A Bittersweet Revisit
Variations in Baking, Life, and Practice
On the edge of August, new workshops are live. Sign up for Paper Marbling tonight at Grimm Artisanal Ales in East Williamsburg and Marbled Paper Roses in Greenpoint on Thursday. August classes include online journaling and lunchtime mindfulness meditation. Today is the last day for 20% off in the shop and paid subscriptions.
It’s been a year since I’ve been back: these city streets, boroughs, bright days and dark, Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. I’m counting hundred of miles walked, breath paced to meet faster days, pages written and then turned, hours in stillness, students in classes, sunsets in the hundreds. Many more subway rides in the last year than ever before, more metallic sounds and car horns, more learning and sleep, less baking. Attentive, the same, to each iteration.
Over the horizon of this last year, I open to the heat of many ovens as I did in the weeks leading up to last year’s move. As often happens in practice, I find myself — find myself baking the same batches, turning to the same ways of writing or breathing, close similars, in some form. A move of any kind kicks us up, requires grounding, some structure in the flow, familiarity as counterbalance, a way of finding a sigh of relief in the act of repeating.
Coarse salt crystals shine on top of the morning’s bake. Salt brings out flavors. Salt enlivens the tongue, reminding us of what is sweet. It lands in palate boldly, bursting, bright, inviting a depth of flavor into life with its variety and intensity. I recall brine from the tides. I recall days of arrival, departure. I recall ovens, chocolate, baking. Then into the city, straight on the highways, and emotions passing across time, rising and settling, finding something serene. I am ocean, earth, batch, iterating, repeating in sameness.
I use the same recipe for these chocolate chip cookies — from Mother Grains: Recipes for the Grain Revolution by Roxana Jullapat, a favorite — their consistency a taste of something sweet, salt, familiar; their repeated arrival marking the vast infinity of possibilities, intentions, and variations. A batch of tart cherry, chocolate, oat for a friend in the throes of late nights, newborn time, and nursing; oat flour, fig butter, bitter chocolate, and salt for an outside market in the winter when I ran out of brown sugar but was committed, already mixing; a batch of tahini, oat, miso, soy, in February after another move, baked with the intention to romance myself.
Practice, ground, path. Breath, writing, and baking. Each are ingredients, playing with form, heat, time, speaking the languages and lessons of predictability and change, consistency and departure. Like a batch revisited and repeated, more mornings than not have started in the same park, greeting this body with breath, writing the date on the page. Each grounding places, each teachers, formal practice a way of communications into life’s moments despite change.
Apartments change, seasons change, as do tastes. I am reminded, in a city often fast, near-constantly in flux, about our own insistence in state-change. That each single cell in our systems is in a constant flow of generation and decay, that some things last our whole lives, while some of what we loved a year ago may shape shift and change form. What remains the same, and how do we choose? For me, that’s meant this city, teaching, the practice of writing, the recipe, the form for seated meditation, and with the chocolate chip cookies, salt.
With practice, as with recipes, we ground down. We set the aim, root into the foundation. We choose the form and then perform the action. We accept variables, variation. We are earth, this is the ground, and then we play. When we broaden our horizons, what does it mean to be consistent? To be steady, sturdy with ourselves, while adaptable, not too rigid.
Variation is a practice — in music, a “formal technique where material is repeated in an altered form”. In the dance with form and formlessness, we give ourselves grace to at once be same and shifting, and that all can be true. In practice, this could mean writing for five minutes one day, an hour the next, and then not for another year; it could mean sitting in the same seated style in a variety of environments; or baking to the same recipe, while experimenting with a shift in the grains and ingredients.
Any practice can be like a recipe. Ratios of action and embodiment in a day are weighted ratios, shrinking and expanding based on the size and availability of the material, as if practice were a recipe and time a pantry. What’s present now, and what do you want to do with it? With half a stick of butter, or half the time to practice as usual, all is not lost; rather, the moment is a lesson in adaptability, in stretching what’s there, in celebrating, in rising to meet what’s present.
Here’s what what I have folded into my mind, body, and practice in the year of being back in this humming city, what recipe repeating teaches me: that anything creativity touches is a practice of change and iteration. That strength happens in increments, through stairs stepped, mishaps, silence and insight, brave moments, and celebrations. That slow beach days by car or by train are a balm for a mind and body throttled by a faster city as much as familiar recipes or chocolate. That oat flour bakes softer at first than wheat or rye but lasts longer baked in those chocolate chip cookies over time. That with the right tools, gentle awareness, flexibility and attention, and moments to deeply exhale, there is often some solution, some surrender, some spaciousness, some idea, and often more than plenty. That practice is a folding in of dedication, devotion, duration, getting back up again, feeling into the bitter and the sweet. That dense days visit and the sun always comes, and salt is a must. That the heat of this life turns our skin golden, firms us up. To rejoice, celebrate, and affirm when we have a chance to try, taste, and practice again.
Still, salt on top. Still writing and mornings, still the same recipes straddled between varying boroughs, seasons, apartments. I notice days that are full body sweet; the days that are bitter and brine, the days without salt — how moments predicable like a bake or varied like the ocean each make the sweetness taste deeper. Creative process is iteration, an infinity of combinations. Each instance is a gift, a chance to see city, skyline, shoreline and listen to the inner dialogue that thinks, feels, and says, thank god, another skyline, day, this body breathing, this bird in flight, this challenge, this relief, this dog barking, this busy street, these strangers, these trains. A city, moment, a recipe; a chance to try again. The bitter and sweet, repeating.
Notice salt crystal, sweet moment, delight, daylight, practice emotion: how each lands, peaks, and changes. What delights your life? What do you cultivate with sameness? What do you learn from day to week to season? What stays the same, and visits in variation?
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