Dreaming and Awake
Today I present you with a poem selected for us by Dana Koster. Dana sends me a poem each month in the subscription check out form, and I thought I would share this with you. Until next week my friends.
When I Wake My Daughter for School
She Tells Me I’ve Ruined the Dream She Had
by Sarah Carson, from the September 2024 issue of Electric Lit
Yes, love, I say to her: Don’t I know it?
And yet.
Just imagine— how much else can be ruined by love,
by that which we’ve dreamed might love us in return.
Here, dear, is what I’ve been trying,
failing every which way to teach you:
the world is equal parts reverie and premonition.
Sometimes to dream is to see the world as it could be.
Sometimes to dream is to see the world as it is & remain awake.
Quick, Look! A distraction...
I really enjoy writing my little notes to you, and if you like reading them too, you can find these mini-essays archived here.
I’ve managed to spend more time reading and writing and drawing (for pleasure!) this year than I have since college. From age 18-20 I would fill notebook after notebook with musings and poems, botanical sketches from the steamy greenhouses in the agriculture department, and figure drawings of art studio models and my friends. I read voraciously for an english degree and also in my free time. Poetry, classics, ancient history and chapbooks from young local writers. I read the New York Times that I took home from my job at Starbucks. I read everything by Michael Pollan and a lot by Susan Orlean, and I thought that maybe I wanted to be a journalist, since I doubted I would make a career as an artist. I loved to hear a story and try to write a person down. Their story and persona. I loved the way Steinbeck wrote real people. Poor people, blue collar people, farm laborers, shop owners, the kind of people I knew.
I worked a lot of jobs, walked a lot of places, and rode my bike around in between the writing and reading and drawing and painting. I made cappuccinos for business folks in the downtown cafe, folded jeans and t shirts in the mall, dropped fries and hollered into a speaker in the drive thru, and lifted up cars to change their oil and rotate their tires, smelling like motor oil. I tele-marketed alongside folks in addiction recovery, typed out phone calls for the deaf, worked in a non profit assisting folks with disabilities, and secretaried for health insurance salesmen, answering calls to sort out the very complicated system of co-pays and coverage. I spent my 30 minute lunch breaks reading and drawing and writing.
When I plunged into motherhood, I had a tiny business selling paintings on Etsy while I learned to bake bread, and rode my bike around town with my kid in a trailer. I read only bread books and cookbooks. Motherhood and bread took over my life, my time, and all my thoughts and dreams. I biked the kids to the library every week, reading every bread book and cookbook on the shelf, 5 or so a week. I was studying for a test, and the test was my life. I wrote only recipes. I doodled funny drawings with my kids, and our homeschool lesson plans. I designed my website and drew my logo and wrote descriptions of bread and drew little drawings of my menu items. I wrote a cookbook for a year, and then another one for two years, and I read cookbooks and books about grain and wheat and read and endorsed the cookbooks of my peers and food memoirs in between. When that dust settled, I mostly wrote instagram captions and made photos of bread. Then I made more bread. Then I made even more bread than that. Then I made even more bread than I ever thought possible. I wrote and read nothing. I doodled nothing. I made things for the internet, and I read the internet.
The voracious hunger for creation and information hadn’t left, but it had been transformed subtly and imperceptibly almost without my knowledge. A necessity for work, turned into a compulsory habit that sucked up my limited free time, energy, and creativity into a never ending scrolling spiral. Depression, I feel often arises from a feeling within that you aren’t living authentically, or that there is a break in the self that you believe yourself to be. I wrestled through this season of a break with myself, and an addiction I had never realized could come for me “an intellectual”
Breaking the habit wasn’t really enough, if I wasn’t reading instagram, I read the new york times app all the way through, if I didn’t do that I read every page of substack, every email I got, or every listing on zillow, every post on nextdoor dot com, or something else in my phone. I couldn’t seem to get out of the place where I wasn’t deciding what I was staring at. I had to replace it with something else completely.
I downloaded an app (irony of ironies) that locked me out of the apps on my phone for half the hours of the day, and checked out more books than I could possibly read at the library so I wouldn’t run out. I read classics, new fiction, science, memoirs, everything. I was in the middle of 5 books at a time, one on the couch, one by the bed, one in my bag, and one on the kitchen table. I tore through them in 10, 15 and 20 minute jags, and my attention span slowly healed. I rode my bike down the trail all summer along side my son. I ripped through hour long sessions laying on the rug on the floor. I fell asleep with a book on my face instead of a phone under my pillow. After four months I started to write again, after 8 months I started to draw again. I detoxed, I rehabbed, and my brain started to feel better.
These email newsletters have brought me more connection to many of you. They have also brought me back to myself as I write my way out of the wet paper bag of the distraction age. If you feel like something is calling out to you from the heart of this letter, we can talk about it any given Thursday, or just send me a reply to this email.
A river of peanut butter and jelly...
We’re slipping into school routines like a squeaky new pair of sneakers (Maybe dragging our undone laces behind a little bit.) I had definitely become accustomed to the quieter Thursdays over summer break and the languid hot days with long stretches of quiet between customers at the end of July. With everyone back in town, the energy shifts right back into a higher gear. The barrage of multi-colored papers from the school flap around the house like busy butterflies.
