bridges

I sketch a raspberry, a cupcake, a slice of tiramisu, making slow but steady progress on this month’s illustration assignment. I am slow in allowing myself the freedom to make mistakes, slow in bridging the gap between what’s in my head and actually making marks on the page. The brain says maybe you shouldn’t bother. The heart says oh but I will. I witness this back-and-forth, hearing it as if I am some third party, the resistance substantive and real. I stall on this bridge connecting two realities, stand at the bridge’s midpoint, dreams and detritus and desire floating around me. I make a move, I (finally) make a mark.

As I sketch, the cast iron pot sits in the oven and the two preheat in tandem, the bread dough finishing its countertop second rise. I smell a hint of other things cooked in that pot, other breads, stews, soups. Maybe it’s my imagination but the smells warm the house, aroma crossing into felt temperature. When the timer sounds, I slide the dough into the heated pot and cover it with the lid, set the timer again, wash the wooden board on which the dough had risen.

I return to my sketchbook, acutely aware of the ways my attention is pulled, the ways I sometimes scatter before settling back into the place I’d begun. I think of the bread now baking, am glad for last night’s last-minute effort to mix the dough. It was worth that (tiny) push, that (tiny) push a kind of beginning. Each moment is a beginning, building one upon another. There is this late-morning moment, standing on a metaphorical bridge, that directly connects to me standing in the dimly lit kitchen last night, scooping flour, adding yeast and salt and water, stirring simple ingredients that will morph into a beautiful loaf of bread, evidence that one beginning grows another.

This makes me think of my middle age morphing and my own second rise. It’s true that I embody both madcap resistance and gracious yielding, is true that I am myself a bridge of sorts, am my own beginning stacking upon (growing from) the beginnings that have come before. I inhabit places of beginning that are sometimes places of returning, and if I keep going, stone-stepping from beginning to beginning to beginning (with the humility of simultaneously returning) I wonder who I might become.

Set your intention to welcome everything you are and watch your life open like a fist, like a flower, like a gate.
~ Mirabai Starr ~

listen here…