Foundation Plantings

I think it was Tolstoy who dreamed of many lives woven into one—farmer in the morning, artist in the afternoon and philosopher in the evening. In Zen we advocate another version of this integrated life—to meet everything that comes, from dirty dishes to the electric bill to the late spring daffodils, with full attention and appreciation.  Yesterday, I had the chance to practice.

In between being with coaching clients and Zen students, I was outside arranging and planting the ‘foundation plants’ I bought: a small weeping Japanese maple, a wonderfully fragrant Korean spice viburnum, a dark-leafed pink azalea and a robust three-foot tall roseum elegans rhododendron topped with buds the size of pine cones. I bought them from Hank at the local nursery with one arrangement in mind, then allowed the future composition to shift as I contemplated the space and imagined the full-grown plants.

Planting a garden is about imagining the future. How will this small seedling look in mid-summer when it is blooming? Is it short or tall? What colors and textures will it bring to this area of the garden? What else around it will be blooming or past? Some people do this in an organized way, with lots of research and a carefully crafted garden plans and drawings. I’m more a seat-of-the-pants kind of guy and have learned to trust my intuition.

In life-coach training I learned that ‘intuition is always right–but sometimes only 5%.’ Just because I have a gut feeling about something doesn’t mean that what I imagine is actually going on or going to happen. But when I have that intuitive sense, it does mean that something is going on and going to happen. Acting on our intuitions as provisional truth leads us to learn more. Sometimes it is necessary to be 95% wrong to get to what is really happening. It may be awkward and embarrassing, but it can be quite useful.

With the garden (as with life) I often think it is better to make a pretty good decision than it is to try to make a perfect decision. Life offers us multiple possibilities at every moment and each possibility leads us into the fullness of our life. Some possibilities may lead to smoother outcomes that are more in line with our hopes and dreams, but even the decisions we make that get us into trouble and cause conflict are also true and necessary.

In the garden, sometimes I place the plant in exactly the right place. Other times the plants I place have to be moved again and again before they find their best place. And sometimes, they don’t even survive my intuitive decisions. But each place is exactly the right place and leads to the garden of the future and, hopefully, improves the mind and wisdom of the gardener of the present.

Wendell Berry says, in one of his wonderful poems, that the job of the farmer is not just growing the crops, but also enriching the soil and cultivating the farmer’s mind.

As I dig the larger hole for the lovely budded rhododendron, I note there are no worms in the recently filled soil around the new foundation. I work in some organic matter and say a silent blessing that this soil may, over time, be a nutritious home to worms, bugs and all kinds of fungus to support the plants—as well as for these wondrous plants that will be the backbone of my garden for years to come. I look forward to watching and working with the results of my intuitive decision and vow to keep learning and appreciating.

Dreaming of Danger

Dreaming of Danger

I was chased through the night by men from a homeschooling cult that called itself the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. (No relation, except in my mind, to the LDS religion or to homeschoolers I know in the real world.)

I had been invited to present to their community at the large compound where many of them lived in northern New York. My presentation went well, but after I talked I began to notice people shying away from me and I got the sense that I had said or done something that was quite wrong in their eyes. After several conversations about working out my return transportation schedule, I realized that they were doing everything they could to keep me there in the compound. They came up with one excuse after excuse as to why my departure had to be delayed. I was getting increasingly anxious and scared as I tried to work out how to get home.

Finally, they agreed to let me go, but the only vehicle they would give me was a rolling cart—like the big flat ones they have at Home Depot or a little like the one I used last week to move my parents into their new more assisted living arrangement. (Upon arriving, they both had to wear an anklet tracking device for the first three days, and then, they were told, it would be ‘evaluated’.) I could push the cart in my dream and hop on and ride for five or ten feet, but then I had to get off and push it again. I figured it would take me a long time to go the hundreds of miles back to Worcester. My fear, in the dream, was that they would let me go then send some guys to beat me up and leave me to die once I was well off the property—and then deny having any involvement in my disappearance. I began making plans for ditching the cart when I got a few miles down the road—hiding it and taking to the woods to find another way home.

(I listened to the book HOMELAND ELEGIES on my recent trip to Philadelphia. Beautifully written and narrated by Ayad Akhtar, the book gives a visceral sense of the suspicion and malevolence that has been directed at many Muslims in the decades since 9/11. His love for his homeland America as well as his confusion, helplessness, and rage are vividly portrayed in this semi-fictional autobiographical novel.)

My dream went on and on and my fear and anxiety kept ramping up. I partially woke several times through the night, aware that I was dreaming and wanting to change or escape the dream, only to fall asleep and into the same dream again and again. Dream-walking through unfamiliar territory, I came to a house and knocked on the door to ask for help. A woman who was on the board of a school where I worked came and invited me in. She too was a homeschooler with a huge family of children ranging from little ones to teenagers. I thought she could help me, but I was only partially right.

