I Cried Today: Rebuilding the Hearth

I’ve been working on my kitchen. That is to say, the kitchen in my family space is being worked on by many hands. I live with others and I’m blessed that the home is oddly constructed. The upstairs is apartment-like because the upstairs had been converted by the previous owner and subsequently rented out. It doesn’t have a full kitchen, but it has the shadows of one. It’s been re-negotiated as it has timbers and beams that are well over 100 years old. I wonder what stories it could tell, what atrocity it has witnessed, and what love and life that have seeped into the wood and plaster not just from the humans living here - but from the life breath of the trees, the minerals, the mud, the soil.

Downstairs my aging parents find solace and peace. The walls in the main living space are basically primer with the remnants of the former color peeking through whispering of another’s home life. My mom landed on a color for this area - a rich earthen color in the orange family. It’s warm, intimate, like uncooked pottery clay. It goes - as they say. I piggy backed on her color selection and suggested I could paint the ghostly kitchen space upstairs with the same color. They agreed.[1]

I’ve been wanting to do it - to make it feel comfy - like a hearth - but I haven’t been okay. Yesterday was the day to begin so I started. One wall. Today - the tears. Behind all the color re-negotiating is a shadow hearth. A place that was obviously a full blown kitchen that only has the ghosts of cabinets and a couple short counters. And I’ve struggled to be present in the creation process.

Better Homes & Gardens is lying in the earthen circle at my feet [see my last post here]. Its pages are crinkled, damp, and decaying as it rots in my soul soil. I went back and read my previous post here on Substack not because I’m narcissistic, but because I wanted to remember that moment; that realization of healing. It was like embracing a journal entry - a point in my life - to remember as I re-member. I wanted to remember the earth in my hands and earthen-text because I’ve had trouble slowing down as my body begs for stillness my nerves won’t tolerate.

Desireé Stephens has been posting on this season of what she calls descent. Her last couple of pieces my attention has captured has been dancing around the word “slow.” She writes in one of her latest posts the following [which can be found here]:

“So if you have been struggling to rest —
If your body wants to slow down but your chest tightens when you try—
It’s not because you’re failing.
It’s because your nervous system was trained to survive,
not to belong.
And now, we are learning to belong.
Inside ourselves.
Inside our homes.
Inside community.
Inside the world we are building next.”

Even as much as my last piece, which centered on her work as well, upset my apple cart, the truth is what is under pressure to decay and compost is the concept of hearth. It’s why I’ve had trouble sleeping at night for literally over a decade. I never talk about this. I don’t like crying. I was never a crier. My chest stiffens and tears and grief turn to panic and anxiety. Tears are stifled. The earth at my feet cracks and dries out as the tension becomes normative - now muscle memory.

Space has always been important to me. Like mulch helps many other plant beings move through winter with some assistance, the hearth for me is the river that runs through my veins. It’s the pulse of the place I dwell as it moves through the other rooms - like differing regions of wholeness and community. It’s bioregional - deeply interconnected even if the landscape shifts.

My living room really isn’t a living room it’s a circle around a fire. It’s outside under the stars and nurtured during the long days of sun but it’s inside. It’s a place where community can be, but not before its passed over the doorway threshold of the hearth. It’s why my living room is a deep green. It’s why the couch is a peculiar color of orange [it goes - it really does - Better Homes style] and the rug is basically Persian styled with a base foundation in blue - for water.

My entire living space is shaped by the elements and the melody of birds in image when I can’t hear them under the sky. And the hearth in all of this, has been a shadow space I haven’t known what to do with - because my concept of it was destroyed before I was even born - but my bones remember. I re-read my own article because I needed to hear myself say what was happening again - this isn’t collapse - it’s initiation. It’s devotion. And back when I posted that I struggled to continue to believe it wasn’t a whole lot of who-haw because it doesn’t feel like that when my body shudders to see an empty hearth where the fire has actually died.

But it is devotion. It is initiation. I’m seeing it. I wouldn’t be digging in my soul soil if it wasn’t sacred or absent of devotion. And that threshold to change is initiation, although I would never think to use this word for that soul space.

That’s isn’t some fluff. The fire is out and the hearth is missing embodied in a half kitchen from probably the 80s. Dead is dead. The stories - gone. The people - erased. The ancestral land - lost. The connections to ways that hold the past, present, and future together? Obliterated. That went out with the fire when the re-negotiation moved from hearth to kitchen and my people traveled from land to land seeking peace and their own way of life. They just wanted to breath, speak their tongues, and do what they do.

