Lake Ontario is Snowing On Me

According to the weather map, a snow storm, which begins south of Lake Ontario, is now snowing on us. Kind of fun to think about the lake evaporating, rising skyward, being blown 300 miles east by the wind, and falling as snowflakes on my lawn and gardens. Lake Ontario is snowing on me.

Lake Ontario water is obviously not me. The Lake Ontario snowflakes melt, percolate through the ground, and enter the water table. Then water comes up from my well. I drink this water. The water in the glass is not me.

Eventually, the water rains out of my body into a toilet. That's not "me" either, though i may claim it as "mine." But is it?

Vacation Day

 Merry Rainy Day. 55 degrees and 2 inches of rain, which melted our 20 inches of snow. 

I took advantage of the thaw to run out to the garden and dig up more Jerusalem artichokes and pull the last of the turnips. Now there is truly nothing remaining in the garden. Nothing. Empty.

Still, i feel delighted to wander around my garden. Some green growing plants give me joy as a warm southern breeze melts more snow.

Winter returns tomorrow. But today, we had a vacation.

The Wind

 

Just before the rain, the wind  blows beautifully. A cool warm wind. I lie in the hammock and watch clouds skid across the sky. 

It's heaven out near the vegetable garden, surrounded by red- and yellow-leaved trees. I'm wearing long sleeves, but the temperature is just right. 

The wind blows the Cheryl-ness out of me until i can feel the clouds skating across the sky also skating through my chest. It's wonderfully wild in the great outdoors.

Path Paved with Yellow Leaves

Yellow birch leaves are fluttering to earth, at times looking like soft yellow rain. My woodland path is paved with gold.

Every morning, i follow my personal "yellow brick road" to meditation at a neighbor's house. 

Meditation offers all sorts of obstacles--lack of determination (the scarecrow), tension and tightness (the tin man), and lack of heart (the lion). Yet we persevere, confident that our path will lead us to our natural state, which is not Kansas, but kindness.

Rotten Amaryllis Bulb

Nowadays, amaryllis in a box come with a plastic pot that has no hole in the bottom. This is a no-muss, no-fuss, and no mess way to plant your amaryllis.

My dozen amaryllises spend the summer outdoors in the shade being rained on occasionally. (In this drought, very occasionally.) So i was surprised to find a rotten amaryllis bulb--in one of those pots with no holes in the bottom. In my 25 years of keeping amaryllis bulbs from year to year, i've never seen a rotten bulb before. And last winter was the first time i had seen the pots with no holes in the bottom.

The amaryllis sellers are in the business of selling amaryllis, not in keeping my bulb alive from year to year. I am seduced by the ease of the clean pot and the peat moss potting soil. Plop the bulb in. Done.

Done, and then gone. For many people, this is sufficient. I've inherited some bulbs from people who can't be bothered with keeping the bulb and its strappy foliage over the summer.

Caveat emptor. If i want to keep my amaryllis bulbs, i need to put them in better flowerpots.

Daffodils in the Snow

Daffodil leaves are popping up through the snow. We are in the midst of winter-spring. Or is that spring-winter?

This is one of the problems with concepts and categories. We think "spring" means spring and "winter" means winter. Meanwhile, each day is full of changes. Sun, snow, rain, ice, and a new word my sister discovered "graupel," which means a soft, snowy hail.

Change. Every day the weather changes. Maybe we need 31 different words for each day in March to describe various combinations of conditions? Even then, dissatisfaction would creep in because spring or winter or the in-between doesn't look like it's "supposed to."

Keep your eye on the change. It's a deep teaching.

Blue Sky

We are on vacation in the Caribbean, expecting sunshine every day. Yet a few days have been overcast with sprinkles or easy tropical rain. By afternoon, the clouds clear and the sun is shining in the blue sky again.

The Blue Sky vine (Thunbergia) is a lovely familiar tropical vine whose periwinkle flowers drop on the ground.

Rain falls. Flowers fall. It's all impermanent. Things change. The weather changes. Flowers change. Yesterday the blue vine flowers were fresh and lovely. Today they are old and brown.

I'm enjoying the blue sky here in the Caribbean.

Glowing Mums

As i'm sitting at the breakfast table, i look across the lawn to the woods. There, in a 3-foot square corner, i've planted some eye-popping mums, which are a pleasure to look at.

This little area is not an official flowerbed. It's usually just background. In the spring, it's filled with forget-me-nots and ferns in the summer.

But as i look across my now barren flowerbeds, the mums make me happy.

In the autumn of our lives, as age muddies our sense doors and hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting become more fuzzy and indistinct, where do we find our happiness? Happiness despite outer conditions.

