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.
No comments:
Post a Comment