Now it’s buried in the origin of names, the records of census, and the stories bound to larger volumes of history where I occasionally verify an ancestor on a ship some place or a marriage record some place else. It shows up in the baby that lived 8 days but died of fever in a book from a foreign land where I noticed the long list of people dying from Cholera. It’s buried some place more sacred - in the bones of my body - in the skin that I have in the so called game. It’s in the whispers of older voices echoing through the darkened sky with the stars beaming down. It’s in the movement of the river nearby, and the trees giving shade. It’s there. I can hear it. Smell it. Feel it. It’s hearth - not kitchen.

For some people the two - kitchen /hearth - are largely similar - one just being an older version of the new with technologically progressed advancement. Don’t get me wrong. I would love to have a stove but I am infatuated with 1700’s construction with that damn pot in the hearth. I like my hot plate and oven. I like going to the grocery store but I love gardening.

I’m not speaking of these two words in a modern parlance - but in an embodied one. Hearth is where cooking and heating happened - where living space was one or two roomed and mixed with outdoor spaces. But for me, in particular, hearth is a symbol - an image - an embodied one that represents something deeper than a fire in a stone setting with a pot hanging inside filled with stew. It runs deeper than that.

Desireé writes at the end of that quote above the following:

“Come inside.
Your body already knows the way.”

I’m not entirely sure I understand these words the way she means them, but in composting Better Homes & Gardens in favor of presence, in favor of warmth, in favor of hearth, I realize the grief in the loss. Dry malnourished soil receives my tears as holy water. Parched but sacred ground receives sacred rain. It can receive this water as moisture as my hands move, crumbling the caked soil into pieces, wetted with salt, warmth, brokenness, grief, trauma, and loss.

I miss my space, the earth under bear feet, the lowing of cattle, the scattering of wind in the trees, the smell of hut, bodies pressed together, laughter, the smell of food, and the feeling of belonging. And I don’t mean some half-baked sense of belonging in a world filled with ideology. I’m talking sweat, tears, laughter, anger, and a kinship that involved a sense of wholeness and not separation performing positional belonging. I’m talking earthen-text. I crave that unapologetically while holding tenuously any nostalgic golden era myth of ancient utopia. My people argue, get pissy, love, have passion, and can be full of shit as much as love. They are human, impossibly fragile, practically imperfect - their shit stinks but they wash their hands before they eat. They would give you the shirt off their back if you needed it and they would walk you home in the rain of desperation that storms through aging bones and heated disagreements.

There is no fucking utopia. Utopia is a perfect world filled with conformity and plastic smiles. It is full of dead bodies and a Starbucks on every corner. It’s picture perfect - like Better Homes & Gardens meeting Fashion Week. No thanks. Give me honest heated disagreement in the presence of elders any day of the week. Give me real tears instead of fake it til you make it in any month. I don’t need a sod house, but the modern hearth is built on fake promises of life when it’s really fuckery foo. And I still have trouble crying and being present in disagreement but prefer it for its honesty even when my nervous system completely freaks out because it’s visualizing some kind of impending violence heading my way.

Titled: Released. ©2025 A-joy all rights reserved.

The Hearth

If hearth is so important than why do I avoid it like the plague? Why do I gasp at the mere painting of a room with a dozen cabinets, a couple counters, an old sink and such? You know- a kitchen. But it’s not a kitchen to me. It’s a hearth. It’s an entirely different space and like the actual room violence has happened. Hearth has evolved into space - re-negotiated away from the circle outside into a narrow corridor of being female. Like being forced to cover up because of weak men, the kitchen has been shamed into utility - as women’s space - for free labor, devaluation, ambivalence, and the space of spills of bottles and plates. Well, unless you’re a chef - a formerly male dominated profession. The professional world of cooking made the hearth a restaurant with stars, glamor, and maleness holding pots and pans and sprinkling herbs. Respectability of course even if their would or could be a side eye from the local dude in front of a backyard BBQ.

If herbs hang over a threshold some place they quickly become pagan, primitive, witchcraft instead of medicine, good food, and healing. It bears the burden of image, of symbol, or perception. Witch and woman, herbs and witchcraft, cats and spells. That’s the world I’m exiting out of attempting to reclaim hearth and earthen-context.

