Bittersweet
Creative fires and transformation
The thread of this letter arrives as I’m sticking my head in a hot oven last week. I have set the task of baking through a mountain of flour when I start pulling on the thread, mining my life for ingredients and curiosity. I am baking in the middle of a heatwave in the house from which I am extricating my life, business, and presence, where flour dwindles lower, but not as fast as the days seem to be slipping past. Soon, there is more flour than there are days left and I am aware of this pressure as I’m making cookies for what seems to be the hundredth time this month, a relentless dedication to miso, tahini, chocolate, and using what is left. Fire is transforming sugar, acid, flour, fat, flattening circles from chilled spheres and cooling on the rack, as heat from last week’s letter on repetition carries over into this week’s writing.
I am repeating an idea, iterating, following the thread. I’ve done this once before, this move, and here I stand at the edge of change season. I am moving to New York today. After days of hauling earth, bags, boxes in the sun, I am baked; like the baking sheets I pull from the oven last week, I am cooling for one final morning on a friend’s porch as the day begins its reveal. The contents of my life are currently packed away. They are expertly laid out like a Tetris game. They are packed up in bags that are color coordinated. They are stacked according to need. All of Odette Press mixed in with my belongings gathered in the back of a sage green Highlander. Clothes, a few books, an abundance of paper. I cross all fingers nothing melts in this heat.
There are push times where we start our inner fires to move faster and slow times, where we press against the asking for urgency. To feel the flow of understanding, tasks ask that we revisit them well, finely tune in with our sensing and listening, and that we repeat them: writing, baking, connecting, creating, focusing, daydreaming, or being. I have been writing in a journal and baking since I was a child, blank pages filled with feelings and waves of salted chocolate chip cookies, attentive to each iteration. I have learned to love a recipe and the potential it contains within, how when all else is changing, the recipe is one that holds the ground and stays the same.
There’s something to be said for doing something not just one time, but a thousand times, with the hope of the results of sameness and accepting the inevitability of life’s changes. A recipe is familiar and with baking, it asks for precision, lest a bake be tempted to failure; follow the recipe and likely what you want will take form. With each bake, I have learned the edges and the boundaries of the materials: what flours will do, what to do with time, how I prefer the striations yielded from chopping a bar of chocolate instead of the uniformity of chips and my unyielding preference for coarse, flaked salt that brings a sound to it — a crunch in the teeth, a burst of yes in the mouth. I learn how thinking and feeling only goes so far and how at some points, the next right action is activity. As a teenager, when I’d moved once before, turning to the quiet space of baking gave me the space to process the feelings I had but had an absence of words for. No thoughts needed, then: just following the movements of body and ingredients, embodying the recipe.
As I bake batch after batch of cookies, filling page after page, or move, I get to know the nuance, what I want, and the intricacies. Chocolate, bittersweet, in bars. Rooms with sunlight. To prioritize slowness. How lately I sleep better if I write out the whirling mind before bed. The foundational processes we turn to give us the ground to pour into when the stuff of life feels shaky. Grounding into the body, I remember that all of the what ifs floating in my brain are thoughts, protective parts vying for safe potentials speaking up out of safety. In transitional times, rooting into embodied form gives the thinking mind a place to settle.
I am lingering in the liminal space, here at the precipice of the unknown. Consider this ripe; consider this a void space. Consider this like the unknown of sitting by lamplight or fireside while the whole atmosphere around is unknown with nighttime. At times it feels exhilarating and terrifying. I listen deeply to where the edge is. Change moments are ripe with risk and potential. What’s out there? We might ask. We sit in the nighttime, look out to the starlight, and wonder.
To root into a familiar rhythm, then, is grounding. There’s nothing the nervous system rejects more than discomfort and change, and that extrication from familiarity would cause a rupture to a feeling of safety makes sense. A move is a rupture; a birth into new space; a rhythm’s change. Part of why we do new, novel, or challenging things is that expansive space that we enter into in the process of our remaking. I cannot tell you how many deep and slow breaths I have taken lately, only to be reminded how powerful the mind is when the body detects change — no, no, no, no no, no it says. So I tune my attention to the ground when I can, into real and felt sensations, into imagining ripe potentials, intentions, ideas, and possibilities, and I start this letter to you. “To be truly visionary,” bell hooks writes, “we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” A grounded imagination is a visionary life’s recipe.
I have moved states several times in my life, but I have baked more batches of salted chocolate chip cookies and started even more days with writing that I am reminded how ease coalesces like salt crystals moving, forming slowly over time. We write thousands of words, phrases, and pages before they start to feel like home; we try a recipe even more times before they feel real and familiar. An address is the same. In times of change, what can we root into? What feels soothing? What can we imagine onward through those unknown horizons? What do we steady into despite the shifting daily realities?
What I learn about change is that avoiding grief only backfires, and that in the center of it is the gift of transformation, and that there are times and channels available for words and talking, and other times where only embodiment and activity will do. These moments are the bittersweet ones — long walks, deep talks, chopping chocolate, rolling dough, and sharing with friends — something sweet and enlivening, with salt on top to bring the flavors through.
This week, write, rest, move. That’s what I’ll be doing. A full moon is said to be an illuminating, clarifying time. List anything you’re finding grounding or clarifying around you. Draw, express, reflect. What’s lit up in your life this season? What parts of life are asking for rerooting or reimagining? Pick through the memories, notice what lingers. Separate the fruit from the pits and discard. Slice with a sharp knife the thoughts that have out grown your desires for thinking. Bring forth the talismans of the future with you.
this week,
Baking up these on repeat and these, adding miso and tahini to both, though this recipe was my first ccc love eighteen years ago. This week I’m resting and driving — here’s a playlist I put together for a drive.
experiences
August 13 Suminagashi Basics (Brooklyn)
August 19 + 20 Renegade Craft Fair (Brooklyn)
August 24 Suminagashi Basics (Brooklyn)
August 31 Pamphlet Stitch Bookbinding (Brooklyn)
Head to the recording library for guided writing experiences on intentions, ideas, focusing, and courage. Paid subscribers here on Substack have access to a guided writing and reflection library — videos and prompts for creative process.