In September of 2020, I moved to a small island off the western coast of Canada. Living a rural life had never been a priority for me, but I suddenly found myself in an enviable environment surrounded by verdant forests, underutilized outdoor space, and master gardeners. It seemed that everywhere I went, veteran horticulturists were engaged in fervent conversation. I, on the other hand, was in my mid-60s with little experience even keeping a houseplant alive.  

The minute I considered joining these gardeners and embracing this new endeavor, I felt overwhelmed—a feeling with which I was well familiar. When I first devoted myself to Tibetan Buddhism in earnest, I felt similarly overwhelmed by the multitude of schools, lineages, teachings, and terminology. But I learned that untangling the vast mystery of the Vajrayana began with recognizing the path as an endless body of knowledge that spread in many directions. So when I took up gardening, I remembered that it is like Buddhism in this way. My decade of solid practice helped me recognize how consciousness is the tool we have for dealing with novelty, and that I could now put my Buddhist insight to use—in a very earthy way. Indeed, gardening demands of us many of the same traits Buddhism requires: curiosity, discernment, diligence, consistency, and patience. 

I began visiting gardens—both massive and modest—with the same inquisitiveness I first felt when picking up a bell and dorje. For the most part, I didn’t know what I was looking at, but in the same way that I’d sensed my background and nature would best mesh with the Nyingma school, I discerned which gardening path to follow. I wanted to plant food, not roses. Our island has rocky soil, a short growing season, and hungry deer. These parameters were enough to guide me toward a vegetable garden with a tall fence and sturdy containers. 

When it came to finding the appropriate guidance, I relied on my intuition. I also relied on YouTube. The first few days I spent clicking through earnest, well-meaning gardeners who were intent on entertaining. After some sleuthing, I found someone who was as confidently eloquent, yet as straightforward and efficient, in his instructions as the lamas I have studied with. His basics became my basics. I also read articles and asked a lot of questions. Pieces of information came together to form a new foundation of understanding. 

In my Buddhist meditation practice, the successes and failures of others, whether on the cushion or off, were not my successes and failures. So, while I was happy to find dedicated gardeners sharing their stories, it was time to seek the deep, visceral knowledge of personal experience. Getting my hands dirty provided a new type of refuge.

The island where I live has an abundance of seedling sales I could have waited for, but germination was part of an experience I wanted in full. With the type of care I use to set up my meditation space, I hung full-spectrum lighting over trays of packed soil in a storage shed. Tiny seeds were pushed below the surface as the excitement of inherent potential rushed through me. Once those seeds were activated, the soil’s crust was pushed aside in the breaking-through of new life. I recalled hearing Buddhist psychology for the first time and how that grew in my mind, pushing aside previous concepts. 

One exception to germinating from seed was the purchase of a ten-inch-tall Desert King fig sapling. I sent a photo of my little bare stick to a friend, who replied that I’d bought my own Bodhi tree. Until his comment, I hadn’t consciously known what my attraction was, beyond the idea of eating figs in three or four years. Now I find myself providing it with extra care.

I tended my seedlings as they grew under the lights, but before they could be transferred to the garden, they required a hardening-off period. This transition period of days in the sun and nights in the shed reminded me of an earlier time when I was still wavering in my path. Once the seedlings were transplanted, enhanced maturation took place. They became firmly rooted with full commitment, as I had also managed to do. Moving forward with no hesitation, knowing exactly where we belonged. And, of course, that certainty is when the biggest threats appear. Curiosity, discernment, and diligence matter, but you don’t get anywhere without patience and consistency—rare commodities in our modern world.

In Buddhism, patience requires faith in the very idea of enlightenment. In the garden, it is the belief that tiny seedlings will eventually be capable of filling an entire pot and bearing fruit. Cultivating a daily practice and sticking to it set me up for enacting the same sort of care with a garden, even though my first spring was epically cold and wet. That challenging weather hung on right into June. My wilted tomato leaves were turning purple when I shook my head and wondered what Buddha would do. Should I try to germinate more seeds and abandon my suffering plants or find ways to protect them? 

I’d learned enough to produce perfect seedlings, but they were floundering. Turning my gaze to the overcast sky above, I thought of the Buddhist term “skillful means.” I grabbed wire cages, shoved them into the three five-gallon buckets, and covered them with the heaviest plastic I could find. For several weeks, I took that plastic off in the daytime and put it back on at night. I refused to give up. 

Nowhere do we encounter the transitory nature of life more vividly than in a garden. The ability to personally witness the cycle of birth, growth, and death leads to a more nuanced understanding of life itself. When inner signs of our practice show outwardly, we hear of these profound changes from others. A teacher, fellow student, or close friend might notice shifts in our temperament, but they are usually so subtle that at first, we can’t see them ourselves. We might notice our lives working better, but often we can’t see how the teachings have changed us until—like my eventually hardy tomatoes—we have grown noticeably healthier. 

Taking it one step further, tending a garden provides daily lessons in the four seals of Buddhism: four viewpoints that mark a teaching as Buddhist.

The first seal is that all compounded things are impermanent. Germinating those tomato seeds created the cause for them to sprout, but the added condition of my exertion brought forth the karma that allowed the plants to thrive, even through inclement weather. 

I also saw how the kindness I’d shown myself while struggling with my own wild emotions was now reflected in the simple equanimity I felt while tending to my fledgling tomatoes. There was no hope, fear, or other emotion that caused suffering. In that, I recognized the second seal of Buddhism.

I’ve now spent several vigilant months overseeing my plot, and the joy of harvest has begun. Cherry tomatoes, onions, basil, parsley, and chard are plentiful, my squash box is overflowing, and I look forward to uncovering the layers of tubers hidden in my potato bags under bushes of stems, leaves, and delicate white flowers. 

That sense of completion and abundance is gratifying, but the opportunity to notice the compounded elements that make up a plant during its various stages of growth has led to a deeper understanding of emptiness—that all things have no inherent existence—the third seal of Buddhism. 

My first harvest is slowly replacing the pleasures of novelty with the comfort of the familiar. I will never know enough, but with both the accomplishment of study and the activity of getting right in there and doing the work, both gardening and Buddhist practice produce big rewards. They both nourish us with knowledge and shift us toward being more loving and non-neurotic. The fourth seal of Buddhism states that nirvana is not fabricated. It is beyond concepts and cannot be held on to. In removing what obscures our innate buddhanature, we uncover what has always been present. My own little Bodhi tree is also very much present. It has grown another foot and is now adorned with a crown of leaves. I believe that someday it too will be tall enough to sit under.

