Baking in mindfulness

First observation today: crickets are starting to look for ways into the house. We know this because one was lurking for hours on the front porch this morning. We think it's a sign of cooler temperatures (more than persistent rainfall) foretelling impending Autumn. The same cup and paper routine that we've mastered for catch and release events with spiders sometimes works for crickets, although the latter tend to be more jumpy than spiders.

cricket lurking near the front door

Photo by J. Harrington

Second observation today: we need to work some more to synthesize Alan Watts' observation that

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”

with our blog posting yesterday about mindfulness while baking. Making sourdough dough this morning, we were our usual unmindful selves, dashing and dithering together flour, starter, yeast, salt, and sugar at the same time we were cleaning up sticky dough-coated utensils before the dough dried and hardened on them. It all got done, but we could have been lots more mindful, and less frantic, as we went about it.

A long-time favorite writer on fly-fishing, John Gierach, has noted that efficiency in tying flies is achieved by organizing all the necessary materials first, rather than hurrying through each the steps in tying a fly. It wouldn't be too great a stretch to presume that organizing ingredients and utensils for making dough, before starting the process, would permit more mindfulness while baking. In fact, once the dough had risen, and we had confronted our lack of attentiveness in making said dough this morning, we actually started to feel some of the sensations we previously had only read about as we worked on shaping our two loaves.

sourdough starter before feeding

Photo by J. Harrington

We felt the dough become more stretchy as we worked it. We remembered to coat the dough and/or our hands with more flour if we noticed sticky spots in the dough being worked. We think we may have actually started to work with the dough instead of on it. It'll be interesting to see how the bread crumb and flavor turn out this time. In any case, we noticed we enjoyed a more mindful process of shaping the dough compared to the somewhat mindless process of making today's dough.

Although today's baking was far from perfection, we did manage to take a step or two down a road we want to travel, and got some positive internal feedback along the way. If we get better organized before we start next time, we may enjoy the entire process even more. We think the following adaptation works. What say you?

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes baking bread. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes make dough and bake bread.

Autumn Grasses

Margaret Gibson

In fields of bush clover and hay-scent grass
the autumn moon takes refuge
The cricket’s song is gold

Zeshin’s loneliness taught him this

Who is coming?
What will come to pass, and pass?

Neither bruise nor sweetness nor cool air
not-knowing
knows the way

And the moon?
Who among us does not wander, and flare
and bow to the ground?

Who does not savor, and stand open
if only in secret

taking heart in the ripening of the moon?
 

(Shibata Zeshin, Autumn Grasses, two-panel screen) 

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.