Since moving from Brooklyn out to New Mexico, I have been baking bread every week.
I have found the process to be deeply healing as I reclaim a pace of living that is in alignment with the rhythms of the days and seasons.
Our movement out of the city, a place we lived for 17 years, has been a slow transformation back towards the old ways of life exemplified by my grandmother. The process has also brought me into closer relationship with nature and food as medicine.
Memories of my grandmother remain a deep part of the inspirational source that fuels my return to bread making. Born on a farm in western Maryland back when all lands grew and produced “organic” foods, she took great care and joy in baking and cooking for our family.
This was one of the ways in which she expressed her love.
I relished the smell of fresh baked goods and the allure of little bottles of elixirs and big pots of stew which decorated her home. These impressions have stayed with me, and fed my reentry into the land, and our desire as a family to return to the wisdom held within natures sacred embrace.
Baking one’s own bread also offers another wonderful benefit.
I am able to know exactly what I am putting into my body and the body of my child, a practice which is becoming increasingly elusive in today’s synthetic world.
The recipe that I use has only 4 ingredients:
Organic Flour, Organic Yeast, Wildflower Honey and pure water.
I will share the recipe and process at the end of this essay.
Most people do not fully understand the impact of not knowing what our food is composed of.
Most people also do not fully understand the impact of GMO non-organic foods on the soil of our planet and the soil of our bodies. Most crops of wheat, corn and soy, for example, are all now heavily genetically modified. What does this mean?
Chemical Agriculture is a process that truly began post World War II.
My grandmother was there, a nurse in the war, witnessing the great turning of the wheel, and the complete transmutation of culture post-war. The very same companies who made the gas poisons for the Nazis shifted production over to create chemicals for food. So, the origins of the Chemical Industrial Agriculture movement stem from the horror of the 3rd Reich.
This is a well-kept open secret.
One of the “benefits” touted by these Chemical Agriculture Companies who produce GMO and synthetic foods is that they are made to be resistant to glyphosate, the chemical found in Roundup. The use of Roundup expedites food production. But Glyphosate is also a poison, originally used as a form of gasoline. They found that when it was sprayed on the earth it killed all plants except for a very particular kind of weed. So, they removed the genetic material from the plant naturally resistant to glyphosate and inserted it into every GMO food including and especially wheat. All GMO crops are now doused in the poison of Glyphosate. All that is needed in order to harvest the crop is to spray some form of this poison on the field and allow everything to die around the Roundup resistant plants.
In this way, they have sped up the process and the practice of agriculture. The GMO crops also do not bare seeds. So, farmers then are forced to return to the same Chemical Agriculture Companies that provided the Roundup to supply them with more GMO seeds, that are resistant to the Roundup. It is a cycle which does not support the chain of nature, and the integrity of the seed and life itself.
Glyphosate utterly destroys the soil of the land. It destroys our gut microbiome. It decimates the integrity of the lining of the gut wall, contributing to leaky gut and all of the issues that accompany this syndrome. It is also a known carcinogen. Lawyer and founder of The Water Keepers Alliance Robert Kennedy Jr. has been in litigation with Monsanto, makers of Roundup, to prevent it’s use and bring justice to those effected by this poison.
Glyphosate is banned in more than 30 countries. But here in the United States, we continue to condone its use, not only in foods and crops, but also in our parks and playgrounds.
Our children are rolling down hills sprayed with glyphosate.
To come into understanding of these systems is a profound awakening.
It becomes a symbol and metaphor for all that afflicts humanity in this incredible moment in time.
From my perspective, the deepest medicine of our times is a return to some of the old ways of being that were so embodied by humans like my grandmother. Growing our own gardens, staying close to the land, foraging and picking wild mushrooms, finding true community, loving, laughing and eating, together. Allowing healing to be a part of our daily lives through the foods, herbs and spirits we take in. Allowing nature to guide us, as we are a part of her profound blueprint.
These are all principles of the old ways which were passed down through generations.
The movement drawing us away from this state of balance and harmony with nature and the environment is the same movement that fashions GMO seeds and synthetic foods. It is a movement that demands that our pace of living be quicker, more robotic, mechanistic, moving ourselves slowly away from a rhythm of life and living that we might naturally choose.
