Sage

Sage is growing in my herb garden, but what can i use it for? Turkey stuffing once a year?

The ornamental Salvias are beautiful--both annual and perennial. They all have that wild sage smell.

The word Salvia comes from Latin, meaning "to feel well and healthy." This sounds like a metta benediction. "May I feel well and healthy. May you feel well and healthy."

Who knew that metta was growing in my herb garden?

Not So Red Tomatoes

I harvested 50 green Italian tomatoes before the first frost two weeks ago. I've been waiting for them to redden and eating the reddest one every day. But lately, well, they aren't all that red; they are a yellowish-red. I guess that means orange. And they are starting to taste like mushy store-bought tomatoes. They've lost their fresh-from-the-garden flavor.

This is what happens when we drift away from direct experience of our meditation object. The object (the breath, the body, metta) becomes mushy, not as clear, and not as delicious.

The tomatoes will never regain their true tomato-y-ness, so i'm making sauce out of them.

But we can freshen up our attention. Straight up our posture. Take a few deep breaths to energize the body. Become interested in something or other. Investigate. One of my favorite investigations is how dullness works.

I'm going to make sauce out of dullness yet!

Gardening for Bear

A bear wandered into my meditation at 6:45 this morning. I opened my eyes just as he walked out of the woods and across the lawn. He meandered over to the hobblebush at the other edge of the lawn, and breakfasted on some hobblebush berries.

I have heard of bee and butterfly gardens, but i didn't realize i have a bear garden.

Sometimes, our minds are too welcoming for our particular bear-of-a-problem. In his sermon on dealing with distracting thoughts, the Buddha outlines 5 methods. The first is to change the subject. Another way to say this is "substitute the opposite." "The opposite" is usually a form of kindness--metta or compassion or gratitude. Choose your kindness now, so that the next time that bear-of-a-problem wanders into your mind, you'll be ready to feed yourself some kindness.

A Spritz of Metta

My chore at the retreat center is to wipe the dining tables after dinner and then spritz them with three puffs of mild bleach water.

During meditation, I realize I feel like I’ve been spritzed with loving kindness. Ahh. Deep cleaning without the scrubbing.

Heliconia

One of the aspects about being in the tropics that i love (besides sun, warmth, beach, and swimming in the ocean) is the tropical flora.

I test myself, trying to remember names of commonly seen landscape plants. Here at our yoga-villa is a heliconia. Yay! I remembered its name. (Pleasant.)

I love knowing the names of plants. Most of the Latin names (some derived from Greek) are descriptive of some aspect of the plant. Heliconia comes directly from the Greek word helikonios.

I also enjoy the Sanskrit or Pali names that are used in English. Although English has a gazillion words for the material world, the vocabulary for the inner world turns out to be quite limited.

In English, we have the word consciousness. In Buddhism, consciousness is delineated much more precisely: eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, touch-consciousness, taste-consciousness, smell-consciousness, and mental-consciousness. Come to think of it, when we are conscious, we are conscious of something. Hmmm. Maybe the Pali language is on to something here.

Karma and Dharma have already migrated into English. The next words to migrate will be metta (loving-kindness) and dukkha (unsatisfactoriness, stress, suffering).

Today i am visually conscious of the heliconia and mentally conscious of how much i love knowing its name.

Aloha Hummingbird

When we were in Hawai'i a couple of years ago, i bought a locally-made pillow that says, "Aloha served daily."

I love the idea of aloha being served daily. Aloha means much more than hello and farewell. Aloha feels friendly; aloha feels affectionate; aloha feels like welcome.

These mornings, i meditate on the deck for an hour at 6:00 a.m. Every morning i can hear a hummingbird whirring nearby. She comes to check out my pillow. It looks like flowers, but....

Welcome, dear hummingbird. And zip, away she goes. Aloha, my dear.

Fennel Seeds

My neighbor has 7-foot tall fennel plants. When she first said "fennel," i thought she was talking Florence fennel, the bulb of which can be eaten like a vegetable--roasted or in salad. But no, she was talking about an ordinary fennel plant, a perennial (Foeniculum vulgare).

"Well, you could use the seeds," i said.

We looked at each other. She's a busy woman. I'm a busy woman. As much as we would love to pretend that we are farmers or bakers, neither one of us has that kind of time.

