Perfect

I'm in Portland, Oregon, visiting friends. Every morning, Mary Beth walks her dogs in her neighborhood. One home has a perfect front lawn with flowerbeds of orange marigolds and red begonias and accents of blue lobelia and blue salvia. Spectacular!

My friend says the flowerbeds have the same design every year. It obviously works.

Some people strive for perfect flower beds or perfect bodies or perfect clothes. "Perfect" comes and goes, just like everything else in this material world.

What if everything is perfect--just as it is? Tangled, cluttered, weedy. (I'm thinking of my vegetable garden, which is "weedy" with volunteer flowers.) This beautiful life we are living is just-so.

Perfect.

My Favorite Varieties

Driving home from teaching meditation at the assisted living facility, i stop at Kindle Farm, a farm school for troubled adolescents. Their single greenhouse is 3/4 full of overgrown and blooming plants. The eggplants are a foot tall and already have tiny fruit. I gave up on eggplants a few years ago, but i can't resist these well-muscled plants that might do very well in the full sun of my community garden plot.

I also buy my favorite Italian tomato--San Marzano--a long meaty paste tomato. And there's Marble Arch! A lovely purple and pink annual salvia. And Lemon Gem marigolds! (Also Tangerine Gem.) I love these gems because you can eat them in salads. These are exactly the varieties i used to grow from seed, but they're hard to find, even at the Farmers' Market.

I buy 2 flats, even though i know i've said it's too hot to transplant. Today is overcast and sprinkling, so I conveniently forget my own advice, my own words of wisdom.

I buy these 8 dozen plants because i know i'm supporting a good cause--young people with an interest in growing things (including themselves). Plants and young people--i'm doubling my joy.