at our favorite vegan restaurant. We're almost at a new year now, and tentatively, I'm ready to face the world once more, maybe not fully emerging from my self-imposed retreat, but just enough to make some new connections and expand my own little world again. 

yesterday, a new pancake photo was posted. 

it's a start. 

just a small re-connection. . 

~

Peace, Eric