Backyard Funerals and Sourdough Boules
This garlic and rosemary sourdough boule is on day 2 of a 3 day long fermentation. I woke up and pulled it out of the fridge to find that it had grown so large it popped the top off its bowl and was trying to spill out. I feel a bit like that, like I’m outgrowing my bowl. It feels as if the container I’ve created for this life I’m trying to live is too small. There is more expansion coming and I’m outgrowing where I am. But what I’m growing into I’m not sure? What changes need to be made now I’m also not completely sure.
I’m uncomfortable, and restless, and like many of us falling into depression under the circumstances of the time of corona.
Today, in our RAW group (Re-Awakening Wisdom 3 spots open for the June session), I told everyone I feel like being alive in the time of corona is like being at war. A part of us has been asked to go off and fight but another part of us is waiting at home, waiting for things to go back to normal, waiting for the part of us that we can’t quite put our finger on to return home. But the problem is that when someone goes off to war they don’t come back the same. Life doesn’t go back the way it was after a war. Things are different, we’re different. Life is different. And right now, the part of us that is away at war is actually missing in action, we don’t’ even know where they are.
One of the RAW participants suggested that we hold a funeral for our lost selves in our backyard. Mark the passing in order to help us digest that things are different and won’t be the same. That would be a beginning.
After RAW this morning I received a package on my porch a shirt and finishers medal from a race I didn’t run, a race that wasn’t even held this year. The Glass City Half Marathon. These tiny little hurts, these tiny griefs are piling up. Races we didn’t get to run, businesses we love making decisions to close or change drastically. Change, growth, but also real and devastating sickness and death.
So often I want to look to the lesson, I value my ability to find growth in tough situations. I want to rush to the end, so I don’t have to feel the pain of change, feel the pain of the fall, the skinned knee, the hurt feelings. It’s hard to see the lesson here when I know things are not going the way I’d planned, things are not going the way any of us had planned…
So I bake bread. I bake bread because it slows me down, forces me into the moment. I must be on its schedule not my own. I bake bread because it reminds me that I’m not in control and yet… . Yet, I feel like I can control the process of baking bread. If I can just get the measurements right, if I can just get the temperature of my oven or of my kitchen right, if I can just get the dishes done in between all this bread making, if I can just get my kitchen cleaned up. If I can just… Sourdough gives us a false sense of control. Many of us are clinging to it’s rhythms because if we can just get it right maybe we’ll feel right again.
Maybe if I could bake the perfect loaf of sourdough bread I could recognize myself again. I could recognize the person who is eating too much, sleeping too much, binging Netflix too much, resisting walks, resisting being outside. Who is this stranger in my house? I bake sourdough in hopes that I’ll revive the inner part of me that’s MIA. I want to look in the mirror and recognize the person who’s looking back at me, but I don’t.
I keep trying to create programs in Yoke and Abundance that will be a life raft and I tell myself it’s for others, but I know it’s really selfishly for me just as much as it for others. I keep creating and offering programming that will help me as much as it will help the women who take part. Creating in hopes these programs might help us recognize who we’re becoming in all of this even if who we were doesn’t exist anymore.
Now excuse me while I go clean up my kitchen and plan that back-yard funeral for the part of me that’s missing, I don’t think she’s coming back.