karma come and getcha

Moving is one of those things, like showing up, that you do for friends. I’ve run out of fingers to count the times I’ve moved my own life from one point to another, and I’m nearly through the toes, which means I’ve learned from experience that moving is always better with a crowd.



Which is why when friends ask, I’m there. (Although I hesitate a little to broadcast this fact to the blogosphere. ;)

Moving karma always comes back around, and sometimes it comes back in curious ways. One of the curious objects that I love in my life is a coffeepot that came to me in a move.



It’s old school, from Ethiopia[1], with a rounded bottom so it can’t stand on its own – I set it in a little dish designed for mixing soy sauce with wasabi for sushi, and it sits, balanced just so, on the top of my Bompa’s bookshelves.



It was given to me by a dear friend whom I helped move once upon a time, who dug it out of a box that we were just about to seal up and said: “Here – you like these kinds of things – would you like to have it?” M is from Ethiopia, and she explained to me that she used it to make coffee – first they’d roast the beans, over the fire, and then they’d grind and boil them, by setting the pot in the coals.

“But won’t you need it?” I asked her, and she laughed. She’d been in the U.S. for several years at this point and she shook her head. “Not at all,” she said, “we use Mr. Coffee!”

So of course I said yes, please.
And thank you.


[1] Lest we forget, coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by, legend tells it, a goat herder named Kaldi – which makes a coffeepot from Ethiopia just about as old school as you can get.