Home? for the holidays!

Yesterday's bread experiment turned out to be edible, but the crumb is finer than we had hoped for and the whole wheat flavor is stronger than anticipated. We used a locally grown and milled wheat without blending in any all purpose or bread flour. The results weren't quite a failure, but neither were they a rousing success. Baking is getting to be as interesting as fly-fishing. We're learning to enjoy the process regardless of the outcome. Maybe we'll be more diligent with a bread-baking journal than we have been with fly-fishing.

more whole wheat than artisan

Photo by J. Harrington

The Joy Harjo books, at least what we've read so far, more than made up for the limited success with they bread. They are more than we hoped for and expected. 

Titles: In Mad Love and War, The Spiral of Memory

We started with the latter and find that it helps scratch an itch we couldn't previously reach. Here's a sample from The Introduction:

"In Mad Love and War this quest is re-presented and further perspectives are opened up. To an Indian legacy of struggles Harjo adds the lucid awareness of a contemporary world smoldering with conflicts that threaten to flare up into a blaze. She thus directs her attention not to one particular place, but to a "global village." Through such an approach, individual or ethnic conflict can be overcome, and an avenue opened up to dissolution of the first among the many barriers that are encountered in a multicultural situation...."

Is it true, that "Home is where your dog lives?"

Photo by J. Harrington

The way we see it, that description could as well be written about the events and cultures of today or tomorrow, instead of more than seventeen years ago. Harjo explores, among other questions, where and what is home. We've been grappling with similar questions for much of our adult life. We hope we'll come closer to answers that work for us if we follow Harjo's poems as guides. If not, the journey will be interesting, at least, and full of beauty and mystery. For now, we'll work from the Christmas tree ornament we have that announces "Home is where your dog lives." Going back to the first Christmas, is a family in a stable close to a stable home? When does a house become a home?

                     My House is the Red Earth

By Joy Harjo

My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I’ve heard New York, Paris, or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it. Radio waves can obscure it. Words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form. For instance, that fool crow, picking through trash near the corral, understands the center of the world as greasy strips of fat. Just ask him. He doesn’t have to say that the earth has turned scarlet through fierce belief, after centuries of heartbreak and laughter—he perches on the blue bowl of the sky, and laughs.

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