SPILL ON THE BIKE

The other day I had a spill on my bike. It's only the third one I've had, thank God. And it was exactly the same configuration as the very first one. What happened in that first one was I just accidently hit the front brake (oops!) as I was going slowly downhill and it tipped me forward and I didn't let go and I just went all the way over. Well I didn't get hurt either time cuz you're not going at any speed and you're only falling a little ways so it doesn't hurt the body. But the first time that it happened, the bike fell in a way so that it broke the derailleur hanger. And it took me like over 3 months to get a new one. It was like a really horrible time, you know? Can't get on your bike, that thing that brings you so much joy and goodness, all you can do is just sit there and look at it. If you’ve got something that brings you constant real joy in doing and you get blocked from doing it, you will know, I suffered. This time when I had the accident the other day I fell in the same way, and the bike came down on the derailleur again, but this time it didn't break. I mean it was the first thing that I checked. I checked that derailleur before I checked my own body. So I think that God was trying to tell me something. I feel like he gave me a big smile right then. He used the way that would really get my attention and would have a significance for me so that I would feel the impact of what he was trying to say. So you could look at having a spill on the bike as a negative thing, but really it's not at all. It's just the depth of emotion that he had to take me to, in order to cement something into me. And so the depth of my sorrow and suffering from the first crash fueled the height of my joy over the second. And so if you want High Joy, well you know that it just has to be matched by the same depth of Sorrow. Unless we can sweeten the judgment. And that's one of my favorite subjects currently. Not that I know anything about it yet, but it's really interesting to me. I realized the other day a different significance on bread and salt that I never saw before. You know we're supposed to dip our bread in salt in order to sweeten the judgment. I never really understood that. I always thought you were to ‘salt the bread’, like a sprinkling on top. But I didn’t see how putting salt on bread was making it sweet. That is, until I tried the variation of dipping some crusty sour-dough French bread down into the salt cellar and some of the crumbs came off into the dish and mixed in with the salt. Now, if you think about it like - from a science point of view, the mixture in the dish is now ‘less salty’ than before. The bread crumbs account now for some of the total mixture we still call ‘salt’. Maybe only 1% now. But if I do it again, the result might be 2% after that. And you can see where this is going. The process of dipping crusty bread into a dish of salt actually causes the ‘salt’ to become less salty. You might ask, where does it stop? Does it reach some equilibrium to where if you keep on doing it, the effect eventually fades and the continued action doesn’t cause any more change to the system after a while (the habituation effect)? Well, actually no. As long as the net change adds more bread to the system, the more dilute the salt will become, until eventually the whole thing will be bread crumbs and there will be no more salt in the ‘salt dish’. All the judgment will be gone, leaving only the sweetness of bread.

Which makes me wonder: what is the bread? And at the BIG view, what is the process of crunching bread into salt? What is the salt? And how do I keep from adding more salt to the dish? Coz I really want the sweetening.