My sons-in-law are doing it, too. Even some co-workers are finding it something easy to both talk about...and taste together. Which makes me wonder what all is happening here.
Maybe there's something about it that is off-setting something else that we're all feeling in one way or another as a society. Does baking bread feel like we're getting back to something? Or, that we're (like some premonition) preparing for something we don't know that is coming?
When I was recently asked about this, I tapped a few things into a quick TXT by way of response. Something about bread feels kind of primal — like you're participating in something that has been a kind of sustenance for millennia. As if by joining something that has always been done and, thereby, connecting to it somehow. Something feels cathartic about it.
And, of course, there are the other elements of it — something to learn (even master), fairly easy to do, but a process that you have to, in some ways, respect. Bread-making leans towards cooperating with you, if you cooperate with it. It's better than the chemical versions from the store (that don't mold for weeks — is it really bread?). And, there seems to be something a little spiritual about it (more on that later).
Oh, yeah, and the most obvious thing is that homemade bread often tastes SO good it seems to even sooth something in our spirit.
...speaking of which, do you suppose it was accidental that Jesus referenced bread the way he did? In one of his more famous prayers, there is something both sustaining and daily about the moments that bread seems to address — not unlike the kind of dependency that we need to have with God.
It is interesting then to also note that one of Jesus' temptations involved bread. Not to mention his claim that he is the 'bread of life'.
Whatever it's all about, I'm into it right now....
