Skeleton in the Living Room

The forecast calls for snow tomorrow, so today my sweetie and i are running around--putting away lawn chairs, storing away any remaining flower pots, and building the solstice bonfire. What shall i do with my Halloween skeleton that has been sitting on the front step?

The lawn chairs are spending their winter vacation in the basement. I turned the flower pots upside down next to the potting shed. The skeleton is sitting in the living room at the moment, till i figure out a better place to put her. Maybe in the solarium?

One retreat center i went to had a real skeleton meditating in the conservatory, surrounded by big-leaf begonias and philodendrons and looking almost jungle-y in the winter.

The Buddha recommends 5 daily reflections: 

• I am of the nature to grow old. Aging is inevitable.
• I am of the nature to become ill--whether i want to or not.
• I am of the nature to die. Death is unavoidable.
• Everything i cherish will change and vanish.
• Karma is the only thing i own. (Think of your good and bad habits. That's it. That's what you own.)

Today, fall is aging into winter. It's 14 degrees outdoors. Tomorrow, fall dies to winter with 6 inches of snow.

Having a skeleton in my living room reminds me: every living room will also die.

Harvesting Hemp

 

A friend gave me 2 hemp plants in June, which grew to be six feet tall and 2 feet wide. So what can i do with hemp? Other than make rope. I would like to harvest some hemp seed, but all i have are buds and flowers.

For now, it's cut and drying in the shed.

Here i am, face to face with don't-know mind. I don't know what to do with hemp, and i don't know what to write about it.

I much prefer knowing what to do, knowing something, knowing anything! But that kind of knowing is not available right now.

So i settle into don't-know and feel how it feels in my body. Uncomfortable. A slight tension impels me forward to wanting. Wanting to know. Wanting to find out.

In the meantime, i have to be satisfied with "Don't know."

A Beautiful Potting Shed

Judith has a beautiful potting shed. When i visited her recently, the other people we were with shivered immediately into her house, but Judith and i slid over the frozen snow in her backyard so i could tour her lovely potting shed.

We gardeners need some place to make a mess. We have our own personal gardening space and maybe even our own potting shed. It's important to have our own meditation space too--a place where we can allow the mind to clean itself up. Purification, as it is called, happens naturally and is one of the forerunners of a calm mind. A mind content with the solitude of the garden, content with the mess inside the potting shed, or content with the purification happening on the cushion.

Sunshed

I bought the cutest garden shed about 10 years ago. A shed that has windows on the south side, so i thought i could use it as a greenhouse. Oh, the lure of a greenhouse.

As it works out, March nights are freezing in the little sunshed, and April days are sweltering. The plants perish if i forget to water them every forenoon and every afternoon. So the sunshed becomes simply a storage shed with a lot of south-facing windows.

Desire does funny things to our minds and feelings. The garden shed is still cute except that all those windows enable a passerby to look in and see all the junk stored in there. Piles of flower pots and stacks of garden stakes are not very scenic.

How many, many things we buy that don't quite live up to our dreams and expectations. I now buy things knowing that my probability of giving them away is higher than my probability of keeping them. I try to watch the feeling of desire in my body, and the tricks desire plays with my mind.

I have thought about giving the sunshed away or selling it at half-price. But then where would i store my gardening paraphernalia?