"I'm going to dig it out," she said.

One line of the Loving-Kindness sutta says,
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.

Just imagine being "unburdened" by the duties of the garden and subsisting on very little.

My neighbor is unburdening herself of several giant fennel plants.

Cactus Fence

Aruba has a dry climate with trade winds constantly blowing from the east. It is in fact a desert island. (Though it is definitely not deserted!) Outside of the tropical landscaping in Tourist Central, the landscape consists of 3 species of cactus and the invasive and thorny acacia shrub.

While driving around the island, we saw cactus fences, which look very good at keeping something out (wild goats or wild donkeys) or something in.

We all know prickly people whose main mode of protecting themselves is thorny comments and stinging judgments. People who bristle easily. People for whom aversion is their predominant defense against the world and their own suffering.

It took me several decades to recognize my own bristly tendencies and to commit to taking down my own inner cactus fences. A much more useful form of protection is loving-kindness, because metta deals with the fear that underlies the felt need for protection. After all, what are we protecting ourselves from? A perceived danger.

It turns out that bristling, thorns, and stings just perpetuate dissatisfaction rather than relieving it.

Let's build our open-gated fence with kindness and compassion.

Petunia Night Sky

I fell in love with Petunia Night Sky as soon as i saw it in someone else's wagon at the nursery. Even though a single plant cost $5.95, i plopped one in my wagon too.

I lead a loving-kindness meditation called Breath In Peace and Breath Out Love. The initial instruction is "Breathe in peace from wherever you think peace resides: a still mountain lake, a meadow filled with wild flowers, the trees in the forest, or the night sky with the moon and the stars."

I imagine peace in the night sky. Breathing in peace, i breathe out love. Petunia Night Sky reminds me.

The Winds of Loving-Kindness

Here's a lovely loving-kindness meditation from Buddhist Peace Fellowship, an organization that cultivates compassionate social action.

I send goodwill everywhere on the winds:

to myself, my loved ones, community,
and maybe even my enemies,

while compassionately confronting oppression

with all my heart.

May the winds of loving-kindness fill my sails as I work to better this world.

Bound Up Poinsettia

I gave a talk recently about caring for your holiday houseplants. I took in a recently purchased poinsettia, and pulled it out of its pot. The pot was still full of soil. The roots were bound in the one-inch peat pot that the poinsettia had been started in.

In the past 2 days, i've talked with 2 women, who recently told a man in their life (friendly ex-husband; father) to stop ladling out the criticism. Each woman said, "I am not going to take this any more."

One woman feels that her standing up (for the first time in this relationship) is a direct result of the recent election. She, as a woman, is not going to take it from this man any longer.

As women, we have been trained to be bound. For Chinese women, it was bound feet. For women in the last century, it was corsets and girdles. Nowadays, women bind themselves with an image of the perfect body, which, of course, is impossible to achieve.

The Metta Sutta directs us to be "straight-forward and gentle in speech." So many women have accented the gentle that they have lost straight-forwardness. If there can be tough love, how about tough gentleness? Tough kindness?

By calling their dear men out, these women are both moving toward truer-to-themselves relationship.

Unbind your tongue, woman, in the name of kindness.

Lovely Foxgloves

Lovely foxgloves are blooming. I keep transplanting them from the strip beds next to the vegetable garden into my flowerbeds. But foxgloves grow where they want to grow, and not where i want them to grow.

I have spent years transplanting foxgloves into my purple flowerbed. They don't "take." They limp along. They don't reseed themselves there. They reseed themselves profusely near the vegetable garden. Hmmmm.

Even though the foxgloves don't necessarily bloom where they are planted, that's no excuse for us. "Bloom where you are planted" might mean making lemonade out of lemons. It might mean "being contented and easily satisfied"* with second-best. Or it might mean moving yourself to a different job, a different family, a different location--a place where conditions are right for your particular talent to bloom.

I myself am practicing being contented and easily satisfied with second-best. The situation is not ideal; it's not what i wanted, but it's what life delivered.

Just because the foxgloves are fussy, i don't need to be fussy too.

*A line from the Metta Sutta.

