A Dharma Garden

An old friend of mine named Bluie Piel, then in her seventies, once led me out the front door of her house to admire her half-shaded lawn, where grass was fighting it out with slabs of New England granite that broke the surface like the backs of half-submerged whales. It was spring, and drifts of self-sown blue scilla were all over the grass, blending exquisitely with the clumps of red-and-yellow wild columbine that had also self-sown there, taking hold even in tiny soil pockets in the rocks. It looked like a miniature alpine meadow, Connecticut-style. “Now, dearie,” Bluie said, “God didn’t do that. I did that.”

-- Barbara Damrosch, The Garden Primer, from chapter on “Wildflowers”

In each of us, there is that capacity to recognize what is good, what is beautiful, what is true. ... Our person is like a garden, filled with many flowering plants. But in the garden there are things other than flowers and plants. If we neglect the garden, it will be overrun with weeds, and our flowers will wither and die.

-- TNH, Shambhala Sun, September 2007

[Click on any image for a gorgeous magnified view.]

Thầy refers to gardens a lot. Seeds, watering, roses, lettuce, weeds, compost. I find it to be a helpful and encouraging metaphor, inherently alive. Even in trying to characterize the trope, I end up using it: organic, earthy, down-to-earth, vital. I like to garden, so hearing the dharma taught through gardening concepts feels good to me.

However, I admit to some ambivalence about the idea of gardening. A garden is not the same thing as nature. A garden is nature under management. If you leave a garden to follow its natural tendencies, pretty soon you won’t have a garden. You’ll have a natural mess.

In that case, what role should equanimity play? Doesn’t tending a garden tend to water seeds of discrimination?

I know it does in me. My discrimination about plants gets keener and keener. Not just discrimination between weeds and cultivars. I am developing strong preferences about all kinds of plants.

I like columbine, but not phlox. I like native geranium, but not lily of the valley. I like clematis, but not honeysuckle. (Or, maybe in your garden, but not in mine, not in the profusion it tends toward.)

I like campanula (bellflower) but not grape hyacinth. I like hollyhocks, but not double hollyhocks. (I don’t like “double” anything. Old-fashioned single will do.) I like lamium (dead nettle) but not hosta. I really don’t like hosta, to the point that whenever I see it, there is the mental commentary: “I don’t like hosta. Don’t care for it at all.”

The list goes on and on. A lot of these preferences are clear instances of useless discrimination.

However, some of the discrimination can be described as the watering of positive seeds. Good gardening is, literally, the cultivation of causes and conditions that will allow what is good, beautiful, and true to manifest. That means supplementing the soil with compost, generated from our own garden and kitchen scraps. Loosening the soil so that water and air can penetrate. Replacing the clay, bit by bit, with humus, sand, and fresh soil. Mounting lattice so that plants that need shade get a bit of shade. Watering when the sky is dry.

Cultivating the right causes and conditions means choosing plants that will thrive in the conditions of my garden that can’t be changed. Accepting that hollyhock and muskmallow will not be happy in my garden’s humidity. Working with the condition of “full sun” as it manifests in my garden in August, which is better described as “equatorial desert.” Allowing my fellow denizens, the squirrels and occasional possum and raccoon, to steal the strawberries just as they ripen. Equanimity about the strawberries allows me to see the beauty in their immature, lumpy, bristly form.

Does an unripe strawberry have buddha-nature?

Mu.

The thing about gardening is that it reminds me of what Suzuki Roshi reportedly said about his students: “All of you are perfect just as you are and you could use a little improvement.” Everything is unfolding just as it should (or must, due to past actions) and don’t neglect the weeding. You are luminous and you must practice with diligence.

Let’s close with a gatha from Thầy.

Watering the Garden

The sunshine and the water
have brought about this luxurious vegetation.
The rain of compassion and understanding
can transform the dry desert into a vast fertile plain.

Monastery Retreat

This past weekend, I joined fifteen or so sangha members on retreat at Blue Cliff Monastery.

It was lovely being up there, taking in the calm and practice of the monastics, and it was lovely being there with sangha friends.

The first day was sunny and beautiful. Apple trees and others were in fragrant bloom. Trees were still in their first green leaf, a few weeks behind Brooklyn in their pace through spring.

The second day was rainy and beautiful. The birds did not mind the rain at all. I heard birdsong I’d never heard before. In front of the cabin I stayed in, I watched chickadees and titmice brave the blue jay who kept trying to usurp them from their branches, their patch of grass.

The formal Question and Answer period with four of the monks and nuns made a deep impression on me. I noticed, first of all, how Sr. Thệ Nghiêm (True Vow) transcribed our questions onto the board in a way that often conveyed an answer. As if she were reminding us that questions contain their own answers, and we already know what they are.

Here are the questions, and what I inferred were her answers:

1. Inner commentary – how to practice with it

Practice mindfully with it.