She made me breakfast and I did my best to engage the many children in conversation about their lives and interests. One teenage boy who was clearly a daredevil and troublemaker wanted to be sure to show me the terrible scar he had on his shoulder from one of his adventures. My friend, the mother, was about to leave with the girls when I asked if she was going toward Worcester and if I could have a ride. She said, no, she wasn’t going toward Worcester, but then relented and said she would take me anyway.

The father and all the boys quickly left the house, ostensibly to go to work. As the mother shepherded the girls upstairs in the homemade plaster house, I told them about how much I loved my two younger sisters growing up and how much I enjoyed playing with them and taking care of them when they were young. I was desperately trying to prove I was not a danger but knew it was futile and that the father and his friends and the boys would come back to get me soon.

I tried desperately to wake up, but could not. Men were now coming in the front door and I knew others were waiting for me out back as well. It was over. I woke myself up enough to know I needed a Deus Ex Machina ending to save myself. I imagined a helicopter descending to rescue me and realized that my friend, the board member and mother could have known this was happening and have called the authorities who would come to arrest the vengeful men and save me from death. I was working out how the police would be able to charge the men with assault if they hadn’t beaten me up when I woke up completely.

The Leaves Are Coming

For the past month, I’ve been writing mostly from a new location. While I wait for morning temperatures above 50, at which time I will bundle up and go outside to write in the fresh morning air with the birds and the sky and the trees, I sit and write by the southern window at the back of the cottage where I now live. We’ve been slowly moving out of the Temple and though we will stay on as the guiding teachers of our Zen community, Melissa and I will no longer be the residents and managers of the Temple building where we have lived in for the past eleven years.

We sometimes refer to our modest arts-and-crafts house as our ‘place in the country’, though it’s only a quarter-mile from the Temple and still well within Worcester city limits. We’re happy to be a few blocks from the thoroughfare of Pleasant Street, nestling into a low-traffic neighborhood with modest homes.

A few weeks ago, I moved my desk and barcalounger to their new location here in the cottage. That was a tipping point for me. Throughout April, I sat in the newly relocated barcalounger and looked out at a new view—southeastward through branches to the rooftop of a neighbor’s house to the trees and sky beyond. Now that May is here, leaves are beginning to fill in the space between branches and between me and my neighbor’s house. Soon, I suspect, my view of their house and the sky above will be fully obstructed by these seasonal flat factories of green. I’ll miss the sky but appreciate the coming green comfort of privacy.

Things change a lot here in New England through the seasons. The hardwood deciduous trees—maple, oak, beech and birch—that fill our abundant forests and grace our towns and even cities are the immobile witnesses and silent supporters of our incessant bipedal rush. Bare for six months and clothed in leaves for the next six, they alternately hide and reveal. In the winter, the contours and textures of the landscape (and houses) around us are laid bare. Beginning in April and coming into fullness in May, the leaves return, like a great green migration, to soften the harsh austerity of our winter viewing.

One mature oak can easily generate over 200,000 leaves each year with a total weight of nearly 60 pounds. I say ‘easily’ generate, but I don’t know how it is for an oak, or for that matter for a maple or beech or any other tree. The leaves come from the buds that are all but invisible through the winter. They swell in late March and April, and now the fantastic green leaves appear everywhere. First, as a golden green blush sweeping the hillsides, now rising to a fullness that softens and obstructs our views for the next five months. We who live on this land that once belonged to the Nipmuck peoples are happy for the obstruction.

These New England trees are part of a worldwide global oxygen generating system that is being degraded daily by the aggressive timber harvesting and land clearing that our modern lifestyle requires. Many have warned us that this is not a sustainable strategy and the urgency of our situation increases daily. How do we realize and take action on what is so obvious and life-threatening to the lives of us all and the mothers and fathers and children who will come after us?

On a soft spring morning, with the light filtering through the small and healthy green leaves, it’s hard to appreciate both the wondering of this ongoing miracle and the reality of the daunting and determined effort that will be required to move toward a sustainable global future.

You Might Wonder

After all these assumed years,
chock full of confusion and delight,
how have I so suddenly come
to this moment—sitting with
my mother and my sister
in the back of a room full of elders?

We sit, upright and slumped,
in wheelchairs and walkers,
and together receive the love
and bright attention of the woman up front
who jokes and sings familiar tunes of the forties.

We are a faint audience,
but she does not waiver
in her lively patter and song.
She calls each of us by name
and invites and delights in whatever soft word
or sassy comment we have available.

From the perspective of
my relative youth at the end
of my seventieth decade, I am
again reminded that the fullness
of life comes in many forms.

The true life that is who we always are
does not diminish, it only changes form—
like a mighty river that twists and bends
without complaint, as it naturally flows
back to the sea from which it came.

17 Perspectives on Downsizing

The quality of our lives is not so much determined by the actual events themselves, but by the stories we tell ourselves—the meaning we make of what we encounter.

The perspectives/stories on downsizing below are mutually contradictory and all true.

