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.
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.
