TOO MUCH TO DO SO I’M WRITING A POEM WITH THE MOON IN MY BELLY.

Frenetic blood flow

and dash-ing thoughts –

dear footless, contented feeling –

rain thups

thoughtless focus--

a perfect situation for blowing up balloons

and not going to the party

Sitting here,

                                    moving.

June Morning Thoughts.

The plant kingdom is springing in the four directions.  For all the life that rests below the soil and the few hands that tend to it -- there is a constant desire to remain in movement both in thought and in body.  As winter turns into this spring, and this plant life awakens there is a sense of relief, knowing that the family is alright.  And then the plant family grows.  Extended relatives show up and it's a lot to hold together.  The momentum of the growing season pulls one in and it is time to surrender, (or struggle.)

There is this saying, "keep up, and you will be kept up." I think this is how this relationship works.  As we tug on a one weed, right under the surface we are gently awakening another weed seed.  And often all we can do is keep up.

At the end of a full day in the fertile air -- we have to let go -- to step away and tend to other families in our life that need to be kept up.  The family of meals, the family of dishes, the family of cleanliness, the family of friendship and love.

--

Each morning as I awaken, I must do everything in my power to march myself up the stairs to go sit on the cushion.  Sometimes I must talk aloud about the process.  And then I sit and it is the same feeling.  Keep up and you will be kept up.  Each morning, through each session of meditation.

Afterwards, when I walk into the fields and gardens it is with a mind a bit more spacious.  And then coming from this place, I can surrender to the plant kingdoms power and complexity.  Oftentimes I wonder if a mind can be trained completely within the garden.  With our feet rooted on the ground and our hands in touch with the many textures of the sun.  Well with my karma, I find, if I do not make it up to sit regularly the life of the garden consumes me and I can not hold my mind in any sort of vastness.

--

The keeping up in this sense, both in the garden and in meditation must be tied to a sense of joy.  A sense of meaning.  Not a mindless keeping up, like chasing after a bone over and over again.  There is a need to revisit why to keep up at all.  A greater view to hold, so our heart and mind are not numbed by the pace, by the repetitiveness, by the drive to continue.  So that our hearts and minds are enlivened and enriched and so that this overflows into all sentient and non-sentient beings.



May our efforts and energy be of benefit.

Nature's Perfection

The Newly Arrived Wellsummer Hen's Egg.

Passiflora

Our composting area happens to be surrounded by the must luxurious populations of nettle and mullein.

The Indestructible - Cutting Through Nettle

Urtica Nettle

The Gentle & Far Seeing Mullein

Verbascum "mullein"

"Peonies" by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready 

to break my heart

as the sun rises

as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open --

pools of lace,

white and pink --

and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes

into the curls,

craving the sweet sap,

taking it away

to their dark, underground cities --

and all day

under the shifty wind,

as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,

and tip their fragrance to the air,

and rise,

their stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness

gladly and lightly,

and there it is again --

beauty the brave, the exemplary

blazing open.

Do you love this world?

Do you cherish the humble and silky life?

Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half dressed and barefoot, into the garden,

and softly,

and exclaiming of their dearness,

fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,

their eagerness

to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are 

nothing, forever?

Flowers in Bloom

The season has had a bizarre feel to it.  Perhaps it is that we are in the seventeen year cycle of the cicada and so everywhere one steps, one finds a cicada or it's older skeleton self.  Maybe it is just the constant cicada hum in the air.  Perhaps it is the likely chance of encountering the slithering snake, which I have encountered more this year than in my entire life.  Perhaps due to the fact that we have entered the year of the water snake, perhaps because I am terrified of snakes, perhaps because snakes represent transformation and something is afoot. 

Within all of this strangeness, comes the clarity and explosion of flowers.  Embracing a flower deeply, inhaling it's fragrance, it's softness, it's velvet skin, the oddities evaporate.

I took some photographs of a few of the flowers in bloom.  I have to say that I went wild this season photographing peonies and included a few of them here.  I simply can not get enough of them.  I think in an attempt to possess the flower's beauty.  It's beauty is so immense I think one more photograph will make it more mine, more a part of me, more of a real experience.   Well whatever the case may be, I have enjoyed stalking the peony and will continue to do so.  I also experimented with about 60 stems, cooling them off when they were a bit past budded and will see if we can delay their bloom by a month.   

After walking quickly into the house as I had encountered an enormous rat snake in the garden, this snake was slithering with frightening skill up the porch beams.  Really! on my home.  Come on now.  You can see it's tail goes all the way up to the top left edge of the photograph.  

The Allium.  The first year we removed bulb after bulb from the garden of these alliums.  They were all over about half an acre, here and there.  Not until this year they bloomed.  Such a surprise!

