Curating Your Garden

 

A new word has entered my gardening vocabulary: Curated. I have a curated garden. Expensive gardeners are now called curators of the gardens they attend to. The word "curate" means to select, organize, and look after the items in a collection. Curate also implies that my plants are swish; they are cool; they are "in." 

My plants don't know or care whether they are "in" or not. They are simply happy to grow, unless conditions are not right.

It's true that i aim for an aesthetically pleasing garden--blues and yellows together, silvers and pinks. At the same time, i realize the impermanence of my entire undertaking. Twenty years from now, very little of "my" garden will remain. My collections will scatter and be overgrown and replaced by something or someone else.

Every curated collection is impermanent.

And so are we.

Heliconia

One of the aspects about being in the tropics that i love (besides sun, warmth, beach, and swimming in the ocean) is the tropical flora.

I test myself, trying to remember names of commonly seen landscape plants. Here at our yoga-villa is a heliconia. Yay! I remembered its name. (Pleasant.)

I love knowing the names of plants. Most of the Latin names (some derived from Greek) are descriptive of some aspect of the plant. Heliconia comes directly from the Greek word helikonios.

I also enjoy the Sanskrit or Pali names that are used in English. Although English has a gazillion words for the material world, the vocabulary for the inner world turns out to be quite limited.

In English, we have the word consciousness. In Buddhism, consciousness is delineated much more precisely: eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, touch-consciousness, taste-consciousness, smell-consciousness, and mental-consciousness. Come to think of it, when we are conscious, we are conscious of something. Hmmm. Maybe the Pali language is on to something here.

Karma and Dharma have already migrated into English. The next words to migrate will be metta (loving-kindness) and dukkha (unsatisfactoriness, stress, suffering).

Today i am visually conscious of the heliconia and mentally conscious of how much i love knowing its name.