Waltzing with Potatoes

For Lent, I'm leading a study of Barbara Brown Taylor's book An Altar in the World. This book is all about spiritual practices you can do in your everyday lives, and one of the first ones she writes about is the Practice of Paying Attention. That might mean paying attention to nature, paying attention to people you'd ordinarily ignore, paying attention to what countries items in a catalogue come from--no matter what you pay attention to, doing so is supposed to evoke reverence in you. Everyone in our group, which met for the first time last night, is supposed to find some way to practice paying attention this week, and come back and talk about what they gleaned from it.

So today, since I Lead By Example, I was looking for something to pay attention to. What I quickly discovered is that there are lots of choices, but it's hard to think of something that would sound worthy of coming back and talking about.

I ended up at Bloom on my way home from our worship committee meeting tonight, because as is often the case, I had no food at home. I decided I was in the mood for mashed potatoes. And then I thought that maybe potatoes were something I could pay attention to.

So I got home and started paying attention. As I held and washed my potatoes I noticed how rough they felt and how if you looked close enough, their skin almost looked like snakeskin. I noticed their lumps and eyes and ridges. I don't know who first decided that a potato was something they might want to eat, because it is dull and brown and hard, like a rock.

The next thing I quickly discovered was that I was bored. Maybe it is hard to practice reverence when you are hungry.

So I went ahead and chopped my potatoes. I tried to pay attention as I did this, too. After all, I've read things about how distanced we Americans often are from our food, and how just slowing down and spending time actually cooking can reconnect us to what we eat. And I like cooking, in theory. I just don't always like cooking when I get home from a meeting at 8 or 9. Also I don't like washing dishes, which is somewhat of a deterrent. Anyway, I paid attention. I felt the tension between my knife and the potato, heard how the slices crunched like an apple when I cut them, felt how they were almost a little slimy on the inside. I suppose if you pushed me I might say the cutting became slightly meditative after a few minutes.

So I don't know. I'm glad God made potatoes. They are delicious mashed up with garlic. Did I develop a heightened sense of reverence for these potatoes and the God who made them? Maybe not so much. Maybe I stopped too early.

Or maybe the practice of reverence and paying attention really does take practice. Maybe it just takes a while to see something new in a vegetable, a person, a catalogue. In the meantime, I suppose it can't hurt to be a little more aware of the things and people God has put around you. And maybe you just have to be in the right frame of mind--and have a snack first.