Create 43 pieces of art inspired by 43Thingers

Can a piece of bread be considered a piece of art? I think so. I baked my first bread today using my sourdough starter, a yeasty, bubbling, bug-rich broth I named “Peaches”. Peaches has slumbered in the back of my fridge for over a month, occasionally waking up to feed on the dusting of fresh flour I gave her. Yesterday I divided her and used one portion to make a sun dried tomato and rosemary sourdough boulle. I added more flour, egg, warm milk, sun dried tomatoes, fresh rosemary, salt, honey and more yeast to the starter and worked her vigorously on my new granite countertop. Set her aside to rise, then punched her down and kneaded and molded her, then brushed her with the oil from the jar of tomatoes, laid her on a pan dusted with flour and cornmeal and covered her loosely in plastic. Back into the fridge she went to rise and retard. When I came home from work she had nearly tripled in size and was reddish and had a pungent, herby scent to her. Into a 450 degree oven for 15 minutes, then I knocked the heat down to 375 and baked her another 15 minutes. A couple of hollow sounding thumps told me she was baked all the way through. Out she came and like a butterfly from a chrysylis I had a “Cessie Sun Dried Tomato and Rosemary Sourdough”, so named for Lady Grinning Soul and her inspired efforts to make her own sourdough bread. Everyone waited with toe-tapping impatience for the bread to cool and set. The bread knife crunched through the hardend shell and dove into the deliciously soft and moist insides. The aroma of rosemary whetted every taste bud. The taste was perfect: Crispy crust with butter-soft bread, rosey and rich with the almost meaty taste of the tomatoes, the woody herb flavor of the rosemary, and that brewery-yeast, tangy sour bite of the sourdough starter. The bread was supposed to be for sandwiches tomorrow but there is less than a quarter of a loaf remaining.

Now, as I said, not everyone will consider a loaf of bread a work of art, but it is called artisan bread, and there is creativity, inspiration, planning, execution, drafts and total disasters, and inspired successes. And I definitely felt inspired by that certain 43Thinger. I have to find a way to FedEx a fresh loaf to her, if she will accept it. So I am counting this as a piece of art.

I do love to cook, I do love to create with food, I do love to make bread. This was an artistic labor of love for my friend Cessie.

“No Day But Today”

My first piece of “art” is something I created after being inspired by CrunchyBread’s support and blessing when I needed to have things move expeditiously for me. She thoughfully provided me with an image and description of St. Expeditus. He is the patron saint of all computer programmers, procrastinators, and is invoked in all matters requiring extraordinary haste. In the picture, St Expeditus holds a cross with “hodie” on it, meaning “today” in Latin. This was the source of my inspiration.

Like most I am prone to put things off, delay, avoid, procrastinate. But I felt an instant surge of motivation when I saw this stalwart saint standing, battle arrayed but without weapons, with only the cross with “hodie” on it. “Today” was a mantra I needed to invoke in many areas of my life, not just an answer on my home loan. I recrafted the cross and word and ended with a design that really resonated with me. This is something I can use for meditation, to drape from rear view mirror of the car, to put on a mug or Power of Water bottle, or emblazion on a t-shirt. Hey, why be a billboard for someone else’s slogans or images?

To me it is coming to mean an abbreviated “carpe diem”. We don’t have yesterday anymore, it is gone and irretrievable. We don’t have tomorrow yet, it is unshaped and uncontrolled. We have today, and by focusing on what we have, we can affect both our yesterdays and tomorrows. Whatever we want to be or have begins today. Whatever we love or seek can be found today. Whatever we want to change begins today. Our lives are lived today.

I want to exercise the power of today in my life. I want to make it part of my mental reflex to deal with things today, not tomorrow. I want to move expeditiously and with purpose. To pursue and achieve, to plan and to act.

The image itself is a equilateral cross with a cicle. Together and seperately these are two of man’s oldest symbols. There is not a culture in the world that has not incorporated them in some way. The circle denotes cyclical natures, infinity, the moon, coming full circle, the earth, the cosmos, the knowledge of spirit, the divine feminine and personal power. The cross denotes the four directions, the four elements, the four seasons, the four noble truths, symmetry, balance, health and wellness, fertility, life, the sun, immortality, the union of heaven and earth, spirit and matter, a cosmic axis, the human form, the divine masculine. Together they form a medicine wheel and celtic cross, a merging of male and female, sun and moon, earth and sky, transition, and unity. Across the center bar, within the circle, is the word “hodie”, Latin for “today”.

The design can be rendered in any color, but I thing the white on black is the most striking, and may be the one I end up using the most.

Thanks, CrunchyBread, for your inspiration!