Shadow and Light
Last year, some romaine lettuce must have bolted. I have baby romaine lettuce coming up everywhere. Having reverted to the wild, it is quite bitter. It is also taking up a fair amount of space, so to be able to plant more appealing things (new herbs and greens) I will be pulling it up. It has become, in essence, a weed. Later in the year, I’ll also have a surfeit of volunteer epazote and purslane, which many would pull as weeds. Those, I actively encourage, eating young the ones that come up over and over again through the bricks and confining in containers a few others to grow larger and to reseed.
Even though it is too bitter to be palatable raw, the now “weed” romaine tastes fine cooked as a tender green. So it does not get discarded. I just won’t make myself eat it in its bitter form as the salad green that it is “supposed” to be. Instead, since it is nourishing and tasty as a cooked green, it is a welcome early addition to the garden.
Just I have challenges and tribulations from whatever is my overall plan for the garden, I have my share of aches, pains, challenges, and disappointments, in life and in my yoga practice. The question is how to discriminate (viveka) among those that are poisonous, those that are bitter, and those that can be made nourishing and sweet, through the cooking of understanding, practice, and effort.
Yesterday, the first of the year, I pulled off the shelf and opened at random Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird.” I’d found it used some time ago and was interested, but other things got ahead of it on my reading pile. The page to which I opened seems highly topical for what is coming this year:
For instance, I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don’t think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.
May we find enough love to suffer well the complexities to come this year. For me, I know that deepening and recommitting to my practice will help me find what more I can offer.
