I used to brew beer. You can buy different kinds of barley to brew different kinds of beer. If you're making a stout or porter, you get barley that's roasted like coffee beans. If you're making something blonder, you get barley that's barely roasted at all.
Yet all barely has to be roasted, at least a little, to keep its sweetness. Barley sugar is necessary for beer. It's what the yeast eats, digests, and transforms into alcohol and bubbles (carbon dioxide).
To 'invite' the barley to become its sweetest, you (somebody) soaks it in water to turn its 'come alive' switch on. The grain thinks it's in moist ground after spring rain--so it prepares to grow by releasing food to sustain its first sprout and root. That food is sugar. To sprout barely for beer is called spalting.
But in order to keep the barley grains sweet, the process has to be turned off. Roasting the spalted grain arrests the process at just the right time, keeping the sugar and adding just the right amount of roastiness for the style of beer you want to brew.
On Saturday I posted that 'tolerance' is as good as chocolate--because it allows us to endure the things that transform us. I guess what I'm saying today is that tolerance is also what makes good beer.
The Sufi poet Hafiz says it this way:
Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human or
Even divine ingredients can.
Trying to avoid life's unpleasant moments--the soaking, the swelling, the cracking, the heating, the roasting--keeps us from ever devoloping our richest flavors, our deepest potentials. Like the story of Jesus at the wedding feast, if we don't hang around till the end of the party, we'll never taste the really good wine.
We could use other words than the 'loneliness' Hafiz uses above. What words suit your situation, now or perhaps soon? Use those words in your poem.
Don't surrender your 'stuff' so quickly. Stay with it. Let it soak, sprout, roast and ferment.