Most human beings have no idea that so much of what we are intaking is no longer born of the land, but is completely synthetic, laced with toxic chemicals that our bodies have never ingested before this generation.
When we are working with substances born of the land, there are cycles of birth and death which organically occur. We have grown and transformed alongside these plants and domesticated animals, finding rhythms that support our biology as well as the ecosystems from which we arise. Through millennia we have learned to live alongside these other forms of life. Indeed, whole systems of healing and consciousness expansion have arisen out of working with plant medicine. When we begin to work with plant medicine, we understand that these living beings also have consciousness, vitality, prana, life force, just as the animals do who surround us.
But when we are dealing with chemically laced substances, these laws of nature, these cycles no longer apply. Perhaps this is what takes us out of the feeling that we need to still be a part of these somatic cycles of life at all. Perhaps this is what moves us to become more mechanical, less human, more of the head and intellect, less of the soma and the body. And yet, the truth remains that we are still human, still born out of these cycles, born from the land. This is our shared Earth lineage. We are not machines yet.
Soon, this lineage will be broken.
Soon, there will be those who fully choose and embrace the synthetic rhythms over the rhythms of nature, the genetically modified over the organic. This is the inevitable movement towards the primacy of the head, the machine, and artificial intelligence. These streams are being developed now; however strange and foreign they might sound. They stand in direct opposition to the human line; whose rhythms remain in accordance with the Earth.
The somatic rhythm of baking bread is a rhythm that brings us back into a more natural pacing of life. It is one that reminds us of our origins. It is one that helps us keep the spirit of those lineages alive. It is one that honors the ancestral lines that brought us here, and understands that we all are born, we live, and then we pass on, as all beings of nature do.
We begin bread baking by first mixing the four ingredients together well, kneading with our own hands, which are truly agents of the heart.
After kneading the bread, the dough is formed into a ball, a sphere that reminds us of the cyclical nature of life and experience. We cover the bread so that it rests in the dark cave of itself. We then allow the bread to grow, like a seed in the earth. The live yeast helps the bread rise, expanding into a new form while we patiently await.
In our home, we might go for a walk, make lunch and then eat. We might let the bread rise for one, two, three cycles of days and nights, of sun and moon passing us by. We allow for other experiences as the bread quietly grows, expands, becoming a new form of itself. A great mystery is in the making.
And then, we heat the oven high and hot and bake the bread under fire for 20 minutes. The final transformation is complete. The wheat is made holy, as food for us to eat, to sustain the vitality of the living. The food is digested into prana, made into medicine for our being.
In detaching from some of these natural cycles, I believe we do a great disservice to ourselves, our families, our communities, our Earth. We sever our connection to the land that we are born of and imagine that we are no longer a part of these systems.
Perhaps some of us even have the audacity to believe that we can control these systems completely and play God. Humans in the future will no doubt fully tread these paths and go down the road of the primacy of the artificial, the synthetic, the machine. It is almost inevitable at this point, as it is already underway.
Here, we are grateful to be able to have the space to begin to practice this great remembrance, this great return into the old ways. It feels to me like an intrinsic part of the next chapter of our Earth, an Earth in which these diverging pathways are now expressing themselves. These pathways represent two realms of exploration, two spheres of consciousness and being. Each of us is choosing, every day, through what we eat, through the medicines that we ingest, through where and how we are living our lives, which pathway we are taking.
The path of nature, to me is made more clear through this most beautiful, slow, and simple practice of baking bread.
I hope you enjoy it.
Artesian Fresh Bread
Ingredients
3 ¼ cups of Organic Flour of choice
2 teaspoons Organic active dry yeast
1 ½ tablespoons of Organic local wildflower honey (more or less to taste)
1 ½ cups water
Optional Organic cornmeal for baking.
Directions:
Fold ingredients together kneading dough into a ball. Cover with a wet towel and let sit at room temperature 2-3 hours.
You can bake the bread at this point or put it in the fridge to allow to rest and rise for up to 3 days.
Remove dough from fridge. Divide the bread into two longer loaves or one rounded loaf. Dust with flour or a mixture of flour and cornmeal to create the crust
Let sit for an additional 45 minutes
Heat the oven to 475 degrees
Bake bread for 20 minutes, or until golden brown
Let sit, cool, and eat.