Compost in Flower Pots

I'm just now getting around to filling up the flower pots on the front step. My innovation this year is to fill the flower pot 3/4 full with sifted compost, then add 3-4" of potting soil. That way, i'm not spending a lot of money on potting soil.

I sift my compost through a flat with smallish holes. The result looks beautiful and feels so smooth. I'm hoping the compost will provide nourishment for the petunias and other plants i put in the pots, while the potting soil will hold the moisture.

If we could fill ourselves up with even 3/4 of mindfulness, just think how much smoother our lives would run. For instance, fewer forgotten things--because we were paying attention.

Let's grow mindfulness in our everyday lives.

British Weather

I hear people complaining about the cloudy, rainy weather we've had this month of May. I didn't even notice. I've been enjoying the cool, misty, cloudy British weather. What conditions give rise to those beautiful British gardens? Cool, misty, cloudy weather.

What conditions give rise to our own internal weather?

A smile works wonders. Just a little Buddha smile on the lips. While you're at it, smile with your eyes--the sign of a true smile. Place a smile in your heart and a smile in your mind.

I feel better already.

Petunia Night Sky

I fell in love with Petunia Night Sky as soon as i saw it in someone else's wagon at the nursery. Even though a single plant cost $5.95, i plopped one in my wagon too.

I lead a loving-kindness meditation called Breath In Peace and Breath Out Love. The initial instruction is "Breathe in peace from wherever you think peace resides: a still mountain lake, a meadow filled with wild flowers, the trees in the forest, or the night sky with the moon and the stars."

I imagine peace in the night sky. Breathing in peace, i breathe out love. Petunia Night Sky reminds me.

Is Sumac Really a Weed Tree?

In the past month, 3 people have said to me, "Sumac is a weed tree. I've got to get rid of it."

Sumac is a weed tree? Sez who?

Sumac has many wonderful benefits:

• It has beautiful red, yellow, green foliage in the fall.
• The sumac staghorns provide food for birds all winter long.
• The 12-foot tall sumac provides a nice intermediary between the 3-foot tall garden and the 60-foot trees in the woods.
• Sumacs have an interesting airy architecture. They are a nice background tree.

Yes, sumacs sucker, but around here, i seldom see vast stands of sumac. Mostly, i see small patches.

A weed is something growing where you don't want it, but are you really going to plant a garden in the place where the sumacs are? They are usually growing in a waste place, a place no one has paid attention to for quite a while. Are you the one who is going to roll up her sleeves and pay a lot of attention to that area? Really?

Saying what everyone else says might be true. Or it might not. Investigate for yourself. Inquire deeply into what is true for you.

Investigation is the second factor of enlightenment. We look deeply into the delusion that is all around us, and call it by its true name: Delusion.

Landscape Fabric

While transplanting yesterday, i dug up a piece of landscape fabric. Oh yeah. 15 years ago, there was a path here. I put down landscape fabric so weeds wouldn't grow in the path. Now the path is 3 feet farther downhill.

Landscape fabric is for gardeners who don't garden. Landscape fabric is trying ever so hard to make the garden stay the same--just as it is today. But guess what! The garden moves. The garden moves so incrementally, you don't notice it. My yard has a slight incline, and the dirt moves downhill ever so slowly.

If you're never going to move a single plant, never going to divide an overgrown plant, never going to dig in your garden, then you might consider landscape fabric. But, really, what's the purpose of landscape fabric, or black plastic? I'm betting you want to keep the weeds down. If you want to keep the weeds down, mulch! Mulch is very pretty, and you can dig around in it all you want.

The Catbird Seat

The catbird seems to be my totem animal this spring. I'm not that familiar with catbirds, but one is often within about 8 feet of me as i'm gardening. I can just sit on the ground and listen to it sing its double phrase song. I wish i could speak as many languages as the catbird! (Or the mockingbird or the thrasher, to which it is related.)

But maybe it's not languages per se that the catbird represents. Maybe i am learning to read people more easily, and not take what they say personally.

My meditation teacher, who had a spontaneous awakening experience when he was 30, says that awakenings enable the person to "see through" people who are less proficient on the spiritual path. No judgment here. Simply an "Oh," which leads to compassion for that other person's suffering and an equanimity of accepting things as they are in the moment.

I'm not making any claims about my own awakening. Once in a while i feel awake for a few seconds, but mostly, i'm muddling along with everyone else.

The catbird is sitting pretty, and i am pretty happy to be graced with its song.

Eggshell Water

89-year-old Margot is watering her hibiscus with eggshell water, and it has the biggest, most beautiful blooms ever. "I have an egg for breakfast every morning," she says, "so collecting the eggshells is easy."

Eggshell water? Put 3 eggshells in a glass, and smoosh to smithereens. Cover with 2 cups of boiling water and let it sit all day. This leaches the calcium and other minerals out of the eggshells and into the water.

