Do you have anything to make music in your yoga practice space? Can you create a sweet and vibrant call to the space of meditation? Do you have a rattle or a drum to shake things and clear out energy? If you haven’t played with music as part of your practice, give it a try some time.
At last enough beans all at once to make a meal. Until now, the birds and I nibbled the few a day while still outside.
What are you going to do about it?
Even though we had real, hard frosts this winter, there are already aphids on my roses. I went out this morning and picked the aphids off of the new buds — yes, my roses are budding. It was too cold to stay out long, but I did a little weeding and planted a couple of pots of pansies.
I was thinking about how I garden in my tiny space — using my fingers to take the aphids off of each rose bud, pulling up individual weeds between new plants in containers, choosing to let some volunteers come up between bricks because it expands my planting area. How different it would be if I even had a small yard by suburban standards. It would not be possible to attend to all the detail that I see, unless I were to spend every waking hour in the garden. If I had an acre, it would take three full-time gardeners to attend without tools and sprays the small things I touch by hand.
It seems we make our world as big or as small as we want it. My tiny garden is as much a universe for me as a gardener as would be an acre garden — though of course I cannot grow sprawling things like melons and potatoes and fruit trees.
But the fullness of how much I see and experience, how much calls out for love and attention, how much I am enriched by tending and observing what is there, is not diminished by what I do not have. Rather, I am called to expand to the greatest what I have within my limits. This is true, too, in our yoga and meditation practice, and our lives. We can choose to live expansively no matter what our limits or we can choose to feel bound and diminished by our limits. The garden, this morning, helped me remind myself of that choice. It helped me turn towards possibilities for growth instead of towards constriction.
I am ok and grateful for my well-being. I am also, among other things, grieving the death of two different friends in the last month and the remaining dregs of democracy. I could be more ok than the ok that I am. Some people aren’t ok at all. How are you?
