Daily Bread

The idea of ‘daily bread’ has many levels of interpretation.

At one level it points to that which we make and bake as a staple daily food. A grain is ground to flour, mixed with water, salt and a culture which encourages expansion whether it be a yeast natural or synthetic, or a chemical agent. What would not have been easily digestible, broken in order to assimilate, is now a readily available food source for human consumption and an energy precipitator.

In the realm of knowledge and information, we say that ‘daily bread’ are the ideas we are offered which feed our mind. The source of these ideas may derive through the five sense organs – hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching – or the ideas may derive from our memory of previous things events and relations, or the ideas may be generated in the mind from the relationship between the sense information and the memory, or the ideas may derive from what we call thinking, the process of rationalisation and pattern formation in the mind.

Also, there is a ‘daily bread’ we all access which is a less definable. This derives from our deep sense of our ability to feel beyond mere material objects and even ideas, from whatever source. We say “we are aware of a process, we feel what is happening, we sense a change, we become conscious of something new.” This awareness, feeling, sensation, enables us to become conscious of a type of food which may not be easily definable, may not be verbally expressible. For instance the feeling of having the company of someone, the awareness that there is a good feeling in the room, the sense that perhaps tomorrow will be better, or we are about to have a good day ahead. These are all types of very intimate food, very subjective food, which may well be described as ‘daily bread’ by more people than we first suspect.

There is another kind of daily bread, a bread which allows us to integrate our physical food, with our idea food, with our feeling food. This is the kind of daily bread we make for ourselves in the way that we comprehend our living reality. We put things together in our mind and feeling which corresponds to our material reality. This is the daily bread which derives from digestion of the previous three kinds of daily bread, and the reintegration of those digested parts back into a whole.

There is a type of daily bread for example which derives from visiting an art gallery, from a refined appreciation of a work of art from a master painter or sculptor. Likewise the beauty of a ballet dancer’s performance, or a great theatre production, or a musical rendition beautifully interpreted. These are forms of daily bread, often very subjective, and perhaps beyond mere physical existence bread for most people. Some say that art is more vital to life than physical bread itself.

We also know that religiously in the Lord’s Prayer, found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, there is a petition of invitation “give us this day our daily bread”. Most say that the invitation is directed to God, or a supreme power, whether transcendent or immanent. Others with a more practical materialist view believe the petition is directed to the environment around us and those providers which inhabit the living space.

We can see etymologically in the word “bread” is the word ‘read’. As we know, the process of reading is a form of information ingestion whether it be for instruction or for leisure. The word “daily” is the adjective for ‘recurring each day’, or the adverb for ‘constantly, always and habitually’.

So, what Is this Blog about?

In short, for the development of interpretation in all of the above, through a range of topics and categories, for whichever level of interpretation you would like it to be.