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.

Naturalizing Mindfulness

The Dutchmen's breeches have jumped into another flower bed, about a hundred feet away from where i am carefully colonizing them. This process of naturalizing a wildflower makes me very happy.

I grew up in a rich woods in the Midwest. On May Day, my sister and i picked bouquets of Dutchmen's breeches, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild phlox, and spring beauties.

When i moved to my home in the dry pine woods of the Northeast, i tried repeatedly to grow the wildflowers of my childhood. No luck.

Eventually one of my shaded nursery beds, under an old apple tree, turned out to be the perfect place for Dutchmen's breeches. I stopped planting other wildflowers in that bed and just let the Dutchmen's breeches have free rein.

We try to naturalize mindfulness in our lives. It isn't easy. It's hard enough to be mindful when we're practicing sitting meditation. How can we possibly practice mindfulness at work or in the car or on the phone or on the computer?

We keep meditating, practicing mindfulness, and then, one day, it pops up while we are taking a walk. There it is. Mindfulness in our daily life, naturalizing itself.

I am delighted that the Dutchmen's breeches have naturalized into the woodland. Mindfulness is another name for happiness.

Spring Beauties

We hiked Mt. Greylock yesterday, the highest mountain in Massachusetts. The trail began with half a mile of spring beauties peeping at us through the leaf litter of last fall's dead leaves. These beautiful little flowers carpeted the forest floor, acres and acres of them.

Spring beauties are another ephemeral wildflower. Here today, gone next week.

We are also here today and gone in a few decades. None of us will live to see the 22nd century. Probably our children will not live that long either. Even my grandchildren (born in 2000 and 2003) are unlikely to see the next century.

Ouch! That unpleasant thought is an indicator of stress. That pang in the heart is the feeling of stress.

Everything that is born grows old and dies. The "spring" of life and beautiful bodies can last until almost 40. Then aging begins to become apparent, little by little, and oh-so-slowly.

"Let's don't think about it" is one way to continue our delusion, which is certainly more pleasant than truth.

Life is ephemeral. Do we have the courage to face truth?
Or shall we continue to sleepwalk through our life?

"Life is not truly Life while the thought of death can still disturb it."

Karlfried Graf Durckheim