The post How Buddhist Practice Helped Create My First Garden appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This summer I journeyed to Upaya Zen Center in northern New Mexico to participate in training 50 Buddhist chaplains enrolled in a two-year program of engaged ministry. My role was to provide a practical one-day introduction to ecological chaplaincy designed to address the call for compassionate service in times of global climate crisis, habitat destruction, and loss of biodiversity.

One of the oldest derivations of the word “chaplain” harkens back to 4th-century France when Saint Martin of Torres, upon encountering a freezing cold man at the winter gates of his city, immediately removed his cloak, cutting it in half to clothe the suffering citizen. Saint Martin is now considered the founder of Christian chaplaincy. What I particularly appreciate about this story is that after sharing his cloak, he kept one half of the garment for himself so that he could continue to serve. Chaplains in the fold of Saint Martin are people of faith performing religious duties in a secular situation, creating chapels of refuge in the heart of the world.

The Buddhist Chaplaincy Training Program at Upaya Zen Center was founded about a decade ago by Abbot Roshi Joan Halifax, who is also one of the early members of the Zen Peacemaker Order. Around the time that the chaplaincy program began, a small cohort and I planted an organic garden at the eastern edge of the meditation hall, selecting only food crops that have been a staple for Native Pueblo people since antiquity. The garden has been growing there ever since, providing a bounty of nutrient-dense food for the Zen community.

These two foundational programs—Buddhist chaplaincy and organic gardening—continue to thrive side-by-side, and likewise have remained inextricably linked in a common ecology of the heart.

Chaplain candidates are vigorously trained in altruistic service, steeped in the applied teachings of systems theory and grounded in daily meditation. While at Upaya, they are nourished by the traditional crops of persistent agriculture until they graduate and enter into a full range of chaplaincy service including contemplative end-of-life care, prison ministry, environmental chaplaincy, and active peacemaking.

The field of ecological chaplaincy is both ancient terrain and new ground. In his article “Principles of Spiritual Leadership,” psychologist and physicist William Keepin observes that modern chaplains must train to serve both as hospice workers ministering to a dying culture as well as midwives helping to give birth to an emerging one. Both of these tasks arise seamlessly and simultaneously.

Buddhist chaplaincy training at Upaya is anchored in the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemaker Order: Not Knowing, or the radical practice of letting go of fixed ideas, Bearing Witness, or being present for all that arises, and Compassionate Action, which germinates out of discernment and a settled heart and mind. These core teachings—which were formulated by the late Roshi Bernie Glassman, who founded the order— are fundamental to training chaplains in view, meditation, and action.

Our ecological chaplaincy intensive began outdoors. Following morning meditation, we gathered at the threshold of the garden with Tewa blue corn, heirloom beans and squash, amaranth, quinoa, and Hopi sunflowers as our witness. At the edge of the wild and cultivated world we oriented ourselves anew to the cardinal directions. Consulting our physical and moral compass, we set our intention for service, protected by the circle of high desert mountains holding and sustaining our practice.

After this orientation ceremony, we spent the morning in the meditation hall investigating the nature of applied ecology and the science of environmental systems and cycles. Particularly useful was the teaching of preeminent systems thinker Donella Meadows and her assurance that all living systems are inherently messy, nonlinear, and rooted in patterns and relationships that are turbulent, dynamic, and ever-changing. In this spiritual and intellectual context, the chaplains learned to celebrate complexity while holding fast to the goal of goodness.

Mid-training one chaplain called out a terse 13th-century Sufi prayer: “Oh Lord, increase my bewilderment!” For the remainder of our session, participants immersed themselves in the joys and challenges of their particular service. Some chaplains were engaged in working with refugees and orphans from Nepal, Syria, Afghanistan, and Greece. Some of the chaplains were themselves refugees and orphans, like one participant estranged since childhood from his native Cyprus who offers spiritual care and art therapy to the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. Another participant worked as a physician for 40 years in Santa Fe, and was now volunteering in a wildlife center ministering to wounded raptors and engaging local children in conversation about climate change.

When our morning session came to a close, we sat together in deep silence. Summer wind rose and fell in rhythm with our quiet breathing. In the presence of these dedicated chaplains, I remembered a primary teaching from Zen monk and peacemaker Thich Nhat Hanh: “What we most need to do is hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”

By midafternoon when we reconvened the eager chaplains were itching for further engagement. Together we hauled barrels full of organic kitchen waste generated from ten days of training to the compost yard adjacent to the garden and gathered a giant pile of fresh weeds, a mound of steaming manure, drifts of dry straw, and wheelbarrows of raked leaves—all fresh fodder for the fire of decay. Some chaplains showed up with written statements for precisely this purpose, compositions designed for decomposition. Others sat briefly in the shade fashioning figurines of red clay to offer to the heat of the compost pile. With raucous intention we assembled all of this discarded wealth from our time together, singing and chanting, praying and dancing while we built a towering mountain of fecund compost. As the pile rose, so did testimonials of gratitude for all that is broken, forgotten, and combined into sweet fertility.

Just before evening meditation, chaplains placed their clay figurines and written offerings on the crest of the compost pile. I imagined these secret ingredients decomposing into mature, well-decayed compost. Radical disorder is the key to well-decayed organic matter. In the decomposition of life into death into life, no two molecules are ever the same. Similarity is rampant; identity—non-existent. (This line, originally drawn from William Bryant Logan’s Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, has become a mantra of decomposition for organic farmers.)

We capped our day of ecological training by adding a thick cloak of sweet blond straw to protect the new compost pile. “Saint Martin’s robe of chaplaincy,” I irreverently mused. Modern chaplains stood together at the edge of time and place, dedicating the merit of our practice to bewilderment, to the Great Mystery, and to finding freedom where fear and courage meet.

The post The Boundless Field of Ecological Chaplaincy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At the live edge of summer, my gardening practice is fresh and unborn, growing to new life in the green womb of our home orchard. The trees in this dynamic ecosystem have been planted over the last three decades, each tree rooted in its own lineage and story. Many of the fruit trees are just now coming into ripeness, offering a dense harvest of Japanese plums, Asian pears, and fragrant dessert and cider apples. Even though spring has been dry and bitterly cold, I feel a warm flush of camaraderie in the presence of this arboreal dharma family.

Many years ago when Soto Zen roshi Dainin Katagiri came to San Francisco Zen Center to lead a Zen training period, he reminded us that followers of the way gather in meditation to establish a sorin, or “forest thicket,” of dedicated practice. In this thicket a density of species grows together, sharing an intertwined root system and enlivening the circle of continuous practice.

At the core of our home orchard, a stately Golden Delicious apple tree is growing. I helped to plant this tree many years ago, before I lived here, with my dharma colleague and friend Patricia Mushim Ikeda. In early April 1989, Mushim gave birth to a lusty baby boy whom we welcomed by planting the young Golden Delicious apple tree on his placenta.

