Chance = Change

...of Summer....Hazy , for sure, and hot....crazy, when not? But hardly lazy....I had forgotten what actual hard work gardening is,and given how much i adore to wallow in the wet mud of it all, a little sweat never did bother me much....and these great gifted days we have to be up at the House...well...there is simply something about it all that is enchantingly exhausting...at this particular moment, I am back in NYC for a couple of days of private teaching, and will return to the gardens Wednesday night...and given how truly tiring my sort of gardening is, I have not even had the energy to blog, and I have fallen into bed at night, so tired from the hot work days in the dirt.

In fact, yesterday, Sunday, I slept much of the day away, excusing myself even from my morning walk, realizing how my body needed a break....I slept and slept...in bed, on the floor of the Studio above the garage, after meditating...I just kept falling asleep...a sure sign that my body needed it. But I have to say that The Sally Garden looks very pretty.....the garden I started after my Momma's death, filled with blue flowers and blue-blooming bushes...(to match her pretty deep blue eyes)...I have not been able to work in it this uninterruptedly in years...and it is showing the care and attention...it does look wonderful now...with more to do still.

That's the thing: there is always something to do in the garden. Since it is an alive thing...I would even call a garden a process , more than a thing...there is always more to weed, trim, plant, water, feed, combine, separate, seed, prune, add, take away...and one other thing I have been able to remind myself of: it is possible to easily enter a highly meditative state in the process of caring for a garden...since it is necessary to pay specific and focused attention to each task at hand, there is a true lesson in mindfulness and what Buddhist's call "bare attention" during the hours spent in the mud. Each task requires specific action. Each plant or root, or weed needs you 100% to pay attention to it and only it, yet holding it loosely, breathing with the plant, living its life as you work with it.

No wonder I love to garden. It takes my wandering mind, and engages it truly.
Plain, simple, useful, productive, yet utterly joyful investment. Nothing at stake that matters to anyone but me and the life of the garden. Nothing to prove. Only to live.

In meditation this morning, up in the Studio, I had such a clear sense of the "I" that rules me....i experienced a true separation between the "I" that was doing the thinking , the mind that was processing the instructions, and the rest of me that was doing as it was told! This meditation thing is amazing. It only gets richer , more interesting ....