dear reader: would you like a piece of toast?

This blog takes its title from the small kitchen at the San Francisco Zen Center where I am in residence. Small because it’s not the celebrated main kitchen, which prepares, on a slow day, breakfast, lunch and dinner for about sixty people, but the more intimate auxiliary, the annex, where people keep their personal items, where there’s a perpetual offering of snacks: white ceramic bowls of tahini, jam, butter, earthbalance, peanut butter along with fresh bread, and the mainstay of every meditation center: the rice cake. Also a fruit bowl, which because this is San Francisco, can be relied upon to be full of beautiful in-season organic fruit, these days: persimmons, apples, pears.

At some point in the day most residents appear in this kitchen; it is perhaps the most random space in the building, and yet it has a grounding quality and ingress and egress from the building is often marked by first stopping here.

The small kitchen exerts the lure of the infinite chance operations of its combinatory elements: the table, the snack tray, the cutting board, the coffee, the personal refrigerator. This is why on the faces of people entering the small kitchen, one can read a display of eternal optimism, a sense of possibility trained on the round surface of the table at the back of this space. This round table is a kind of null category a blank space through which passes, sometimes very quickly, public offerings of things that are usually desirable, but are in some way “extra” and in Zen Center terms, “available:” a box of tiny chocolate bars from a data management company, a tray of pastries from a board meeting or leftover popcorn from a movie.

This round table is the site of more intimate conversations than one might have in the large dining room, and often late at night–late for Zen Center, that is, say 9:00 p.m., it’s possible to enter into delicate investigations here, for example, when does acceptance become passivity– while the rest of the building has gone quiet.

So, welcome! And to invoke the liminal quality of the small kitchen, right now I’m on my way to the Headlands Center for the Resonant Spaces event with Walter Kitundu, Kaffe Matthews, and Ellen Fulman. And I’m going to take along this pear…