When Words Nourish

Bread, words, and the hunger for meaning.

I still have the little bracelet I wore when I left the hospital forty two years ago.
A thin strip of plastic, stamped with my name,
a beginning small enough to fit around a newborn wrist.

Most people lose these things. I kept it.
Sometimes I wonder why.
Maybe it’s proof I was here.
Maybe it’s a reminder to ask, will any of this matter?

This wonderful, messy, wondrous life.
Will it matter to anyone but my audience of one?

I think of words in the same way.
We live in a time where they fall like rain.
Cheap, endless,
produced in volume, like store-bought bread.

Plenty to fill the shelf.
But not enough to nourish.

Meaning, though, does not vanish.
It waits for weight.
And weight comes when words rise from lived experience,
from presence,
from the kind of reflection you can’t mass produce.

It is the difference between bread in plastic wrap
and bread pulled steaming from the oven.
One fills the stomach.
The other feeds the soul.

Technology will always give us more.
More speed.
More noise.
More empty calories.

And yet, the rare thing glows brighter.
A handwritten note.
A story that lingers.
A word that arrives carrying the fingerprint of a soul.

This is what we hunger for.
Not more words.
Words that nourish.

So maybe this is the work now,
to bake slowly in an impatient world.
To leave behind not just words,
but bread worth breaking together.

I don’t know if this matters.
But it felt like breaking bread,
warm , imperfect and unfinished,
passed from my table to yours.

And so I’ll leave this crumb,
thsi one small signal amongst the noise,
to remind you it was written by me.