Excerpts from “Cooking Dharma”

I spend a great deal of time in the kitchen when cooking for retreat.  The kitchen becomes my cushion and it's function my meditation. 

At home I spend most days in silence.  So the silence of retreat is easy.  I don't actually cook much at home.   My children are all grown and I am no longer married so my eating habits are modest.  

Once I arrive at the retreat center though, all my ordinary life, concerns, and obligations disappear.  There is nothing else but this.  

The retreat center where I cook has a large walk in cooler and there is ample room for storing food.  In the walk in I designate areas for dairy products, produce, fruit, and separate shelves each for salad, brunch, and supper fixings.  In this way when food is prepped during the work periods before each meal it can be put on the appropriate shelf and accessed easily when the time comes to cook and lay out the meal.  There is also a designated place in the walk in and on the counter for snack food so that the person responsible for putting it out in the morning can find it easily.

This organizational skill has been grounded by Zen practice.  My Mom was an organized person as was my paternal Grandfather (husband to my beloved Grandma Ann).  And although being organized did not manifest in my life until I was older, the seed was planted in my youth.  The beauty of order is that in being so, especially in the setting of a kitchen used by many but of course anywhere, one can become utterly selfless if one does not become emotionally attached to their individual organizational decisions.  By this and in the circumstance of the kitchen shared by many, I mean that if for example I choose to put all the whisks in a drawer in a particular place and come to find they have all been put in another drawer elsewhere, it doesn’t matter.  Just so they are in one drawer that is consistent.

Anyway, the multi faceted beauty of kitchen organization is that any cook at any time can use the kitchen and know where to find the tools needed to produce a meal.  So the set up is not about one person’s idea, it’s about the use and functioning of all.  Also, this organization of many manifests from the actual day to day cooking of cooks who have found through cooking, the most logical, practical location of all things used in a kitchen. 

Having order also allows us to be of service to others in maintaining this order.  For example, the retreat participants who are assigned to the kitchen for prep, or doing dishes, can be directed to the various locations of kitchen items and in this small way we are able to contribute to their sense of confidence both in themselves and the kitchen’s function.  So over the course of retreat they become proficient in their part of the overall running of the kitchen.  

Retreat offers us a condensed version of the benevolent, practical, and extraordinarily mundane possibilities in our ‘ordinary lives.’  Confidence in whatever part we play in retreat is therefore a seed for our potential contribution to the lives all beings.