Fermented Feminisms

Dear Insane Minds,

I have woken up happy from life in a country house with two witches, Anna and Amanda who do strange things with what they find out there. That is to say, they walk through the fields and gather what is for me weeds and cook them, make ointments, perfumes and everything.

We spent last night sitting in a kitchen, like real ladies, like ladies from another time who have that, time, the three of us, Vanessa and MasaMadre, who are a living organism that is my age: 45 years, 45 soles, and she is still there so pancha, put in a boat and feeding on oxygen, flour and the love that her witches give her.

Having something in a boat that is your age and is alive has been one of those experiences that makes my head explode with particles. His sourdough has been making daily breads all these years. Diaries Making a calculation of those of person of letters, they give us 16,425 loaves that are the days that we have both been swarming around the planet. And each bread is different, they tell me.

What have I done in those 16,000 days? Well, many things, let’s not fool ourselves. But not all edible, not all good, not all kind, not all anything.

Amanda has recommended a book to me: The Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz, which is a bit like my Lynn Margulis, the wonderful philosopher-biologist poet who makes you understand not only the universe but your concrete life through any little bug.

Sandor says that the times of fermentation are related to our real life times: patience, affection, observation, the link with the past, with the present and the future. All things that resonate with feminism, with feminist life.

Not with theory and gossip, which really bores me, but with feminist practice from day to day, in small things that have no visibility or give you social scores of any kind.

Sandor quotes Blair Nosan, “Fermentation requires cycles on our part: we have to go back, inspect, refresh and renew.”

Feminist life has these things too: we have to return to what we have seen, what we have experienced, what we feel, what we think. Inspect and inspect ourselves, look from a new place, put new eyes on it. We have to refresh what we live and what we think, our way of being to renew it. If we want to change how things happen, we cannot keep doing them the same way over and over again (I don’t say this, I think Einstein said it).

Amanda, who makes bread with sourdough, says that bread made this way has its own rhythms and you have to adapt to them. Both bread and sourdough pass from human times, because human times are just that, even if we strive to make the world pass by our clocks. But the world passes, the truth. This bread has its rhythms and if you want bread, you have to adapt and learn to accept that rhythm, and regulate yourself with it.

Now the loves and the love rush come to mind , and the affective networks that implode because we impose the rhythm of a desire on it without understanding that the network has its own rhythms.

And I also think about the duels. In the rush that we give to the duels to end since we are in a hurry and no, the duels also have their times, whatever our clocks say.

There I leave it. I turn to look at the sourdough and enjoy this calm.

Happy slow, Minds, and happy week!