My Familiar Is Bread

[@regardenthare]

Hope, my sourdough starter and kitchen pet, will be 7 years come Mabon. She was born of gratitude and grief. She's been split, shared across the country and even helped open a restraunt for a time. This year on the farm we are taking the Mystery a but farther and grew the wheat. Harvesting at Lammas and gonna make bread with Her.

[@markusironwood9736]

Love this kind of craft/magical practice/relationship. We see the sourdough starter in our house as a spirit as well. Just like giving the ancestors coffee in the morning, and Domowik the first bit of bread, our starter gets fed once a week and I say a nice prayer for her as I stir in the new flour and water.

[@RockandRollMystic]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing! ✨

[@nunubarrantes8782]

I love how your mind and soul work in relation to the seen and unseen worlds. I am an animist, and feel that all living but also some non-organic elements have a soul, or may develop one. I remember in one of your talks how you explained your bonding with a lake? (If I remember correctly) in that you visited and acknowledged and interacted with the body of water. Yeasts are extremely powerful organism and I don''t know if they are a subset of fungi or just a different class entirely, but fungi are behind life creation and communication between species, I learnt that fungi flund at the roots of trees create a symbiotic relationship with them and "wire" trees to one another at root level, so that chemical information is conveyed from one individual to the others through them. Fungi live and thrive thanks to the nutrients provided by the trees and in exchange they link trees together, they expand the biological possibilities of trees. I think you tapped into real magical energy yourself, and that you have a truly excepcional relationship with a life form with whom it is extremely rare to bond. That tells a lot about you and your core. Beautiful. Modern humans within a Western culture are very disconnected with Nature, not only physically but also espiritually. Spirits often explain that they are flexible in how they relate with other beings, with us. No two humans have the same approach and interaction with them. There are no right or wrong ways, apparently, as long as you approach them with respect and not for selfish reasons (one thing is mutual profit, an exchange, a healthy bond, and another, an uneven self-serving approach). You really explore possibilities others have never thought of. Thanks for sharing!

[@ModernMystic81]

Potentially of interest, in the novel A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive baking the young main character is a young woman with baking-related powers and her familiar is a sourdough starter named Bob who has a small but mighty in the story.

[@JackChanek]

That sounds hilarious! I'll have to check it out.

[@YvonneAburrow]

I really enjoyed this video! It gives a whole new dimension to the concept of familiars. I was just posting it on our coven Discord and at the exact same time, one of the coven posted a photo of a sticker on the rear of a car which read “Proud parent of a sourdough starter”. Synchronicity or what? I’m curious how you got your sourdough starter from your former abode to your new one, though. And, unrelated question, as it’s been bugging me for a couple of videos-what is the thing on your left with the white plastic handle?

[@JackChanek]

It's a vacuum cleaner. 😂 My apartment doesn't have a convenient closet to keep it in, so it lives in a corner behind my sofa. For transporting a sourdough starter long distances (or storing it for an indefinite period of time), you can actually dehydrate it. If you dry it out so that there's no moisture left, the yeast goes dormant and will then reawaken and be perfectly healthy once you're ready to rehydrate and start caring for the starter again.

[@YvonneAburrow]

@@JackChanek good to know, thanks!