Loungechair anthropologist philosophizing

I'm convinced that working with your hands is fundamentally nourishing. As the Shakers said, work is a gift to the person doing the work. Why turn it down? When you knead bread, you're kneading all the channels and acupuncture points in your hands. Whether or not you call that a spiritual benefit or just a physiological one, doing something with your hands is just incredibly invigorating to your whole body. -- Edward Espe Brown

Since I've had a bit more time at home with the end of the crazy winter term, I've taken up baking yeasted breads again, something I hadn't done by hand in years, maybe since I was living in San Francisco.

I bake my yeasted breads mainly from a second-hand copy of the Tassajara Bread Book that my mom bought at an estate sale at the home of the then-recently-deceased artist Susan Seddon Boulet. Apart from the simple joy that Edward Espe Brown always brings to me, there's something added in baking from Boulet's old cookbook, complete with age and water spots, an unexplained hole punch through the front cover, and a recipe for "Homegrowen Chocolate-Hazelnut Torte -- Chronical - Nov. 92" penned into the last page in what I assume is her own handwriting. There's something so intimate and human about it that only enhances the already earthy experience of handling dough on a wooden board and participating in its transformation over the span of several hours.

Baking, like anything else, has a remarkable way of serving as a microcosm of life, and a vessel of wisdom that often seems obscured by the strangely anti-quotidian life we seem to lead in the fast-paced, sanitized, convenience-oriented world of the metropolitan United States. When I clip fresh thyme and marjoram from my garden plot or toast up a fresh slice of spelt-wheat-buckwheat bread I produced myself, I can't help but wonder whether the gains really outweigh the losses in the way we've established our lives here.

There's a funny sense I have right now that my life has opened up its arms to me in a newly gentle and loving way recently. Is it the friends who are dear to me? The quiet beauty of waking beside the lake in the morning? The lilacs in bloom all around? Spying rabbits, turtles, fish, snakes, and deer around the place I call home? I'm not sure -- and I don't know what it means. But yesterday, on a solitary walk through the woods beside the Huron River at sunset, I became newly aware of the depth of my gratitude, even in the absence of certainty.