where the hours do not oust one another...

Today is rainy and cold. This entire week has been cold but the sun was out, too. Doing yard work - even hard pruning and raking - was satisfying as the sun heated everything up. My bread baking, therefore, was postponed for today. It is a new recipe for an unbleached white sandwich loaf. Already the first rising looks good - so we'll have fresh bread for tonight's meal.

I cherish quiet, cold days of solitude like this. They bring a measure of healing to my soul. Bread baking days are uniquely satisfying, too because through my failures I have learned that I can't do anything else but pay attention to the bread. It is time set aside and outside of normal time. It feels a little like this morning's column by David Brooks who spoke of both Abraham Joshua Heschel and Makoto Fujimura:

In “The Sabbath,” (Heschel) points out that the first sacred thing in the Bible is not a thing, it is a time period, the seventh day. Judaism, he argues, is primarily a religion of time, not space. “The seventh day,” he writes, “is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, of joy and reticence. In its atmosphere, a discipline is a reminder of adjacency to eternity. Indeed, the splendor of the day is expressed in terms of abstentions.”

The Sabbath, he continues, is not a rest from the other six days. It is the peak experience the other six days point toward. On this day the Orthodox do less and in slowness can glimpse the seeds of eternity. Sabbath, Heschel concludes, “is endowed with a felicity which enraptures the soul, which glides into our thoughts with a healing sympathy. It is a day on which hours do not oust one another. It is a day that can soothe all sadness away. No one, even the unlearned, crude man, can remain insensitive to its beauty.”

Bread baking days for me are ones where "the hours do not oust one another." It is a day saturated with stillness. Gunilla Norris speaks of the rising of a loaf in ways that are wonderfully comparable. In Becoming Bread she writes:

Here in the bowl

is a warmth and time to rest.

The dough is set apart and covered.

Here in the bowl

the rising starts

and creeps up the sides

reaching into time,

into space... into possibility.

Dreams are like this,

full of air,

going ahead of us,

wanting to take us

beyond the rim 

of our horizon,

wanting to lift us out

of where we are.

Dreams are like this... unfolding

a moment at a time,

expanding us, breathing us,

demanding something new,

wanting to take shape.

This is also dangerous

for there are dark dreams, terrible

dreams. And the ones where

love asks the impossible from us. 

Can this be the restlessness 

of God? Are we being dreamed?

The time for has come to shape the dough into loaves: time to stand and deliver and see if I have paid enough attention to the recipe and the stillness that nourishment is possible. What a beautiful gift on this cold, rainy day.