Here's the Dish

I bought some new white dishes last week on sale. (check out the photo above). I've been in the market for everyday dishes for two years now. I've been hobbling along with a smattering of dishes that I bought my freshman year of college and some of my grandmother's everyday china. I only have four plates of each and a couple of bowls and one set is blue and the other pink and green. It hasn't been really conducive to entertaining. So, this new purchase is my answer to that little problem. 

I've only wanted white dishes. No color for me. I want these dishes to last a very long time and go with everything. Hopefully that will be so. 

But these dishes also feel like a big commitment. A big commitment to being a real grown-up. Like this is my house, this is my car, this is my husband and these are my dishes. You only have dishes when you have a decent place to house them and a table to set them on and great food to serve on them at your latest dinner party. 

Dishes make you responsible for all sorts of things. 

They seem to proclaim to the world: I'm here, I'm settled and this is my life. 

Maybe that is why I've been avoiding, delaying, and running from the implications. I've been really unsure for a long time where I am, if I'm settled and what my life looks like. I've been in a giant holding pattern waiting for the next big thing to come along: my fabulous life as a writer in New York, my adventurous life as deep sea diver in Alaska, my neo-spiritual life as hiking guide in the mountains of New Mexico. Something or anything different than the job I work, the body I have, and the indecision that continues to mount in my life. 

And really, I think I just kept waiting for the wedding. 

You know, that nebulous, fairy-tale thing that is supposed to happen to you in your twenties when you've finally found the one and decide to make a life and babies with him. That wedding. 

Yeah, that wedding didn't come. Neither did the shopping together and the setting up of our first house and the choosing of dishes that would signify the life we were living together where we shared a table and food and a daily ritual that could stretch on into forever. 

It's taken me a while to pack up that little fairy tale. It was a pretty one to hold in my treasure box, but it isn't the only dream there. And in some of my pining and moaning for another reality, I've forgotten all those other dreams. All those other places I want to go and people I want to see and life I want to live. I've let those other dreams get a dusty and cobwebby and hidden. 

And it's killing me. 

So, the lid's been taken off the treasure box and some dreams have been dusted off and others discarded. Really, the only dream that truly matters is that I'm using my gifts to serve and love others in this world. That I'm living the best life I know how in the moments that I have right now and not waiting for the future to meet me or the past to catch up with me. I'm just using what I've been given right now, right here, in this very moment. 

So, I bought dishes. Pretty white dishes that make me feel I can welcome the world at my door and serve them meals on understated, elegant dinnerware. And so I can really get this party started called my life right now. 

I'm here, I'm settled, and this is my life. And these are my dishes.