Pulling Garlic Mustard

Garlic mustard, a biennial invasive, is blooming its tiny white flowers this week. Last evening, while waiting to meet a friend for dinner, i spent 5 minutes pulling garlic mustard on the nearby rail trail. Someone stopped to ask me what i was doing. "Practicing random acts of gardening," i said.

It's a small thing. Pulling garlic mustard on the roadside for 5 minutes. Today, i pulled Japanese knotweed near a stream for 10 minutes.

Yet this is what we do when we pull the weed of impatience for a minute as we sit at a stoplight patiently. We weed an unkind thought and replace it with kindness.

What would you weed? Irritation? Desire? Resentment? Envy?

Simply being mindful of these unskillful mind states leaves us, for a moment, with the spaciousness of mindfulness.

The Long View

I attended a garden party on Sunday afternoon. The terrace with a 10-mile view was large enough to comfortably seat 5 conversation groups.

The long view settles us, calms us. Then our focus reverts to the people sitting near us and the conversation narrows our attention on something near, and perhaps dear. Maybe the topic pricks us ever so slightly--family or local politics--or fluffs up our ego--family or our accomplishments or one of our opinions that we are sure is correct.

The long view is the quality of equanimity that underlies our practice, the ocean of space that surrounds us. Of course, our attention focuses on some thing near, some thing recognizable, some thing that feeds our sense of self.

Yet, if we step back and take the long view, we see that even these small things are held in spaciousness.