How To Serve A Season: Winter

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If you go through world folklore- from places where winter is a thing- you’ll find the connection of Winter and Death.

In Norse Mythology, Idunn, goddess of youth, falls from the branches of Yggdrasil while picking the apples she feeds to the gods to keep them strong. She plummets- like a falling leaf- all the way to Niflheim and Hel. Niflheim and Hel are at the very bottom of the tree, the realms of ice and the dead, respectively. When the gods find out and Hela (goddess of death) refuses to let her go immediately, Odin gives her husband Bragi (the god of poetry and song) a white wolf skin to keep her warm until Hela lets her go. Odin (the sky) sends a white blanket (snow,) song and poetry to keep Youth comfortable until she is freed.

We can see it again in the well-known story of Persephone and having to stay with Hades for part of the year, during which her mother Demeter won’t let anything grow.

The trees lose their leaves. The snows, rains, and winds come. Animals hibernate, and wait for the world to live again.

Fall slowed everything down. Winter is when we are meant to stop and rest. Humans aren’t so good at that though, so we adapted. When the Earth retains and nurtures its bounty, we have gotten VERY good at relying on when it didn’t.

Photo by Adriaan Greyling
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An Object Lesson in What Matters

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I was sitting in the break room at the winery, having just finished my lunch. It was a chilly, sunny day, and the break room has a really nice window that looks out on the terrace, the waterfall feature on the grounds, and beyond that over the valley.

I was debating how to best pull off the rest of the week, crank out a new bread recipe for my chef’s latest special, and what kind of desserts I should do for the seasonal menu change. I was grateful for the distraction. The toxicity of social media around the Israel-Hamas War was still trickling through despite me pulling back. When that many lives and that much culture is on the line and the generational trauma of two entire peoples is simultaneously triggered, there’s too much at stake for it to be managed through TikTok videos, memes, and idiotic flame wars- but here we are.

It made my heart hurt, and my mental health required me backing off, so I’d resolved to do what I’d always done when feeling pained and powerless- feed people, and put good things into the world that weren’t there before.

Then my phone rang. It was my wife, nearly in tears. Life was about to provide an object lesson in Pain, Powerlessness, what we do in the face of it, and the things that mean more than posting “the right things” on social media.

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Something Like An Update

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Hello everyone!

This week won’t be as heady or heavy as my previous posts have been. “It can’t rain all the time,” after all. Besides that, some version of whatever had Emily laid up for the last week or so has moved on to me. I don’t want to skip another week though, so instead I’m gonna pump myself full of DayQuil, chug broth, step back from the shitshow the world is being, and tell you about a project I’ve been working on and how you can get involved!

So… much… white space.
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Thoughts on Belonging

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We all want to belong. To something greater than ourselves, to have a community, a tribe, even just to have a family, biological or chosen.

The last few weeks have been a serious trial of my personal sense of belonging. Getting (mostly) off of social media has helped stem the tide of belabored bullshit. “You are either with us or against us,” whatever the “us” is, is a big red flag for whether you actually belong to a certain group or whether your belonging is conditional on saying and doing the “right” things.

Work in the kitchen has provided a sense of place and community. Kitchens ave historically been my “safe spaces” and sanctuaries. Everything has a place, a purpose, and my belonging in them is undeniable and absolute- by my experience and skills if not myself.

“Matt the Baker” is only part of me though, and leaning into that solely for my sense of belonging is dangerous. I am also an American, a Jewish man, more a leftist than anything else politically, and fundamentally a human being.

“Belonging” to any of those things has been intensely difficult lately, but I still feel the need to have a tribe and not be a “man without a country” when things get tough.

We have to learn to belong, first and foremost, to ourselves.

A black and white portrait of a woman with her eyes digitally smudged out
Photo by Thiago Matos
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Connecting By Disconnecting

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The world feels like it’s exploding.

If you are like me, you are constantly fighting with yourself between staying informed even at the risk of marinating your brain in Sensationalist Hate Broth of social media, and burying yourself in tiny comforts and ignorance until it goes away.

I have my own opinions of Israel vs. Hamas, and since October 10th I have felt the need to share them as loud as possible. Maybe, just maybe, at the cost of my peace of mind and sanity I could get people to stop being pissy and angry and screaming past each other so that maybe- MAYBE- we could all make sure the violence, madness, and death stops.

Wasn’t gonna happen. There’s room for every voice and opinion on the internet, but social media in particular isn’t built for connection or communication. It’s built for engagement- for keeping us doomscrolling and “interacting” and staring at ads and being on the platform for as long as possible.

Things that make sense don’t help that. Patience, compassion, complexity, and nuance don’t jive with that goal. Anger, rage, hate, pain, and self-righteousness do. After marinating in that hellbroth for way too long on a false hope, I made the call to back off for my own sake. I post for this blog, I answer messages, and (every now and then) I watch funny videos. That’s it.

There’s ways to bring happiness and reason to the world, but screaming on social media sure as shit isn’t one of them. By backing off, you get the brainspace and emotional bandwidth to find them on your own.

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