The mums glow even on a rainy day.

Raining Yellow Leaves

A heavy rain last night rained yellow leaves off the maples, the birches, the hickory, the ash. The yellow leaves that were up above yesterday are now down below my feet.

The world is upside down. The sun sinks lower and faster. Fall is falling through my hands, into my lap, onto the ground. I can't catch or stop any of it.

Life flows through my fingers.

Tea Cup and Saucer

At the church bazaar last weekend, i bought a unique garden ornament--a cute teacup-and-saucer affixed to the top of a garden stake. Supposedly, the saucer is a bird bath, and the cup can hold bird seed. 

That might happen in a tame and civilized garden. Here, however, I can too easily imagine a squirrel jumping up to devour the bird seed and bringing the whole thing crashing down. I'll just let rainwater collect in the saucer and see if any birds partake of it.

How often am i seduced by a cute idea? And it's a beautiful garden ornament. Very unique. Oh, can i rationalize my purchase.

How often am i seduced into unskillful action or unwise speech? Oh, just this little bit won't hurt, i think.

It's cute. It makes sense in the moment.

Only later do i shake my head. What was i thinking?

The In-Between

Icicles hang from tree branches. Freezing rain means the ground is glazed with ice. Temperatures hover right around freezing. Drip, drip, drip. This is the in-between time--sometimes rain, sometimes ice. Sometimes liquid; sometimes solid. Rain changing to ice; ice changing to rain.

The in-between time seems like a time of magic. In between night and day, the roseate dawn lights the darkness. In between the day and night, shadows lengthen and dimness prevails.

In between awake and asleep, liminal consciousness leads to unconsciousness.

In the ancient Egyptian calendar, these days before the new year were "extra" days--in between the years.

In-between is not a time of waiting, but of watching. Watching / feeling every moment change into the next.

Bedraggled Mums

The mums on the front step are beginning to look bedraggled due to frost, rain, and age. Ah, yes. Mums deteriorate, just as we ourselves do.

A British friend describes her mother's aging process as a sort of pool-and-drop river. Her mum's health remains steady for a while, then there's a small or big emergency. Her mother recovers, but loses some functioning, and never returns to her previous state of health. We could call this aging process "weathering the storms of the body"--frost, rain, and age.

This is what bodies do: Deteriorate. How can we feel happy despite the fact that the body feels lousy?

Mindfulness can lead us, breath by breath, into our calm place, into contentment with this present moment. Not comparing this moment to any other moment. Simply happy to be alive, no matter what we look like.

Mums age and die.
Sigh.

Not Too Much Harvest This Year

by Guest Blogger, Laura Evans

Not too much harvest to worry about this year—alas. Something—maybe moles? Or voles?—found even onions tasty, munching on them from underneath. The onion would look nice and plump with its papery gold-brown top showing above ground, waiting for its stalks to flop over, indicating readiness for pulling. Then when you'd pull it, it would seem to fly out of the ground with no effort on your part, and you realized it was a trick: no roots and no onion left at all. As for other things, some never germinated or were devoured in infancy. Some seedlings were eaten early by rabbits, which we'd never had before in our 35 years of hillside gardening.

Birds, as always, loved the red “razzles,” but many got moldy before quite ripening. Chipmunks enjoyed the cherry tomatoes. I watched a squirrel delighting in our plump blackberries. The deer greatly appreciated our kale and the tops of tomato plants. Blight and tomato hornworms also joined in the tomato decimation. Weeks of rain were part of the picture too. So, we got little or no cukes, cabbage, broccoli, or squash (summer or winter).

Then there are (were) the apples. Doug comes in the door with deep red ones from the biggest tree—all five held easily in his cupped hands. I look up from chopping store-bought veggies as he announces, “Well, here's the Jonathan crop for this year.” He sets the gnarled knobby little things on the counter. Horrified at first, I grew fond of them over a few days, finding them humorous and cute—like the shrunken little old heads of apple dolls—no drying needed.

Last year, the apples did okay, and a year or two before that, even though we don't spray them, the branches were groaning under the weight of big flawless fruit. Pears too, that year; same thing. And peaches.

This year, the small seckel pears were plentiful and coming along until, after a few days away, we came back to find them just not there. Along with the hordes of squirrels, we think a gray fox participated in the feast. We saw it soon after, apparently looking through the grass below the tree for any it might have missed. (Unlike their red fox cousins, they can climb trees.) 

I love seckel pears best of all, but the glimpses of that gray fox almost made up for the losses.

Laura Evans is memoir writer and an early childhood educator who lives with her gardening husband in Vermont.

