A Long Rise

What a difficult space of settling in to new routines and our new place it has been. The last month is a blur for me: of many shifts worked at the restaurant, journaling in the mornings, fishing whenever I can sneak away to the salt. I both believe that necessary things happen in periods of seeming inactivity or silence or waiting and that we often can't see (or even know) what these things are as the days tick by. Which makes months like the last one I've had vital (please, God) and excruciating (help, God).

I am pretty convinced that if I can't find two things pretty soon, this project won't ever get off the ground: a video / photography crew and our first bread maker. I think I've found a solid and viable platform for the book, and a solid enough list of features / content to forge ahead, but now I need a team and an initial subject to gather material for a sample chapter.

Letting bread rise in the fridge takes longer but often tastes better, I'm told. I hope it's the same with this project.

Feeding Bird

If you won't see the bird with me, I can't imagine how this will work. And yes, I can post a picture of the bird for you, but mostly I will have to work in words and you will have to work with your imagination (and my words) and that means we both have work to do. But we will need some time, and probably some quiet, and already you can feel how hard this is, and I can't believe you aren't doubting if it is worth it. I do, don't you know. There really is so much else to attend to. 

I live in a land of water and fish and many things that creep and crawl and this means I also live in a land rich with birds. Most people call it Florida. We have the flitting chirpy kind of birds you may enjoy (or choose not to enjoy) where you live, but also, beautifully, water birds. Great and majestic snowy egrets with their yellow eyes. And Sandhill cranes. Anhingas. Hordes of Gulls and Sandpipers. My God, the pelicans. And so many others that even though this is my childhood home and I've been seeing these birds on the waves and in the shallows all my life, it seems like I see new ones all the time here.  

My parents are something of amateur birders, and take great delight in watching the birds change with the seasons in their Carolina backyard. They love the daily rituals of putting out the feed, disparaging (lightheartedly) the resident squirrels, the bringing forth of the humble garden hose to change the royal bath water. Robins and Cardinals, Red-winged Blackbirds and the unmistakable blur of the traveling Hummingbirds I know straightaway, but there seems to be an endless stream of small, nondescript, mostly unremarkable birds that visit the troughs at their home. When I ask them what one of those might be, they tell me it's "an LBJ... a Little Brown Jobby." 

This morning I found an LBJ of the waterbird family. Sleek and dark and of medium build, it was looking for lunch in an oversized ditch 20 yards from one of the busiest eight lane highways in Tampa. Dale Mabry Boulevard runs north to south very close to our apartment. Home to a mind-boggling collection of strip malls, restaurants, subdivisions, box stores, strip clubs, hotels and diminishing stretches of grass and oak now zoned commercial (or very soon to be), Dale Mabry is an artery of traffic and commerce, and what you must travel to get to the particular Starbucks I was at this morning since our kitchen was low on the magical morning beans.

A small and polite note at the counter with the cream and stir sticks informed me that new regulations have officially been decreed in regard to smoking and this facility, and, as such, Thou Shall Not Smoke within whiff of our doors or complimentary patio seating (overlooking the highway traffic light), and many thank yous for understanding and obeying. Being thus banished, I fired up just outside the parking lot, down by the edge of the standing water of the ditch and there spied The Bird. 

It takes me about seven minutes to burn one at a leisurely pace. I might have watched The Bird for 10 minutes. And this afternoon that's where I began to remember some things as I watched The Bird work. I began to remember how hard, how consuming the work of getting food for the day is for most creatures. The Bird fished hard for 10 minutes in front of me with nothing to show for it. It might work an hour for a few minnows. And how many minnows does The Bird need to catch a day to not starve? How many hours work is that a day? Small wonder the squirrels pillage the overstuffed feeder by any means possible in my parents' yard. 

And thinking about that made me think again about how hard, how time-consuming the work of going and getting, or God help us, actually growing or raising food, has been for almost every human for almost all of time. My body aches, my eyes blur and water with weariness just thinking of it. I thought of my own experiments over the last few years as I've returned to the hunting and fishing of my childhood, things I've come back to with an earnest curiosity and finding, over and over again, humility in the difficulty of these things, terror and wonder at the reality of these things. The preparing to go, the searching, the finding, the catching, and the killing. The taking of life to sustain life. The blood. The gut knowledge of what "meat" (or nuts, berries, leaves) were, the precious weight of them in my hands as I move in the kitchen, preparing food. A meal. A pronunciation of grace. The ratio of work and energy to consumable calories is staggering, even for the most skilled hunters, gatherers, farmers. And the effect on my soul, the transformations in my mind, my thinking, as I dumbly enter into these processes, these most ancient and ordinary rituals, is all but unpronounceable. 

