Friendship Cake

Friendship cake. That delectable treat you bake at home using starter dough received from a friend. Part of the dough is set aside, maybe to share with a friend or, perhaps, yummy as it is, kept to start another cake granting it a sort of eternal life within your home.

When you consider that the friendship cake's existence is derived from an original recipe that is sustained as the dough passes hands into time, each friendship cake is the offspring of the original and a relative of all other cakes.

Similarly my existence, although subject to what I want to make it to be within the windows and doors of opportunity I am able to open, is comprised not just of my life, but of the starter dough of myriad lives that come before me going back in time. There is a sense in which the eternal life of those who came before me is played out in the unfolding of my own existence. Their life meaning and mission forms a collective conscious that lies deep within my soul.

As I reflect back over this life from my earliest memories as a child, I now recognize instances where memory and the fodder of my thoughts and imagination transcended what my experience had been at the time. The only possible explanation is that, in such moments of reaching inward, I was connecting with that collective conscious and touching the most intimate experience of all those who comprised it.

© Copyright 2007 gentlefootprint. All Rights Reserved.