Water your houseplants the following morning, and let me know what your results are. You can even drink the (taste-free) eggshell water.

The reason we take calcium is that ever so slowly, minerals are leaching out of our bodies. Without even noticing, our bones are becoming porous. Earth elements are invisibly returning to earth, even while we think we are our same old selves. Ha!

We can replenish ourselves--or our plants--with eggshell water or some other form of calcium. It's a temporary fix that works for years, hopefully decades. But eventually, our own bodies will be broken eggshells headed for the compost pile.

Big Purple Balls

 My grandmother had flower beds all the way around the brick ranch house that she and my grandfather moved into in 1955. Every Saturday, while mother went grocery shopping, we kids stayed at Nonnie's, and she gave us a tour around her flower bed. Very boring for this teenager, but I now take pleasure in what pleased her. One of her unusual specimens was 3 alliums that bloomed with a big purple ball on a three-foot-tall bare stalk.

My purple allium balls are blooming this week—very eye-catching as they stand naked above everything else that's going on in the flower bed.

The tall things, the big things get our attention in life because they are so remarkable and give us so much pleasure.

Can we continue to pay attention as the remarkable thing fades and becomes ugly? Can we notice that all things are impermanent? My grandmother's garden—long gone.

Allium comes, and allium goes. And so do we.

The Blame Game

My morning meditation group is reading a book on forgiveness. Yesterday we read a chapter on The Blame Game, which i think i would like to memorize. Then yesterday afternoon, as i was teaching meditation at the county jail, one of my students talked about her relationship with another woman inmate, and how they were just playing a hurtful blame game with each other.

The blame game starts with you-statements. This is a way of throwing a hot potato at someone. Usually, the other person will throw it right back at you with another you-statement, and then the two of you are off to the races.

It takes extreme mindfulness to hold on to the hot potato and notice that it is hot and burning and that you feel angry or frustrated and that you want to say whatever is on the tip of your tongue. Stop. Stop and notice all those pains. Count to 10. Give yourself a moment to cool down. Try to drop the hot potato. Keep trying to let go of that hot-hot-hot potato.

Of course your feelings hurt. That is your pain. Notice that "they" did not cause your pain. You are causing your own pain by holding on to a painful idea. They condemned you. So what?

It's time for you to make a change. A change of habit. Probably a change in relationship. The pain will cease. But only when you stop resisting it.

The Blame Game is a game you are sure to lose. So stop playing it.

Trillium Gets Me Out of Bed

Trillium got me out of bed this morning. I was lying in my warm bed, listening to the rain, various thoughts sprinkling in my mind, when i noticed that the rain had stopped.  Trillium! I thought. It's time to transplant trillium. I sprang out of bed, rushed into my clothes, and sprinted outdoors.

I set an intention years ago to landscape the edges of my woodsy driveway with wildflowers. There are still a few bare spots, one of which i designated in my mind for trillium. As someone recently said to me, "Trillium likes to grow on the edges."

Among all the give-away plants I have been trucking around this past week are a couple of broken trillium. Only a true gardener could see the promise of a bare broken green stem, so those orphans remained with me.

As i planted the 2 trillium, the rain began in earnest again, so i hurried back indoors. Happy. Happy to have fulfilled that long ago intention. That bubbling joy lasted for 20 minutes.

We set an intention to walk our spiritual path, but sometimes we don't get around to it. We follow various other rabbit trails in life. Then, one day, we remember our intention, and we head in that direction. Yes! Our heart sings. Yes!

Allegheny Pachysandra

I'm ripping apart one flower bed that is covered with 2 ground covers.  The lamium is easy to rip out and throw in the compost. But now i am face to face with Allegheny pachysandra. I have it in another bed, where it has slowly colonized, but it has suburbanized this shady bed.

I thought that Allegheny pachysandra would be good because it is native to the North American continent. But it's still pachysandra!

Now is the time to remember my long-term goal: once i know a wildflower can survive, i can dare to transplant the colony into the woods. I have a long-term construction project with the Allegheny pachysandra. There's enough that I can landscape most of my woodland trails with it.

Now is the time to remember my long-term spiritual goal. Landscape my life with kindness, mindfulness, and patience.

How Stress Crumbles

The Garden Club had its plant sale today. I took 2 truckloads of perennials, and brought home one truckload. Now what am i going to do with them?

The easy answer would be throw them in the compost, but i can't quite bring myself to do that. I could re-plant some of them in different places, and cross my fingers for rain--which is supposed to be coming in a couple of days.

This week and next week are the time to transplant before early summer arrives, and it gets too hot to transplant. So i've got my work cut out for me. I believe that's called stress.

I balance that stress with the joy of contributing one truckload of plants to the sales for the Garden Club. And if i focus on the joy, the stress starts crumbling. Happy, happy, happy.