If you happen to be engaged in the process of downsizing (as I am), you might read through the list below to see which viewpoint (or some other one) is most familiar to you. Be aware of what your ‘default’ story is and how well (or not) it has served you. Just knowing the perspective we are in can be helpful in creating more options moving forward.

If you want to create more flexibility and perhaps even more fun in your downsizing efforts, you might see if there are perspectives below (or ones you can make up) that are also true for you and that might be useful as you go through the sometimes necessary joys and sorrows of downsizing. If so, see if you can consciously touch the truth of this other position that may not be the most natural to you. What is it like to ‘step into’ this perspective? What would it be like to do some part of your downsizing work from this position?

17 Perspectives on Downsizing

1) My Wonderful Things — We collect treasures that remind us of experiences, places and people we love. These objects are a precious and wonderful part of our lives—every little stone and shell is unique and life-giving.

2) Lightening My Load — The things we have require both physical and mental space. They can weigh us down, clutter our lives and leave us little space to breathe. They were nice once, but if my whole house burned down, how many of my things would I even remember to miss?

3) Prepared For Contingencies –- You never know what is going to happen. If you let go of that pair of old pants, what will you wear next time you decide to paint the porch? Hold onto as much as you can to be prepared for what lies ahead.

4) Practicing Dying –- Eventually, everything you have will be taken away. Though you may imagine this as a fearful event, human beings have also reported being quite excited about the prospect of leaving the suffering and burdens of this ‘mortal coil’. Many religions also preach that a certain kind of dying before we actually die is a necessary step toward a life of freedom and meaning.

5) Hard Thing to Do –- The decision-making process of looking at each item you own and deciding whether there is room for that in the new place is exhausting. It brings up memories of the past and concerns about the future. There’s no way to do it but to buckle down, grit your teeth and plow through.

6) Nothing Really Belongs to Me Anyway – everything you have has been given to you. Even the things you bought with your own money or made with your own hands were given to you through the generosity of the universe that gave you the skills to earn the money or the talent to create. The stuff of your things comes from the world around you that can neither be owned or not-owned. It was here before you ever showed up and will be here long after you disappear.

7) Yes, No and Maybe –- Some stuff is clearly useless and some is clearly necessary, but a huge amount of your stuff probably fits into the ‘maybe’ category. Do Yes and No first and see how much room there is for maybe.

8) Full Moon –- The moon would not be the moon without both the waxing and waning. So it is with our lives. Sometimes we accumulate, sometimes we diminish. Complaining about the waning moon is certainly possible, but is not likely to lead to an improved quality of life. Happiness only comes from appreciating whatever phase we happen to find ourselves in.

9) Quality of Life –- What if the end result is not as important as the place you are right now? If you want to live a life of compassion and acceptance, there is no other time to live this life than right now. Can you appreciate the challenge of letting go of so much and allow yourself to feel all the emotions that arise? Sadness for what is over, resentment that this is necessary, excitement for what is to come and a thousand other emotions as well.

10) Bird Song –- The birds carry very little with them from season to season, from nest to nest, yet they sing fully every morning and make no complaint against whatever weather arises.

11) Trailer Truck –- It honks as it rushes by in the early morning. It’s filled with stuff going somewhere. All the stuff that we have is simply a distraction from the real thing of life, which is relationship – to ourselves, to others and to the world around us. Imagine loading everything you own into a trailer truck and taking it all away for someone else to have to deal with.

12) Sparks Joy –- Thank you Marie Kondo for reminding us of our visceral connection to the things we own. But the unspoken secret to the effectiveness of her method is the assembling thing of a category (clothes, books, kitchen stuff) in a large pile before you touch each thing and choose to keep only the items that ‘spark joy.’ Without the pile, we lose the perspective of the whole and make decisions without realizing the vital connection of one thing to another and everything to the greater whole.

13) Plaid Shirt –- Though fancy clothes and things are nice, the basic stuff, like a plaid shirt and pair of jeans, does just fine for most of life. A small selection allows more freedom to live your life than a large selection – less time deciding and less time focused on the surface of things to allow more time for what truly matters.

14) Just the Right Shirt –- To wear clothes that delight us is a way of expressing ourselves and living a good life. Having choices allows us the joy of each morning finding just the right clothes for the season, for our mood and for the occasion of that day.

15) Passing It On –- Even in this country of abundance, there is real need—families and individuals who have few resources. Giving away some of what you have to organizations that sort and make it available for others is a way of passing on the abundance of your life.

16) A Little Help From My Friends –- My mother used to come in my room and help me clean up by just being there and keeping me company. It’s easy to get lost and overwhelmed in the process of sorting, selecting and packing. Ask a friend to come over and help.

17) No Mistakes –- So far, in this life, you have had all that you need to get by. Whatever you decide to keep or let go of will be just the right thing—no need to worry about the ‘right decision’. Keep what you keep, pass on what you pass on and praise God through it all.

(Excerpted from forthcoming book Wandering Close to Home: A Year of Zen Reflections, Consolations, and Reveries. September 1, 2024.)