bubbling cresting breads

 I just discovered a new added instagram favorite, (new genre?): cook_as_you_feel_it. High drama, French, jazz, instrumental music played along to timelapse videos of baked goods baking. Camera in the toaster oven/oven(?) Breads liquid centers breaking, cresting, toppings growing apart. A loaf in a bread pan enlarging, center splitting, the Center cannot hold, liquifying parts of it sprouting upward, growing up, sending themselves up. Croissants wobbling, off-kilter, kneeling toward one side, disability as beauty. Parts of ourselves: seeds, toppings, growing at different rates, off center. Liquid parts of us becoming solid, as our life bends or sprouts or takes or gives air, bulging in one way, then another. Under heat, growing. Not only up but out and in all directions, growth. Cracks forming, the center like 2 hands drawing apart, gradually separating. Parts of us bubbly, fretting and quaking all over from the excitement of it. Browning, glowing as we're cresting. Many of us on the tray, growing into one another, burbling outward toward one another, little fits and spits and different bulges. Quivering with excitement.

Cut open: Blessed and broken. The beautiful intricate web of holes inside, the croissant's chocolate jeweled core, the thin veins of line holding us together, we who have burbled, blessed, squelched, grown under fire, reached toward our neighbor, bust at our seams, bubbled upward and outward at inconsistent rates, burbling, besting, becoming, blessed and broken.

Again.

5/31:

Weeping as necessary part of the process, our wet innards cresting upward toward warmth to become solidified. How we topple into our neighbor, are conformed by them. How we inflate, and then deflate. Parts of us growing at disparate rates. The beauty in the airiness, cut open at the end to find it was not us, but the airy pockets that allowed us to take our final space. Where we allowed space.

Videos made to be universal, at the end, pulling the product close to our face and wripping it over to reveal its texture.

And yet.

Eucharistic bread as unleavened bread. Flat, necessarily, Containing none of this beauty.

But Flat because of what it was not. Jesus' Last Supper, our Eucharistic meal, a Thanksgiving, a call. A gathering spot And a reminder of what's to come.

If you hear my voice, you're breaking bread, do not wait for the bread to rise. Instant obedience. Children of Israel had to leave Egypt in haste, could not wait for bread to rise. As soon as you hear God's voice.

Jesus at the Last Supper was celebrating Passover.

the Lord's prayer: Give us this day our daily bread.

Bread that has been given time to rise. The great blessing of what is to come. The Last Supper. Bread with sustenance. Bread with community. We eat of the Lord, unleavened bread.

These videos are also in haste: they are time lapsed, change does not. Change does not always feel beautiful. About being made. About being called upward. About being warmed by something that necessarily penetrates all the way to our core.

disability and the other

Disability. Re-reading About Us, collection of essays from the Disability Series of the NYT. What about disability intrigues? Is so articulable? Embodied experience that is truly other. Minority status that unlike race, we could be on the other side of tomorrow. only so many different ways to see the world but living with a sensory or physical disability a unique mindset, a truly different perspective. Essays clearly articulated, solidified, hardened, confident, because lives have spent so long forming, hardening their perspectives around it, living in it, it is solidified, it is hard, it is their reality. The social form, the outside, the environment as that which is disabling. That which we see as soft and fluffy kind party sphere as that which can be naive, blind, not twist an eye toward them. The need to be perceived with dignity. The need for inherent goodness, the ways in which disability comprise essential parts and also bring pain. Isn't it all stories? Our painful parts also defining us, sculpting us in ways uniquely us. About Us. Nothing About Us Without Us. Necessary Voices. Book could not include all voices. Could not include those whose disability prevents them from talking.

Hopefully if we live long enough we'll have a disability (idea somewhere in Chloe Cooper Jones' book, or an Ezra Klein podcast on disability). An inevitable part, often, of a long-lived life. John Altmann, "I Don't Want to be 'Inspiring.'" John Michael Reynolds, philosopher of disability, says the world is essential disabled. Remove an elevator or stairs and a man couldn't make it to the second floor. It would be absurd to accentuate this inability to the point where it's all the man was. John: "So too is it absurd to boil me down to my needing crutches to traverse the world. I am John Altmann, I am not my cerebral palsy. When this becomes common sense to the world, then I will have effectively escaped my disability, even though I will always use my crutches to do so."

Disability as seeable and unseeable. How do we converse about it. How do we ask about an otherness yet ground in sameness. How do we see uniqueness, how what is interesting/constituent to another may be accessory to a self.