Sweetness is the Antidote to Bitterness
Sweetness is the Antidote to Bitterness It was a week for an unusual amount of baking. For me, this week, there was baking for co-workers, and baking for students, and baking for classroom guests. Amongst these was baking as part of a thank you gift for a group of four nurses who had traveled to give a talk to one of my classes on campus. They had had a full day, and a hard day, in their hospital workplace before driving the two hours to spend time with me and my students. They would then drive two hours home, after our night class. As part of their thank you gift – one of several thank you gifts I baked this week - there was a gift bag full of a series of treats, as - with the help of Angela Liddon from Oh She Glows - I continued to experiment with the new paradigm: it doesn't have to be bad to be good. So, there were vegan, and gluten free, refined sugar-free, “real food containing only”: dream bars, and cookie dough snacking squares, and brownies, and peanut butter truffles, and a really fun little jar of caramel sauce. In one case this week, I made a batch for a work colleague, knowing that peanut butter/chocolate treats were among the favorite treats of his wife. So, there was the box for him, and the box for him to give away to her. It was just so lovely to observe that one of the best gifts I could give to him was something he can give and to her. Sweetness - it can be easy to forget, and sometimes hard to see - is the antidote to bitterness, in the same way that kindness is the antidote to aggression or humility the antidote to pride. Hard things happen. They can leave a bad taste in the mouth. It can be good to know the intentional skill of how to make things sweet again. It can be an exercise in paying attention, and awareness, to know how to distinguish, and choose, the kind of sweetness that will actually nourish. Perhaps that's why I enjoy the playfulness of the vegan, gluten free, refined sugar-free, so- healthy-it-hurts, utterly easy to make and yummy delights from Oh She Glows: it doesn't have to be bad to be good. It can just be “all good”. What actually is this sweetness that can help us to feel that good taste in our mouths again, and help to bring us back to a place of relative balance when we're working with hard things? I'm here in eastern Canada, in the north, so perhaps it's like asking the question “can we choose maple syrup over white sugar?”; “can we choose something that's real over something ‘wrapped in plastic’, that might look good but is likely to actually cause us pain?”. Part of what happens, in the beginning of the beginning of spring in the north, as we've explored together, is that the sap of the trees begins to flow again. The sap will pull deep into the trees through the depth of the long winter, and part of coming out of that period of cold and darkness is the time when the sap begins to flow again. Here on the east coast, in Maritime region of Canada, in about February or early March, it's possible to put a tap inside of a maple tree, and to draw out the sweetness of that maple sap. It is then boiled, and condensed, to make the sweetness of maple syrup, then transformed into any amount of breakfast – and other - works of magic. It can be useful to observe that tapping into sweetness like that is part of how we can get our own sap to start flowing again. In my experience, when hard things happen, it can be possible to pull deep inside ourselves, and to somewhat cut-off: like having nicks, and corners, and parts of ourselves where our own juiciness has somehow spilled out onto the ground, or hardened deep inside, like a tree shivering its way through the winter. Hard things happen. It can leave a bad taste, and become frozen slightly like that. It can be hard to wake our way out of it again, the way that our trees do in the spring. So it becomes an exercise in remembering how to reach deep inside of our inside worlds, or how to rea