Sign Making Around Town
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What’s For Breakfast?
Snowpeas, tri-color beans. Peppers. Cherry tomatoes, basil (blueberries and strawberries did not make it out of the garden).
A student asked me the other day why I garden–was it to save money, he asked, was it for better tasting food?
It does save money to grow food and food eaten straight out of the garden is a foodie’s exquisite pleasure, but those are not my primary motivations.
I garden for the delight it brings through all of my senses and for the joy of knowing that the garden never questions nurturing. The more I give the garden, the more it gives back, without question or judgment.
I garden for the sense of relationship with the deeper seasonal patterns. To experience at an intimate level the impact on health and thriving of variations in seasons, light, heat, and rain.
With the drought and extreme heat in our area, the garden is struggling. Peppers are fruiting before having gotten tall and full. Cucumbers are yellowing and drying, though a couple have grown large enough to eat. There is a surfeit of kale, but the snow peas, which prefer cool weather, barely had time enough to grow enough to flower before it was too hot to thrive.
Part of the reasons some recipes have many ingredients is because they are premised on there not being enough of any one thing to make a meal. I am getting a few servings of vegetables every day, but the blasting heat is preventing the kind of abundance for some things I might have in another year. The grapes, though, may be outrageous; they like this crazy heat.
I want to be conscious of these challenges and serendipities. I want to know how I might need to change and adjust to thrive in a world that is ever more out of balance. I garden because it helps me be aware of crisis and challenge, but always and first providing extraordinary pleasure and beauty.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Where Ram Das First Met Neem Karoli Baba (or So I Was Told)
Having been brought to yoga by the Beats and the Beatles and having discovered Be Here Now not long after it was published (Quaker youth camp in New York in the 1970s—of course we did), this was a bit of history.
Tomorrow I go back into the office. I am grateful for my slow reentry.
Haiku About An Assignment
I’m attending via the Internet a year-long series of lectures through the Upaya Zen Center about Socially Engaged Buddhism. On the honor system (the program consists only of watching zoom or YouTube lectures and a Facebook forum with no interaction with any leading the program other than group emails), as part of the year, we are supposed to have a “social engagement” project informed by Buddhist principles of right living.
Social engagement as an intrinsic element of spiritual practice/observation seems completely consistent with the principle of Quaker practice I was raised with —that of putting one’s faith and recognition that there is good in every being—into how one lives and works. It also resonates with my understanding of the yoga practice of seva (“selfless” service), which I have tried to make a consistent part of my personal yoga sadhana.
After much intentional and spaciously open contemplation of this exhortation to have a project, and in response to my listening to the lectures and the questions and observations of others listening to the the program, I came to the conclusion that, actually, I could not take on another thing without it being toxic to myself.
In fact, after 30 committed years, I’ve given notice of my intent to retire from the Federal civil service at the end of the year. I am also doing less volunteer work than I had been prior to the pandemic. For the rest of the year, I am continuing my concerted efforts to share my experience and knowledge to make sure my co-workers are prepared to take on the responsibilities for the complex project that has been largely my responsibility to lead and coordinate for over a decade. That, along with what it is taking for a mindful emergence from pre-vaccine pandemic living, is taking all the energy I can give and still be healthy.
I continue to budget to make reparations, to speak out, and make other consistent offerings, but am at last releasing the need for measurable accomplishments, rather than feeling compelled to find or produce more.
As saying that I am doing what I have already been doing has not seemed sufficiently responsive, and after these months of trying to articulate what I mean in a way that would not sound dismissive of the task, I wrote this haiku:
This is my project:
Be kinder to myself and
Also to others.
PS It is, I am sure, just a coincidence that it is Bastille Day.
PPS Get out the vote!
