Appreciation

I'm the email secretary for our little local gardening group, Perennial Swappers. Maybe you could call it a club, but the only business is that Bonnie arranges the bi-weekly garden tours. Then every 2 weeks during the spring and summer, we meet at 6:00, give our extra plants away (takes about 10 minutes), and head off for a garden tour of a local, ordinary garden. I am amazed by the variety of gardens within a 5-mile radius of my house!

As email secretary, i pass along emails i receive that are of gardening interest. The Smith College bulb show, the Mt. Holyoke College greenhouse open house, an Ikebana workshop, a gardening seminar.

I send these emails out to the 133 people in the Perennial Swappers group. Maybe 10 or 20 come to any one meeting, and you usually see the same faces. Still, it's fun to trade gardening stories and to get together with other good gardeners to discuss plant problems and garden questions.

Today, i received 2 thank-you emails--notes of appreciation for letting people know about these gardening events.

Appreciation is all the pay i get for this volunteer job of email secretary, which i do enjoy doing. It pays to appreciate everyone we see today.

Walking the Labyrinth on Snowshoes

What to do with 15 inches of snow? One of my neighbors decided to snowshoe a labyrinth in the snow.

A labyrinth was, historically, more like a maze--a complex pattern, which, once you enter it, is difficult to escape. Perhaps you feel this way about a particular situation or relationship in your life.

Yet, if you keep walking, keep following the path, the answer finally comes. You reach the center of the quest, the center of the question, a small still point. Honestly, there's no need for rancor or impatience, frustration or hurt feelings. The answer is right there in front of you, if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other with an open mind.

Expressing Gratitude

My neighbors are having their kitchen redone, and their downstairs bathroom accessible-ized in preparation for old, old age. Meanwhile, they are staying in our guest suite, nicknamed The Sweet, where they can cook, be warm, and sleep comfortably.

In gratitude, Diana gave me a beautiful bouquet of flowers.

Expressing gratitude reminds us to not take things for granted, to not take life for granted. When we are young, we think things are going to stay the same. After all, that's the only way we've known life to be. We expect our grandparents will continue to be there, just like they have always been. As grandparents, we know the end is coming, and we prepare for it as best we can--like taking out the bathtub and putting in a shower with handrails.

If we were really in touch with life and aliveness, we would express our gratitude for just about everything--even the difficult things which force us to loosen our grasp on something or someone or other.

In the end, we have to let it all go anyway--flowers, friends, grandparents, and handrails.

Blooming Tulips

For Valentine's Day, i gave my gardening friend Paul a pot of tulips that i had been forcing in my garage over the winter. After a month of living in the warm indoors, they are blooming.

We plant ourselves in meditation. Maybe at first, it looks like nothing is happening. But as our roots are established, as we notice the warmth of what we are doing, an insight sprouts and blooms.

Climbing Rhododendrons

The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina are thick with big old rhododendrons. When i stopped in Blowing Rock, a woman told me that she and her sister used to climb rhododendrons as kids. What a great place to play!

I don't spend enough time outdoors, and i don't spend enough time playing. My do-er likes to be doing something in the garden. That's my adult form of play--rearranging and neatening up the flower beds, trimming branches off shrubs. All to make a more beautiful landscape, which will soon enough revert to its wild state when i can no longer care for it.

Rhododendrons grow tall. Children grow up. And i grow old.

Roadside Redbud

Driving across the state of North Carolina--length-wise--the interstate was lined with redbud trees for a hundred miles, until the highway gained elevation and entered a different climate zone.

Oh, what a breath of spring! I love redbud trees, which are native ornamental trees that grow wild, usually on the edge of the woods.

I was on my way to Southern Dharma Retreat Center, high up (2700') in the Great Smoky Mountains, where it snowed both Friday and Saturday nights.

Although we long for certainty, conditions are variable, changeable--sometimes wildly so. From spring to winter in just a few hours, a few miles, a few hundred feet of altitude. Conditions constantly change. It's never the same, even if it sort of looks/feels the same.

Redbuds bloom. Snow falls. 

A Taste for What's Good for You

My friend Samantha took me to the Duke Gardens today. We practically swam through five terraces of daffodils and tulips. So much spring packed in to these gardens. I particularly liked the red ruffled kale tucked in with the pink tulips.

It took me many years to develop a taste for kale. It always tasted too green and nutritious.Then someone told me about kale chips, and i was hooked. I love kale chips and kale salad.

Mindfulness also seemed like one of those things that's "good for you" and therefore, boring. It took a few years for me to develop a taste for mindfulness and realize the subsequent calmness really felt pretty nice.

Now i love mindfulness. Especially when i'm eating kale chips.