Tall Plant Season

It is the season of tall plants blooming. Phlox, bee balm, and all manner of yellow sunflower-y looking things. In April and May, the short ones bloom--little ground cover type things. Johnny jump-ups and forget-me-nots. Some plants are so short that you may not even notice or recognize them--draba or mazus or arabis. What welcome patches of color they offer in early spring.

Now, after months of inching up, butterfly bush, eupatorium, and verbascum are taller than i am.

Meditation practice also varies from person to person. Some, few, bloom early on. Most of the rest of us, grow and grow, inching along before flowering. Whatever our own personal growth habit, let us simply be content with growing in our practice, knowing that we too can reap the fruits of the spiritual life.

Different Gardening Styles

When i go outdoors in the mornings, i stroll around my flowerbeds, clippers in one hand, bucket in the other. I'm dead-heading and propping up flowers, and generally tidying up some flowerbed or other.

At 7:45, i arrive for meditation at my neighbor Connie's, and there she is in her nightgown hauling foot-tall (or more!) weeds out of her vegetable gardens, her hands caked with dirt, and her white nightie pretty well smudged.

For me flowers are the priority; for her vegetables.

The mind loves to compare. So far as i can see, that's all the mind actually does. And in this comparison, the mind wants to divide the world into good and bad, black and white, better and worse. Yet here are Connie and i, two old friends with very different gardening styles, both reaping joy.

Japanese Beetles

Japanese beetles are feasting on my zinnias and potatoes, creating leaf lacework. They copulate on a marriage bed of creamy white marigolds. The beetles themselves are beautiful--iridescent blue-green and bronze shimmering in July's hot sun.

One friend, Kai, goes out to her vegetable garden every morning and picks off the beetles. It's a "weeding" out of bugs. A preventative measure protecting the life of the plant.

This sort of steady attention is a quality we bring to meditation. Every day, we spend some time sitting quietly. At first, we simply notice the weeds in our mind and identify them one by one: irritation, desire, confusion. Eventually we apply the antidotes: loving-kindness for irritation, generosity for desire, and wisdom for confusion.

The Summer Sag

I call this season the summer sag. I look out my windows, and all i see in my flowerbeds is green. Where are the flowers? They must be blooming in someone else's full sun garden because they are not blossoming here in partial shade.

I confess: i still haven't mastered the art of rolling bloom--a little garden that is constantly full of flowers. Apparently i'm in good company. When the Garden Club toured my garden last week, i sighed about this, and the president said, "Who has mastered it?"

Those photos in gardening magazines and books are so beautiful. And the British make it sound so simple. "Just cut back the pulmonaria (or the doronicum or the....), and they will bloom again. They will bloom again in July if your summer high temperature is 70 degrees, but our weather on this side of the pond has been cooking for the past several weeks.

This is the delusion, whose spell we fall under: we can have a flower-filled garden like the ones in the photos. But the reality is that some season comes, the color sags, and all we see is green.

We live our lives in these sorts of hopeful delusions for the future that don't quite work out as we had planned. We are disappointed or disgusted. Perhaps we complain. This is just one example of suffering (also called stress). We want more of the pleasant (flowers) and less of the unpleasant (plain green). We stay in constant motion, tweaking our environment--inner or outer--and in order to do this tweaking we need an ego; we assume a self.

We can reduce our stress. In fact we can even become free of stress.

The first step is mindfulness. Let's begin there today by simply walking through our garden and noticing the pleasant. And noticing the unpleasant.

Let me know what you find out.

Bug Joy

After strolling around my garden in my nightgown this morning, i came back indoors and felt something crawling on my leg. Even though the weather is too hot for ticks, i live in deer tick country, so i looked carefully. About twice the size of a wood tick, this 6-legged insect looked like a beetle.

A baby lightning bug! About half an inch long, it spread its wings and flew away.

So that's the result of the flurry of fireflies in June. The males flying their flashers around, and the females lying in the grass glowing back.

Lightning bugs bring joy--to young children chasing them and to grown-ups lying in a hammock at 10 p.m. looking at the night sky full of stars and fireflies.

The Meditative Gardener is on Retreat until July 20

I'll Make You Special, If You Make Me Special

Here's the deal: I'll make you special if you make me special.

This is the quid pro quo i have with my garden. If i make it a special garden, then it will make me a special gardener. People will (and do) come to stroll around my garden, and then they think well of me. "Wow. What a great gardener Cheryl is."

We also have this deal with our best beloved people. "I'll make you special, if you make me special." Marriage partners, family and close friends--we make each other special in return for them making us special. When this unspoken deal fails--for instance, during infidelity or talking behind someone's back--a LOT of suffering, heartache, and stress results.

Sometimes the deal fails in small ways: someone we care about and want to spend time with doesn't want to spend time with us. If the heart doesn't exactly break, it does at least crack.

This is the price of attachment. This is the cost of something that looks like love, but actually has small clinging tendrils wrapping themselves around our hearts. This deal-making opens the heart to some dear ones, but closes it off to others.

What we are aiming for in our spiritual practice is an experience of the naturally open heart. Once upon a time, our hearts were as big as the world. They still are.