Related: Grassroots Dharma

From the first, tree and child took muscular hold. Famed for vigorous health, and renowned for firm and highly favored flesh, the Golden Delicious apple originated from a chance seedling of the Grimes Golden apple bred in the early 1800s in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. Self-fertile and uncommonly productive, the Golden Delicious apple is an ideal pollinator plant for the orchard, assuring fertility and fruitfulness for all other apple varieties growing in its vicinity.

A few years after we planted this placental tree, mother and son moved to Oakland, where Mushim now maintains a full life as a meditation teacher, community activist, and Buddhist writer. Some years later, after 25 years of residential training at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, our family moved one mile north to Muir Beach, to the exact location where Mushim and I planted the Golden Delicious apple tree. Now every autumn we send a box of fresh apples or a large Mason jar of delicious apple butter to our friends in Oakland.

Grounded in affection for these iconic fruit trees, I follow a three-part harmony of care and coordinated practice in our home orchard ecosystem. No matter the season, I always begin with a long pause of silence and a deliberate slowing down of all inquiry in order to hear the voice of the watershed where I am working. In this silence I am aware that a wild forest thicket of California native plants grows at the edge of our domesticated garden. Here, medicinal elderberry mingles with damp stands of red alder, creek dogwood, and pools of black willow. A dense understory of stinging nettle and horsetail fern covers the floor of this forest, setting the rhythm for nature’s round dance of growth and decay, and transmitting instructions for the health and vitality of the cultivated landscape.

With the blood of the wild forest circulating in my awareness, I remember that healthy fruit trees depend upon a steady diet of fungally dominated woody debris in order to feed their hungry soil. Accordingly, the second phase of orchard care begins with the pruning of the fruit orchard at the New Year. In this dormant season, fallen branches are gathered from the forest floor and chipped together with tender fruit tree prunings. This mix of woody debris is spread throughout the orchard along with mounds of raked forest leaves and wheelbarrows full of ripe compost and moldy straw. Throughout the growing season I continue to deliver woody debris to the fruit trees, making sure that each offering is tucked beneath a woodland mulch generated from the forest thicket.

Related: Seeds of Plenty

The third practice of mindful orchard care involves the application of four holistic sprays that are coordinated with the seasonal opening of the first apple buds, the first fruit blossoms, and the first petal fall in the orchard. My husband, Peter, and I brew most of these holistic “sprays of spring” from scratch. Peter applies organic Neem oil, an ingredient derived from the cold-pressed seed of the sacred Neem tree of India and Africa. This spray serves both as a seasonal insect repellent and a disease inhibitor for the orchard. He also delights in brewing a fertilizer of liquid fish, which he sources by collecting raw fish scraps from the last working dock in the San Francisco harbor, mixing the fish with rough oak leaves and stirring this seething brew into a 55- gallon drum filled with fresh creek water. (Blessedly, the drum is stored downwind, in the faraway shade of the forest thicket.) The reeking fish brew ferments for several months, providing a powerful holistic spray of liquid nitrogen and micronutrients laced with rich fatty acids from the decaying fish. This spray nourishes the entire orchard ecosystem.

Although I enjoy the preparation of homemade sprays of spring, I occasionally feel like a possessed Buddhist barista as I brew these bubbling batches. Still, I delight in blending our third spray of whole milk whey, comfrey, and nettle leaves and mineralizing it with a dash of rock dust
to provide available calcium for the orchard and to retard harmful fungal spore germination. Likewise, I cherish our fourth spray of spring brewed from liquid compost tea boosted with a slurry of effective microbes and sweetened with blackstrap molasses. This spray enhances nutrient density in all home orchard fruit. Wearing my trusty backpack sprayer, I pause before applying any of these holistic sprays of spring to the orchard. I imagine potent aerosol nourishing each tree, and I treat every application of these ingredients as a sacred tea ceremony for the living orchard.

It is early summer now in California and quiet at the roots of the forest thicket. In the heart of the garden, the Golden Delicious apple tree stands
in full fruit, its continuous practice opening the circle of the way.

A few days ago I came upon a 1989 journal entry from His Holiness the Dalai Lama that I remembered reading to Mushim when we planted the apple tree on her son’s placenta so many years ago:

On a certain day, month, and year,
We should observe the ceremony
Of tree planting.
Thus, we fulfill our responsibilities,
And serve our fellow beings,
Which not only brings us happiness,
But benefits all.

The post Forest Thicket Practice appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Beneath the October harvest moon, the sharp sickle of autumn has laid bare the field stubble at our local community college organic farm in Novato, California. We have gathered here in the bounty of the Three Sisters garden under the guidance of the Cultural Conservancy, a nonprofit indigenous rights organization that protects the traditional knowledge and practices of native cultures through a variety of programs. One of these, Native Foodways, revitalizes the plant species and practices, songs, and stories that accompany crop planting and harvest. My farmer husband and I have been working with the Cultural Conservancy for the past six years.

This year, the harvest was abundant beyond measure. At season’s end, on the margin of the field, full mounds of Taos blue hubbard squash and Lakota winter squash cured in the autumn wind. Ripe ears of Oneo, the heritage white flint corn of the Iroquois Confederacy, were hung to dry for winter storage, their husks folded back and braided into thick ropes. A portion of this corn harvest was ground and roasted into fragrant cornmeal and served as a traditional cornbread for the annual feast. In the center of our gathering circle, seven varieties of richly patterned Native American heirloom beans were arranged on a large wooden-spiral offering tray. The remainder of the bean harvest was sorted into deep buckets for distribution as seed and food to the extended Bay Area intertribal community.

This honorable harvest was celebrated with prayer and blessing, and convened by young Mohawk Seed Keeper Rowan White, who led us in the traditional Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Thanksgiving Address of the Six Nations Confederacy:

Greetings and thanksgiving to the many supporters of our lives! The Original Instructions direct that we who walk about on earth are to express a great respect, affection, and gratitude toward all the spirits which create and support life.

In the grandeur of the Three Sisters harvest we summoned gratitude for the kinship represented by the Native Foodways crops. During this unsettled year of natural disaster and violent political upheaval, fire, flood, earthquake, and famine have devastated the landscapes of our world. From Bangladesh, Oaxaca, and Myanmar to coastal Florida and Puerto Rico the effect of global climate disruption is acute. Dharma friends at the Houston Zen Center continue to assist flood victims still suffering from the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. In nine states of the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain Region, more than 80 wild fires burn, darkening the midday skies. Our daughter in Portland, Oregon, reports that during the Eagle Creek fire that devastated the Columbia River gorge, parts of the region were covered with a thin blanket of pale gray ash.

