Love and Bread

 The phrase “Making Love,” and “Making Bread” don’t seem to go together, but there are similarities.  Maybe Bakers make good Lovers.  In both cases you use your hands.  You have to know how to touch and feel.  Love and bread don’t just happen by a 1, 2, 3 and you are done.  That machine approach makes for bad bread and bad love.  You have to know what goes into the making, and mix when it is time.  Timing is important.  Readiness is a process.  Bread and person respond to touch in a certain manner.  And the making is never the same each time.  But experience does help.  When you are finished mixing the bread you are not “done.”  The bread mix is not fully bread anymore than sex is fully love.  The dough needs time to develop like lovers need time to just be with one another as in “after.”  You cannot hurry dough and love.  I think the baking of bread in the oven is like becoming our truer self because of the love-making that day.  But what do I know.  I am a monk!