Flowers Spell L-O-V-E

 

For my birthday, my sweetie brought home a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Such a delight to have fresh flowers on the kitchen table.

F-L-O-W-E-R-S spell love. So does T-A-K-I-N-G  M-E  O-U-T  T-O  D-I-N-N-E-R.

Love comes in many disguises. Some are sweet and feel good, like a hug. Some disguises are hard to swallow, such as tough love. And some disguises feel so entirely ordinary that you take them for granted--the air you breathe, the chair you are sitting on, the body that makes you think you are a self or have a self.

This self thinks she's a year older. A year older than what? 

The self is born anew every second.

Don't Know Daffodils

My gardening friend Ruth divided the white daffodils near her front door and gave me a small bucket of bulbs in September.

Where to plant them? In the white garden. But where exactly?

Not knowing the answer, i potted them up. I now have 18 pots of daffodils, which will spend the winter in the garage. For now, they are still outdoors and being rained on today.

Don't-know is one of the most difficult mind states for me. I want to know! Yet the daffodils don't know either. They simply grow where they are planted. Pots today. Next April i will plop them in the ground after i see where other white daffodils are located.

I have 6 months of not-knowing ahead of me. The daffodils are simply resting comfortably in their not-knowing.

Leaf Covered Path

I spent the weekend at Southern Dharma Retreat Center (SDRC), teaching at the Fall Clean Up Retreat. Eighteen people came from Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina to rake leaves and shovel rain-washed gravel out of the ditches and back onto the narrow mountain road leading to the retreat center.

Driving to the center, I crept my car along the leaf-covered one-lane road, which looked pretty similar to the nearby woods. Sometimes it's difficult to distinguish exactly where our path is. In the steep Blue Ridge Mountains, a wrong turn can head you terrifyingly downhill.

As meditators, we try to follow the Noble Eightfold Path, which at times may seem to have more folds than path. How do you respond with kindness in a difficult situation? Is your livelihood harmless? Is your (and my) retirement portfolio harmless? The path is not straight-forward, after all.

I arrived safely at SDRC. The Eightfold Path leads us to safety of a different sort--safety of heart and mind.

Cyclamen: Warm & Chilly

On the left: Kept in the kitchen. On the right: Kept in a chilly room.

In December, i gave a talk on holiday plants. I encouraged people to keep their cyclamen in a cool spot. Joanna did an experiment. She bought 2 cyclamens at the same time.She placed one cyclamen in her kitchen, near the wood stove. The other one she put in her study, which is too chilly for her to use in the winter. Three months later, here are the results. The leggy cyclamen with no flowers is the warm one. The compact fabulously blooming cyclamen has been living at 50 degrees.

It's counter-intuitive that warmth would lead to legginess and no blooms at all, and that chilly leads to continued blooming. It's almost as though too much pleasantness leads to a "lazy" plant. Resilience comes from a seemingly difficult climate.

This conforms to my experience. My siblings and i have a high level of resilience, perhaps partly due to a slightly chilly upbringing. Children who are accustomed to having everything provided for them lose their vigor. Uber-protection can lead to a lack of resilience.

Resilience is a key factor in happiness--happiness despite outer conditions.

Alyssum Still Blooms

Alyssum is still blooming along the edges of several walkways. Despite the fact that it's November. Despite the fact that we have had hard frosts of 20 degrees. Despite the fact that it's dark out there. Alyssum is a real trooper.

In April i buy 3 or 5 big packets of alyssum seed. Then i walk along the paths through the gardens and sprinkle. By June, the seeded ones have caught up with the ones that came from 6-packs. And now, in November, when all the other annuals have given up the ghost, alyssum still blooms.

Alyssum soldiers on through the dark and difficult times, and emits a light, bouncy joy with its soft tiny white flowers. By this time of the year, it has spread into a little community.

A 75-year-old once said to me, "Aging feels like a battlefield. I look around at my fallen comrades. I don't understand why i'm still standing."

Alyssum still stands on the ground while the battle of aging, illness, and death goes on all around her.