Porch Prayer

On An Ethic of Mutual Flourishing

In Belonging: A Culture of Place (if not my favorite, certainly one of my most frequently referenced)  bell hooks writes about the porch as A Place Where the Soul Can Rest. In this essay, hooks explains that while the street corner is eternally patriarchal territory, verandas and porches are feminine spaces. I love the way she describes the porch as  “liminal space, standing between the house and the world of sidewalks and streets, [as] symbolically a threshold.” The southern porches of hooks’s experience were where women went when the chores were done, to see and be seen. To embody a kind of sovereignity. To come out on the porch she says, signaled “a willingness to be known.”

When we purchased our house, a yellow farmhouse style spot in the middle of a wild and under-tended two acre patch crowded with pine trees and poison ivy, the front porch was a selling point. It is small compared to the wraparounds of my southern dream houses, but its faded haint blue ceiling complements the yellow railing and a swing at its far end, that “symbol of potential pleasure,”  seats two cozily.

Pre-closing daydreams of the yellow house on High Ridge consisted almost entirely of entertaining. I thought about the dinner parties we’d finally be able to host with a proper dining room and of cocktail parties too, where intimate sites of hospitality throughout the house would encourage guests to move through the open space towards the next conversation and a new set of snacks. The porch would be a perfect place to pause if a guest found someone with whom they wanted to converse further, or better yet, share the swing. I envisioned a setting with tiny white Christmas lights, lit citronella candles, and something tasty: salty little ham biscuits or tequila-spiked watermelon.

Alas. The parties have yet to be. We are in the deep and isolating suburbs of Conyers, there is still that whole global pandemic thing, and frankly, life has been exhausting. While like hooks, I may have “ longed for a porch for fellowship and late-night gatherings” I ended up with one “for quiet and repose.” I still spend a good deal of time here, but I spend it mostly sitting, reading and staring into the pine trees, trying to glean peace or insight in the midst of a broken world. I’m often sharing the space with my husband who will usually be silently engrossed in a car magazine in the chair next to mine.

It was he, in fact, who discovered the nest. Snug in the depths of one of our hanging ferns is a  beautifully woven oval nest holding 5 small eggs, two cream, one speckled, and two of palest blue. Now when we sit on the porch, we are almost always challenged by several very vocal little brown birds who only want to occupy their part of our shared threshold. Moderate googling suggest the eggs may belong to house finches. I don’t know for sure, but the presence of the nest and the interaction between us and the vocal brown birds has reinforced and extended my understanding of the porch as liminal space and site of hospitality.

Porch sitting is a way to be ‘of house’ and ‘of the outside’ simultaneously. Porch sitting is another way for me and my more-than-human family to engage, to encounter one another. hooks reminds me that the porch is my domain, a space where I, in my feminine embodiment, am sovereign. The house finch eggs create a hospitality of visitation that requires a renegotiation of this space in the spirit of mutuality.

Irina Aristarkhova reminds us that “hospitality is a radical relation…because it entails an active gesture of welcoming, greeting, sheltering, and in many cases nourishing.” The house finch eggs nudge me to consider—seriously—how my hospitality might extend beyond care, beyond formal invitation—even to the more-than-human. They aren’t humans summoned to a cocktail party, but I am grateful for my winged guests. I work to extend to them what Val Plumwood would call an “ethics of flourishing.” How can I contribute to their success? Careful plant watering, so the fern’s plumage keeps the nest well hidden. When the little brown birds flutter and vocalize, I excuse myself from that liminal, feminine space, to the back patio, or the dining room table.

In her essay, hooks reminded me that, of all the domestic spaces, the porch is where I might go to be seen, to be free, to practice civility, to build community, to extend hospitality, to experience myself as sovereign. This week, in particular, when I feel like this country is consciously moving against me and backwards on each of these fronts, when its leaders would try to tell me that even my own body is no longer mine, is no longer a place where my soul can rest, I am searching. For peace or insight. My anger is white hot and my grief is ocean deep but I am grateful. For a place where my soul can rest. For the pine trees. For the house finches. For space to think and plan. For the wisdom my porch extends me about feminine space, family, radical hospitality and the importance of defending sovereignty. May this porch and this house extend welcome, shelter, nourishment, and respect for feminine sovereignty always and especially when the country cannot.