In dire times, real hunger and thirst rise. Blessedly, so does resilient engagement and dedicated dharma. Last month, practitioners from the San Francisco Zen Center joined hundreds of citizens across the country for a day of compassionate action and a walk to feed the hungry, sponsored by Buddhist Global Relief, an organization founded by Buddhist scholar-monk Bhikkhu Bodhi. The mission of Buddhist Global Relief is to provide direct food aid to people affected by hunger and malnutrition, to promote ecologically sustainable agriculture, and to support the education and right livelihood projects of girls and women worldwide.

With insightful clarity, Bhikkhu Bodhi reminds us that the most fragile link between accelerating climate change and natural disaster is neither flood nor fire but a diminished food supply and malignant injustice in our economic and political systems. Although the Buddha taught that the gift of food is the gift of life, 900 million people, one-sixth of the world’s population, suffer from food shortage while 5 million children die annually from poverty and hunger.

Without turning away from this truth, and grateful for embodied Zen practice, I sat alone after our harvest festival at the roots of the giant Coast Live Oak where we had celebrated our Three Sisters ceremony. Darkness spread from the edge of the empty field inward. At the waning of the season, I felt the old spirit of Thanksgiving move in the shadows.

In the original teachings of the Buddha, followers of the Way were reminded that the dharma is hard to see, difficult to awaken to, quiet and excellent, as well as not confined by thought, subtle, and sensed by the wise. In an ecosystem of dharma awareness a spiral of gratitude radiates out, grounded in the wisdom teachings and compassion of heart and mind.

Genuine gratitude thrives and grows when three essential gifts are cultivated. First, the gift of material support and the nourishment of real food. Next, the gift of authentic dharma teaching, designed to uphold and support practice that refuses to abandon the truth of suffering. And finally, the gift of non-fear, radical and deep-rooted.

In the shelter of the grandmother oak, I imagine fearless bodhisattvas, ecosattvas, coming up now out of split open ground. Their continuous practice is generated from prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom. Emerging from this matrix, bodhisattvas find no obstacle for their minds. Having no obstacles, they overcome all fear, and lifetime after lifetime they arise, food and dharma nourishment for a hungry world.

The post Spiral of Gratitude appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This summer in our coastal community of Muir Beach, dharma friends and neighbors are planting a medicine garden of wild and cultivated sage. The summer soil is alive and hungry. The planting proceeds freely, without a thought-out pattern or design.

With more than 900 members in its august family, sage, or salvia, from the Latin salvere, “to be well,” serves as both an herb of the hearth and home pantry, and a potent medicine in the pharmacopeia of old Europe and the Mediterranean region. Sage has long been held in the highest esteem of the ancients: the saying “Why should a man die whilst sage grows in his garden?” goes back to Anglo-Saxon times.

I first thought of planting a medicine garden in January, around the time of the 2017 presidential inauguration. The weather in the Bay Area was tempestuous, the West Coast submerged under an atmospheric river of torrential rain. Still, more than 80 activists, artists, and meditators convened at Point Reyes National Seashore to convene for an alternative inauguration in the eye of the storm.

We walked along the San Andreas fault line to Kule Loklo, a recreated Native Coast Miwok village. There, we stood in a sodden circle as ceremonial leaders started a fire the traditional way, using a fire drill. The drill’s hollow center, packed with dried plant fiber, leaped to flame once an ember from the friction met it.

We circled around this fire for over an hour, offering white sage, or Salvia apiana, to the flames to strengthen our resolve and resilience. At one point the winter sun emerged briefly from behind the storm curtain to illuminate a full rainbow spanning the sky. Then, just as suddenly, a volley of icy sleet pelted down from the heavens, ending the festivities. “All hail to the Chief!” someone yelled out irreverently as we scurried for shelter.

When the sky cleared, we walked three miles to the village of Point Reyes in silence to dedicate a peace garden in the middle of town. We planted a young white sage plant in the garden’s center. Revered as an herbal savior for its many uses, white sage is said to open the memory and to generate truthfulness. It also stimulates and cleanses the liver, supporting blood filtration while aiding digestion.

After the inauguration, the sage family continued to work on me. I began to save seeds and cuttings from more than 13 distinct species of sage, growing them all in our tiny Dragon Coast greenhouse. While I worked, I often thought about the two meanings of the English word sage: derived from salvere, it refers to the plant; but a homonym derived from sapere, “to be wise,” refers to the sage teacher. Salvias, like sagacious human guides, further our capacity to perceive and generate discriminating wisdom.

When it was time to prepare the soil for the medicinal sage garden, the new farm apprentices from Green Gulch joined me in Muir Beach. The earth was still heavy with rain. We layered the raw soil with old issues of the New York Review of Books, pages lovingly placed on the ground, facedown, so that land’s microbes could digest well-written analyses of the overworld. We covered our paper trail with last season’s wind-whipped prayer flags and applied wheelbarrows of ripe compost to the ground, finishing with drifts of blond rice straw.

While we worked, the apprentices bantered about the koan they were studying at Green Gulch, Case 87 of the Blue Cliff Record, in which Yun Men addresses his community: “Medicine and disease subdue each other. The whole earth is medicine. What is your true self?” A perfect koan for these times, I thought, imagining salvation without a savior and gardens before gardening.

Now, it is summer and 13 herbal plants from the greenhouse cuttings are ready to enter the earth. Before we plant, I step into the greenhouse alone to offer white sage. A simple altar is set up on an overturned wooden crate at the back of the propagation house. A molded concrete Shakyamuni Buddha figure, another true sage, sits there quietly, solemn and unperturbed. Perched on his left shoulder is a sky-blue plastic dragon rescued years ago from the rot and ruin of our compost pile. As sage begins to burn, the dragon hisses into the Buddha’s long-lobed ear: “Medicine and disease subdue each other!” Implacable, the discerning Sage of the Shakyas responds, “The whole earth is medicine.”

The post The Whole Earth is Medicine appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Wendy Cook did not expect to spend her summer rescuing more than 100 rabbits.

“I was truly, truly trying to have a quiet summer,” Cook recently told Tricycle from her home in Massachusetts. “I wanted to get more knowledgeable about gardening, and I was going to grow herbs. I was also going to do less email and less social outings.”

Things turned out quite differently. It all began when Cook was tending to her plot at Codman Community Farms in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. A friend mentioned that she was concerned about the rabbits being kept and bred for meat on the other side of the farm.

“When she first told me about the rabbits, I was like, ‘Don’t tell me that. This is my quiet time. I want to grow my lettuce and tomatoes,’” said Cook, who has been a practicing Buddhist for the last 30 years. But once she saw the rabbits and the conditions they were being kept in, she said she needed to take action.

