Last week I was contemplating seasonality, as folks working in the food space often do. I also spent a lot of previous writings discussing my migration off of social media and away from it’s attention grabbing clutches. It’s already been 28 days, four whole weeks out of the fray. I’ve had more time to read, of course, but I’ve also had much more time to think. As the cacophony of every opinion loud or audacious enough to kick up the dust of the algorithms recedes into a vanishing point, a space has cleared. Generative thought has become less fraught, and my writing floats up more gently.

I notice more about my physical presence now too. When those little 15 minute breaks in my day aren’t occupied with dissociative scrolling, I think for a minute and realize I would like to stretch out my sore shoulder, get some water, and eat an apple. I can’t help but wonder how often my mind searching for dopamine, missed those subtle cues of what actually might be helpful in that moment.

Time also feels longer, and slower. It’s deeply ironic to me that our screens claimed they would make us so productive, but these devices can kill off 45 minutes so swiftly, leaving us accomplishing nothing and remembering nothing that occupied us so raptly. 45 minutes in the physical world, actively writing, reading, stretching, walking, talking to a friend or working, is often transformative.

I’ve spent a lot of time and words talking about my experience with bread baking as a mindfulness practice. Bread asks for a presence of mind and holistic approach to a system of old world knowledge similar to agriculture. Sourdough is a wild yeast, and it follows seasonal rules like the rest of our wild and natural world. To work with a sourdough culture, is to be present to an ongoing art project and science experiment, bound by temperatures and the elements. In warm weather, fermentation leaps into action and the baker must join the race, during the colder season, it is slower and the baker waits. (Larger bakeries use a lot of technologies and fuels for giant provers and temperature controlled environments to avoid these seasonal enemies of productivity). Regardless of my inefficiencies, these seasonal qualities have always brought me back to my pleasure at the physical presence required of the baking life. Maybe my work and it’s craft have allowed me to more easily slip into an older mindset of past times with fewer technologies. In reverse order, whatever draws me to the art of baking, possibly arises from my deep luddite suspicions of most things new and shiny. Chicken or egg, etc.

Here in my drafty 1920s house, in this small cottage bakery, I will put on an extra pair of socks, brew another cup of hojicha tea, and as old world bread bakers have done for centuries before me, I will wait for my dough through the cold season. Today during this 45 minute interval of empty time and “lost productivity” I will spend it writing to you. From where I sit at the window, I can see my cat Crouton lazing shaped like a perfect cat loaf in a sunbeam on the porch. I hear the birds warbling in the giant sycamore tree out front. The light is breaking the grey storminess of the past couple days, the clouds have gone to soft whipped peaks, reminiscent of a Monet painting.

Blog - Alchemy Bread

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