Shoveling Manure

Last week, it was "too cold" to garden (according to some), and this week, it is too hot--96 degrees. I really intended to be out in the garden from 6 a.m. to about 10 and then retire for the day, but i didn't have my logistics quite right. At 7:30 this morning, i picked up a truckload of manure. Since i needed the truck to carry a load of plants to the Perennial Swappers meeting at 6 p.m., i needed to unload the truck in the heat of the day.

We have our plans, and then they (or we) go astray. Life doesn't go the way we expect it will. Life doesn't go the way we want it to.

Can i accept life just as it is? Without complaint? Shoveling hot, steaming manure in the mid-day sun?

I could shovel the manure of the mind along with the manure in the truck. Or I could just shovel manure.

Pulling Garlic Mustard

Garlic mustard, a biennial invasive, is blooming its tiny white flowers this week. Last evening, while waiting to meet a friend for dinner, i spent 5 minutes pulling garlic mustard on the nearby rail trail. Someone stopped to ask me what i was doing. "Practicing random acts of gardening," i said.

It's a small thing. Pulling garlic mustard on the roadside for 5 minutes. Today, i pulled Japanese knotweed near a stream for 10 minutes.

Yet this is what we do when we pull the weed of impatience for a minute as we sit at a stoplight patiently. We weed an unkind thought and replace it with kindness.

What would you weed? Irritation? Desire? Resentment? Envy?

Simply being mindful of these unskillful mind states leaves us, for a moment, with the spaciousness of mindfulness.

Cool May

May's refrigerator weather is keeping the daffodils in bloom even as the next roll-out of mid-spring blooms arrive--tulips, money plant, apple trees. The result is a feast for the eyes. Flowers everywhere you look.

As much as some people lament the cool weather, this British-style climates gives us British-style gardens: Everything blooming at the same time.

Keeping our cool is a learned skill for most of us, and it requires changing our perception, specifically changing our belief about something unpleasant.

Something unpleasant happens (cool weather), and we gripe and complain and wish for something different from what is. We can change our perception simply by practicing gratitude. It's so fabulously May out there! Keep up the gratitude for at least 30 seconds, and re-install every time the mind drifts into snarkiness.

This is one way we can learn to keep our cool and enjoy the cool weather of May.

Too Cold to Garden

"It's too cold to garden," says the Exercise Queen.

You nearly have to drag me to exercise class, yet i gladly go outdoors in layers of wool and fleece with neck warmer and hat in order to dig in the dirt. Within 10 minutes, off comes the hat and the second layer of fleece. I'm trudging from garden to garden, digging, dividing, transplanting, and warming up.

I guess it all depends on what you find unpleasant. She finds cold unpleasant. I find exercise unpleasant. She finds exercise pleasant. I find trudging around the garden, all bundled up and covered in dirt, to be pleasant.

Really, pleasant and unpleasant drive our actions. So after exercise class, i went directly to the garden and started digging.

The Postage Stamp Garden

Just a year ago, i took a truckload of plants to a 34-year-old former neighbor, Kristin, who now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts--the most densely populated city in New England. Her garden area is just 12'x10'--a postage stamp of a garden.

While we were planting, several neighbors stopped to see what we were doing and to admire the baby garden.

Here's how the toddler garden looks, a year later. The rhubarb hides the foundation neatly and makes a nice backdrop for red tulips.

Alas,  Kristin's life is in transition. She and her sweetie are moving to Maine this summer, so that he can go to medical school. Good-bye sweet little garden. All things are impermanent.

Hello new garden, wherever you may be.

What Gets You Into the Garden?

At exercise class yesterday, Hilary said she would rather exercise for 4 hours than garden for 4 hours. And then some of us are inveterate gardeners.

What is it, exactly, that gets you out in the garden? The solitude? The planting? The weeding? The artistry of the garden? The harvesting? The outdoors? Some people love one thing, but don't like the other aspects of gardening. For me, it's dividing my plants so that i can have the joy of giving them away. I do get the side benefit of the artistry of pleasing balance and color combinations.

It's different strokes for different folks. While teaching meditation yesterday at the county jail, one inmate told another, "You have to find an approach, a meditation that appeals to you." Then M explained to me that her friend was detoxing from addiction, so her friend's body was very frazzled. "So she might prefer meditation in motion, such as tai chi, qi gong, yoga, or any of the martial arts," i said.

M nodded. "I have anxiety," she said. "So i need calming meditation."

Each person has to discover their own special blend of meditation and exercise.

Letting Hate Be

I've received a couple of pieces of hate mail recently. Ouch! That hurts!

The mind wants to get going on a story and all sorts of rebuttals about the other person's point of view. I hate to be blamed. Yet blame is inevitable. Someone will not see things the way i see them. Someone will lash out. This is life. I much prefer praise, but you can't have one (praise) without the other (blame).