After writing a letter to the board running the farm, a meeting was scheduled for July 6 between the farmers, Cook, and her friend.

“I was a little annoyed because I wanted to go to puja [a special ceremony during which offerings are made] for His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s birthday,” said Cook when she realized the date. “But then I thought: advocating for rabbits is my puja.”

The teachings of the Dalai Lama and Lama Zopa Rinpoche were in Cook’s mind leading up to the meeting, and she began to wonder whether there was any possibility that she could purchase the rabbits.

“As a practicing Buddhist, the daily practice is to see all living beings as equal and wishing the best for all of them,” Cook said. “I can be a very assertive Buddhist. I really believe in compassion and action.”

With that in mind, she began doing some calculations in order to figure out how much the rabbits would cost. “I don’t even think I mentioned the possibility of buying them to my husband,” Cook said. “I just had this thought of maybe I can buy all of the rabbits.”

It turns out that Cook was given the opportunity to do just that at the meeting. The farmer told her he had invested in the rabbits and asked her, rather facetiously, if she would like to buy them.

When Cook asked how much, the farmer told her: $20,000.

“I just said yes,” Cook said. “I didn’t have that money myself, but . . . I knew that across traditions there is lot of emphasis on animal liberation in the Buddhist world. “I just saw this window open a fraction and I thought ‘yes.’”

Once Cook made the decision to purchase the bunnies, she swiftly went into action to gather the funds she needed, starting Facebook and CrowdRise pages in order to support the “Great Rabbit Liberation of 2016.” Most significantly, she reached out to one of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s students, a Singapore-based Tibetan Buddhist monk named Venerable Tenzin Drachom, and explained the situation.

“He just said, ‘I’ll let you know how much we can raise,’” Cook said. “Within 24 hours he contacted me and said all of the money had been raised. I wasn’t expecting it to be that easy.”

Indeed, Cook says she had been mentally preparing to start contacting other Buddhist groups and friends around the world in order to collect the funds. “But there have been so many auspicious signs throughout this story,” she said. “When Ven. Drachom said that he’d secured the money, he was actually on his way to Tibet. And when the money was transferred to me, he was at Mount Kailash [a Tibetan mountain that is a holy site for multiple religions].” Cook took both events, along with the fact that her initial meeting was on the Dalai Lama’s birthday, as signs she was on the right path.

“There are so many things I can’t do,” Cook said. “I can’t get homeless people off the streets. I can’t stop the war in Syria. This was a moment where I felt that I could make a difference.”

Over the next few weeks, Cook, who had never considered herself an animal activist, began learning more about the animal rescue world. Her life quickly began to revolve around figuring out how to care for the 135 rabbits that suddenly became her responsibility. She initially thought she could house them in her home and on her property, but was deterred from doing so after neighbors complained. She then began working with rabbit rescue groups across the East Coast, including members of the House Rabbit Network. “They came in and saved the day,” Cook said. “Some [rabbits] were taken home immediately.” The volunteers helped with medical treatment for the animals and also helped find the vast majority of them homes or places in shelters.

“I have huge respect for people—Buddhist or non-Buddhist—who are incredibly compassionate and in the animal rescue world,” she said. “They work long hours, they are not afraid to travel for miles for even one animal. That’s just what they do.”

Cook and her husband decided to keep about six rabbits in their home as pets and are still looking for homes for about half a dozen more. She stresses that her spirituality remains at the center of the heart of the Great Rabbit Liberation.

“I’ve done this whole thing on faith and a prayer. I was able to give the rabbits imprints of the Buddha’s teachings,” Cook said. “I did this by playing Buddhist chanting they could hear; I recited many mantras to them, and each rabbit was circumambulated around an altar. The vicious suffering circle of samsara has to be broken. By practicing the Buddha’s teachings, we stop creating the causes to be in samsara and start cultivating the causes for our enlightenment.”

♦

The Great Rabbit Liberation of 2016 is continuing to raise funds to pay for the medical treatment and upkeep of the remaining rabbits. If you are interested in adopting a rabbit, please email Wendy Cook at wendy@lamayeshe.com.

[This post was originally published on September 30, 2016]

The post Why a Buddhist Yoga Teacher Heard the Call to Save 135 Rabbits appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

After a long winter of rain, the bottomland fields of wild mustard bloom cadmium yellow under a blank cobalt sky. Red-winged blackbirds call from the dank marshland. The brawny root system of mustard penetrates to a depth of six feet, scavenging raw nutrients from wet ground. Above the bog, mustard plants exhale a long sulfurous outbreath into the spring wind.

Mustard carries benefit beyond measure. It is a primary member of the vast Brassicaceae family, also known as Cruciferae for the cross-shaped flower petals of these plants. Thought to have originated in the Himalayan region of India before spreading to Nepal, China, and Japan, the plant has served for five thousand years as food, fiber, medicine, and biological fumigant. It provides a rich source of essential minerals both to the living soil and to humankind; the seeds and leaves of this iconic plant are harvested to help protect against cancer or assist in the treatment of diabetes, to maintain cardiac health and lower blood cholesterol. When ingested, steamed leaves of mustard are known to bind bile in the digestive tract and to stimulate the excretion of fatty acids.

I always associate the fiery taste of mustard with our early years of practice at San Francisco Zen Center in the 1970s. We were still in the thrall of our Asian male teachers in those years and eager to follow their traditional practices. At Tassajara it was not uncommon to serve a Japanese monastic breakfast of brown rice cereal, miso soup, and hijiki seaweed cooked with shaved burdock root and accented with pickled mustard. We often finished our practice day with a medicinal supper of savory gruel and a side bowl of spicy mustard greens, plants with names like Mizuna, Green Wave, Osaka Purple, and Hatakena, chosen from our favorite Kitazawa Seed Co. catalog.

In the tangle of pungent mustard I remember Yaeko Nakamura Sensei, who treasured this wild plant of the Orient, and who taught classic Japanese tea ceremony and Noh theater chanting at Green Gulch for more than 15 years. Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi, the second abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, encouraged us to study these fundamental Zen arts with her. She was a respected teacher, renewing Zen culture with her refined, discerning, and adamantine practice.

I served as Nakamura Sensei’s tea attendant for many seasons, helping her care for the maintenance of the formal tearoom; she also trusted me to harvest humble flowers from the Green Gulch fields for the tea ceremony. I remember how in springtime after tea class she stepped out of her formal teaching kimono and walked slowly down through the farm fields in her simple work robes to stand in silence before the blaze of mustard, her hands clasped loosely behind her back.

