Morning at Bread | Lab

baking and zazen.

Today’s been a good day in the kitchen. Everything’s come out of the oven more-or-less the way I expected (and hoped). And the smell of baking bread is pretty wonderful. There aren’t many smells I love as much.

The sun’s shining and the wind is whipping cold, bare branches and sending the bird feeder swaying. There’s a pileated woodpecker gripping the suet basket and pecking in the sway.

So, today it’s going to be a post about bread. or zazen. Or baking bread as zazen. Or zazen as paying attention to baking bread.

Okay: all of the above.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the Venn diagram overlap of bread baking and zen practice.

With good reason, in fact.

I think what makes bread baking so attractive as a zen-adjacent practice is really the same thing that make pretty much any activity at all zen-adjacent: the necessity of attention, the surrender to the task at hand, and an appreciation that exactly whatever it is you’re doing right now is the only thing you have to do.

Bread baking — and in my case, specifically, sourdough bread baking — radicalizes that attention and necessity. In the way that carpentry, writing, and music radicalize attention: by demanding a rigorous and ruthless surrender to technique.

Feeding sourdough starter. Choosing flours, deciding on mixtures, scaling ingredients, judging hydration, temperature, and timing. laying out my tools so they’re at hand. Prepping the work space.

No day baking is ever the same: a flour mixture that rose perfectly a week ago at a certain temperature and duration behaves completely differently today for reasons that (for me, anyway) are almost always hard to understand. And most definitely hard to predict.

Over time, and with practice, maybe you start to develop a feel for the dough, for the starter, for the ways the day’s weather might influence fermentation. All the little adjustments and observations and nuanced shifts in temperature and humidity and flour add up to loaves of bread that either work, or don’t (and that’s before you get to not burning the bread).

Which is to say, anything can happen. Lots of anything I can’t predict, and definitely can’t control.

How is that like zazen?

There’s an opportunity implicit in the baking: the opportunity allowed by attention.

Nothing focuses attention like a 500-degree oven.

A decent baker, like a decent carpenter, or a decent writer, or painter, has embraced a dedication to refining technique through disciplined practice. In the same way we use the techniques of zazen — posture, attention to our breath, koan, or shikantaza — to go beyond technique into simple awareness.

Once I let go of my expectations and start to trust my intuition of how things might go, baking — precisely like zazen — goes a little differently: the challenges of the day’s eccentricity, the dough’s elasticity, my sense for how today’s dough might hydrate, all happen pretty much on their own; my body seems to know answers a few seconds before my brain arrives at the same answers.

Not thinking: baking. Which happens in my body, not my brain.

Some days go better than others; some bakes go better than others. It’s all in the surrender to the process. In fact, it’s all the process itself. No difference between the technique and the action. At the end of the day, there’s no perfect zazen, no perfect loaf of bread, no prefect sentence, so much as there’s the continuity of technique applied, of the craft of whatever it is I’m doing. Might as well be cleaning the bathroom, grocery shopping, driving, or eating dinner.

it’s all process.

Practice.

I know I’m not ever getting to perfect; I can embrace the continuity of process over time. With that careful and consistent application of craft — internalizing technique to the point where it becomes embodied expression — craft at some point transforms into artistry.

The process itself — the application of technique — is a crucible that forges us. Bakes a loaf of bread. Hangs a door. Finishes a novel.

You put yourself into it, whatever it happens to be, without reservation. 100% attention.

Sometimes, it’s going to go sideways. That’s just the way it is. Sideways, though, is just an invitation to return to the basics of craft, an opportunity to return to the foundations laid with that consistent application of technique.

Occasionally, I’ve found myself lost, in the best way — absorbed — in the details of craft and the rigor of technique. Just doing.

Just this breath in-and-out.

Just sitting.

That’s the tastiest bread.

Your comments are always welcomed and encouraged. We’d love to hear from you.

One more thing.

As a zen priest I’m a student of Tenshin Fletcher Roshi at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center. For more info on Yokoji, please visit www.zmc.org.

I’m also the caretaker of Warwick Zendo, a small in-person and online sangha based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. if you’d like to check out our practice community, we’re at www.warwickzen.org.

How this works.

I plan to post at least once a week, at minimum. The Freeside offers those weekly posts, which will always be accessible. Payside will (eventually) offer access to some longer writing and ongoing investigations into practices both literary and zen.

Payside also helps to sustain this project, and this practice. Like any creative project, keep sweeping is a kind of labor, and as such, your support to sustain that labor is much appreciated.

If Payside is not for you, that’s all good. The posts will keep coming on Freeside. The support of your reading and attention is a deeply appreciated gift, and I thank you for being here.

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