Paying Attention

Yesterday and today were easy work days in the garden, watering, weeding, tying up and pinching. And this forms my first commentary on the post of a couple of days ago: while it's true that if you want to harvest, say, carrots, you must plant carrots and not lettuce. But if you want to harvest carrots it's not enough simply to plant them: you must also attend to their needs on a daily basis. This means keeping the little seeds moist enough for them to germinate (and carrots can take a long time to germinate), keeping the seedlings with their shallow little roots moist, weeding around the carrots so they have room to grow, thinning the carrots so they don't crowd each other out. So it is with our minds. It's not enough to plant a seed -- think a kind thought or perform a compassionate deed. We must pay attention to our minds, moment by moment, cultivating awareness of the living complex of thoughts and feelings that comprise our karma, learning when to keep it all to ourselves and when to share.

Planting Seeds

I don’t remember the context for this story but it’s one of my favorites:

A man approached the Buddha and asked him for help resolving some difficulty. The Buddha asked, “You are a farmer, aren’t you?” The man said, yes. The Buddha then asked, “Tell me something. If I plant pomegranate seeds can I harvest coriander?” The man smiled. “Oh, no, Buddha, if you plant pomegranate seeds you can only harvest pomegranate.” “Oh,” the Buddha replied. “Well, then, if I plant pepper seeds, can I harvest spinach?” Again the man smiled. “Oh, no. The same principle applies. If you plant pepper seeds you can only harvest pepper. If you want to harvest spinach you must plant spinach seed.” The Buddha became a little stern. “This is what I have told you and told you and yet you do not heed my words. If you plant the seeds of anger and greed you will harvest anger and greed. If you plant the seeds of wisdom and compassion, you will harvest wisdom and compassion. Whatever difficulties you are now experiencing are the fruit of the seed you planted in the past. If you want to avoid these difficulties in the future you must now plant a different seed.”

I would add a little to this teaching and say that anger and greed are like weeds. They grow willy-nilly (like dandelions or bindweed) and can be very hard to eradicate. But wisdom and compassion need to be nurtured more carefully. In my experience, one word of anger can destroy an acre of love. Over time, wisdom and compassion can grow to towering heights, like the cottonwood tree, casting such a long and deep shadow that anger and greed whither and die from a lack of sun and water. But all those qualities--anger, greed, wisdom, compassion-- are part of our human karma and can never be fully eradicated. Even the most bitter and hardened person is capable of love. And the most loving person can burn with anger. 

What seed are you planting right now?

It's Alive!

I've been gardening a lot this year and thinking that I should blog about it, if only to have a record of the slow transformation of our backyard. I decided to resurrect this blog rather than start a new one. So here goes:

My Zen teacher, Linc Rhodes, was here last weekend to lead a retreat. We had some free time and spent part of it in the garden. Linc staked up my two healthy tomato heirloom tomato plants ( a Lemon Drop & a Speckled Roman, both from Seed Savers Exchange) and reminded me to pinch the new growth that appears exactly in the joint between two stems. This is to encourage the plants to produce fruit rather than leaves. He also reminded me to give the peppers some sulfur by burying match sticks upside down in the ground near them. Yesterday morning, I gave him the first of the tomato harvest, a single hybrid cherry tomato. This is the smallest possible token of my gratitude to him for all his teaching and help.

This morning I watered everything except the tomatoes, which had two good soaks over the weekend, one due to a storm, the other due to my efforts. I also gave two of the tomato plants a little extra support (the Lemon Drop & one of the hybrids), pinched some unwelcome growth, pulled grasses out of the summer squash / cucumber / winter squash bed, and planted a little 1' x 2' patch of Miner's Lettuce (Bountiful Gardens) and a nearly four foot row of Painted Pony Beans (Seedsavers) along side the most pathetic tomato plant in my garden, a hybrid Margaret picked up at the TCF's spring plant sale. I plan to put in two more rows over the next few weeks. These beans can be eaten green; left on the plant they'll dry into cooking beans. Sixty and eighty days to harvest, respectively.

I did a bit more rigorous work, moving a barrowful of compost into the tomato / bean bed and weeding out some tall grasses that were a) encroaching on a path and b) harboring chiggers. It is hard for me to want to save those sentient beings. Perhaps they too are my great teachers? If so, I must admit that I am a reluctant, even hostile student!