Elegant and aristocratic in her bearing, Nakamura Sensei was never caught by grandeur or fame. She began teaching in North America when she was in her mid-seventies. In an era when very few Asian women were entrusted to convey the authentic Zen arts, Nakamura Sensei carried forward the original lineage of the 16th-century Zen practitioner and tea master Sen no Rikyu. Without hesitation, Sensei trained bumbling and sincere Western practitioners in Rikyu’s tradition of “Wabi Tea,” a reference to wabi sabi, honoring a way of life, a spiritual path, and a starkly intimate aesthetic conveyed by incomplete, imperfect, and impermanent expression.

Almost 30 years ago in March, just after the vernal equinox, I was walking up from the ocean through the bottomland fields of the gulch. It was early afternoon and mustard was in full cry, incandescent in the spring sunlight. I stood in the backwash of the mustard, thinking of Nakamura Sensei, who was older then and no longer able to walk the fields. Impulsively I cut a wide swath of gold mustard flowers for Sensei and staggered to her doorstep, a slow-moving mountain of mustard medicine.

Nakamura Sensei greeted me at the threshold in stunned silence. Without explanation she crumpled to her knees and began to weep uncontrollably. Fortunately, Virginia Baker, who tended Sensei for years, was present and hurried to comfort her and to translate for me what had happened. Apparently I had unknowingly harvested wild mustard on the exact anniversary of Sen no Rikyu’s death by ritual suicide, or seppuku, commanded in 1591 by feudal warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In the Japanese tea world, there is unspoken agreement never to harvest mustard from the time it begins flowering in late winter until after the anniversary of Sen no Rikyu’s death.

Before fulfilling Hideyoshi’s command and raising the “sword of eternity” to end his life, Sen no Rikyu’s last act on earth was to prepare and host an exquisite tea ceremony. After serving tea on that solemn occasion, the master smashed the priceless tea bowl he had used in the ceremony. As the guests departed, Rikyu presented each one with a memorial gift chosen from the ceremonial tea utensils. In the solitude of his rustic tearoom hung a simple scroll with calligraphy evoking the evanescence of all that is. At the base of this scroll Rikyu had arranged a single wild mustard flower.

This season I renew my gratitude to Nakamura Sensei with uncut mustard as my witness. I remember Rikyu’s charge that each meeting of host and guest be a treasured encounter. “One time, one meeting,” he taught, invoking the long mystery of a garden path unfolding through fields of wild mustard far from this fleeting world. “The path remains a way to us,” he promised. “Why not shake off right here the dust from our hearts?”

The post Wild Mustard and the Way of Zen appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We have a simple wooden Buddha figure on our home altar. During a surfing holiday in Bali, our son Jesse purchased this Buddha from a seaside craftsman. Jesse asked forgiveness of the Buddha before wrapping him in old T-shirts and a salty towel and hauling the World- Honored One home to the Left Coast of northern California.

This morning as autumn ravages the garden, our Balinese Buddha is dusted with thick drifts of gold sunflower pollen. Above him in a vase the last Hopi Black Dye sunflowers of the season silently expire. “Ah! sunflower,” whispers William Blake, “weary of time.”

The original Pomo and Coast Miwok people of the Bay Area teach that time is always told in linked events. The garden work of late October is measured by the rhythm of the noble sunflower harvest. As altar flowers shed their last pollen we rig wire scaffolding in our warm living room to dry hundreds of seed heads of Hopi sunflowers for next year’s planting.

I love to study the faces of these darkeyed beauties. Each sunflower seed head is composed of between one and four thousand individual flowers growing in a densely curved pattern of intersecting spirals. Thirty-four spirals spin clockwise from the center of a single flower to merge with another whorl of fifty-five spirals turning in a counterclockwise gyre—a dizzying fractal sequence of tightly joined spirals that allows the maximum number of seeds to ripen on the face of each sunflower.

I always leave a few Hopi sunflowers in the garden at year’s end to feed the hungry birds of autumn. Purple finches peck out spiral seed sockets of the last flowers, feasting on indigo wisdom from the ancient Hopi world.

I remember receiving the seed of these Black Dye sunflowers more than thirty years ago. An old Zen friend passed them to me, warm hand to warm hand, upon her return from a pilgrimage to the Third Hopi Mesa in Arizona, one of the oldest continuously inhabited dwelling places in North America.

We planted the sunflowers in a rough spiral in the early farm fields of Green Gulch. In the 1990s, Gary Paul Nabhan, author, ethnobotanist, and cofounder of the conservation organization Native Seeds/SEARCH, visited us there. I remember his genuine delight upon discovering Southwestern pueblo sunflowers growing vigorously in the long foggy outbreath of the Pacific Ocean.

The culture of sunflowers is vast beyond measure. Native Americans in the eastern United States first began to domesticate these plants more than three thousand years before the Common Era. Throughout the indigenous world, sunflowers are considered kin and treated with reverence and respect. They provide food, medicine, oil, shelter, fiber, and ceremonial support. All parts of the plant are cherished and used to support the life cycle of their people. In the iconic Hopi pueblo tradition midnight blue dye is extracted from the cracked open hulls of each sunflower.

During his visit to Green Gulch Farm, Nabham taught us about a rare member of the sunflower tribe, Helianthus anomalus. The anomalus sunflower is a deviant relative of the domesticated Hopi Black Dye plant. Whenever this weedy ancestor germinates on Hopi farmland, it is honored and protected as a revered elder. The Hopi people count the wild sunflower as blood kin. The anomalous sunflower carries an irregular genetic code that helps to strengthen the cultivated field. A scrappy outlier, it provides resistance to rots and wilts and protects domesticated sunflower family members from the harmful effects of drought, withering heat, and pestilence.

The range of the anomalous sunflower is not limited to the lowland fields of the Hopi Nation. This ancestral plant also grows at the edge of the high mesa ceremonial kiva (underground chamber). There, its long gold petals are gathered by Hopi maidens every autumn to prepare a celebratory powder for use in the sacred dances of the season. The anomalous sunflower petals are dried and pounded into a paste. Each maiden rubs the paste into the moistened skin of her face until her very countenance radiates with the living gold of her sunflower ancestors.

One of my favorite poems, “Sunflower,” by the Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobson, begins with a double question:

What sower walked over earth,
Which hands sowed
Our inward seeds of fire?

I trust that the perennial relationship between the Hopi people and their weedy sunflower ancestor is not an anomaly. Rather than being simply a deviation from the norm, the kinship demonstrated here of the human and more-than human world generates a common ecology of the heart. In times of climate disruption and species extinction a family circle of sowers and seed move across the earth. Inward seeds of fire are sown to warm and nourish all beings in the ten directions.

