‘the softness of bread and weather’
A man filled with the gladness of living
Put his keys on the table,
Put flowers in a copper bowl there.
He put his eggs and milk on the table.
He put there the light that came in through the window,
Sounds of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.
The softness of bread and weather he put there.
On the table the man put
Things that happened in his mind.
What he wanted to do in life.
He put that there.
Those he loved, those he didn’t love,
The man put them on the table too.
Three times three make nine:
The man put nine on the table.
He was next to the window next to the sky;
He reached out and placed on the table endlessness.
So many days he had wanted to drink a beer!
He put on the table the pouring of that beer.
He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness;
His hunger and his fullness he placed there.
Now that’s what I call a table!
It didn’t complain at all about the load.
It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.
The man kept piling things on.
Table, translated from the Turkish of Edip Cansever by Richard Tillinghast
The Many Meanings of Bread & Weather
The name Bread & Weather comes from the above poem by Turkish writer Edip Cansever. I first came across the line “the softness of bread and the weather” and kept repeating it in my head, not because I understood it fully, but because it felt right. It was quietly powerful and it stayed with me.
Later, watching a nature documentary in lockdown (classic), I realised just how deeply the words connected to what I was doing: making small, beautiful things with care and reverence for the natural world.
Bread and weather are the foundations of life. We need healthy soil to grow food. We need a stable climate to live in. Without those, we are lost. But more than that, they represent our most basic needs: food and shelter. And because we’re human, we make even our daily survival beautiful. We bake innumerable delicious varieties of bread and cakes, we scent our baths with treasures gathered from nature, we light scented candles, we decorate our ‘shelters’ and we pause to read poems.
That’s what Bread & Weather means to me. Small rituals of care that restore us. Candles and soaps might seem frivolous in the face of big things like climate change or political chaos, but they aren’t. They are gestures of hope and grounding. We cannot take care of our world if we don’t first thoughtfully care for ourselves and each other.
This name reminds me daily: the big things are made of small things. It captures something I think we’re all aching for: the beauty of small things, the comfort of daily ritual, the quiet resilience of softness in a hard world.
Bread & Weather is a small studio rooted in that feeling. A place for making things slowly, by hand, using good materials. Candles and soaps that speak to the senses. A return to presence.