Last month at Elvie’s Open Mic Night at Elvie’s Studio our Beit e’Shai tea ceremony reflected on how we move through Bitterness.

Serving bitter herbs to aid digestion.

How do we even begin digesting bitter thoughts and bitter feelings…

In between performances, I shared some words, on sacred rage, feeling bitter and tasting bitterness, on sitting in bitterness, and plant wisdom that holds us, that alchemises and transmutes.

By the end of the night I realised that Bitterness is best digested in community.

There is only so much we can process alone.

I also shared a reflection on Olives.

How they’re naturally bitter.

How the process of making them digestible involve crushing or slicing them a little, washing them for weeks, then placing them into jars with brine. It is only with time, the healer of all healers, that their internal bitterness extracts into the brine. Making them edible. palatable. digestible.

Bitterness sits still in the vessel. In the brine. With the olives, but outside of them. We honour this feeling of bitterness, we acknowledge its lessons and work with it just as our olives teach us to. We sit with it in our vessel, it sits around us, rather than inside us.

When people don’t make sense, plants do. I’m grateful to the olive trees for their sacred wisdom.

Join us for tea, spoken words and poems at Elvie’s Open Mic Night, tomorrow night Friday 23rd February.

I won’t be sharing words this time, will let tea speak for itself. Tea is our poetry here at Beit e’Shai.

I look forward to hearing your words and being in community with you again.

Thank you Ella for bringing together our community of poets and dreamers in another evening of reflection.

Images from Rasha Tayeh’s ‘On Food & Memory’ solo exhibition (2016).