The post Ecology of the Heart appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When my now 27-year-old daughter, Alisa, was growing up at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, she regularly prowled the fields with a roving posse of renegade Zen kids. These young ruffians disappeared all day long into dense blackberry thickets, to emerge at dusk with rough wooden machetes fashioned to slash down 9-foot-tall poison hemlock plants menacing the neat lettuce rows at the edge of the farm.

Chagrined by their feral behavior, a few Zen parents organized family practice days, taking turns to offer simple interactive programs for our children, grounded in the original teachings of the Buddha. I planned a summer session on the noble eightfold path with Reverend Heng Sure, the director of the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, who came to the family program strumming his guitar and belting out this sassy rendition of the noble truths:

“Ouch,” says Suffering,
“Mooooore,” says Craving,
“Stop!” says Cessation,
“Walk the noble eightfold path.”

Our Zen kids loved both this catchy mantra and imitating Reverend Heng Sure. With their interest piqued, they decided to plant a noble eightfold path garden in the shape of an eight-spoke wheel. It became my summer work to help realize this garden.

As sons and daughters of practicing Buddhists, our children understood that the teachings of the eightfold path are divided into three categories—wisdom, morality, and concentration. To make these categories clear in their garden design, they chose signage marked with three primary colors: blue for clear-eyed wisdom, yellow for warm-hearted morality, and red for fiery concentration.

I was surprised to see how avid the children were in creating their garden. They loved selecting the best plants for their design. For right view, in the wisdom section, they chose eyebright, a medicinal herb that fosters clear vision, and for wisdom’s matching virtue, right intention, they planted a rich mix of cover crop seed to feed the garden ground.

In the threefold category of ethical morality, the young Zen gardeners chose the revered Three Sisters plant trio of Native American antiquity and traditional ecological knowledge: corn, beans, and squash. In this category they selected Dragon Tongue beans for right speech, open pollinated Golden Bantam sweet corn for right action, and sugar pumpkins for right livelihood, with the secret entrepreneurial intention to sell this crop back to the sangha at Halloween.

In the last category,that of deep concentration, the kids planted indigo-seeded sunflowers for right effort, rosemary and lavender for right mindfulness, and stinging nettles for right concentration (since just a tiny, concentrated sting of the nettle goes a long way).

It has been almost 15 years since this noble eightfold garden was planted in the area we now nostalgically call the Children’s Garden. A few months ago I walked the remnants of this plot and noticed that eight clear organic gardening principles rose up for me out of the folds of the ground:

RIGHT VIEW is to have no fixed view of what a garden is and to allow the voice of the uncultivated watershed to guide the design.

This insight came from noticing that the original eyebright plants of the first garden bed had long ago yielded to a wild jumble of California native plants indicating original fertility far beyond the cultivated imagination.

RIGHT INTENTION is to keep your garden beds covered with a mixed mantle of diverse plants in order to protect and build soil health.

Here on the original site of the Children’s Garden, cover crop plants have continued to thrive and grow, creating one of the most fertile pieces of paradise in the garden, a little slice of Eden, humming with life.

RIGHT SPEECH is to proclaim the importance of protecting and saving seed as the source of life and the embodiment of biocultural diversity in every garden.

In this section of the eightfold garden, Dragon Tongue beans covered the ground with their brightly patterned seed for many seasons. We continue to collect, share, and sow this heirloom seed today.

RIGHT ACTION is to garden organically without the intervention of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides, and to plant seeds free from genetic modification.

This section of the garden reminded me that corn is one of the most genetically engineered plants in the modern marketplace, a practice not sanctioned by organic agriculture. In the 15 years since establishing the Children’s Garden, we have been committed to planting only open-pollinated varieties of corn. This season a prolific stand of Oaxacan Green Dent corn graces the Zen fields.

RIGHT LIVELIHOOD is to focus on growing plants in interactive poly-cultural guilds and to celebrate each diverse harvest with your community.

Although the first sugar pumpkins of this bed were harvested long ago, I still remember how voluptuous that initial harvest was and how excited our kids were to celebrate within the “lively hood” of their Zen sangha.

RIGHT EFFORT is to grow plants that will nourish the web of life and provide integrated pest management in the garden.

The original Hopi Black Dye sunflowers sown in the Children’s Garden continue to offer a thriving source of pollen and nectar for the farm and garden, reminding us to always plant for the pollinators and to share the wealth of every harvest with the more-than-human world.

RIGHT MINDFULNESS is to invite the unknown into the garden by bringing heart and mind together in the present moment.  

When we first planted the Children’s Garden, I mentioned our first garden teacher, Alan Chadwick, who always planted rosemary for remembrance and lavender for comfort in every garden he grew. Accordingly, our kids selected these two plants as primary guides for mindfulness in their eightfold garden.

RIGHT CONCENTRATION is to welcome dangerous and powerful plants into the garden and be nourished by the concentrated strength of these guardian plants.

I was most surprised by the children’s selection of nettles for their garden. Since it is difficult for nettles to grow in cultivated gardens, our kids took to harvesting them from the wild and bringing these undomesticated plants into the kitchen to be made into nettle broth, which still serves as the base for our most nutritious and flavorful soups.

The Buddha began and ended his long teaching life by walking the noble eightfold path of wisdom, morality, and concentration, and applying his timeless teachings to every aspect of practice. His commitment encourages a fresh adaptation of these original teachings today for children, organic gardeners, and seasoned practitioners alike. May all beings in the ten directions follow this ageless path. 

The post The Noble Eightfold Path of Organic Gardening appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

1.  What would it look like to do a good job at my garden? I’ve tried, and the lettuce is good. Everything else is sort of OK or dying.

My friend E has this magic with land, plants, gardening that I don’t have—but is it magic, exactly, or a green thumb, or years of acquired knowledge? Is there a difference? Does knowledge built up over years + joy = magic?

Poet Alexis Pope writes: a ritual is what / I make happen for myself.

Is a garden I make happen a ritual, a magic, a simple capacity? Or can I master it if I work hard enough?

2.  I’m curious about effort, and about management. My hair is unmanageable right now, which I guess means I do not have mastery over it, and even when I try to care for it, it does not look like magic has touched it.

The French gardener, botanist, and writer Gilles Clément, known for his design of public parks, writes: All management generates an abandoned area.

Clément suggests that by choosing one area to manage we automatically lose the rest. If my hair were manageable, would that mean I forfeit management of something else in my life? How many parts of me can I control, and what gets left out? How many things can we manage at once?

This feels relevant always, these days, when my days feel full of an endless to-do list, when something is always poking up that needs managing and I never arrive at the bottom of my inbox. I feel compelled to believe there is a limited amount of management that can be done at one time. I feel a potential for forgiveness there, in the belief that we can’t manage it all.

