Kinfolk is a magazine, a blog, a roving dinner party, a “movement” I first learned about about a year ago. It’s one of the most heartfelt, organic, beautiful things I’ve seen, a testament to what we can create when we create from a place of love, and bring forth the things of our heart.

As they say in their manifesto, Kinfolk is “a growing community of artists with a shared interest in small gatherings.” They feel that entertaining should be “simple, uncomplicated and less contrived” — and they’ve created a whole universe in which the world they envision comes true a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. 

I was first taken in by one of their films, seen below, of a woman making pesto with just her hands, a mezzaluna, the surface of a table, and a bowl. Having always made pesto with a food processor, this film was a revelation, and a reminder of the wisdom of slowing down and doing the work of the hands which, often as not, is also the work of the heart.

When I slow down. When I make things with just my hands and the simplest of tools. When I set the table and shine up the silver and lay simple food out on beautiful plates… When I sit down in a candlelit room and break bread with people I love, new friends and old. Then do I feel my oneness with the All.

Kinfolk is a beautiful reminder, in a world where too few of us have time to do the things that matter, that it’s worth rejiggering our lives so that we can make the time. And here’s the secret truth. Making pesto by hand doesn’t really take that much time. Five minutes tops, ten if you take your time, chopping between sips of wine. Truth is, we can all make time for food and fellowship and kin — in the broadest sense of the word, where kin is anyone who comes to our table to eat and listen and imbibe. Kinfolk offers its beautiful vision of how.

VIDEOS BY KINFOLK.COM

Tags: Community, Entertaining, Kinfolk Magazine, The Life