A few Sundays ago I made bread.  It was the kind of day that called for such a meditation.   It was a morning that started with discord and stretched out into hours of processing, misunderstandings and miscommunication, listening but not hearing, learning the language of relationship without the he said she said, the scenes that Hollywood films spare you as they splice together the make-up scenes and gloss over the hours in between.

I turned to my tattered Tassajara Bread Book, a Christmas gift from a roommate in 1994.  Originally authored by Edward Espe Brown in 1970, the version I have is revised and updated as of 1986.  If you read the ‘About Ed Brown’ page at the end of the book you learn about the many roles he served in relation to Tassajara Zen Monastery, the Zen Center in San Francisco, the Zen Center’s well-known restaurant, Green’s, at Fort Mason in San Francisco, and at Green Gulch off of Highway 1 in Marin County.

Sometime after I was gifted this book in the latter part of the 90s, I took a cooking class with Ed Brown.  He was very charming and funny, in fact I’m pretty sure he still is.  We made lentil soup and a pear tart using recipes from his book titled Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings: Recipes and Reflections.  I bought the book that day, as well as a vegetable knife that is my favorite knife to this day.  He signed the book for me with a blessing that reads, ‘for Lisa – May your heart be nourished, your spirit lifted, in the kitchen and out – feasting on your life.’  In some ways that feels like more like a fortune looking back over the years since.

He taught us how to clean and chop cilantro for the soup, including suggestions on how to  use a knife properly.  Some of the students were not following his instruction.  He did not point out who they were, he just stated, and I paraphrase ‘you know, I teach these classes assuming people want to learn new ways of doing things, but if you want to pay to take my class and continue to do things the way you’ve always done them, well that’s your prerogative.’  That tickled me silly and I think of it whenever I prepare meals using recipes from his books, his voice and the tone used when he made that comment resonate and make me smile.  He is a wonderful writer who folds Zen teachings into his recipes.

I was introduced to Buddhism when I was 21 by a woman named Susan Dey.  She had a degenerative disease that was gradually taking away her abilities and she needed assistance with the activities of daily living.  She hired me to do things like feed her cats, help her get dressed, prepare her meals, take her out to do things in NYC, and read to her.  She had memberships to museums and got special entrance to performances due to her disabilities.  Those were definitely my salad days and I like to think that I appreciated the ‘culture vulture’ access she gave me.   But that might be casting a rosy glow, because truth be told, I resisted many of the lessons she offered and the tasks she put before me.  For instance, I found it irritating that she wanted me to do things like heat the cat food on the stove.  Cat food stinks before you add heat to it!  We dialogued about this one day and she brought in the concept of compassion, asking me if it wasn’t right to offer the comfort of heated food to the cats the way I enjoyed heated food.  This is still pretty fresh 24 years later, so it seems to have made an impression.

She asked me to read to her from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s book titled The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation.  I remember being similarly frustrated.   The ‘myth’ of freedom did not find an easy place to land in my 21 year old brain that was busy busting out for freedom in every direction.

But, ten years later, I was learning to make bread, soup and tarts from Edward Brown.  A quote from Wikipedia says that Brown tells his students that, “every dough is different, just as every day is different.” And that gets to why that Sunday a few weeks ago was a bread baking kind of day.

There is magic in making bread the old-fashioned way, aka sans bread machine.  The magic of the yeast, hoping that you get it right with the water temperature, not over kneading, and having patience with the process are all wonderful opportunities to practice faith and trust. Once you commit to making bread you are house bound for hours to allow for the risings, the punch downs, the risings, and the shapings until the baking which results in one of the most pleasing aromas my nose knows.  In fact, when I am on my death bed, I want to smell bread baking even when I am past the point of eating.  I want to be in a place where sunlight streams in and sounds from outside drift in.  And please, if you have any influence over the music that is playing, make sure Wilco is on heavy rotation in whatever playlist happens to be cycling through.

I say these things now knowing that just like any plans, you have to hold them loosely, “completely let go and not struggle against change, because when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness.” An excerpt from a Pema Chodron quote that I am thinking of having tattooed on my body – how’s that for impermanence?