The Potato Meditation

The recipe said 8 potatoes.

But I was doubling it.

That meant I needed to scrub, peel, and cube 16 potatoes.

And just as I was contemplating a new recipe, I remembered a two articles I'd recently read, Karen Maezen Miller's "Do Dishes, Rake Leaves (And Don't Forget the Endless Loads of Laundry)" and Edward Espe Brown's article "Let Your Passion Cook" on mindful cooking, both in the recent issue of Shambhala Sun. Having long cooked at the Tassajara Zen Center and written the famed Tassajara Bread Book, Brown writes about eschewing recipes in order to connect with ingredients and process, quoting Suzuki Roshi on working in the kitchen, "When you wash the rice, wash the rice. When you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. When you stir the soup, stir the soup." Similarly, Zen priest and author Miller writes,

When we cultivate nondistracted awareness as a formal practice, we call it mindfulness meditation. When we cultivate it in our home life, we call it the laundry, the kitchen, or the yard—all the places and the ways to live mindfully by attending without distraction to whatever appears before us. But it’s hard for most to believe that attention is all there is to it, and so we complicate things with our judgment—debasing the ordinary as insignificant and idealizing the spiritual as unattainable—never seeing that the two are one.

And so I realized that I just needed to do the potatoes. Not fight doing the potatoes, not do just 2/3 of the potatoes, not change to a recipe without potatoes, not wait for Mama to come home so she could do the cutting of the potatoes. The potatoes were there for me to do and I was the one who was going to do them. So I started washing and peeling and cutting. I "peeled" my hand three times, but just put on a bandaid and kept going (they were little annoying knicks; sometimes I'm not a great peeler. Or cuber). I got bored. My lower back got tight. 6+ lbs of potatoes is a lot of potatoes for me. And instead of trying to distract myself with my kitchen radio or a phone call, I tried to focus on the potatoes. How they felt, the most efficient way to peel, even cubes. Even how my finger slice throbbed and how my back was tight. And when I got halfway, when all the peeling was done, I almost faltered--it looked like such a ton of potatoes. Did the recipe really call for 16? So I went back to the source and indeed it was 16 potatoes. Couldn't I just do 8 or 10 and "let" Mama make the rest into mashed potatoes or something? But I kept going. And with 3 left, I was so elated. I knew I had done it without giving up. And when it was done, I happily stood there looking at the messy cutting board, the empty collander, the full stew pot.

And I cleaned up and kept cooking.