2. Fourth Mindfulness Training (in relation to anger)

Be in loving relationship.

3. Resurging habit energies (thoughts, desires, attachments)

Habit energy is always just habit energy.

4. Practicing when others act harmfully/selfishly

Just practice.

5. Dwelling in the present moment “out there”

Dwell in the present moment.

6. Addressing fear in daily life

Hello, my fear.

7. Taking care of self (vs?) others first or simultaneously

Yes. (The word “simultaneously”was Sister’s, not the asker’s.)

8. Prayer (subject/object/function)

In prayer, the subject and object are one. That is the function.

9. What are your personal, intimate volitions

What are yours?

None of the monastics directly answered the last question, except one who said he had never thought of volition as personal and would have to think about it. I suspect that the asker meant “intention” or “aspiration.” By their answers to the other questions, though, they all seemed to reveal their aspiration quite plainly: To live mindfully for the benefit of all beings.

About habit energy, one monk suggested that we may hold on to habit energy out of fear that we will feel lonely without it. Also, he said that some habit energy is beneficial, such as the habit of coming back to mindfulness. Those habits we should nurture.

But the comment that most transformed my experience was this. One nun related how she tries, especially when doing an action that is very familiar, such as entering the meditation hall, to place her mind exactly in that action. “Is my mind with my hand on the knob of this door?” For the rest of the day, I made an effort (an easeful effort) to be more mindful with every door I opened or closed. I also remembered hearing how Thây had instructed the monastics, if you haven’t been mindful with every step in a staircase, then you must go back and climb or descend them again. And so I tried to attend to every step. To some extent, I was successful, and it made me very happy.

Another very special moment was hearing Sr. True Vow sing to us during deep relaxation. This video features her lovely voice. Please enjoy.

P.S. Remember this fellow? About halfway through the first meal, I noticed him hanging in the nun’s dining hall.

Sr. True Vow told me that the sisters were delighted with him. That makes me happy, too.

Compassion for My Mother’s Hands

These are my mother’s hands.

Actually, they are my hands. But when I look at them, I see my mother’s hands.

I don’t remember particularly noticing my mom’s hands’ appearance until I was an adolescent. My mother would have been in her mid-forties then, and at that time there were many things about her that were objectionable to me. Her middle-age spread, her taste in polyester (this was the ‘70s), her suddenly annoying way of speaking. And her hands. I didn’t like the brown spots, or the rough knuckles, or the crepe-like texture to the skin, through which the veins bulged blue-ishly. I never wanted hands like hers.

But I have memories and impressions of my mother's hands that go back before I cared about their appearance. Hers were hands that held her funny nurse’s scissors in a funny way, in the left hand. Hers were hands that shook the thermometer down authoritatively. These were among her RN ways, mysterious and estimable.

Hers were hands that, when the driving on the way to piano/ballet/skating/swimming/pottery class got hectic, reached for a cigarette, punched in the lighter and retrieved it, glowing, to ignite the Carton, rolled down the window a crack, and smoked with resolve – as if one drove better with just one hand.

Hers were hands that gripped my small hands tightly as she trimmed my fingernails, keeping them piano-student short, like hers. Hers were hands that played Bach preludes and fugues in the living room when we kids were elsewhere – she didn’t want an audience. I didn’t understand this back then, but now I do. Even with one child (she had four), I relish times when I am not regarded as “mother,” when I am just myself, the object of no one’s eye but my own.

My mother played beautifully, by the way, when she did. She played Bach and Beethoven, Bacharach and Manilow. She played what my sister and I thought was, “You See The Sky, The Sky’s in Love with You.” And songs like "Moon River” and “Born Free,” for which we mocked her.

I remember her hands on her hips, backwards, when the “dumb dishes” were done. I remember her hands ironing clothes distractedly, a cigarette and ashtray within reach. I remember her showing me she had stopped wearing her wedding and engagement rings, about six months after my father left. I remember her hands at the typewriter, typing up papers on history and economics and policy, as she worked over the years toward a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree. I remember her hands spanking me when I was sixteen and had insisted on washing my dirty hair, even though it was well past bedtime and she had said no.

My mom’s hands now wear rings she bought for herself. Her hands haven’t fingered cigarettes in a long time. She still puts her hands on her hips, backwards, when the dumb dishes are done.

These are my hands, but when I look at them, I see all of my mother’s hands. I am now in my late forties myself, and I find many things about my hands and body objectionable. But when I see my hands as my mother’s hands lately, I see an opening for compassion.

Compassion for the woman she was, and the woman she is.

Compassion for the child I was, and the adolescent, so full of judgment and uncertainty.

Compassion for the woman I am now, the woman I have become, with these hands.

To peer into this opening is partly a gift, and partly yet an aspiration.