Gardening & Non-Gardening

My friend Cassandra reports she was visiting her friend Andrea. Andrea and her husband were busy harvesting their garden: washing their just-dug potatoes, blanching green beans for freezing, cutting up cukes for pickles, getting ready to can tomatoes and freeze blueberries. Their kitchen was a veritable beehive of food preparation.

"How's your garden?" Andrea asked.
"Well, i have a few flowers," Cassandra replied, "but even that is pretty minimal. I don't have a vegetable garden."
Andrea stopped in her tracks. "You don't have a vegetable garden?"

Cassandra felt compelled to justify herself. "Well, i have gardening neighbors. And i drive by a farm stand every day on my way home from work."

Some people are following different paths than we are. Whether that's a spiritual path or a non-gardening path, who are we to judge?

Of course, judging is what the mind does so well. Sorting the world into good and bad, holy and secular, right and wrong. Etcetera, etcetera.



Sit back into non-judgmental awareness and watch the judging mind at work. Back and forth it goes, a volley that never ends. "They're so wrong, and i'm so right." Or "They must be right, and therefore i'm doing it wrong." Etcetera, etcetera.

Often it feels like the judging mind is just going around and around. It can even give us a literal headache.

Andrea gardens. Cassandra doesn't.
Really, that's all that is happening.
Free of anyone's opinions.
Free.