Over time it is easier for me to understand why describing or explaining the complexity and mystery of the Christian communion meal is so difficult: I have insurmountable difficulties explaining Chicken Parmesan or a Caesar Salad. Lord Jesus, what, in your name, is a chicken? I'm a fool to think I know. Romaine I recognize easily enough by now, but our most brilliant minds can't agree on what, exactly, the light that made the leaf grow, is. Particle or wave? We are some (justifiably) proud to say how fast this energy that sustains all life here moves, but we can't even see it: this thing that illumines everything we can see. Seeing. I can't even start thinking about eyeballs right now, but God bless our opthamologists, and also our ingenious technicians that refine the cameras which so cleverly imitate these horrifying gelatinous globes stuck in the heads of everything with breath that moves. No, really, I can't think about eyeballs right now.

Because I'm thinking of bread. I'm thinking of the most magical bread of all: manna. Manna, as the story goes, was the daily bread of some lost and displaced and special ancients. It was sent, somehow, by their God from heaven each morning, crusted up on the sands of the desert they wandered in for decades. Manna came with very specific instructions about when to gather, how much to gather and warnings for those that didn't follow the instructions. This morning, watching The Bird, I was thinking about the context and backstory of those ancients and their Miracle Muffins. 

These ancients, my adoptive forebears, had been slaves for a few centuries to a cruel and ambitious bunch. And in the story of their exodus from bondage we get to see a bit of the internal lives they were carrying around, the feelings they had about their Devine Rescue and subsequent Sandy Sojourn. Yes, they had been breaking their backs for decades out of memory making bricks in the Egyptian sun. (I've never made a single brick in my life, how about you? Much less a brick with no straw to hold it together. What cruel and useless work for the vanity of the privileged, merciless ruling conquerers.) A billion billion bricks and the most dramatic stage exit in the history of our human theater later, and breakfast (and lunch, and dinner) are just given them each day. Their work is to gather it, give thanks. If it's strange to us (of course it is), it was no less for them, given what they named it. Manna, literally translated (I'm told), means "what's it?"

One of the best and saddest and most personally poignant parts of the story of the ancients and the manna though, is the lamenting that begins to creep up among them. Manna yesterday, manna today, looks like a forecast of nothing but manna tomorrow. Wistfully, it seems, they begin to remember and crave the food of their brickmaking days: including the vegetables they could taste only in memory now. Onions and leeks. I have so little experience with leeks I confess I'm in no defendable position to proclaim, but must say nonetheless: how horrible must life have been, how dreary must life have become, for them to be salivating over leeks? But apparently they were, and it was important. Important enough to include in the spare summary of a million chosen peoples' 40 year trek through a wilderness that was ripe with drama, death, road music and such import for the rest of the story unfolding in their corner of humanity and history. 

Important enough for me to remember in my tiny exile today, smoking in a thin strip of grass between Dale Mabry Boulevard and an overgrown ditch as The Bird, one of the uncountable ranks of seemingly unremarkable creatures hunting lunch, even now hunting lunch, looked for life that would sustain its own life. And standing where I was, the easily gotten (relatively, for me, at least) and gobbled corporate coffee in my belly, with hordes of humans stopping and zooming, stopping and zooming on to go and quickly buy something else we didn't make or grow or know in its original glory on my right hand, and The Bird and his minnow hunting drama on my left hand, I wonder again about those leeks, and those people, and what they were really missing, and why. And I wonder again about why I want to make this book about making bread in a world that clearly doesn't need another book (or song, or video, or thing to consume through a screen). Please believe: I wonder so much more than I understand. But I like, I love, to wonder. And I'm grateful, often humbled, when I begin to understand (and led ever into deeper wonder). 

I can (barely) believe my ancients missed the taste of the leeks and other items on their Desert Grocery Wishlist, but it is easier for me, each day it seems, to believe in why I want to make a book about people who make honest bread with their skilled hands. People with names you would never recognize doing the ordinary (for them) and beautiful work of mixing and rolling out and baking and breaking the bread of their ancients. People who at least know how to make something (even if they didn't grow or gather it) that can't be gotten as fast or easy or as cheaply as we most of us do love while we are zooming off to make bricks, or zooming somewhere else after. People that will help lead me into wonder over the bread we can make, and also the daily bread of Jesus we none of us can make, but rather is given us in our wandering toward home.

