Columns of Water

This weekend i visited a greenhouse that has plexiglass columns of water as its inside wall. During the day, the sun heats up the greenhouse, the tile floor, and the columns of water. During the night, the tile floor and the water columns release their accumulated heat back into the room full of houseplants.

These columns of water emit a translucence of light from the adjoining room.

We practice meditation and warm our heart with loving-kindness meditation that warms the people around us.

Be a beacon of light in these cold-hearted times. Warm yourself and others with kindness. Let your heart light shine.

Glass Wall

My neighbors have a greenhouse attached to their kitchen, and it is looking spectacularly summer-ish right now. Impatiens, begonias, and verbena are still blooming. Add 2 dashes of mums--pink and yellow-- and i smile every time i look into the greenhouse.

Just outside the glass walls and glass roof, the temperatures are below freezing. The greenhouse is cool, yes, and the flowers love it.

One description of the meditative absorptions (jhanas) is that it's like sitting under a glass jar: Outer sounds are muted, and body sensations drift away to a distance, so the sense of the body becomes rather amorphous.

"Inside" the meditative absorptions feels happy and calm despite whatever may be going on outside.

The greenhouse is a protected space. So is meditation.

Appreciation

I'm the email secretary for our little local gardening group, Perennial Swappers. Maybe you could call it a club, but the only business is that Bonnie arranges the bi-weekly garden tours. Then every 2 weeks during the spring and summer, we meet at 6:00, give our extra plants away (takes about 10 minutes), and head off for a garden tour of a local, ordinary garden. I am amazed by the variety of gardens within a 5-mile radius of my house!

As email secretary, i pass along emails i receive that are of gardening interest. The Smith College bulb show, the Mt. Holyoke College greenhouse open house, an Ikebana workshop, a gardening seminar.

I send these emails out to the 133 people in the Perennial Swappers group. Maybe 10 or 20 come to any one meeting, and you usually see the same faces. Still, it's fun to trade gardening stories and to get together with other good gardeners to discuss plant problems and garden questions.

Today, i received 2 thank-you emails--notes of appreciation for letting people know about these gardening events.

Appreciation is all the pay i get for this volunteer job of email secretary, which i do enjoy doing. It pays to appreciate everyone we see today.

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.

Babies in the Greenhouse

Having a greenhouse is like having a baby. You have to carry it psychically with you at all times and be mindful of its hourly health.

At nighttime, you don't want it to become too chilly, so you make sure it's warm enough and add extra heat if necessary. During the day, you don't want it to become overheated, so you might have to open all the vents, windows, and doors.

Water at least 2 times a day on sunny days. And protect those baby seedlings from catching any bugs. Give them vitamins (e.g., fish emulsion) so that they'll grow strong.

There's a lot of "doing" associated with a greenhouse--and with gardening. Our challenge is to simply "be" in the garden with as much mindfulness as we can muster.

Sometimes the "being" is simply "being with doing." Simply being with a young May garden requires a lot of our attention.