Breadmaking

Breadmaking by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams from Hummadrumz (Seren)
Forgive the flour under my fingernails
the dabs of dough clinging to my skin:
I have been busy, breadmaking.
So easy, the flakes falling feathery
into the warm bowl, as I dip and measure
and pour the foaming treasured brown
yeast down to the ground grain.
O as the barm breaks and scatters
under my working fingers like a scrum
of tides on shifting sands, the secret cells
swell, you can smell their life
feeding and beating like blood
in my bunched palms
while I lift the lump and slap it back again.

It moves, like a morning mushroom,
a breathing side, stirring, uncurling
animal nudged from sleep; so I pummel
and thump and knuckle it into shape
to see it unwind like a spring
soft as a boneless baby on the table.
I have covered it now:  let it grow
quietly, save for the least rustle
of multiplication in the damp bundle
telling of motion in the fattening seeds.
It's body's an uproar as I open the burning door --
it gives one final heave, and it blossoms out
to the brown loaf I have spread for you.
Taste the butter touching its heart like snow.

Once upon a time I spent my Saturday mornings making bread.  It was when I was living in an apartment in Glover Park.  My roommate worked an odd schedule, afternoons and evenings during the week, bright and early on weekends, so I often had the place to myself.  I'd get up, make a cup of tea, clear the clutter off the table in our tiny dining room, then start measuring and kneading. 

When I first started baking bread I used Nick Maglieri's How to Bake as my bible.  I chose recipes at random and tried out several before I found one that regularly worked well for me.  Eventually I got to the point where I didn't need the book.  I knew the recipe by heart and could adapt the ingredients depending upon my mood or what I had at hand-- tossing in a handful of chopped kalamata olives, some fresh rosemary from the pot of herbs I planted outside, dusting the crust with parmesan and cracked black pepper or sesame seeds and sea salt.  Since our oven was in keeping with our diminutive dining room, one loaf was the most I could bake at a time but it was usually enough for the week.

It struck me as I read today's poem how much meditation is like breadmaking.  You find a method you want to try, assemble the ingredients-- perhaps a special location or posture, maybe a mantra or image on which to focus-- and then you begin to put it all together.  It can be exhilirting at first as your soul feeds on the silence.  Sometimes what bubbles up feels like agitation, at other times, fermentation.  But if you've found your perfect recipe, you sense something is happening.

So you start adding more ingredients, more time, more silence.  There comes a point, however, when you may start to feel stiff and unyielding.  And then it happens:  your soul starts to feel like it's being pummeled.  Of course, there are those lovely times when meditation leaves you feeling as soft as a boneless baby but those moments are fleeting.  Just as dough needs to be worked in order to form the gluten that gives the bread strength so it doesn't fall apart when baked, so does your soul need to be kneaded sometimes in order to give you the strength you need to face the heat of daily life . . . and to nourish others. 

The question to consider today is where are you in the process?  Are you fermenting?  Baking? Being kneaded or needed?  Or maybe just resting?