My garden is finally beginning to grow.
I planted it late this year, and it seems the soil has needed a lot more care with fertilizer and tending than in past years.
As someone who has the fortune to not be completely dependent upon her own crop (though some might rightfully make the opposite argument about whether it is "fortunate"), my reason for keeping a garden has more to do with pleasure and hobby than it does productivity or output.
Part of that pleasure simply comes from the pure joy that I get to bear witness to the absolute miracle of growth.
In fact, it feels like sheer delight when I walk, almost giddy, to the back of my yard, and notice that my tomato plant has grown an inch taller or my basil has ten new leaves, and in that moment I am filled with awe and wonder at the way mother nature does her work.
I recently came upon this passage from a book I picked up called Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Spiritual Life From Scratch (1999) by a Western Buddhist teacher named Lama Surya Das (aka Jeffrey Miller).
It reads as follows:
"Gardening helps us realize somatically, viscerally, the laws of growth and gradual unfolding. We can't pull the plants up to make them grow, but we can help facilitate and midwife their blooming, each in its own way, time, and proper season.
I have learned a little about patience and humility from my gardens. It's so obviously not something I'm doing that creates this miracle!
I also like to reflect upon and appreciate the exquisitely evanescent, transitory, and poignant nature of things in the garden.
Growing a garden is one of the best ways to grow ourselves and cultivate our true selves. Then all the daily shit we go through can be transmuted into manure on the spiritual field of Bodhi flowers- flowers of awakening.
Everything becomes useful and has meaning and purpose regardless of how it seems to us at the time because it's all grist for the spiritual mill.
If you love the Dharma, you have to farm it."
I love these ideas and these words like: midwife, humility, purpose, and even shit.
I love the concept of gardening as a somatic and visceral experience in our body, and the possibility of cultivating spiritual values such as patience and wisdom through such an ordinary and ancient human activity as gardening.
And of course as a Seeker and a Psychotherapist I love a good metaphor, and Lama Surya Das offers several.
One metaphor was already familiar to me through the writing of Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh in regard to gardening or composting as a symbol for the possibility of using our suffering or difficult emotions as an opportunity for transmutation or creation into something beautiful (remember the lotus).
The second metaphor, however, had not yet occurred to me.
This metaphor is also in regards to gardening, and was written by Lama Surya Das in the same chapter of Awakening to the Sacred that resonated deeply with me as a parent of young children.
"What is the garden in your life? What do you want to watch grow and flower?
It may be a standard garden with dirt and flowers, or it might be something else. Some people tiptoe into their children's bedrooms at night to watch them sleep. Their children clearly are the flowers they love best.
We find our natural meditations in those places and ways of being that we love best. There is great peace in cultivating and gardening all the things that we hope to nurture in our lives, from our work to our families."
Perhaps you might also find a garden (real or metaphorical) to tend today in order to bear witness to the unfolding growth in your own life.
May it be so.
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