Keeping the engine of the home running and the lists checked off, is a job enough to itself. Are these toothbrushes worn out? Are our socks too thin? Is there life left in these binders and folders? Is there enough shampoo and conditioner at the same time? Is there enough peanut butter and jelly at the same time? It’s enough to think about that I slide into a fugue state and fantasize at a stop light about laying down in a shallow river on the smoothed stones, letting the currents rush over me until the modern world fizzles out of mind.
This weekend I did just that, zoning out with my ass nestled in a riverbed pothole, those circular depressions formed by swirling water creating smooth eroded spots in the riverbanks. Red tailed hawks flapped and soared in circles over the outskirts of Waterford. My sons made a game of letting the current pull their bodies downstream laughing, pulling themselves out by a rope affixed to a tree, and running back up to me along the rocky trail. When they tired of this game, they built a dam lugging heavy rocks and stacking them to make a pool. They forged upstream to a fallen oak, climbing it and jumping off over and over again. This work was important and vital. It required focus, energy, and two pieces of sourdough slapped together with mustard, turkey, swiss, and a fistful of arugula. I was content to sit in my little pothole, eat sardines out of a tin, and talk to my accomplices in motherhood about literature and kids and food and nothing/anything. My girlfriend settled in to read a book, my friend splashed in the water with little ones. I watched the wildlife. Birds, tadpoles, teenagers with vapes and bluetooth speakers playing reggaeton, a dude with a guitar, people flinging their bodies into the river from ropes, a handful of baptisms on metal folding chairs, and the smokey aromas wafting from charcoal grills covered in enough carne asada to feed a small village.
I can’t help you with the to-do lists we are mired in, except to say that good bread comes in handy, and at the restaurant depot/chef’s store where I buy eggs and butter and chocolate chips in large volumes, you can also get 5 pound containers of peanut butter and raspberry jam. At first, these giant drums seems an insane quantity, but I was willing to bet it would all be eaten, and I tell you it was.
If all else fails, I hope you run away for an afternoon and get thee to a trail, a river, or some unstructured unscheduled place if you can. It’s free, it’s close, it’s necessary. If all else fails, a book of poetry usually staves off some of the worst effects of over-busyness. A poem in the car, a poem before bed, a poem with coffee, a poem hiding in the bathroom. If you need help finding your poem or river, we can talk about it any given Thursday…
the Pro-toast resistance...
It’s a Tuesday and it’s back to school here! Carbs are extremely beneficial to developing brains, did you know this? Well here I am with some pro- carbohydrate propaganda. Our brains work beautifully with grainy toasts for breakfasts and hearty sandwiches for lunch! Bread on the side with dinners, bread underneath beautiful ripe tomatoes with some mozzarella and basil plucked from a little pot in the garden. The staff of life, our daily bread, that quotidian pleasure worth rhapsodizing about and riffing on with whimsy and zeal. Join the pro-toast anti-corporate cereal resistance!
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing...
Hey everyone,
I’m out of office this week for our yearly end of July vacation celebrating my (40th) and my son’s (14th) birthdays. No bread this week on Thursday, but we’ll be back at it next week with the August Bread and, apparently, a new school year.
I’m going to simply leave you with a favorite poem here where I typically write my prose. Chew on that a little if you don’t mind and I’ll catch up with you next week when I’m back behind the baker’s bench.
-B.
Dogfish
by Mary Oliver
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.
And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?
*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don't know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.
*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?
Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it's the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it.
Life on earth as we know it...
It’s another Tuesday night. I’ve made a decent amount of bread today, there’s a dried dough bit stuck somewhere behind my elbow as usual and a weird twinge in my back under a shoulder blade. It’s been a over a decade of using my human form as a piece of bakery equipment and the wear and tear is deeply felt. Hours standing, hefting a peel holding 15 pounds of loaves in and out of 6 shelves of hot oven, making repetitive shapes with hands and fingers, carrying 50 pound bags of flour and grain, lifting tubs full of kilos and kilos of dough. Cutting, folding, shaping, placing on boards and lifting boards of kilo sized dough balls into a rack configuring 64 loaves at a time, moving in a little circle around a room while watching the light change through the windows. Morning folk tunes feather into afternoon Motown and then slip into evening jazz. Hands move through soap bubble dishwater, sweeping motions, and knife-work for meals in between. A life lived in a never ending flow dance of handwork to a background melody.
I occasional marvel at what a human can do, spurred on only by an engine of hope perhaps and cyclical dreaming. What I know in my body, a computer can never truly understand. When I stand in the middle of the bakery I can feel the atmospheric pressure, a coming storm or cloud in my very bones. When I place my hand under the tap, my years of experience tells me what temperature it is, I can visually assess that a dough needs more water, that the flour is not milled quite as fine, that fermentation is skipping along quickly, or that a thousand other minor sensory inputs vary by slightest degrees. I can even generate my own electricity. I feed myself an omelet, bowl of oats or piece of toast, and turn it into the labor that creates so much more food. I don’t even pollute the earth very much, turning a cup of tea into a bit of sweat equity. For about $2 of breakfast, I can get a lot of work out of me. I can even generate new thoughts and ideas while I scrub dishes and whistle. How special a machine must be to do all of that. Somewhere between strength and tenderness there is a middle road for how to handle a dough and shape a loaf, and a way to make a life outside of the machinery of greed. In between there is time to joke around with a child, listen to a dream, read a poem.
