If It's Brown, Cut It Down

If it's brown,
cut it down.
If it's green,
it's clean.

Now is the time to put the gardens to bed--cutting down the brown stuff and leaving whatever is green. The advantage to cleaning up the garden now is that you won't have to do it next spring, when there's so much other stuff to do.

Ever since spring, our attention has been on what's arising in the garden--first the bulbs flower, then the shortest plants bloom, and later, the tallest plants flower. What's new in the garden revs us up and makes us happy.

Now our attention is almost all on ceasing. Flowers have died. Green leaves have curled up and turned brown. Now is the time to notice: "gone."

If we move our attention just a little closer to what feels like our center, we will notice that most things we think of as "ours" are also "gone," leaving us with only the virtual reality of memory.

All we really have is the present moment.