As I enjoy the briefly warmish weather before it is cold again tomorrow, I delight in the very earliest signs of spring (check out the leaves starting on the rose bushes all around town) and remember why I love this city filled with gardens and flowers.
Whenever I see extensive plantings of tulips, it brings to mind the tulip mania of the 17th century Dutch. At the height of the mania, single bulbs could sell for several times the annual income of a skilled worker.
Now, the tulip is just another beautiful flower. How could it ever have been the focus of such outrageous extremes of lust, gambing, greed, and social mania?
It is a great contemplation to examine what leads us to desire and seek and value particular things–either individually or collectively. Do the desires bring us to a place of greater good and true fulfillment or is the desire just fueling the unhappy dance of craving and loss?
The tantric philosophers point out that desire itself is not bad. After all, it is what gets us out of bed in the morning and can turn us to the good. But if it is driven by external opinion and emptiness of self, then it yields suffering–the suffering from which yoga seeks to free us.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Yesterday I went out into the garden first thing and fed and deadheaded and trimmed and harvested and pulled seedlings and rearranged and swept for several hours. One of the most delightful things about planting decoratively with herbs and greens is that trimming and pulling things back transforms directly into meals and gifts for neighbors and friends. My visitor to the garden walked away with bunches of oregano, lemon balm, and mint and lemon balm with roots to plant in her own garden. We drank a cool lemon-mint infusion (mixture of spearmint, peppermint, lemon balm, and lemon verbena) and ate a few strawberries (some from the garden, some from the farmers’ market). Later in the day, my lunch included a salad with lettuce, radishes, baby spinach and chard, spring onions, and various herbs. For dinner, I used chard, beets, and green onions to make a stew of chickpeas and greens.
With today’s rain, everything will keep flourishing, and I’ll be out there doing the same later in the week. My morning visitor and I agreed that one of the great delights of gardening is that the garden always welcomes more attention. The garden never asks to be left alone; it drinks in whatever attention and nourishment we are able to offer and returns it with grace. There are few things that both are comfortable with steady attention and fully nurture us the more attention we give. I find that meditation, too, always gives and receives graciously steady attention, which is one of its great gifts and joys.
Sign reads: 1. Accept only what is true. 2. Work for the common good. 3. Match our needs and wants with what is in our control. 4. Embrace what nature has in store for us. ***Catch mice.
