Cooking Can Be Spiritual?! NO WAI.

I've been having a tough time lately, emotionally. Trying to figure out how to get home for Christmas, how to have enough money to get back up here in January and get a job so I can stay for the rest of the schoolyear... it's all pretty annoying and stressful, on top of midterm stress. And in the middle of all of that having a brain which tends to latch onto inconvenient contradictions and questions about religious, social, and cultural issues (one example: gender & sexuality issues and mormonism... not a fun topic). I've been lucky to have lots of little things which have been cheering me up, like having a nice dinner with my visiting teacher last night (though that too was fraught with some awkward moments) and actually (sort of) having a social life all of a sudden... where did that come from? xD (a social life meaning only that I talk to people in classes and on the bus, someone actually came over to my apartment for dinner last week, and then this week someone invited themselves over for next week).

Still, when I headed home from institute today I felt like all I wanted to do was curl up in a blanket and bury myself in a pile of pillows. And maybe cry (yeah I'm a baby okay deal with it). Knew I should make dinner so I wandered aimlessly around the co-op on the way home and finally got some potatoes and an onion so I could make this recipe from a fellow Bellinghamster's vegan blog. I've been craving such potatoes for a while (mom calls them scalloped potatoes).

Here's a bad flash-y picture of the finished product (already cut into--we were hungry!)

(Some quick notes on my recipe variations: I didn't have any parsley so I used chopped bits of fresh rosemary and dried basil. Also put in only 1 1/2 onions since I get so tired of buying onions all the time... we use so many of them! I used 3 or 4 large potatoes but there was some left over once my casserole dish was full. I also didn't have garlic powder so I chopped several small-medium cloves of garlic and added a bunch of garlic salt. Made my own unsweetened almond milk in the blender. Added a tiny sprinkling of Follow Your Heart cheddar on top.)

The funny thing about all the cooking I've been doing lately, is that it has become a de-stresser for me for some reason. It has also become a handy form of procrastination. I come home from a tense day at school--oh, I need to make food! Better get on that right away, homework will have to wait... 30 minutes to 2 hours later... food's done, now I have to eat, maybe we'll watch a movie while we're eating... then it's time to do dishes. Eh there's a few hours left before bedtime, I can cram it all in then right?

But in all seriousness, cooking is becoming a haven for me. I'm someone who struggles at being in the moment... I worry a lot about the past and the future. Cooking somehow puts me in the right frame of mind. While I'm washing and cutting up vegetables, my mind calms down and focuses on the task, the moment at hand. The same thing sometimes happens when I'm washing dishes, though not as often. Maybe it has something to do with being a part of a life-cycle process.

While I was slicing the potatoes, I suddenly became aware of how much my mind had calmed, and how peaceful I felt. I was tapping into a sense of continuity. The potato I held in my hand came from a plant that had constructed itself out of water and sunlight and minerals from the earth... honestly, quite a miracle when you think about it. Now I was part of that process somehow. It's difficult to explain. Sometimes I feel like we make life so complicated, when at its best it is beautifully simple in its complexity. There are patterns; we ourselves, as well as something even so simple as a potato, have complicated cellular structures, but I guess sometimes we lose the beauty of just being a part of this intricate and breathtaking web of life.

I remember in my East Asian Art History class at BYU-H, hearing about a particular Buddhist sect which believed that sudden enlightenment could be achieved through repetitive, mundane actions, such as sweeping the floor. There's a famous ink painting of a leader of this sect chopping bamboo, as one example.

Maybe there's something to this idea. Perhaps that is why many people feel a kind of joy when they are exercising, especially outdoors--it frees their mind and makes them aware of their physical surroundings, their interconnectedness, through the air they breathe and the reality of their own sweat and aches. Maybe that's the same reason many people say that they often feel closer to God while hiking in the mountains than they do while sitting in a chapel.

Last spring, when I was in a particularly dark and chaotic place mentally, I suddenly decided I wanted to have a garden. Living in an apartment, that makes things a little more difficult, but Danielle's mom said I could use some of her big plastic pots and so I impulsively bought a 50-lbs bag of soil from the local nursery (getting it home was another adventure entirely) and some seeds and went to work. It seemed like an irrational thing to do... it used more money, and cut into my precious study time. But filling the pots, pushing the seeds under with numb fingers (it was still very cold outside), watering... these moments were full of a peace I couldn't find anywhere else. And then the sprouts started to come up.

Every time I came home from school or left the apartment, this beautiful growing life was waiting for me by the door. Something about the simple process of watching them grow really put some light back into me, and I think was one of the main reasons I made it through that time. Those sprouts were a promise of cycles, of things getting better, warmer, brighter.

Eventually my garden got so big the fire department threatened to haul all the pots away if I didn't move them off the walkway!

I could go on with even more specific stories of times in Hawaii when meeting eyes with a bird (or a dog or a gecko or a mouse) gave me something like a spiritual breath of fresh air, a sense of communion with something larger than myself, like stepping into the edge of the ocean. That was a time of special awakening in me, of discovering a sense of family with the rest of the natural world.

Overall I guess my point with this post is to re-affirm to myself that God is out there, and that his presence, his spirit which connects everything living, is present for me to find in even so humble a thing as a potato, if I am willing to just calm my mind down enough to see it. This aspect of God, this beautiful life-force of joy and love which causes plants to reach for the light and moves human hearts to compassion, is not judgmental or wrathful (apart from the kind of heartbroken "how could this happen?" anger a kind person feels while looking upon violence). So when I trap myself in these mental obstacle courses of trying to reconcile all the tedious bits of doctrine which don't seem at first glance to line up to my conscience, I just have to take a deep breath of Life and chop some potatoes, plant some seeds, pet a cat, or go take a hike.