On Coffee, Bread and Patience

Patience has never been easy for me. I am too headstrong and short tempered. Fevered, giddy and impulsive. But patience has its place, especially in a creative heart. So I like to seek it. Force it upon myself. Hand myself moments, whole and golden to pause and gather and assess and breathe and observe with patience. Not in a vertiginous frenzy.

I can have moments, isolated and discrete but still whole, where I am creating. I am achieving. I am pursuing life. Maybe it is not furiously. Maybe I am not spilling coffee on my dress, maybe I am not eating breakfast in the car as I rush from one adventure to the next. I am still pursuing life. But in the spaces, the silences. There is just as much to be found. There is a natural rhythm to be found.

This morning I went to a cafe and had a coffee while I read some creative essays.

I stir my coffee before I drink it. I learnt that from Gen. So that the consistency is a little more uniform. Not half froth – half actual coffee. The spoon clinks in syncopation against the glass. I pull it out slowly and while I wait for it to be cool enough to suck, I watch to see if the residual coffee will drip. I tilt it on some elegant trajectory and hold it at an angle so the coffee gathers on the end of the spoon and forms a little drop. My heart beat quickens in trepidation, will it, wont it, my eyes are fixed on this spoon and my surroundings are fuzzy. One drop, two drops, and I catch the third in my mouth and lick up the sides of the spoon. Warm metal, sticky amber coffee.

It is mornings like this that remind me of how sacred and gilded each moment is. How much there is to be found in them, how rich a resource, how worthy of attention. I like that sometimes I feel a torrent of moments and it evokes creativity in me, and sometimes i just feel one, with intensity and attention to detail, and it evokes a different kind of creativity.

Like baking bread. I crave days that I have time of a morning to bake bread. It represents to me the idea of slow and comfortable creation. The absence of pressure and expectation and this great sense of haste and hurry. Because creating should be free. You cannot force it, you can encourage it and create a space where it is fertile and rampant, but it has it’s own rhythm. A tricky thing to balance sometimes, so I bake bread, and bread represents my balance. I drink black coffee, I listen to blues music and I stick my hands in a bowl of dough. it is so good to make something with your hands. to spend time engaging in something purely physical (well, dexterous) for the sole sake of creating. it is the most glorious suspended moment of time. with dough warm and wholesome in your palms. it is so good to have hands covered in butter and sticky dough. to form something with your fingers. to feel the yeast alive and growing and elastic. feel it bouncing beneath the heel of my hand. its very sensual. bread. creating. kneading. needing.

and then i just sit and wait while it rises. maybe there is a time for everything and i can just learn to be patient.

I used to add cold water to my black coffees, to my herbal teas and even to my teas with milk. Such haste, such hurry. Such impulsive imminent desires for things. Now, most of the time, I like waiting for my coffees and teas to cool, for that perfect drinking temperature.

I can wait for things to fully form themselves in their own time. There are things I have control over and i celebrate my urgent desires for them. But there are things that gloriously, I have no control over. I can wait for those to form around me, to be ready to give themselves to me. I can work around the rhythm of other things. I can wait.