One of the books that really affected me in high school was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I’ve since reread pieces of it and it surprises me how intense it is: violent and brash and deeply spiritual in a way that almost feels dark. But I can still understand why it moved me so—not unlike many formative experiences around that age, it was the newness of it, the way it simultaneously cracked open my world to become wider and spoke to something deeply familiar within me.
[In case you were interested, I’d count Ishmael, The Master and the Margarita, Encounters with the Archdruid, and One Hundred Years of Solitude amongst the other books that mattered to my education the most.]
In the case of her book, it showed me incredible writing and how to translate something wild and beautiful into words. It reached the part of me that loves land and space and the physical world, and it used that comfortable terrain to lead me into new territory. It also gave me the gift of one of my favorite lines in any book, ever: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
The other day I was standing in front of the bookshelf, running my fingers over the colorful spines. (Just between us, I was actually searching for The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook while also contemplating the sheer idiocy of filling my entire living room wall with unsecured glass-and-metal shelving piled with heavy books when I have a chubby baby juuust on the brink of crawling. Oh well! It’s good to have a task! Time to bust out the power tools.)
My hands fell upon a thick white book with a comfortable heft. I picked it up and flipped it over to see that it was The Abundance by Annie Dillard—a collection of essays that I bought at the secondhand library shop for 25 cents and never opened.
I abandoned my Silver Palate quest (pasta puttanesca and lemon chicken be damned!) and sat down to flip through the pages. Twenty minutes later I found myself deep in one essay, reading and re-reading the final page, captivated by the imagery and sentiment.
How could you not fall in love with a book that says this to you: “You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars themselves neither require nor demand it.”
In her essay titled “Seeing”, she writes: “I cannot cause light; the most I can do is put myself in the path of its beam. The secret of seeing is to set sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit until you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”
She goes on to talk about the era when doctors discovered how to remove cataracts—describing the experience of blind people who could suddenly see, and how they attempted to describe what was in front of them. One girl, upon seeing a tree for the first time, called it “the tree with lights on it”, as that’s what colors were to her: vividly aglow. Dillard then talks of walking in the woods, “thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
I love, love that sentence. “I had my whole life been a bell…”
(I could say something deeply sappy and sentimental here about how if we all are bells, what more could we strive for for than to be struck and to ring daily, rather than waiting until late in life to find out how to make that music sound? But seeing as I am not a 60-year-old yoga teacher running an off-the-grid commune in Taos giving daily motivational speeches over bowls of vegan millet porridge, I will spare you that and allow you to extrapolate your own meaning from Dillard’s words. OOPS. I said it anyway!)
So if we are to find ourselves in the position of wanting to be surprised and delighted and to see things newly on a regular basis, a la Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver, than where do we begin? How do we look?
I think it’s best to focus in very ordinary, daily places. To feel like you’re witnessing some good in the world, you don’t have to go traverse the challenging 12.4 mile Avery Peak Loop hike up Bigelow Mountain in Maine at the height of fall foliage in the early morning, pausing at a lake on the way up to witness the fuzzy tips of a moose’s antlers as the animal dips its head gracefully to drink. You could do that. You could!
You could take your kayak out just before sunset with your grandson and watch from a distance off shore as a rainbow emerges behind pillowy clouds in the fading blue sky, making the scenery look like a CGI graphic.
You could rock climb above the beaches at New Zealand’s Kawakawa Bay, or sail a 22-foot Catalina around the Whitsunday Islands, anchoring at high noon to swim in the bright blue water.
There are incredible trails to wander. Art to examine, architecture to marvel at, adventure to be had in far-flung places.
And you could do all of it. But to be delighted, you don’t have to. You could start closer and smaller.
This WILL NOT shock you, but I’ll recommend baking. Take, for example, a cake. A chocolate cake. Add cayenne and cinnamon and top it with cinnamon-infused whipped cream. Make chocolate chip cookies with cacao nibs. Take your favorite muffin recipe and sub crushed graham crackers for some of the flour. Dust balls of snickerdoodle dough with sumac and sugar instead of cinnamon and sugar.
You get the idea. Small wonders.
Here’s another one that surprised and delighted me lately: sourdough pie crust.
I’ve used my sourdough starter in every way I thought imaginable: waffles, chocolate cake, coffeecake, brownies, muffins, banana bread, cookies, pumpkin bread, savory crepes, pancakes, crackers, and on and on. But never did I consider adding it to pastry.
This crust would be very good with a savory quiche but it’s also awesome for dessert pies. Here I’ve done it with a sour cherry filling (I used frozen cherries which works just as well as using fresh ones) and topped it with a streusel. But it’s a blank canvas: use it in any pie recipe you like.
Note: The pie crust specifies ripe sourdough starter, by which I mean starter that is 100% hydration, meaning it has been recently fed with equal amounts of water and flour.
Sour Cherry Sourdough Streusel Pie
Makes one 9” pie
For the crust
1 1/2 cups (180g) all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (226g) cold unsalted butter, cut into pats
1 cup (8 oz or 227 g) ripe sourdough starter (make sure it’s cold from the fridge)
For the filling
2 1/2 pounds pitted sour cherries (frozen or fresh)
3/4 cup granulated sugar
6 tablespoons cornstarch or 1/2 cup (60g) all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
For the streusel
1 1/4 cups (150g) all-purpose flour
1/2 cup almond flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup (113g) cold unsalted butter, cut into pats
3 tablespoons ripe sourdough starter
To make the crust: In a food processor, pulse together the flour, sugar, salt, and butter until mixture is in coarse crumbs. Add 2 tablespoons of the sourdough starter and pulse a few times. If the dough is very dry, add the remaining starter. Don’t overpulse! Transfer the dough to the counter, press it into a disk, and wrap in wax paper or plastic wrap and chill for 1 hour. Remove the pie dough from the refrigerator and roll it out to a 10” circle, then transfer to a 9” pie plate and trim/crimp the edges.
Chill for 30 minutes; towards the end of this time, preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
To make the filling: Toss together all the filling ingredients and mound them into the center of the chilled pie crust.
To make the streusel: Whisk together the flour, almond flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar. Add the butter, working it in with your fingertips until the mixture is sandy-looking. Add the sourdough starter and stir until evenly crumbly.
Spread the streusel evenly over the filling.
Place the pie plate on a baking sheet (to catch any drips) and bake for 20 minutes, then remove from the oven and cover loosely with a piece of foil to prevent over-browning. Return to the oven and bake for another 40 to 60 minutes, or until the juices are bubbling and the streusel is golden brown. Start checking after 40 minutes, but sometimes it takes closer to an additional hour.
Remove from the oven and let cool.