Spring.  The word originally described the action of a watch spring, the mechanism designed to spring forth after being held back.  Eventually spring came to also describe the season that follows winter when surging energies arise out of the long stillness.  Here on the Wisconsin farm meadow where I live, one can almost see grasses rising, buds springing forth into leaves and flowers.

 

FLOWERS AND WEEDS

Over this past winter, I nursed a spring dream of creating a flower garden in a field that in past years had been home to the farm’s chickens. In the gloom of March, I did what gardeners everywhere do—-I feasted on the brilliant colors in the seed catalogs and ordered a dozen packets of flower seeds destined for many a beautiful vase come August.

Soon my friend and gardening mentor, Mary, became a partner to my dream.  In early May, we gathered our seed packets, sat at the dining room table and stood at the edge of the chicken yard, planning, designing, imagining the transformation of this sizeable field into colorful beds of pleasing shapes, complete with a bench for sitting peacefully in the midst of our creation.

Our gardening dream was born out of a very human impulse to make and to have pleasurable, nourishing, beautiful things and experiences for ourselves and others.  The surging energy that arose in me as our idea took shape matched the spring weather. I was full of joy and inspiration, so ready to be gardening after my own winter’s rest.

But…..what was springing forth in me were ideas, concepts, mental constructs that are born of planning, figuring things out, projecting into the future.  I dearly love this activity of constructing possibilities in my mind.  It seems so right to think things through, to build my conceptual truths and possibilities, turn them over in my mind, chew on them, savor them, hone them into more and more polished versions of MINE.

As the month of May progressed, MY garden plan began to encounter obstacles.  The tiller needed repairs.  Then the spring rains made tilling the soil impossible for days and days.  Other of life’s commitments trumped gardening when the soil finally did dry out.  Day by day, I watched myself succumb to the pressure created by my garden inspiration.  Flower seeds should go into the ground by the end of May yet we were nowhere close to planting by that time. I lay awake at night, getting further tied into knots as the pressure mounted.  As these days of not gardening followed each other, my aversion to the weather, my craving for more energy to prepare the soil under the hot sun mounted.  I watched my anxiety as the process of what to plant, when to plant and where to plant remained fluid and uncertain.  I was caught in a high octane push to have my spring dream manifest.  Exhausting.

All the while I suffered, something else was slowly and quietly becoming clear.  Each May day, as I went out into the fields to do what I could, I began to see that the problem was not the weather or my energy or the heat.  The problem lay in the very act I loved so much, formulating mental constructs that shape my actions.  My garden dream had become an obstacle to planting flowers.

Eventually Mary and I let go of our grand garden scheme. We tilled two long straight rows in a different field and planted a smaller selection of flowers, reserving many of the seed packets for another time.  Even this pared down version of a flower garden has taxed my capacity for working in the hot sun, bent over the long rows.  But now Mary and I tell each other, “We will do what we can, we will see how much can be done, that is all we can do.”  It took awhile to GET it, to recognize and then practice “just this moment,” expecting nothing, going nowhere.  This is a great relief.  Peace in the garden.

As I pull weeds among the poppies and clean the freshly tilled soil of weeds so we can plant sunflower seedlings, I still often find myself leaving the work of my hands for some automatic mental rumination.  But a deeper stronger wisdom, born out of my suffering, brings me back to the warm soil and my sore back, the only place where the actual unfolding of spring planting is taking place, the only place where the idea of “my garden” can transform into “things as they are.”

I smile now when I pass the old chicken yard-cum-flower garden extraordinaire. Its birth and the pain it caused me have been great teachers.  I see how seduced I can be by my own mental creations, how attached I sometimes remain to finding satisfaction in the material world.  I see the suffering I brought on myself when the idea that compelled my spring plans met the truth of life.  I see how easy it would have been to continue believing the fear and judgement I felt, how easy it would have been to act out of that negativity and cause harm to myself and others.

Now that the flowers are all vigorous seedlings, I worry that they will meet a premature end due to drought, deer, moles, or weeds I do not have the stamina to pull.  But I know that the most problematic weeds are those in my mind.  When I feel protectiveness towards the new flowers rise up inside me, I can meet this moment of clinging with an awareness that knows a bit more dispassion for this material realm, the realm of our dreams, the realm where suffering happens.  I can practice pulling the weeds of striving from my mind while I pull weeds from among the flowers.  Moment by moment, flower by flower, pulling the weeds, making a garden.

 

Photo credit: Wilhelm Rieber

Photo Credit: Flowers & Weeds, Getsu San Ku Shin

NEW!

Book Review

Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng, is remarkable because the author reveals a word of warning to those of us who hide what is important to us. At the outset, Ng notifies us of the consequence of our human tendency to please, to care, to be a caretaker of other people’s happiness rather than to be fearless to live in the face of life’s inevitable losses.

Ng informs us with just three words, “Lydia is dead.”

This is the consequence. It is a forewarning followed by a general reference of those this happens to. “But they don’t know this yet.” Ng’s ability to use the word they rather than the family, her friends, her neighbors keeps us including those we encounter in the novel up to and including Lydia herself. Lydia doesn’t know this inevitable outcome until it is too late. But the reader does. It is too late for Lydia to live out her life. Her young, frightened self is unable to unsaddle the burden of her all too common promise to her mother. She believes and vows to manipulate her child self to the wishes of her mother. It isn’t until she is an adolescent that the promise is seen for what it is. Suffocating, manipulating and manipulative.

Everything I Never Told You takes into account every member of Lydia’s family as well as others. There is Jack, who in his own renaissance as a young gay teen and despite his reputation with girls, confesses his love for Lydia’s brother. Each character lives with everything they never tell one another and to one degree or another each lives with the inevitable consequences of hiding the truth as they hide it.

In the end, there are wounds, piles of them that require significant amounts of recovery time leaving most if not all of the characters scarred and wounded for life. Ng offers a strong word of advice to those who stumble upon her book albeit on a mundane level.

Don’t fall prey to the conventions in the material world, if you do you will suffer the consequences.

Reveal yourself or die. You can’t make anyone else happy, that’s just not your job. In Zen, your job is to find your true nature or die. If you are so lucky, everyone benefits.

Reviewer: Fashi Lao Yue

 

 

Yoga Principle: Letting Go

Do the things that you do not like to do that are good for you.
Do not do the things you like to do that are not good for you.