Rain Ruin

Rain every day. It feels like we live in the tropics--warm and wet. The sun shines, then we have a downpour. Repeat two or three times a day.

The daily rain ruins flowers fast. The geraniums on my front step bloom, then turn brown the next day. A day without rain and suddenly the petunias look very pink and perky. Then it rains, and they droop again.

When the rain of our life falls on us, we may cry, we may spend a lot of time crying, yet with the support of the Dharma, with the support of meditation, we find an inner strength. We might not bloom exactly, but we can thrive anyway.

As Shinzen Young says, meditation is not a quick and easy fix. But it's a deep fix.

Water your roots deeply with daily meditation.

No Slouching

Amaranthus lying down and gossiping with Veronica.

Due to the recent heavy rains, many flowers in the garden are lying down on the job. Two stalks of hollyhocks are lying flat on the ground while 5 sister stalks remain upright.

One line of the Loving-Kindness Sutta says,
Let them be able and upright.

We want to sit upright in our meditation--whether that's in a chair or on a cushion. No slouching.

We want to act in an upright manner in all our dealings with other people. We want to be honest and just. We want to be in accord with what is right. We aspire to be an upstanding citizen in our community--no low or crooked behavior.

Even when the storms of life conspire to beat us down, we do our best to remain upright.

It's Raining. It's Pouring.

It's raining. It's pouring. It would be a good day for snoring, especially since i'm still recuperating from jet lag.

Okay. I admit it. I've already taken a 10-minute nap while i was meditating this morning. There's something so soothing about the sound of rain. Zzzzz.

Drowsiness during meditation is a hindrance. I've set our intention to be mindfully aware, but then delicious drowsiness sneaks up. Oh, i have my excuses. I woke up at 3:15 this morning. Still, i don't want to sleepwalk through life.

Wake up. Wake up to your one and only life.

Woodland and Prairie

Last weekend i went to a wedding in northern Indiana, just at the western edge of the Eastern Woodlands. The habitat of hardwood forests originally stretched for a thousand miles from the Atlantic coast all the way to the present Indiana-Illinois border. As i drove toward the Illinois border, i could see where the woodlands (which are now mostly Hoosier cornfields) gave way to the prairie. The fields had fencerows filled with redbuds, and then suddenly, there were no trees growing in the fencerows. No more beautiful redbuds, which had nearly lined the interstate for an hour.

I was also seeing what couldn't be seen--the results of 100,000 years of glaciers advancing and receding. The land changed from ever so slightly rolling to absolutely flat--bulldozed by glaciers, but also by sedimentation from a proto-Lake Michigan, which expanded a hundred miles beyond its current shore. Flat, flat, flat.

The woodlands are rich in ephemeral wildflowers--spring beauties, phlox divercata, trillium. The prairie is a rich grassland, a savannah.

What i was seeing was the result of soil and rain--a little more here, a little less there.

What conditions are you creating for yourself? This moment conditions the next moment. When we bulldoze a situation with our opinions, it flattens other people's response to us. When we grow flowers of kindness and happiness, our future moments are more likely to be flavored with kindness.

You choose.

April Showering

Siberian Squill

It's April showering out there in the garden right now. The May flowers are arriving daily as i notice early delivery on blooming daffodils, bloodroot, and hyacinth. Spring is truly sprung.

And how do we shower ourselves with kindness and patience?

Spring starts with the little bulbs blooming--snowdrops, cobalt blue squill, dainty white and light blue striped pushkinia.

We start with little doses of wishing well for ourselves.
May i abide in the well-being of the garden.
We befriend ourselves, just like we befriend our flowers.

Spring Revolution

A revolution has happened. A week ago today, we were home-bound by snow and sleet and freezing rain. Today, the sun is shining, and the daffodils are blooming. Birds and squirrels are chasing each other.

On Friday, my 95-year-old hospice client woke up to a day like any other. She fell twice during the morning, and by noon was living in a nursing home.

Change. Change is the only thing that is constant.

There's only this moment--this ever-changing moment.

Live it.

Wintry Mix

It's precipitating a wintry mix today--snow, sleet, freezing rain. The temperature hovers right around freezing. Here it's 31 degrees, but three miles south, it's 33 degrees. The earth has warmed just enough to melt the snowflakes, but the snow accumulates on my car. A glaze of ice covers sidewalks and steps.

We are in the transition zone between rain and ice, freezing and not freezing.

In fact, we are always in a transition zone from one thing to another. We think that people, places, and things have hard edges, but quite often, things are morphing. Like the weather today. A time when it's neither this nor that. More likely, it's this and that. Uncertainty and instability prevail. Take a close look to notice the ever-changing change.