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    Robert’s Dendrobium

    ByElizabeth

    roberts-dendrobium2A number of years ago, when he was moving from Capitol Hill to Denver, my friend and former neighbor Robert gave me this dendrobium orchid, which bloomed this year for me for the first time.  The dendrobium was just an extra.  If you know orchids, you can see that it is planted with a vanda.  These orchids came from Robert’s mother’s garden in Florida.  When she had to give up her place in Florida, Robert brought home some of the orchids, including the vanda.  If I know Robert, he just saw a baby dendrobium in the garden and stuck it in with the vanda when he carried it back north to Capitol Hill.  When Robert moved to Colorado, he left the vanda with me because he did not expect it to tolerate the Colorado climate.  Even here, the vanda is not likely to bloom.  Not enough heat, light, or humidity in DC (really!!!).  But after five or six years of steady care, the dendrobium flourished and finally bloomed.  Robert inspired my affection for orchids; he had a greenhouse and knew each one of his tropical plants intimately.  We would go to an orchid show or nursery, and he would look with love on each and every plant, cherishing their individual traits, no matter how small or large.  At the botanical gardens, he had different plants he visited and enjoyed.  Now his yard has cactii and peppers.  He has a few of his most faithful orchids, which are flourishing and which were delightful to visit, and I have this lovely reminder of a time when Robert was one of my local gardening buddies.  This, I think is one of the extra joys of gardening, especially with houseplants that come from cuttings.  They have a history with our family and friends that is passed on, cherished, and shared.  I also have a night-blooming cereus that was a baby from a plant that started as a baby of one in his mother’s garden.  The night mine first bloomed (just a single night in the year), the parent plant with Robert in Denver also bloomed.

    Bonus love from this particular dendrobium; it is scented!

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    Invite to Practice Yoga and Gardening

    ByElizabeth

    I am pleased and excited to announce my first public, in person practice since the inception of the pandemic.  Is it any surprise that this yoga offering is an invitation to the garden, which is a place dedicated to creating and sharing joy, learning, and nourishment throughout the community for over 50 years?

    Come get out into beauty and into your own body and into the dirt on Tuesday, June 6th, from 9 am to 12 pm: at the Washington Youth Garden, on the grounds of the National Arboretum.  After the welcoming yoga practice, we will all join the staff and the regular volunteers (I’m one of them), in the garden.  Throughout the time, I will be available to respond to individual questions about yoga and about optimizing physical alignment/orientation to make it more sustainable to work in the garden, especially for older bodies.  Here’s the link to get more details and to register:   Yoga and Volunteering at the Washington Youth Garden

    Think this sounds great, but you’re hoping for a different time or location, please feel free to reach out.

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    What Does It Mean to Study War?

    ByElizabeth

    Martin Luther King, Jr. said:   “A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just. …A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Still, the Pentagon suggests that Martin Luther King “might” have supported the war in Afghanistan.  Not sure on what basis.

    Last night at the Willow Street Book Club, where we were reading Ram Dass’s Paths to God–Living the Bhagavad Gita, one of my fellows raised the question of how we could read as a spiritual guide a book whose context is war.  Another asked a similar question from the perspective of a feminist.  It was a fabulous, engaged, lively discussion, and I hope to see more next month.

    It would be an injustice to the text and the historical context to read entirely out of the Bhagavad Gita the duty of a warrior to kill, a wife to practice suttee, and persons born into each caste to accept their lot in life in a society structured on the caste system.   There is much richness in the text, though, that can provide guidance for a feminist, pacifist, who believes that “all men are created equal.”

    We have reread “men” in the Declaration of Independence to include women and those of all races (though we cannot manage to rewrite the Constitution to explicitly state that women are equal, but that’s a thought for another day).  Similarly, without doing injustice to the text, we can see that the ultimate teachings about living in accordance with duty (svadharma), love, devotion, and sacrifice in the Gita, like the concepts of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” provide guidance and force for social action and spiritual devotion beyond a historical context that oppressed and bound on the worldly plane the very persons who are now seeking the deeper meanings in the text.  In fact, I believe that we can use the essential intent of the text to teach and transform the oppressors, to use the very text to show why the violence and oppression of the historical context is injust and needs to be changed so that the spiritual intent can be expanded and spread beyond the privileged.

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