Chinese Forget-Me-Not

Chinese forget-me-not (Cynoglossum) is the show-stopper of this late fall season. It's sky blue flowers grab the attention of visitors to my garden. "What's that?" they ask.

I pull up the dead ones and hand the entire plant to my visitor. "Here. You'll have it next year."

Each blue-blue flower turns into a tiny bur of a seed. I often find dozens of them sticking to my pants legs or gloves or shoes. This sort of sticky seed is called a hitchhiker because you can carry it for miles, unaware of your role in the dispersion of this plant.

The word "meme" originally meant a behavior or gesture or manner of speaking that is transmitted by repetition and replication (in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes), such as when you find yourself sounding like your mother or using your good friend's turn of phrase or gesture.

When we clean up our moral act, we can transmit kind and caring words and gestures. And isn't that what we truly want to do? Perhaps especially in our polarized society, where memes of meanness and even cruelty are too often perpetuated.

Forget me not mindfulness.

Twins

My neighbor gave me 4 acorn squash plants at the end of May, and they have yielded a dozen children including a set of twins.

Two squash from one stem reminds me that both compassion and wisdom are needed for our meditation practice to take off. They are often called the 2 wings of awakening.
 
Compassion without wisdom can be mushy and saccharine. Wisdom without compassion is dry.

In our meditation practice, we want to practice self-compassion, and we also want to deepen our insights with wisdom practices. When we speak, we want to to be gentle and straight-forward. Resting in the middle of these paradoxes, we find the Middle Way.

I'll be baking some compassion-wisdom squashes later this fall.