I finished the smoke, went back inside, wondering, and started to write. And later, before I left, I checked back to see if The Bird was still there. He was, and I saw him catch a fat earthworm in the shallows. And you most likely can too, thanks to the fancy camera in my phone and those horrifying, gorgeous eyeballs in your head. I tell you true: for me, one stalking step forward in that muddy water was more full of grace and deftness than any choreographed dance I've ever seen a human make on any stage.

A New Recipe

One of the things I'm beginning to realize about this project is that I want to make something that I haven't seen before: a truly multimedia rich ebook. 

I have little experience with ebooks in general, so there is a lot of new territory for me to explore and understand as I make decisions about format and platform and hosting and distribution and the user experience.

So far I have roughed out a list of the kinds of content I think I want to include in this project: 

• good writing and storytelling above all else
• brilliant design / layout
• exceptional still photography
• gorgeous video
• ambient sound and chapter-specific music
• audio recordings of the text (read by yours truly, the author)
• at least one version of a recipe for each bread
• profiles of each bread maker
• Behind the Scenes Making of the Bread Making book video and content

I want to make a 12-chaptered book, and I want each chapter to feel like it's own little world, and to have the whole thing held together with good design and the writing voice.

As I begin to try and really explain this idea to friends I am getting more clarity about what the thing is really about: it's about the bread makers and their stories. A book that celebrates, honors, enjoys, explores and beautifully shares their lives, their stories, their families and cultures, their bread. And it's about me: my work to find and get to know these people and understand and play and learn and be surprised and disappointed and delighted and find ways to share what I find, what happens along the way.

In my last post I mentioned The Artist's Way, and this week I'm embarking on a difficult assignment in that book: Reading Deprivation. One week of no reading. I'm taking that to the extremest extremes I can imagine in my media soaked brain: no Facebook Feed binging. No email. No texting (thank God). No re-reading any old work or notes. No research for the Twelve Loaves Project (frustrating). No holing up with somebody else's words. 

This week, if I'm going to sit with some words, they are going to have to be ones in my head, or new ones I make on some new page: like this one. I don't think I will be too missed by too many folks in correspondence this week -- I think the much more difficult thing for me will be to focus my time and energy into making (or more frighteningly), playing. Today I spent a good 20 minutes of writing railing against this assignment and the crazy lady that issued it from the (nearly) antiquated pages of her book, and all that venting was good. It, at the least, showed me how much resistance there is in me to trying it. Which is about all the proof I need to see it will probably be a good and rewarding and surprising thing to take seriously, for seven days. 

Maybe it will inspire me to build bookshelves for our 20 boxes of books this week instead of leaving them in their cardboard coffins. Maybe I will make better dinners. Maybe I will fish more. Maybe I will play. Maybe I will have less hair next Saturday than I do right now. Maybe I will give up the endeavor in a couple of days, or later this afternoon. Let's see what we shall see.

In the meantime, if you have any resources or examples of great ebooks or rich multimedia offerings that you would recommend to me, please post a comment here, message me on Facebook or drop me some mail (to be read and responded to next week): michaeldechane AT gmail DOT com.

Onward,
Michael

Mise En Place

The last week was so full for me and my wife: I started a new job slinging pizzas at a restaurant down the street, we moved into a beautiful (and cozy) 600 square foot apartment with our 80 pound mutt, we unpacked, we celebrated our third wedding anniversary, we enjoyed the courtyard view outside our new front door (full of peacocks, big oaks, morning life-and-death dramas between resident squirrels and hunters from the marauding feral cat clan), we walked by the lake and met new neighbors, I caught my first fish in Lake Ellen, we laughed a lot, and thanked God a lot for so many prayers answered so quickly, beautifully, extravagantly. 

And I wrote precious little. 

I spent a goodly amount of time in the cracks of our days and nights thinking about this Bread Book Project, and what next steps might look like, and I worried and wondered if I was ever going to share the first post to this blog with friends and family, and I daily considered my dreamed of life as a writer around our work with The Artist's Way. Each morning I put the needs of the day highly, and the needs of time in contemplation and working at the keyboard lowly. And a string of days like that can create a mighty groundswell of doubt and abasement and low-level shame.

If you are at all engaging with your own creativity, you must know the kind of thing I'm talking about here. Over the years I find it particularly strong just before and just after starting a major project (or even a small one, at times). And it usually comes raring back about 90% of the way through a project, as the finish line seems nearly mine for the taking. 

