The Meditative Gardener

My neighbor's greenhouse, attached to her house, has actual beds of soil. I offered her some compost to fertilize her little indoor flowerbeds. She wheeled her garden cart over, but my compost pile is an iceberg. She scraped off the top 3 inches before hitting permafrost. She went home with about a bucket's worth of compost, so she'll come back another day for more.

Many people just skim the surface of the Buddha's teachings and are entirely satisfied with the ease it brings to their minds and to their lives. The mundane insights we receive from our "insight meditation" works well enough to reduce our stress.

For decades, i did not realize that "insight" meant insight into the 3 characteristics of all experience: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self. Meditation offers us the opportunity to have a sort of x-ray vision to see deeply into our lives.

We might be satisfied with simply scanning the Buddhist teachings for that which makes sense to us. Some of us will want to dig more deeply into the richness and vastness these teachings offer. Some of us will come back for more.