Praise Be the Baker

I’ve been slow. I start, sputter, pause, start. All the while, I’m busy busy. Managing the get-up-and-go. So whatya do all day? Can’t quite say. Where did the day go, by the way… And what is it? This urge to share, to connect, to join. All the while, ever-more disconnected, spread out, relying on the digital space for connection (which is like meeting at the community pool, but the pool is full of pee.)

So here I am. Sitting on my couch, having coffee, and thinking about the ways we toss our ideas into the ether. In big forms and small forms. Toss, toss, toss. I like to take a bag of peanuts into the park and toss them, one by one, to the crows. Every morsel is a bit of communion, kinship, accord. Why should ideas be any different? But boy-howdy are they. The way we use them, anyway.

Thinking about what a messy place the world is today. Waking up to the news of more warring, death, raids, and confrontation. It hurts your heart to look at it. Everywhere, struggle. Here (where I am), with civil liberties, freedom of expression. Back in the States, whew, it’s a dreadful whirlwind full of dust and dirt and tiny little poison darts. Hard to say who’s unaffected? There’s Pakistan, Sudan, Myanmar, Azerbaijan. Let's see, Yemen, and Ukraine, Palestine, Congo, Iran, Los Angeles. Oh, and Haiti, Xinjiang, South Africa, so-and-so mall, thus-and-such nightclub, Smalltown High School. Hard to keep up. Where do we find the space for peace, the moments to love?

I think:

“Start local. Start next door, upstairs, one lane over. I don’t know. Protect your heart. Let it weep when it needs to weep, but feed it when it needs feeding. Always needs feeding. Spewing rancor into the digiworld hurts, dehydrates, desiccates, enflames. Never been one for that, but just seeing it. Yuck. Hating anything burns everything. Hate is a flamethrower, don’t you know, and it’s always there. It’s tempting to pick it up, what with its gentle little pilot flame tickling the business end. Almost like a friendly little candle. Go ahead. Pick it up. No, don’t pick it up.”

Every morning about now, the smell from one of the two bakeries near my place wafts up on the morning breeze. Just did. Just now. And it reminds me of something – something safe, something joyful – and it’s rooted way down deep in the double-helix. I know this because my mind leaps back to the last time I was blessed with the daily aromas of a local bakery: Lugnano in Teverina, 1991. But the feeling was the same then, so my mind leaps back again and it lands in the void of everything that came before.

Just happened again, another pulse, this one stronger. Can’t put my finger on it, but I’m pretty sure we need more of whatever that is…