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“The only way out is through.”
on drawing close to the pain, approaching with love instead of hate
My wife tells me that I should have seen it before, that it was clear to her. This is not the first time she has been right; I am quite sure it will not be the last.
She is referring to my baking, specifically the way that over the last year or so I have taken to making sourdough loaves. My sourdough starter is made from “wild yeast”; this “wildness” means that I left a container open on the counter to collect the yeast in the air of our home, allowing it to settle into the flour and water, to find a home there to grow, to ferment. The starter required feeding, more flour, more water until the bubbling starter became the source, the beginning of many loaves of bread that have fed me, my family, my friends and neighbors.
Yet while my wife is pointing to this bread, she is also showing me how it is related to the title of my book, Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls. And to be honest, I had not seen it.
The book grew out of the prolonged death of my father, a man who was a farmer, who grew wheat in addition to corn, soybeans, and peanuts. The book explores his death through the themes of the Christian season of Lent, itself a prolonged “dying” that prepares us for the resurrection and new life of Easter. The…