It was Zach's birthday and one of our new lovely crew members, Allyson gave me a delicious carrot cake recipe.  Our friend Meg decorated it with me covering it in chamomile and bowles black violas.  

 

the fairy-like of all flowers: nigella, chervil and salad burnet.

a bird's paradise

The garden in bloom.  White clover abounds.  Kale throwing up it's flowers in yellow! Surrounded by the tight and perhaps slightly serious lettuce. 

Tomorrow those kales will be gone, so I wanted to send them out with a mention.

chamomile and chives

chamomile just harvested to be dried for tea

The Peony.

 and the sweet blooms begin.

As the rain came pouring through last night many peonies ravaged about.  

Stunning in their power, thrown down to the earth.

A flower seemingly too regal for such a display.

Maybe it will allow each of us in our own need to be perfect, 

to fall about and to really let it hang all out.

Warming up a Cold Heart

Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca)

Often times it seems that the answer to challenging times is continuing to open the heart.  No matter what, open the heart.  And when one thinks they know anything,  to open up from there with curiosity.  Even when the heart is tender and in pain to feel that and then to keep coming back to the next fresh moment that we are so fortunate to have and to see how that feels. 

(How does the heart feel now?)

But this is easier said then done.  I have habits of freezing up and setting a nice cold barrier between myself and what I am avoiding.  For me to open up my heart feels like for one, my power is being diminished because I feel some form of strength-independence-self-reliance in my cold self.  Two, I do not feel like myself.  This cold self I have fed for a good part of my life time.  We are quite familiar with one another.  Who would I be without her?  Three, this isolation creates space.  It allows me to become internal and to get things done, to check off my to-do list. 

But the other side of being closed off is that my body is tight.  My mood is shallow and unhappy because I am not feeling.  I am checked out.  It is difficult to avoid one aspect of life and then to open up to everything else.  It seems often an all or nothing deal.  Cold or open.  

Althaea officinalis

And so it is a constant practice to shift this response.  

As a dear friend talked about today: our darkness is not something that needs to be removed.  The further we push it away the more power we give it.  So I want to acknowledge that this habit has helped me persevere in difficult times and hopefully I will use it more sparingly as time continues.  

Here is to: moving towards basking in a raw heart, setting boundaries for my personal goals open heartedly, and becoming very good friends with an ever changing and free energetic body mind heart.

Someone sent this Tricycle article to me today which inspired this post.

No Gain by Barry Magid  

Relationships won't solve our problems, but they can help us grow

MY TEACHER Charlotte Joko Beck pretty much sums up her attitude toward relationships when she says, “Relationships don’t work.” Rather than talk about everything we normally think that we gain from relationships, like love, companionship, security, and family life, she looks at relationships from the perspective of no gain. She focuses on all the ways relationships go awry when people enter into them with particular sorts of gaining ideas and expect relationships to function as an antidote to their problems. Antidotes are all versions of “If only...” If only she were more understanding; if only he were more interested in sex; if only she would stop drinking. For Joko, that kind of thinking about relationships means always externalizing the problem, always assuming that the one thing that’s going to change your life is outside yourself and in the other person. If only the other person would get his or her act together, then my life would go the way I want it to.

Joko tries to bring people back to their own fears and insecurities. These problems are ours to practice with, and we can’t ask anyone else, including a teacher, to do that work for us. To be in a real relationship, a loving relationship, is simply to be willing to respond and be there for the other person without always calculating what we are going to get out of it.

Many people come to me and say, “I’ve been in lots of relationships where I give and give and give.” But for them it wasn’t enlightenment; it was masochism! What they are missing from Joko’s original account is a description of what relationships are actually for—what the good part is. In addition to being aware of the pitfalls that Joko warns us about, we should also look at all the ways in which relationships provide the enabling conditions for our growth and development. That’s particularly obvious with children. We would all agree that children need a certain kind of care and love in order to grow and develop. Nobody would say to a five-year-old, “What do you need Mommy for? Deal with your fear on your own!” The thing is that most of us are still struggling with remnants of that child’s neediness and fear in the midst of a seemingly adult life. Relationships aren’t just crutches that allow us to avoid those fears; they also provide conditions that enable us to develop our capacities so we can handle them in a more mature way.

It’s not just a parent-child relationship or a relationship with a partner that does that. The relationship of a student with a teacher, between members of a sangha, between friends, and among community members—all help us to develop in ways we couldn’t on our own. Some aspects of ourselves don’t develop except under the right circumstances.

Aristotle stressed the importance of community and friendship as necessary ingredients for character development and happiness. He is the real origin of the idea that “it takes a village” to raise a child. However, you don’t find much in Aristotle about the necessity of romantic love in order to develop. His emphasis was on friendship.