Permaculture

Tamarind pods

While i was in Florida last week, i visited my friend Annette, who has a tiny permaculture farm. In her backyard, she is growing mangoes, avocados, lychees, grapefruit, lemon, key lime, and tamarind. Permaculture is sustainable agriculture, and we can all do this in our own backyard, our front yard, and our gardens.

Here in the North Country, i don't have the mouth-watering selection of tropical fruits that Annette has. I have two old apple trees in my backyard, which a pruner has encouraged into production. I canned a couple of gallons of applesauce last fall.

To live sustainably on our little plot of ground is to live simply. We use what Mother Nature provides. I think of a line from the Metta sutta: "contented and easily satisfied."

Can i be content with my gnarly apples? Can i be easily satisfied with second best?

Annette gave me 3 tamarind pods. When they ripen, i'll be satisfied with that sweet-sour taste of tamarind.

Chickadee as My Totem Animal

When i was writing my book, Following the Nez Perce Trail, i collected a few dozen first-person Native American accounts of their traditional lives. Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows reported that her mother's totem animal was the chickadee who was always nearby while her mother was tanning buffalo hides--the chickadee nipping in and grabbing bits of meat and fat.

I'd like to take the chickadee as my totem animal, my avatar of friendliness and generosity.

One method of practicing loving-kindness meditation is to visualize an embodiment of the goodness we aspire to. That could be the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, the Buddha, Jesus, any of the saints, or, for me, a chickadee.

Sweetheart. Sweetheart.

The chickadees started singing their spring song--their "phoeee-beeeee" song--on February 4.  I wanted to shout with happiness and tell you, but i was in cyber-silence (on retreat) for the month of February and had to wait until now.

At my first metta (loving-kindness) retreat, which was in February, around Valentine's Day, many years ago, i heard one of the other chickadee calls as "Sweetheart." "Sweetheart."

Chickadees are, to me, real love birds--conveying friendliness, kindness, and love wherever they go. Or maybe it's just that i'm a sucker for anyone who calls me "sweetheart."

Filling Myself with Golden Light

I often lead a guided loving-kindness visualization called A Lotus in Your Heart.*

Imagine a lotus 
growing in your heart. 

From the center of this lotus streams forth golden light, 

filling you from head to toe with golden light. 

The warmth of this golden light surrounds you completely 

with a feeling of well-being and protection.

While i'm lying in the radiation machine every day, i imagine this golden light streaming from my heart, filling me from head to toe with golden light. As the radiation begins its 40-second arc over my chest (and heart), finally buzzing its last 10 seconds directed at the scar on the side of my right breast, i "feel" this golden light of well-being and protection throughout my body.

May all beings feel protected.
May all beings have ease of well-being.


* Here's Ayya Khema leading the meditation.

My Only Child in the December Garden

I love harvesting vegetables from the snowy winter garden. There's not much out there, true. But fresh, really fresh vegetables in December? It's a miracle. Even if it is kale, kale, kale.

Oh, i complained about kale just a year ago, but i've made my peace with it. After all, it's my only child, right now. My December-garden child.

A line from the Metta Sutta on loving-kindness says,

Even as a mother protects with her life,

her child, her only child,

so with a boundless heart,

should one cherish all living beings.

That includes cherishing kale.

Who is one person you are not so fond of whom you could practice (i said "practice") cherishing today. Imagine this irritating person as a child--as a baby, as a 3-year-old, as a first-grader, as a 10-year-old.

It's difficult to love them at their current age, but look past that into their inner child. They may have forgotten their inner child, but that's no reason for you not to see them as they were. And, at some level, still are. Hurting, and acting unskillfully, perhaps.

I am loving my kale, even with its strong flavor.

Party Time

Party Time is blooming! The tiny white astilbe-like flowers are unremarkable on this hot pink-and-green foliage. Also called Pink-and-Green Joseph's Coat, you'll probably choose one of these names instead of the Latin name Alternanthera.

I bought Party Time instead of impatiens last summer and then brought one plant indoors in the fall. It makes me very happy every time i look at it.

The Pali word metta (Sanskrit: maitri) is often translated as loving-kindness. Sometimes it is called loving-friendliness or goodwill. Other possibilities include amity or benevolence.

We can choose the translation that resonates with us. Because whichever word we choose, metta makes us happy.