Like a lot of people, I’ve been baking a lot lately. I call it “procrasti-baking,” because it feels like I should be doing something else more productive. Like clearing out my home office of the unfiled paper, old magazines, and various piles of crap I put in there when I had to move it off the dining room table. I could be cleaning or exercising or weeding. I have a lot of weeds — if you drove by my house, you might think I planted dandelions as a farm crop.

But I’m baking again today. I bake many dozens of Christmas cookies every year, and now I’ve baking like Christmas in June. The 25-pound flour container is sitting on a chair at the kitchen table again, with the vanilla and baking soda on top like a little hat. And as I slip — again — on the sifted sugar on the kitchen floor, I’m thinking about alchemy.

I remember as a child learning about alchemy from some book. I don’t remember the book, but I remember the moment of understanding what the work meant:
. . . a form of chemistry and speculative philosophy practiced in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and concerned principally with discovering methods for transmuting baser metals into gold and with finding a universal solvent and an elixir of life.-
. . . any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value.-
Origin: 1325–1375; earlier alchimie < OF alquemie < ML alchymia < Ar al the + kīmiyā’ < Gk kēmeía transmutation; r. ME alconomye, equiv. to alk(imie) + (astr)onomye astronomy

I remember the wonder of the idea. The notion that anyone who’d lived in the Middle Ages, when everyone believed the world was flat and monsters lived in the sea, would dare to look around and to say, “This world doesn’t work the way everyone thinks it does.” People brave enough to think, “I, a mere mortal, one single person with my own five senses and my own hands, can prove to you that what you believe about the way this world works, the way the sun shines and the birds fly, is not the way it is.” People crazy enough to say, “I can show you that the world is different — is better — than the way you believe it is.”

And the achemists right there among the Galileos and Newtons and the explorers. As Hemmingway observed centuries later about an equally insane world, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”

This morning, as I contemplate my dandelions, I’m thinking about the alchemists. About the airy ordinariness of flour and sugar becoming shatteringly crisp cookies in the blue flame of my oven. About butter and sugar boiling like a witches cauldron into toffee. About cocoa from places I’ve never heard of.

The alchemists believed that you could turn iron into gold. I believe in the alchemy of butter and sugar. I believe that you can look at the world around you and believe it can be different. I believe that you can use your own hands to turn ordinary things into precious things.