I have seen the factories that make most modern bread, dough mixed, cut, shaped, balled and baked by machines, slipped into plastic, packed onto trucks and driven so many miles. The amount of electricity, exploitation, cheap commodity additives, plastics, and carbon emissions it takes to get you this staple food are enormous. Is this preferable to a human in your neighborhood (in my dreams, in every neighborhood) making a simple 200-400 loaves a week and handing them over warm wrapped in compostable paper? No machine yet can turn two eggs and a slice of toast into the manifestation of maternal love, community spirit, and simple human contentment.
Just as factory farming and factory food has been disastrous for health and humanity, the factory farming of data is the next great idea to replace human work, ingenuity, dreaming, and magic with another ecological nightmare.
Don’t eat factory food. Don’t settle for factory farmed art, writing and ideas. Make your own out dreams of a better world out of toast and tea. Thanks for supporting local sourdough bread made the old fashioned way, by a person you know in your town.
-Bonnie
Bread and Roses
We’re reading Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit this month for my birthday book club (if you want to read the previous post about that you can here)
I’ve been listening to the audiobook while I work in the bakery. There’s an extensive section on the Bread and Roses movement for women’s and worker’s rights during the industrialization era. There were so many times in the past when “just the way things are” included child labor, extreme exploitation, exceptionally dangerous jobs, and overwhelming work hours. It’s important to remember that women and men went hungry on strike, died in unsafe working conditions, and wrote, organized, and spoke out to create the world we may take for granted.
I can’t help but think the rights to our own time, attention, voice and free thoughts are at stake even now. Powerful men become billionaires extracting every ounce of focus and scrap of attention from us using algorithms and digital sleight of hand. Now piles of AI tools are being foisted upon us, whether we ask for them or not. They aim to capitalize while eroding our human ability to read with nuance and understanding, to reason, to generate new thoughts, create art. As if making art, or poems, or reading literature to broaden our minds were the exhausting tasks we were just begging to be relieved of. (sarcasm implied) What are we to do against such powerful forces.
Read a book. Ride your bike. Jump in a river. Tell a friend. Make a silly drawing. Go to the library. Go to the cinema. Cook something new. Write about it in your own handwriting. Call someone on the phone. Take a nap with your cat. Lay under the shade of a tree. Perhaps eat a just made baguette while walking down the street.
People fought and died for those 8 hours you have after work, Don’t let tech corporations siphon it back from you. It’s all yours. We need bread, but also roses. Sustenance as well as arts and leisure.
I need you to read...
In Bonnie news, it appears I will be turning 40 at the end of this month. A few friends asked about some sort of party, but I actually don’t particularly like a confluence in my honor. Don’t get me wrong, I do host a lot of get togethers, and I think they serve an important function communally. The purpose, in my view, of so many informal dinner parties, grilled cheese nights, pizza nights, snacky park play dates and open house potluck’s are so that folks can meet each other. A recurring gathering of rotating friends is like sewing over the same seams, making them stronger and more bound up in each other. I love watching people pairing off and connecting while I fire pizzas or grill sandwiches for piles of kids and make sure everyone has a drink, but I often can’t help feeling that a night will pass without me getting to the magic of deeper conversation. It’s an beloved position and I’ll do it everyday of the year, but on my birthday, I want something more.
I spent the day thinking on what I truly value and maybe a bit about who or what I am (excuse my navel-gazing a moment). I think one of my favorite things is a one on one conversation about a book. More than any other piece of media, a book creates an extended shared reality in a different way. Sure the authors words are there, but the space between the writing and the self creates a new place. An opening, a portal, a shared consciousness. Over the languid hours of reading our nervous systems can rest. Our thoughts can meander. Reading for pleasure can be a hard sell in a world of efficiency, but I entreat you, in this mid year moment of oppressive heat, to find time to siesta with a book in a darkened room to the gentle whirr of the ceiling fan.
SO! Here’s my request, if you’re game. As a birthday present to me and you that we can share, will you read a book with me during the month of July? It’s a very informal book club for my birthday month. I’m reading Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit It’s free to listen to on Spotify, or you can request it from Bookish our local bookstore. It’s a book that forays through so many aspects of life and with such a far reaching scope, I think it could appeal to any person who gardens, writes, thinks, works, and is possibly wondering about the value of pleasure, beauty, art and joy in “times like these”.
Will you read this one book with me for the month of July? If so that would be enough. For extra credit, by July 28th will you email me, text me, stop by the bakery during open hours on a Thursday, catch me at Penny University for a coffee, or at Intermission for a drink, and talk to me about all your thoughts about the book we just read? I would love to hear all about it.
I’ll send you off with one of my favorite songs to listen to while you acquire your book or audio book for this community thought experiment….
Think a little about that, and I’ll see you soon.