Lunch Is Dried Bread

On Simplicity and Plenty

Dear Friends and Family,

Before I sit down to write this letter, I grab the heel of last night’s bread from a wooden bowl. When this vanhome is parked, the bowl sits on a four-foot slab of wooden countertop called my kitchen. To the right of the sink in the center is a butane burner. I can boil water in the kettle or warm the bread on cast iron, but I cannot do both at the same time. I wash my hair at the sink.

In the bowl are a couple of heads of garlic, three cayenne peppers drying for winter tea, a few fat thumbs of ginger, and a bundle of thyme I picked up at the farmers’ market on Wednesday. In the winter, I’ll rub the thyme between the palms of my hands and watch leaves fall into a bean stew. I’ll wonder which is more pleasing, the texture, fragrance, or flavor, this body a kaleidoscope turning inside a world where every fragment in the hollow is a sensation ripe for feeling.

The bread is dry and stale, a leavened stone. I eat it and wash it down with water.

I do not blame you if by now you conclude I am obsessed with asceticism, given this series’ refrain of emptiness, emptiness, and emptiness in silence, solitude, and simplicity. Emptying, I keep discovering, opens the doors of everything. And lunch is dried bread because I sense it might reveal something about hunger—not just physical hunger. It might reveal something about the other side of hunger. And I must say, of these three, simplicity is the hardest for me.

It’s symbolic, if nothing more, the barebones gnawing on what’s left of yesterday’s spent loaf of sourdough. The archē (beginning) of meaning is in every dry crumb. Buy less, do less, strive less, desire less are modern takes on simplicity. They are portals into an ancient practice, coming about when the human began to feel the first ache of losing the soul line with Archē, with Origin, and as much, its inner pull.

We could go so far as to say simplicity is prayer, not the prayer of pleading as much as prayer of naked intent: coming to this moment with the recalled innocence to say yes to the fullness of being, come what may.

Photo Credit: J. JFarquitectos

From Dried Bread to Daily Bread

I’ve been reading The Way of the Pilgrim. It’s a slow read through a simple book, but don’t let simple fool you. He gives these two lines as the second and third.

My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast-pocket a Bible. And that is all.¹

The anonymous writer is on foot, a mendicant journeying through southern and central Ukraine, Russia, and Siberia in the late nineteenth century. Nineteen times in this two-hundred-page text he mentions bread. Most of the time, he says it’s dried.

In this blissful state, I passed more than two months of summer. For the most part I went through the forests and along by-paths. When I came to a village I asked only for a bag of dried bread and a handful of salt. I filled my bark jar with water, and so on [I walked] for another sixty miles or so.²

If you and I were together having tea, I could tell you the story of this Pilgrim, struck by the words of St. Paul to “pray without ceasing.” I would share the one-line prayer for mercy he sets out to utter three thousand and then six thousand times a day and that, in time, he does.³ I would hope to show you that the prayer takes hold in his heart, as he hopes it will, and point you to every occasion he receives what can only be called mercy. And I would take you to the page where he refers no more to dried bread but daily bread.

But I would need to open the book as he tells it to show you its truth, and we are not having tea. So, I touch in this letter an unseen thread between dried bread and daily bread and three flesh-and-blood matters that seem to connect the two.

Daily, he eats the bread that is given.

Daily, he walks without knowing where he’s going.

Daily, he prays a prayer for mercy over and over like a heartbeat between strides.

These three are a braided rope, each strand an embodiment.

To eat is to touch hunger and experience need; to receive what we need is to acknowledge that we need. To wander is to surrender to an unknown path and so, to relinquish control. To pray is to be naked before the immediacy and mystery of being, which cannot be entered by the intellect alone.

Photo Credit: Eddie Bloom

The Blank Stare of Hunger

Hunger of the spirit, the soul and the body is the experience of emptiness or poverty.⁴ 

It is five in the afternoon, still sweltering, and showing no signs of cooling before dark. The sun draws sweat as soon as I step out from under the van’s awning. For every step in the first ten minutes, I talk myself into the next one. I don’t know which haze is thicker, the heat, the hunger, or the fatigue from last night’s fitful sleep. My legs are cast iron, my belly a blank stare. My mind toggles between the two and lands at last on the blank stare.

We come into the world with that blank stare, a hunger that is a tuning fork for emptiness. There’s a deep vein in the human condition to run from both, the hunger and the emptiness. We run as surely as we would run from a tornado sweeping across an Oklahoma plain. And what is a tornado sweeping across an Oklahoma plain if not air spinning around its emptiness? Is a tornado not unlike our present day hunger for busyness, the retail purchase of green and zen and minimalist, the beehive inside when that (not urgent) text becomes an urgency (still) unanswered?

I write to you as no stranger to this, and so, for ten days, reading The Way of the Pilgrim, lunch is dried bread. I wish to still myself inside that hunger. I wish to taste the poverty of taste.

Hunger is always at our heels. We could turn and face it, stare into the stare. We might need a steadying hand to hold for a little while until we can steady ourselves. There are steady hands.

If we turn toward the hunger, the emptiness might steal the breath. Grief does that, and pain. Love does it, too.

We’d sense the breath taken. We’d feel the body want for air. We’d know our elemental need. We’d come close to our deepest desire to continue to be. That might be more terrifying than the hunger. And just as soon, we’d perceive something Unseen breathing us. We’d know the world is there, too, answering our need, our hunger.

We’d meet the strange paradox of plenty in inner poverty—in the experience and practice of inner emptiness. We’d wander the hinterlands of enough in the wheat-grained plain of simplicity. The Pilgrim did that. He wandered the bypaths in bliss.   

Forthcoming

Details are coming together for the December in-person gathering, and pre-registrations are coming in.

Here is last week’s save the date announcement with all the details coming soon.

Please reply to this email, DM me here on Substack, or email Doreen (tanenbaumd@gmail.com) to express your interest.

I will host a Zoom gathering, if there is interest, the second Saturday in September to explore any questions, wonder, further reflections on silence, solitude, and simplicity as we bring this series to a close. Let me know your interest in comments or by replying to this email, and I’ll be in touch.

For you who have been asking how to make a one-time contribution (any amount), at last. . .

Next Gathering in Silence: Sunday, September 1, noon–1:30pm ET

These Zoom gatherings are becoming an enriching shared experience in silence with meaningful conversation that follows. All are welcome.

Some reflections from our last gathering:

It was as if the silence was within me and everywhere.

There’s not a lot of silence in my life. I feel welcomed in this silence.

The distance between us disappears.

I can’t quite say how or why, but these gatherings are supporting my path through grief.

Email me to register: reneeeliphd@substack.com

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1. Anonymous, trans. R. M. French, The Way of the Pilgrim and the Pilgrim Continues His Way, (New York: Seabury Press, 1965).

2. Ibid., p. 21.

3. The prayer has many names: the Jesus Prayer, the Inner Prayer, the Mercy Prayer and with these names, slight variations of the verse. The Pilgrim prayed: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

4. Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1985), p. 155.