So where do i find happiness despite the outer conditions of ugly letters? I've been practicing forgiveness, toward myself, first of all. I forgive myself for not understanding this situation before i got into it.

I seek refuge in the Dharma--in patience and kindness, toward myself first of all.

And i notice the pain of remembering the letters. Can i just sink into that pain and watch it release?

The sender of the hate mail is living in a mental hell realm. By creating their own false story and then sticking to it, i can practically see the narrowed mind, the mind closed to relationship and to additional facts.

Oh, well. My job is to let the story go. Let it be as it is. To sink into the truth of silence. And feel compassionate toward all the political people who are receiving much worse hate mail from more people.

Here's a verse from the Dhammapada:

Those who are contentious 

have forgotten that we all die;

for the wise, who reflect on this fact,

there are no quarrels.

Naked Gardening Day

Today is World Naked Gardening Day. Just you and your garden, together in the buff. No one other than the tulips and rhubarb needs to see you.

Naked Gardening Day is not about beautiful bodies. It could be about noticing that even beautiful bodies are not actually beautiful. The bag of skin holds muscles and bones together. Muscles look like meat, which is not particularly beautiful. And bones look like skeletons, which are not beautiful either.

The body serves us well for all these decades. If we take a close look, we might realize that our 70 percent water bodies are not different from the water out of the tap, in the hose, or in the birdbath. The air that passes into our nostrils and bodies is no different than the air that surrounds us. The "earth" element of our bodies--including calcium, phosphorus, and batches of trace minerals--are no different than the chemical elements around us.

So, why exactly, do we compare our body with anyone else's body? What's the point? Rather, compare your body to a river or to your garden, because all of our bodies are composed of the same material elements.

Be one with Nature, today!

Opinions About Rain

It's raining today. Raining steadily. The forecast for the coming week is cloudy and rainy. I'm hearing lots of complaints. We want Spring! We want May! We want blooming flowers. We want to be outdoors in the garden.

Do you notice how we resist the present moment? This wet present moment.

The rain may be unpleasant--it's chilly; it's wet; it's raw. Not liking it only adds to our suffering and increases our stress.

We don't need to have any opinion at all. Imagine that! It's raining. Period. No opinion. No judgment. Only the feeling of unpleasantness.

I gaze out the window with a cup of tea in my hand. Raindrops dying in quick succession.

Pleasing Combinations

This evening, Perennial Swappers come to tour my garden, and, i must say, it is spectacular. The early-season daffodils are fading, but the late-season daffodils are just now blooming. The yellow and white daffodils sit above various blue-blooming perennials--pulmonaria, brunnera, and forget-me-nots. Yellow and blue make a very pleasing-to-the-eye color combination.

What's the pleasing combination for our lives? What's the right mix of social life and solitude? What's the right mix of work and play? It's too easy for over-balancing one way or the other.

A mother of five recently came to me for meditation instruction. She said she gave up a lot of friendships in order to have children. And as a career mother, she's not quite sure where meditation might fit in her life, though she's sure it would be good for her health and for the stress in her life.

Sometimes, it's time to restructure our lives--or our gardens--for the most pleasing combination of solitude.

Rainbow Garden

I try to arrange May so that i am out in the garden for several hours each day. I love the days when i stay home all day, even though this sometimes means playing hookey from various meetings and exercise classes. I rationalize it by assuming that walking for six hours in the garden, back and forth, must add up to a few miles. Gardening is as good as exercise, isn't it? Plus, gardening is so calming.

Yesterday's day in the garden ended with a sprinkle of rain while the sun was shining. That meant a double rainbow in the east.

The rainbow reminds me that my self and my garden are as real as a rainbow. Here today. Gone tomorrow. But, oh so beautiful right now.

Dividing Daffodils

My grandmother died 30 years ago, and, in her will, she gave each grandchild $600. I spent my entire inheritance on daffodil bulbs, so that, every year, on her birthday in early May, i can remember my Nonnie.

This year, i am really focusing on dividing clumps of bulbs and giving away my extras. I'm passing on my grandmother's legacy of spring flowers.

Joy in the blooming. Joy in the memory of my grandmother. Joy in the giving of flower bulbs.

Dancing in the May

This morning, before dawn, i walked to the top of a local mountain where Morris Dancers were dancing in the month of May. The dancers wear bells on their shins, have sticks to tap the ground, and lots of ribbons on their shirts. These English folk dances feel like a great way to welcome in the May.

For late risers, the men's team and the women's team danced again in the parking lot of the Town Hall at 6:45 a.m.

We take time to ceremonially welcome in a change of season--in this case, the month of May. Even though everything is impermanent, everything is in constant and continual change, we pause for a moment to welcome spring.