This morning I had to make a decision: take one of my full days off this week and go with my wife on a short trip to visit old friends in Orlando... or write. Or at least give myself the space to read, reflect and write. 

And here I am, camped out on my brother and sister's shady, screened-in back porch: the quintessential Florida Room, looking for my words, and thinking again about how good it is to miss those we love, how much it can make love deepen and grow. 

I went back this morning to revisit some of the early inspiration for this project. One of those things is a 15-minute TED talk from a guy named Peter Reinhart on the 12 stages of making bread. I loved (and still love) the mixture of his description of the chemical processes and literal transformations that happen "from wheat to eat" and the beginning glimpses into the metaphorical meaning and potency of the mystery of making bread. 

Peter is no Malcolm Gladwell as a speaker (another of my favorite TED talks is Malcolm on Spaghetti Sauce), but I think his plain language and evident wonder at the thing he's had his hands and head in this long is so compelling. He's written several books along his journey as an instructor at Johnson and Wales, and I've added a couple of them to my new Amazon Bread Reading List. I would be glad to have your suggestions on other books that I should be reading as I refine the scope and real heart of this work. I'm particularly interested in writers that have written at the intersection of the practical means of making bread and the metaphorical and / or spiritual experience of making (and sharing) bread.

My favorite part of Reinhart's talk when I watched it this morning comes about 6:00 minutes in, where he talks briefly about Stage 9 of making bread: Proofing. Proofing is where the baker lets the dough that has been mixed, shaped, rested and panned rise. And proofing, he says, is where we "prove that the dough is alive." It's growing. All the prep work and conditions are good and have been blessed and the thing is becoming something else under its own power. 

I wish I was at the Proofing stage of this project already. In some small sense, I am. I'm trying to do the work (right here) that makes life undeniable. But in another sense I'm still firmly in Stage 1: "Mise En Place" or 'everything in place.' Get organized. Have an ordered place to work. Collect what you will need. Prepare. 

Having actually done this last Thursday when I cleared our new kitchen to make our first meal in our new place, a meal to celebrate our anniversary, I'm grateful for the special joy of being in this stage, even as I hold the anxiousness to begin actually making the words and the photos and videos in tension with that joy. If the end result is half as good as what I made for my wife and I that night, I will be so delighted, and I think you will be, too. 

Starter

My name is Michael, and I want to learn how to make bread. 

I want to meet bread makers: humans with their hands in the dough of their families and cultures for many years who would be gracious enough to show me how (and why) they do what they do. 

I am a storyteller, and I want to share what I see and hear – and especially what I smell and taste and learn – with you. A humble, warm-from-the-oven offering we can all make sandwiches with.

I am a poet, and I want to observe, participate, distill and forge: to be delighted and undone and terrified at beauty. To be overcome with wonder and urging you to all of this yourself. 

I am a photographer and videographer, and I want to partner with other visual artists to help me share this exploration. 

I am a Christian following Jesus, which means, among other things, looking and listening for Jesus. Learning over the years to know his voice. To recognize this man, this God, who says he is the bread of our lives, in the midst of the mundane and the extraordinary days that are the gifts of our lives. To see, with surprise, Jesus, whose body we break and remember and have in our teeth each week in one of the most profound and beautiful mysteries of my life. 

If Jesus is alive, if the Christian faith is true and trustworthy, then I expect to find him at the tables of those that know him and those that don't: in the bread that is the staple in the kitchens of everyone, everywhere. In the Cuban loaves and French baguettes. In the black Russian rounds and the blessed focaccia. In the challah and the tortillas. The naan and the injera. In the breads I don't even know the names of yet.

For several years the idea of a book about learning how to make bread has been bubbling and fermenting and rising in me. And my early experiments with people and flour and water and yeast and salt have only made me more sure I want, I somehow need, to make this book with friends and people who may one day be friends. 

Last week I finally crossed a significant threshold: beginning to write the dream down. Using my words to begin outlining the vision, the hopes, an outline for how to make the thing come into being. 

This blog, this entry, is just another small step in that direction. One part journal of the journey, one part tangible reinforcement and advance against resistance, one part declaration of intent: a tiny recipe of a work long in process, here I take the starter in dusted, grateful hands, and finally begin to make the dough. 

I welcome you, whoever you are, into this story, whatever it will be. I may not know you, but this is for you. We may not end up in any place I expect to wend by word and wondering, but may we find our bread for today: something good in our bellies, good for our souls, and enough to share.