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State of the Garden

ByElizabeth

After having at long last (years), had the back sleeping porch and deck repaired and improved, the garden has expanded to the sleeping porch. I’m trying beans, cherry tomatoes, and hops as trailing vines. It will be interesting to participate. Everything except the geranium and the strawberries were volunteers or plants outgrowing their space below.

I’ve given away lots of starts and divides and have plenty more, as well as cuttings. Locals—let me know if you want some. Soon I will be fully vaccinated. If you will be also, we could even do some yoga.

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    Good Information on Companion Planting

    ByElizabeth

    In the plant world, we recognize that some plants get along more beneficially than others and some are better kept apart.  Hmmm.

    Here is some good information that I just saw on one of the list serves I read on “companion planting.”  I have been strategically planting marigolds, onions, and garlic for decades as natural pest control, but I hadn’t known that planting basil and tomatoes together improves flavor.

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    Some Books About Gurus

    ByElizabeth

    As I have discussed with a few of you, I have been contemplating deeply and for a long time the questions of what is a guru and who is a guru.  In the context of this contemplation, I read to enhance my background and understanding, deepen my contemplation, and give myself food for thought or additional exploration.  Here are some books that I have in my library about gurus or those who have been labeled gurus (in no particular order).  Some are written with loving devotion by disciples.  Some question or comment on the interrelationship between the status of guru and the sometimes all too human foibles of the guru and his disciples.  Some are of the guru’s own experience of practice and his relationship with his own guru.

    Be Love Now, Ram Dass, HarperOne (New York, NY 2010)

    Miracle of Love — Stories About Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass, E.P. Dutton (New York, NY 1979)

    Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, Self-Realization Fellowship (13th Ed., reprinted 2001)

    The Golden Guru — The Strange Journey of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, James S. Gordon, The Stephen Green Press (Lexington, Mass. 1987)

    My Guru and His Disciple, Christoper Isherwood, Penguin Books (New York, NY 1981)

    Ramakrishna and His Disciples, Christopher Isherwood, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY 1970)

    Great Swan — Meetings with Ramakrishna, Lex Hixon, Shambhala Dragon Editions (Boston, Mass. 1992)

    Bhagawan Nityananda of Ganeshpuri, Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa, SYDA Foundation (South Fallsburg, NY 1996)

    The Buddha from Brooklyn — A Tale of Spiritual Seduction, Martha Sherrill, Vintage Books (New York, NY 2001)

    Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, Stephen Cope, Bantam (New York, NY 1999)

    At the Eleventh Hour — The Biography of Swami Rama, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, Himalayan Institute Press (Honesdale, Pa. 2001)

    Play of Consciousness, Swami Muktananda Paramahansa, SYDA Foundation (Oakland Ca. 1974)

    The Great Oom — the Improbable Birth of Yoga in America, Robert Love, Viking Press (New York, NY 2010)

    ps Jess–Yes, the widget for Library Thing is coming for the website.  I just need to add more books, so that it is a decent start at a representation of at least the yoga-related portion of my library.

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    Approaching Samhain

    ByElizabeth

    The space between the spheres thins and the wind creates passageways.

    The spirits are outraged; how could they be otherwise?  Their dance tramples

    And blows things down, but still cannot help but create beauty.

    The leaves–green, red, gold, brown from the drought, that distant memory–

    Hang listlessly with the weight of rain and a bit of slush

    Hardly even dancing in the wind, but still becoming perhaps

    More  extravagantly lovely by the  storm’s grey light.

     

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    Chanting the Names/Listening to the Silence

    ByElizabeth

    Krishna Das reminding his listeners the reasons he practices and offers kirtan scrolled across my Facebook feed last week with this quote:

    “My path is to be in the living Presence; We have to find a way inside us, we have to find a way to open our hearts, to quiet our minds, to let go our fears and our selfishness, our guilt and our anger and jealousy; Everything is already present in our own hearts; By repeating these Names over and over, we are moving ourselves into that place in us; the Heart in us is deeper than any emotion or psychological issues; I don’t know if there is God, I know there is Love – Unconditional Love and I know I like to be in that love, and that maybe God; all you have to do is look, and chanting remembers us to look.”

    I am in a space right now where chanting is serving me to help remember the good, despite all that is going on that doesn’t feel particularly good or hopeful.  I don’t believe in “God” as an actual being (though I can no more disprove the actuality than anyone has been able to prove it), and history certainly proves the power of the idea of such a mystical being.

    Regardless of whether the very real ideas of God(s) represents an actual being, it has been my beautiful experience–studying with Krishna Das and others over the years–that engaging in practices that turn our hearts towards love and universality helps us be sweet living in relationship to ourselves, to others, and to the ecological fabric of the whole of embodied existence.  I chant because calling out the names in their universal multiplicity is a recognition, not dissimilar to what I have found offered in the silent collective worship of Quakers, that everyone has their own individual access to and ideas of the sublime, of the divine, of what brings them to feel a fullness of love.

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