Geranium-a-rama

Several years ago, when we were in Scotland, our B&B had a mix of lovely geraniums in mid-summer. I came home and ordered several varieties.

The blue variety reseeds itself freely, so i weed out several seedlings in the spring. The magenta variety is eye-popping. I also have white geranium and a variegated white-and-blue.

Geraniums provide a tapestry of color in these early summer days. What keeps us blooming when life heats up (or cools down)? What keeps us blooming when life dries up (or swamps us)?

Life is happening one moment at a time. Notice this simple fact.

Firth of Forth

I suppose it had to happen while we are in Scotland. We spent the night at a lodge on a golf course--not my usual milieu, but Scotland is the home of golf, so when in Scotland....

The stunning view looks across the golf course and across to the Firth of Forth to the Fife peninsula beyond. Translated into American English, "Firth of Forth" means the inlet where the Forth River flows into the North Sea. I can see cargo ships in the distance cruising in and out of Edinburgh.

I've been asking the lodge staff about other Scottish-English words i'm not familiar with. We are staying at the Craigielaw Lodge. What does "law" mean in this context? One archaic meaning of "law" is "low," which makes sense as the low land of the Craigielaw Estate.

We hear many words in Scottish English that i've never heard in American English. What???

When we start meditating, we become more familiar with words we may have had only passing acquaintance with. "Equanimity" is one. Several people have asked me what that means, as if they've never heard the word before. Once we experience equanimity in meditation, we have a visceral sense of what the word means. Calm, yes. Tranquil, yes. Balanced, yes. But there's an emotion that cannot be put into words. We say "equanimity," and know, really know what we are talking about.

Beech Hedge

Here in England and Scotland, we often see beech hedges--an inventive way to make use of those copper-y beech leaves that don't fall off until the very end of April. A beech hedge can be one "wall" of a garden "room."

The idea of a beech hedge is particularly attractive to me since i live in the woods, which is full of beech saplings. I recently heard the state archaeologist give a talk, and he said that 6,000 years ago, just after the Ice Age, beech made up 36 percent of the forest in Vermont. My guess is that it still does.

My neighbor, who lived in England 40 years ago, is trying to create a beech hedge to keep the deer out.

How do you create a protective hedge so that the positive qualities you wish to grow will actually grow? For instance, it's difficult to listen to the news and cultivate happiness at the same time. The news gives us many opportunities to practice compassion, but i often get stuck in ain't-it-awful or some other form of aversion. Aversion is a mental weed that i do not want to propagate.

My "hedge" means i don't read or listen to the news very much--maybe 5 minutes a day reading the headlines in our town newspaper. It's amazing how much i absorb through osmosis.

Here in the U.K., the news has been interminably of Brexit for the past two years. People are good and tired of that "news," which could just as well be called "olds."

It's time to build a hedge around your precious time, your precious life.