Starting the year by Remembering

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Restarting the Culture

The new year always arrives quietly for me.
Not with fireworks or declarations—but with a soft inner turning.
A pause. A breath. A listening.

This year, my restarting looks deceptively simple:
I am restarting my sourdough culture.

A bowl. Flour. Water. Time.

And yet, it holds everything.

Sourdough has always been a teacher. A living mirror. A reminder that life does not rush, but it responds. That fermentation requires patience, warmth, trust—and a willingness to tend what you cannot see.

When I restart my starter, I do so carrying all the wisdom of what has come before. The mistakes. The moldy jars. The overproofed loaves. The loaves that fed my family anyway. Nothing wasted. Nothing lost.

This is not a return to naïveté.
This is a return with memory.

Ancient cultures understood what modern life has forgotten:
That probiotics live everywhere.

They live in the dirt beneath our feet.
On our hands.
In the grain.
In the air of our kitchens.

They live on our skin and in our guts, shaping immunity, mood, fertility, and resilience—long before supplements came in plastic bottles with promises too loud to trust.

Our ancestors didn’t sterilize life.
They partnered with it.

The hearth was the center of nourishment, culture, and transmission. Food was medicine. The kitchen was a laboratory of love and lineage. The microbes that fed the bread fed the people—and the people fed the future.

This year, I am returning to the hearth.

Not as nostalgia—but as strategy.

Because fertility—true fertility—is not just about making babies.
It is about cultivating conditions.

Healthy soil.
Healthy guts.
Healthy rhythms.
Healthy nervous systems.

A culture—microbial and human—that can sustain life.

As I reconsider my personal goals, my brand, and my vision, everything keeps pointing back to the same place: the kitchen and the garden. The compost pile. The chicken coop dirt rich with life. The cycles of decay and regeneration that modern culture is too uncomfortable to witness—but that nature depends on.

Nothing grows without decomposition.
Nothing ferments without surrender.

My vision has never changed, only clarified:

A healthier next generation of children.
Healthier parents who remember how to nourish instead of numb.
A thriving future built not on extraction, but regeneration.

And that future does not begin in policy or technology or perfection.

It begins in the kitchen.
With flour on our hands.
With microbes we trust.
With soil we tend.

With the humility to restart—again and again—bringing forward ancient wisdom into modern life.

This year, I am not chasing “new.”
I am choosing alive.

And I am letting the culture lead the way.