I feel that way with my body also, when if it isn’t my unruly hair it’s acne or chipping nails or dirty laundry. My female body that has been taught it has to be managed to be visible, to be appropriate.

My maintenance of my hair, nails, and so on—these are choices that I make, but when I maintain them, am I abandoning other women who don’t? Am I enforcing the idea that their bodies are more abandoned than mine?

All management generates an abandoned area.

Clément is writing ecologically, referring to wild landscapes versus developed spaces, but we can extend his ideas to humans managing themselves and managing their lives. In times when our lives feel unmanageable, what things must we abandon in order to manage?

And: what would it be like not to manage? What would it be like to carefully choose what we can’t manage?

3.  An abandoned area. Part of my garden is abandoned. I tried but failed to seed borage and catnip there—failed, perhaps because the roots of the giant tree and the invasive oxalis already “manage” that area, but—I abandoned it. Spiny plants with red flowers that I don’t recognize grow in there, mostly, oddly, in the shaded areas. The area that I carved out of the yard as a garden bed remains mulched, but grasses are encroaching along the edges.

I’m a beginning gardener, and so I’m not sure exactly what to do. All I know is that I want to be in control of this garden bed. I listen to my meditation teachers reminding me to have a beginner’s mind, for the sake of openness, for the sake of joy. How can I succeed at being a beginner?

My first impulse when I notice my lack of mastery is to give in completely—to say, Forget it, let the grasses come in, let the wild mustards win, give in, give in, for I am no master of this space. To say, I cannot do this at all if I can’t manage it completely.

But I want to try, which is a foreign concept for those of us who love control. I want to put forth some effort and continue to try despite what already exists in my garden, to put forth effort even if I can’t control it all.

The celebrated Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein writes: Right effort creates energy.

This is difficult for me to believe. I am often afraid of effort, afraid that I will be drained by it or afraid of effort that results in failure. I need not be afraid of effort if it will create energy, but in many ways this idea is new to me.

Perhaps in part it’s gendered. I believe I am small and effort will erase me. I fear my own weakness and expect myself not to be capable.

But I also want to dominate: I’ve been taught that I’m responsible for controlling my body and my environment, for subjugating them to my ever-powerful human will. Though I am learning otherwise, I often perceive any failure as my own fault of effort, rather than the fault of the conditions around me.

Joseph Goldstein again: When awareness is established and mindfulness is happening by itself—what we could call effortless effort—then we can simply rest in the continuity of bare knowing.

“Rest.” To rest. I am often stunned by Buddhist instructions to “rest in awareness.” How can I rest if I am responsible for failure? I, who must manage or abandon, be managed or be abandoned?

I have a deeply conditioned belief that if I do not manage myself carefully I will certainly be unmanageable and will thus soon be abandoned. While I reject this belief intellectually, I still find myself thinking that my unmanaged state is not good enough on its own to deserve attention and care. The anxiety of this belief is a major part of what initially led me to Buddhism, to a set of values that instruct me to make the effort to rest.

4. Most people have a question they ask spiritual teachers over and over again, and this is mine: How can I put forth effort and also rest?

I open Goldstein’s book to find an answer and come across this line: “abandon those unwholesome states that have already arisen.”

Abandon them. I love this position: that unwholesome states have already arisen and the work is to abandon them now, rather than to regret that they have arisen at all. To acknowledge deeply held beliefs, passing fantasies, unwholesome thoughts—and to abandon them.

According to Goldstein, abandoning means to choose to stop engaging with something; not to feel badly about it but to move on. It seems here that abandoning could be OK. Abandon: leave it behind. To abandon does not mean in this context that the life in something disappears, but that you let it move on without you.

Here the body and the garden grow close for me, again: if I could let go of the fantasy of control—let go as my body ages outside of my control, let go as the earth grows and fails and changes—could I then connect more to the body and the land? Could I then perceive more fully the agency of the garden, the agency of the body?

The poet Elizabeth Willis writes: to belong / to dirt, like a question.

Belonging like a question, being open to what is possible through me and what is possible outside of my control. A belonging that is also an abandoning: a belonging by release. I abandon, and so I open humbly to what could be.

In times when our lives feel unmanageable, what things must we abandon in order to manage? And: what would it be like not to manage?

5. To return to Clément: An ecological approach requires humility, requires knowing that whatever one chooses to manage, one will also lose, cede other areas. An ecological approach requires bowing, knowing that one can manage only one small piece. It requires allowing some parts of the earth to move on without us. It requires us to be humble as they move on, to acknowledge what is beyond our will.

And yet the question still rankles, still lingers for me whether this is laziness or right effort. How can one know? I try to ground myself again in Buddhist teachings: one must abandon things as they go, but stay present in the meantime. One is not abandoning reality, simply putting forward the effort required to stay present as other things relentlessly move on. It takes effort to pay attention as things go.

Writer Diane di Prima: how the flesh / adheres / in its / passing.

We humans adhere so well. We still really stick with these bodies. We stick with it. We say, “I admire your stick-to-it-iveness.” I’ve always wanted to be someone who sticks to it, sticks with it. Someone clear about her objectives, and determined to get them done no matter what.

So what do I stick to now, as I age, as the earth ages and we see how impossible it is to control its weathers and eruptions?

I think—as di Prima says, how the flesh / adheres / in its passing—that the passing itself is where I adhere. I stick to knowing the passing. I give way to loving people, loving communities, loving earth around me that will and does pass, will and does abandon us.

I think of twelve-step programs and how participants say, “We admitted that we were powerless over _____ , that our lives had become unmanageable. . . . ” My friend A tells me how much she loves this part, how acknowledging that things are unmanageable brings the saving grace of release, how that release itself is what allows addicts to change.

6. If all management generates an abandoned area, then we know that release is just around the corner. We know that we cannot manage all of our gardens, all of our bodies. We know they will all abandon us, be released from us whether we like it or not.

And so we can choose to know that this release is coming, instead of resisting knowing it. I once heard that the American Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein said of past events: “It could not have been otherwise.” The causes and conditions that lead to an event form its result, so it could not be otherwise. Our only choice is to release.

May we invite ourselves to this release. This is how my body is in this moment, this is how my garden is in this moment, and the causes and conditions working on both have led them to how they are right now. Neither is fully under my control, and so may I abandon control of them and begin again.

May we know we’ve been abandoned by the past, that the past has left us and moved on. So too have previous versions of our bodies left us, so too have previous iterations of the earth and its ecology left us.

To garden like an offering: only an attempt. To belong like a question belongs: only a door.

The post Notes on Abandon appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.