Letting the Dough Rise

A friend was writing about sourdough bread and creativity.  How setting out the dough to rise reminded them of setting a project aside for a for a bit to let it develop, to let the subconscious work its creative magic. This sparked a few things for me. 

One is that the yeast and sugar will do its thing with the flour in the dough without any intervention on my part. I can trust the process to work. The same is true of creativity. Once I start the process of writing, (assuming I see the process through), I’ll get my loaf of bread.  

Also, it’s no help to the process if I intervene, trying to raise the dough faster. Here I’m thinking about how my ego will try to engineer great writing with thoughts and strategy. Thoughts and strategy aren’t writing. (Sitting down and writing is writing). The process is consistent.  Write a draft, quickly. Then walk away for a while. When I sit down again for draft two, improvements are obvious.  

But finally, and most important, when I decide the dough is no good and throw it out before I’m done, I don’t get any bread.  

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4 thoughts on “Letting the Dough Rise

  1. I love how the otter is kneading the bread! And it’s a good reminder that sometimes you can’t rush the process. The work has to be done, but the ideas and coming together need their own special amounts of time to come together.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Yes! Love this! Been making a lot of bread this quarantine. 🙂 To stretch the analogy even further, sometimes the loaf of bread will be a little flat, or it won’t have that fancy open crumb that everyone likes to post pictures of. But most of the time, the bread is still actually pretty tasty, and maybe just needs to be toasted or turned into croutons. Or the closed crumb means not as much of your sandwich fillings are going to spill out of the holes.

    Like

    1. Oh cool! I like the idea of turning the crumb into croutons. I like how it invites a person to use the parts of a song like like to make something else, or another song.

      Like

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