Hoe Your Own Row

This morning in meditation group, one friend told us about her closest friend who is stopping medications for MS in favor of an all-natural diet approach. Since one person in our group is married to a person who has MS, we began venting our opinions. We felt we could do this with our close friend and neighbor, though we do not feel free to vent our opinions to acquaintances. We have to remember to "hoe our own row." In other words, mind our own business.

When i start minding someone else's business, i take on additional stress and distress. Why on earth would i want to do that? I may think i'm doing it out of love, but is love that stressful? Really?

Chances are i'm having an opinion because i'm attached to the outcome or attached to the person.

It's so much simpler and easier to hoe my own row, and just allow you to hoe yours--even though they may look completely different.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like...

I'm living inside a Christmas card. Snow lays on the bare branches of trees and cloaks all the evergreens in white. The temperature is just below freezing; cold enough to hold the snow but still feel pleasant. The foot of powdery snow on the ground is light enough to shovel--neither too wet nor too frozen nor too icy. It's beginning to look a lot like....

"Looking like" is not the actual thing. What we call love is usually attachment in disguise. Love expects nothing in return. Nothing. (If reading this sentence feels like "Ouch! That hurts." Then that's the feeling of attachment. Attachment hurts.)

Attachment wants something. There's a quid pro quo. I'll make you special if you make me special. The emotional state we call "true love" is usually true attachment or true lust. True love lets go. True love doesn't hold on.

Love looks like wide open space. And it's all around us.

Compost Camouflage

My compost bins are camouflaged with morning glory vines, just as i had been hoping for. In fact, the compost bin is so well camouflaged (okay, you can call it overgrown), that a guest could not see it even though it was literally right in front of her eyes and right beside where her car was parked.

Our life is overgrown with clinging vines of attachment. We are so distracted by the beauty (of the morning glories) or so repelled (by the weediness of the overgrown-ness), or just plain oblivious (What? Where's the compost pile?), that we fail to notice the Life that's right in front of our eyes.

Relax. Breathe. What does it feel like to be alive?

Grape Tomatoes

I've come to a deeper appreciation of grape (cherry) tomatoes this week. I grow them specifically to sun-dry them. I like their firm meatiness. As i sliced hundreds of cherry tomatoes in half for the food dryer, i eventually noticed that the grape tomatoes are, by and large, stemless while about half the Sungolds still have their attachments (their stems).

What about our attachments? Sometimes we can detach from the mother ship (or mother plant) or any situation in our lives and go on to the next moment.

But sometimes we are still carrying our attachment to what was said in yesterday's meeting or what was done (or undone) last week. We cling to these sorts of attachments and can't shake them off even though we know it would be a whole lot better for our mental health if we could just "let go."

Let go of our guilt or the opinions we keep raking over or the hurt which is creating sorrow or distress for us.

If the grape tomatoes can just let go, can I?

Attachment

A bluebird house is attached to one of the fence posts in the vegetable garden. No bluebirds have taken up residence there, but it's often the home of chickadees or wrens.

Yesterday i saw a surplus of nesting material pushing out of the easy-to-open front panel (so you can spy on baby birds). Since nesting season is over, and the summer birds have flown south, i flipped open the front wall and raked out the grapefruit-sized nest.

Out fell a mother mouse with 7 suckling teenage mice. She landed on a leaf and lay there for a minute looking extremely weary and perhaps stunned by the sudden eviction from her comfy home.

Then she dragged herself and her 7 cute, gray attachments off to hide under other nearby leaves.

Attachment, sometimes called craving, is the source of our on-going sense of unease with ourselves, our friends, and our world.

How does attachment feel?

Attachment to material possessions yields a sense of "mine." Mine, and you can't have it.

Attachment to people is an important developmental stage for babies (and baby mice too!)
As adults, attachment masquerades as love. Yet would love really be dissatisfied when the object of its affection is absent or distant or choosing her or his own path? Would love be disappointed? How could love be heart-broken? Love, by definition, is heart-open. How could love hurt?

Attachment suffers, but love does not.

Still, we drag our attachments around with us like the mother mouse dragging her 7 nearly full-grown children. Like her, we are worn out and panting from our burden of attachment, but how can we lay it down?