Perhaps the World Ends Here…Headlines from Your Kitchen Table...

At age 90, Scottie traveled with my friends to hear me deliver my first keynote, and he was the first one to join me on the dance floor (yes, it was a unique kind of keynote). His playful, gregarious nature was just one of the many expressions of a well-lived life. I remember thinking he must have had the happiest childhood, so I was surprised when he told us that his earliest memories were of living through the Blitz in World War II in Scotland and the difficult years that followed.

As much as we all miss Scottie (he passed away a few years ago), I would prefer to remember him for many other reasons than the one that comes to my mind most frequently in these days of collapse; he is a personal reminder that children can live through hellish times and grow into amazing humans who care about others, learn to coexist with their pain, loss, and trauma, and live long, fulfilling lives.

Many of us have put all of our energy into shielding our post-pandemic babies, children, and teens of all ages from an ongoing pandemic in a world that quickly left care for the other behind. If you’re like me, you still held out hope that, at some point, things would change, and now, after so much work, sacrifice, advocacy, and struggle, 2025 has turned into an unfathomable nightmare.

But I shudder to think how much harder the past 5 years would have been if I had known what was waiting for us in this “Golden Age” of once eradicated diseases returning, total information blackouts, and the collapse of too many institutions, values, and foundations of our democracy to count. And if that isn’t enough, we also have the million-dollar question about when bird flu will go human to human circling us like a hawk, threatening to make Covid look like a cakewalk, and steadily plucking away the last vestiges of calm, peace, and connection many of us have found in the great outdoors.

We need new sources of motivation, hope, courage, and perseverance for the ever-expanding battles ahead, particularly since many of our material and spiritual resources have already been severely depleted.

I want to turn back to Scottie’s story for some answers. I don’t remember the details about how his family managed the Blitz. But what stood out was how his family made him feel safe despite the ongoing terror. While the war consumed their every waking thought and blankets and tape covered their windows, it seems they didn’t allow it to consume the “air space” within their home or the sense of playful connection and humor that characterized their lives before it began.

I wish I had asked him to describe their time around their kitchen table during those long months. It might have sounded like these excerpts from Joy Harjo’s life-giving poem, “Perhaps the World Ends Here” (Please click to read the poem in its entirety; it’s too powerful to miss).

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

Joy’s poem and Scottie’s story give me some hope- they point me back to some of the few things I can control in this current hellscape: how we spend time together, how we relate to each other, what we focus on during these precious times, and most importantly how safe we feel in each other’s presence.

No matter what lies ahead, I want our children's sense of felt safety to be strong. I want them to know what it feels like to sit around a table where relating to each other is the top priority, not what is eaten or what “manners” look like, so they can cultivate that same spacious acceptance around the tables they will join throughout their lives. I want our family’s kitchen table to be a bulwark protecting our spirits across a wide emotional range of human experiences. I want this place of beginnings, endings, and everything in between to become a vessel we can ride together through any storm. In Joy’s words, “I want it to be “a place to hide in the shadow of terror.” May our table anchor our hearts as we face increasingly grim realities and mount our resistance, and may it never hold even the slightest resemblance to the complete void of humanity, compassion, and love currently embodied around the table of our current administration.

Like Scottie climbing out of his bed, his little heart holding pockets of the joys of the day now muted by rounds of bombers, I want our children to know that while none of our lives can be lived outside the impact of local, national, and global headlines, the experiences, joys, challenges, and struggles of our own lives will always be the most important “headlines” shared around our table and that there is still much joy to be had in living.

Author and Spiritual Director Emily P. Freeman says it best in her Podcast 101: Read Your Own Headlines.

“A well-written headline can tell you a lot both for the world around us and the world within us….there are important headlines that will never show up in your newsfeed. They won’t get any airtime on the evening news or push a notification to your phone. These are the headlines that broadcast what’s happening in the invisible world that lives inside our bodies, the inner world of the soul. The inner world needs our attention, but it won’t shout to compete with the pace of the world…it only whispers. It doesn’t respond to programs, agendas, or to hustle. To hear the headlines of the soul, we have to take a little time to consider what’s going on in the invisible places within us. When we ignore the headlines of our lives, how can we possibly understand the full story our life is telling? Fredrick Buechner, in his book Whistling in the Dark, says this: “…..the extraordinary, commonplace events of each day as they come along, we tend to let slip by unnoticed. That is, to put it mildly, a pity. What we’re letting slip by unnoticed are the only lives on this planet we’re presumably ever going to get.”

I refuse to let the attention economy steal my inner world. The more I let them take of it, the less present I am, the less joy I have, the fewer resources I have, the less connection I have, and the less I remember what is worth fighting for in the first place. Focusing on the kitchen table is a practical, grounded way to gain insight into our children’s experiences of growing up in such tumultuous times because it is where most of the translation between the outer and inner world takes place. It is a predictable, functional place that can help us notice, hold, and appreciate the only lives we will ever get.

Writing this essay about Scottie sent me down memory lane. I found myself sending old videos, photos, and clips of him to our mutual friends. We had so much fun reminiscing about him and other times in our lives that we decided to make Sundays our “personal headline days.” So here’s our new rule: group texts on Sundays can now only be used to share current headlines from our lives or to share old ones that our partners and older kids will enjoy. I am so excited to add this kind of fun and soul nourishment to my current practice of turning off all social media and news for one day a week.

The last line of Joy Harjo’s poem: “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table while we are laughing and crying, eating the last sweet bite,” reminds me of the final scene around the table in “Don’t Look Up” when Randall (Leonardo DiCaprio) says, “The thing of it is we really did have everything, didn't we? I mean, if you think about it."

So, let’s gather around our tables and think about what we have NOW, talk about it, write our headlines about it, cry about it, cherish it, celebrate it, and, by doing so, become even more equipped to fight for it.