The Morning Smell of Home

Something I do when the weather starts to change, animals start to hibernate, and many spend longer nights at home, is bake Pan Ranchero. It is a practice that has been passed down from my father, from his father, and so on. As I gather all the ingredients in my narrow apartment kitchen and begin to make the dough, the process and the smell reminds me of a moment in my life that I hold dear.

I had just completed a record-breaking deployment of 206 days underway on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, but my thoughts were not of home. We had just made port in Norfolk, VA at the height of a pandemic we only knew about through fragmented updates. Our sealed-off world ended the moment the brow hit the pier. The bubble we had been living in for months had burst, and the outside world finally rushed in. The only place I had in my mind to spend my next two weeks was with my brother Daniel, who was in the Army and stationed in San Antonio.

After spending so much time at sea, trapped on a floating steel island, the only thing I wanted to really do was bake bread with my brother and finally teach him how to do so the way our father taught me. In his cramped, warmly lit, closed-off kitchen in his shared two-bedroom apartment, we began to make Pan Ranchero.

They were not the most perfect batch we ever made, but they were the best in my book because of who I was making them with. The whole apartment smelled just like the many houses we moved through in the Midwest and waking up in the morning to the sweet smell of bread being made by our father. That day, we made so many that he shared it with his fellow soldiers at work. That detail always stays with me. Something my father passed to me moved through my hands and into his, and then into the hands of people I never met.

Food connects like that. A recipe survives borders, politics, and history. Something as simple as bread can carry generations with it. It does not need a passport or a flag. It travels through people, not nations. Pan Ranchero is something that was easily made back in the day, something that could be carried onto the fields to be nourished on long hard days.

Thinking about that led me to the native food of this land, and the way so much of it traces back to the Three Sisters. Corn, beans, and squash. They are called sisters because they only truly thrive when planted together. The corn rises first and becomes a living guide. The beans climb the corn and return strength to the soil. The squash spreads low, its broad leaves protecting moisture and keeping weeds away. None of these plants thrive alone. Together, they create a balanced ecosystem. A shared exchange of energy. A kind of emotional and physical cathexis that keeps everything alive.

I think about this when I think about people. We are meant to coexist in ways that allow each of us to grow, not in ways that force us into roles we never chose. A lot of us were shaped by systems that reward obedience, output, or performance. Those systems train us to live from a defended ego state, reacting instead of choosing, performing instead of feeling. Some people stay there. They move through life like NPCs, not because they are lesser, but because they are stuck in the scripts life handed to them, avoiding the parts of themselves that would require waking up. I do not cut ties because someone drains me. I cut ties because some people are not living. And I do not want to mistake that for connection.

For the past three years, I have been untying myself from the idea that my worth comes from utility. That was something the world tried to teach me, especially the military, but it is not who I am. I am learning to live in the experience instead of the label, the moment instead of the performance. That includes how I see my own identity. I do not feel the need to fit into the traditional boxes of what a man or a woman is supposed to be. Those labels feel like costumes. They create distance between who I am and who I am meant to be. I want to live from a conscious place rather than an inherited one.

Meaning has become more important to me than happiness. Happiness feels like a chase. Meaning feels like presence. It feels like grounding my energy instead of letting the world claim it. It feels like choosing where my emotional investment goes rather than letting it scatter into roles, expectations, or survival habits.

And in all of that, I feel something Adler talked about without needing to quote him. The idea that we are pulled forward by the lives we want to live, not pushed by the lives we used to have. That our behavior, our healing, our growth, and even our pain is shaped by the goals we move toward. Teleology in its simplest form. I am not running from my past. I am moving toward a life that finally feels like mine. Whether I am baking bread, filming someone’s story, or driving across the country with nothing but the road ahead, I am following that pull.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

Your playing small does not serve the world.”

— Timo Cruz (Ricardo Gonzalez), Coach Carter (2005)

That line makes sense to me now in a way it never did before. The trouble is not that I lack something. The trouble is that I have always been more than I allowed myself to be. Teleology again. The future self-pulling the current self forward, asking me to stop shrinking, stop performing, and step into the version of myself I keep pretending I am not ready for.

The Three Sisters grow because they understand their place in the ecosystem. They do not force themselves into shapes that are not theirs. They do not compete for dominance. They simply grow in a way that allows for mutual thriving. People can be the same. We coexist without needing to be identical. Harm will happen because it is part of being alive. What matters is intention. If someone is not intentionally causing harm, they have a place among us. Mistakes become lessons. Growth becomes intention. And intention becomes the root system we build our lives around.

When I think about my brother, about my father, about baking bread in that kitchen in San Antonio, I realize that the most meaningful parts of my life have come from being present, not performing. From connection, not expectation. From living, not acting. From moving toward meaning with purpose, even when I did not have the words for it. From reclaiming the parts of myself scattered across systems, identities, and histories I never chose.

I want to live more authentically. I want to stop the performance. I want to live in a way that honors where I come from, who I am now, and the people who have shaped me. I want my life to feel like the bread we baked that day. Something real. Something passed forward. Something alive.

Looking back on that day we made bread together, I understood something I had never been able to name. Bread-making has always been home to me. Not a city. Not a building. Not the places we moved through in the Midwest. Home was the ritual. The smell. The way the dough formed under my palms the same way it did under my father’s. Home was never tied to geography. It was tied to practice. And wherever I bake, I belong.

This reflection is dedicated to my brother, SSGT Daniel Antonio Gonzalez, whose 26 years of life brought much meaning to mine and those who had the privilege to know him. The space he occupies in my life, he will always occupy, and I will carry our bread into the hands of others I meet on this journey.