Aristotle said that in order for people to become virtuous, we need role models—others who have developed their capacities for courage, self-control, wisdom, and justice. We may emphasize different sets of virtues or ideas about what makes a proper role model, but Buddhism also asserts that, as we are all connected and interdependent, none of us can do it all on our own.

Acknowledging this dependency is the first step of real emotional work within relationships. Our ambivalence about our own needs and dependency gets stirred up in all kinds of relationships. We cannot escape our feelings and needs and desires if we are going to be in relationships with others. To be in relationships is to feel our vulnerability in relation to other people who are unpredictable, and in circumstances that are intrinsically uncontrollable and unreliable.

We bump up against the fact of change and impermanence as soon as we acknowledge our feelings or needs for others. Basically, we all tend to go in one of two directions as a strategy for coping with that vulnerability. We either go in the direction of control or of autonomy. If we go for control, we may be saying: “If only I can get the other person or my friends or family to treat me the way I want, then I’ll be able to feel safe and secure. If only I had a guarantee that they’ll give me what I need, then I wouldn’t have to face uncertainty.” With this strategy, we get invested in the control and manipulation of others and in trying to use people as antidotes to our own anxiety.

With the strategy (or curative fantasy) of autonomy, we go in the opposite direction and try to imagine that we don’t need anyone. But that strategy inevitably entails repression or dissociation, a denial of feeling. We may imagine that through spiritual practice we will get to a place where we won’t feel need, sexuality, anger, or dependency. Then, we imagine, we won’t be so tied into the vicissitudes of relationships. We try to squelch our feelings in order not to be vulnerable anymore, and we rationalize that dissociation under the lofty and spiritual-sounding word “detachment,” which ends up carrying a great deal of unacknowledged emotional baggage alongside its original, simpler meaning as the acceptance of impermanence.

We have to get to know and be honest about our particular strategies for dealing with vulnerability, and learn to use our practice to allow ourselves to experience more of that vulnerability rather than less of it. To open yourself up to need, longing, dependency, and reliance on others means opening yourself to the truth that none of us can do this on our own. We really do need each other, just as we need parents and teachers. We need all those people in our lives who make us feel so uncertain. Our practice is not about finally getting to a place where we are going to escape all that but about creating a container that allows us to be more and more human, to feel more and more.

If we let ourselves feel more and more, paradoxically, we get less controlling and less reactive. As long as we think we shouldn’t feel something, as long as we are afraid of feeling vulnerable, our defenses will kick in to try to get life under control, to manipulate ourselves or other people. But instead of either controlling or sequestering our feelings, we can learn to both contain and feel them fully. That containment allows us to feel vulnerable or hurt without immediately erupting into anger; it allows us to feel neediness without clinging to the other person. We acknowledge our dependency.

We learn to keep our relationships and support systems in good repair because we admit to ourselves how much we need them. We take care of others for our own sake as well as theirs. We begin to see that all our relationships are part of a broad spectrum of interconnectedness, and we respect not only the most intimate or most longed-for of our relationships but also all the relationships we have—from the most personal to the most public—which together are always defining who we are and what we need in order to become fully ourselves.

Relationships work to open us up to ourselves. But first we have to admit how much we don’t want that to happen, because that means opening ourselves to vulnerability. Only then will we begin the true practice of letting ourselves experience all those feelings of vulnerability that we first came to practice to escape.


From Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide, © Barry Magid 2008. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom Publications, wisdompubs.org
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Gifts of Spring

We have been cleaning out last season, packaging it up and thinking about it's future,
including some ashwagandha*chickweed salves, and calendula salves.  As well as honey.
Pictures will come of these soon.

Here are some photos of spring's bringings.  

German Thyme, a chunk of soil blocks covered in moss.

Look at underneath those leaves!  

tea blends that we are selling to a very special local yoga studio/bodywork space 

Sweet young figs! and schisandra!  and behind hops on the rise.

Spring nettle!  The first day we harvested these, I couldn't resist but to include nettle in every part of my day.  This began with nettle muffins and a blueberry.peach.nettle smoothie.  Such a treat.  

For the muffins, I substituted some ingredients from this website (http://weelicious.com/2012/01/04/spinach-cake-muffins/) which was originally meant to find ways to encourage kids to eat spinach.  These were splendid.   

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup maple yogurt
• 1 large egg
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 cup fresh nettle tops, pureed and packed
• 3 tablespoons maple syrup
• 2 tablespoons safflower oil or coconut oil
• 1 1/2 cups of a mix of freshly ground quinoa, brown rice and millet.
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Preparation

1. 1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
2. 2. Mix the first 6 ingredients.
3. 3. Slowly add the dry ingredients
4. 4. Scoop batter into a muffin tins, filling each cup 2/3 of the way.
5. 5. Bake for 12 minutes.
6. 6. Enjoy!

This is about to be a summer of greens...

Here is my grandmother overlooking some of her loved flowers.

My inspiration.