The project: To bake and give away at least one loaf of bread each week.

The reason: A personal protest against the selfishness of our society.

The bonus: It’s good spiritual practice.

I just passed the six-month mark of my Let Them Eat Bread project. And, yes, it does feel as though six whole months have passed since I started giving at least one loaf of bread away each week. Somehow, in the winter, it seemed easier to make and give bread. But with the advent of spring and summer, my thoughts have turned to the outdoors, and making bread involves more planning and extra work. In a way, that’s not a bad thing. By its very nature, spiritual practice requires some effort. As the Zen master Katagiri Roshi once observed: “Life is no guarantee. You must make effort.”

I am certainly making an effort with my Let Them Eat Bread project, and this effort is teaching me that it is not always easy to be generous. While there might be a natural inclination toward generosity in most of us, we like to be generous at our own convenience and on our own schedule. In other words, when we damn well feel like it. This approach leads to a scatter-shot approach to generosity, where sometimes it goes where there is need but at other times the need is unmet. This is why the progressive activist Jane Addams would write “One of the first lessons we learned at Hull-House was that private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city’s [Chicago’s] disinherited.”

I agree with Addams and would broaden that statement to include the whole country. Yet I do feel that personal generosity is important—I expect Addams did, too—that we should be generous as both individuals and as a society, especially in a world with many people and finite resources.

Well, there are many sides to generosity. Loaf by loaf, in my own small way, I am learning about them.

This month I gave bread to Esther Bernhardt, Cindy Hinkley, Mike Sienko, JoEllen Cottrell, and Kate Johnson (finally!).

Total bread given away in June: 5 loaves

Total for the year: 34 1/2 loaves