The hearth, the place inside, is mother bosom to me. It’s loving, it nurtures, but isn’t afraid to hold my face in two aging hands and stare me in the eye when something needs a mending. It isn’t violence as love. Its wisdom wrapped in lemon balm tea and a deep understanding of rage as grief, disassociation as strategy, and invitation as restoration. It’s patient but it will tell me if I’m being an asshole.

It’s not a hearth anymore. It’s not a place where herbs hang and boil, where laughter and generosity breath, where the fire heats the home, where people understand where their food comes from. No Walmart, No Amazon, no grained lots and fields focused on feeding cattle shit they never were meant to eat. Like everything else, the hearth is ripped from the earthen-context and squarely re-negotiated into a positional social order stripped of its depth, of its meaning, of its warmth and generosity, of its heat, of its sweat, and of its love and belonging. Now the hearth is buried so deep inside the house that one walks through the circle first and the hearth last. Women, like children, are meant to be, in their case, cooking - but also unseen. Birthing, but in the back. Everything life giving is held under cover possessed while being dispossessed. Anything outside of the order makes you a witch, a Jezebel, a whore, a harlot or - a feminist.

Now the hearth is trending into fucking trad-wife. Better Homes & Garden meets conservative theology during fashion week making home made corn flakes in evening gowns. That’s not hearth. That’s not even kitchen. That’s some delusional nazi shit masquerading as popular humanity.

And while I recognize hearth and circle are situational places that defy a deep gated boundary, it’s the fact they have become what they have they even have walls at all - in the sense that this room is for this utilitarian purpose. Hearth exists in the circle under the stars or the canopy of the trees as much as it exists under a roof in the back of the house. Just trying to write it out I hear surround sound voices, lips smacking with well meant slurs like pagan, primitive, savage.

I guess hearth is hard to explain. I’m probably rambling now. It’s just a ghost to me; a place I’m attempting to describe while recognizing it’s more than just a place symbolically.

In my space - the front door is the back door and the first room is - you guessed it - the kitchen. Company has to cross that cooking lintel before it can even get to the living room - the circle under the canopy. You pass through the fire of hearth before you sit in the fire of rest. Make no mistake, food, like hospitality, moves between any space as blood moves about the body. But it’s the hearth - the heart - that one walks into first. It’s the space that literally used to heat and nourish all the other spaces at some point in time when caves were no longer homes and we weren’t open air living.

So I grieve because as I slow down - well attempt too - I’m faced squarely with ancient and modern violence that has convinced my line of humans that modern convenience was advancement and being a hireling in a hustle economy wasn’t, as Desireé calls it, a “plantation economy.” Now the hearth is melding into something from hell that doesn’t even look like kitchen but smells like sterility masquerading as some kind of loving home environment where women are cooking in $200 plus dollar dresses and curating a fantasy world that is so divorced from earthen-text to churn a buck convincing other women this is what hearth looks like to true patriots.

It is, as it was in my ancestral past, getting ahead by selling their earthen-text for a context - for a subscription to Better Homes & Gardens and now fashion week and complementarian Christianity. The violence never stops.

I’m painting my kitchen in an earthen color today and washing the walls with tears. It’s not a kitchen. It’s a hearth. And today, I’m lighting the fire - the one my ancestors knew and lived with. It isn’t nostalgic. I don’t know enough to be wishful. Can’t you tell? No indeed, my bones know and I hear them [the ancestors] calling in the voice of the season of in-gathering. “Put the kettle on” they say, “and we will sit a spell and remember. We will re-member together.”

So, I weep, I dig through my cramped cupboards for my missing kettle, and I reach for a match even if all I’ve got is a hot plate.

Readings

Stephens, D. B. (2025, November 5). The Season is Asking You to Slow Down. Liberation Education Newsletter. November 6, 2025, https://substack.com/inbox/post/178066810

Stephens, D. B. (2025, October 27). When Food Becomes Control: The Truth About SNAP, Racism, and Community Survival. Liberation Education Newsletter. November 6, 2025, https://desireebstephens.substack.com/p/when-food-becomes-control

Footnotes

[1]It’s their house. I receive permission to alter it since I’m doing it on their behalf to their investment and home.

Featured, Terminal Rebirtha_joyNovember 6, 2025Rebuilding HearthComment