By Andrea Lingle

“Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labor. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits.” (Chardin, The Mass on the World, “The Offering”)

“Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.”

— ISAIAH 58:8–9A

Breakfast begins right after the dinner dishes are done. After the dishwasher is started, I set up my coffee to drip, automatically, at 7:25 am and mix together breakfast. On Mondays we have oatmeal, soaked in milk of something (almonds, cows, or, oddly, oats) overnight so that it can be cooked quickly in the morning. On Tuesdays we have German Pancakes. These are heavy on eggs and drama and satisfaction. Wednesdays we have pancakes laced with cottage cheese and plain Greek yogurt to stave off the 10:30 tantrums. Thursday we have baked French toast (which is a great way to get rid of loaf bread heels in a coating of eggs). Friday we have oatmeal pancakes made out of left-over Monday morning oatmeal.

Each and every morning, someone asks for the maple syrup. Just a splash of earthy sweetness makes the morning ripen beautifully. Not every day, but not infrequently, I think about the wonder of maple syrup.

Maple syrup is the sap of a sugar maple tree. In the late winter and early spring, when the nights are freezing and the days not, the sap begins to “run.” If you have a sugar maple, a bucket and spile, and appropriate weather, you can collect sap.

I had the bucket, spile, and tree.

I do not have appropriate weather.

But that did not stop me from trying. My kids and I followed the forecast for the best possible series of days (here in North Carolina it had to be mid-winter as by spring the freezes have thawed to frosts. We pounded our spile into the side of the tree, and it bled!

We collected, over the space of four days, a quarter of a cup of maple sap.

Unfortunately, this is a bit short of the required amount to have a proper sugaring. To get a gallon of something that tastes like syrup, you must concentrate forty gallons of sap. That’s a lot of collecting for a golden morning.

Creating is hard.

Sometimes it feels like you have poured in forty gallons of effort per gallon of result. To create must be to believe in the value of the process because the product is obtained at too dear a price.

If you were to look at life logically, it would make no sense to render syrup from sap. How did people even figure out that it would be possible to do such a thing? Sap holds its secret dearly. It takes more than a little grit and stubbornness to believe in a thing so deeply that you would be willing to boil away 97% of it to reveal the hidden glory of syrup.

Creating is scary.

Can you imagine hauling forty buckets of sap into a boiling house, pouring it into shallow pans, and stoking fires while 97% of your effort went up in steam. Would it be worth it? What about painting? Surely there are forty sketches for every finished painting. What about love? Surely there are forty hours of effort for every hour of joy.

I know it seems impossible, illogical, impractical to be willing to be poured out at such a losing ratio.

I know…

We struggle, we strive, we haul bucket after bucket. We cry out into the steam of our, seemingly, dissipating efforts.

And yet…there, in the turning vapor, you can imagine the whispered breath of an answer.