Harvesting More Than Garlic

Big change is afoot here at Pudding Creek. The garlic was harvested today, and we have people sharing the land and our practices with us. 

Last September, with the help of a few visitors to Pudding Creek, we planted garlic at the back of the garden. It grew large with the winter rains, and now it is drying in the yoga room (which is currently filled with the summer abundance of baby garden sprouts waiting to be planted, the garlic harvest, and peppermint drying for tea.)

This year we have invited some college student interns to come here and practice gardening and living sustainably, in harmony with the earth and each other. On Saturday, the first of the students arrived on the bus from SF.  She studies politics (!!) and the environment and asked us to call her by her childhood nickname. 

Meditation happens on the deck each morning. The sound of the raven's wing slicing the air as it flies overhead arises in the silence that is filled with the sounds of morning. Meditation (life) is beautiful and hard.  

I woke up thinking that I would write to you about the first lesson in the garden, but it turns out there are so many first lessons and I can't decide what is most important to tell you. It is all a metaphor for being alive in these times. 

The first lesson in the garden is that everything is connected and what we do matters. 

Or maybe the first lesson is to take in the beauty and contribute to it too. An hour in the flower bed is a lovely thing.  

Or it could be that we can't control much, but we can observe what is happening and adjust our actions for the benefit and flourishing of all.  

Or that the immediacy and physicality of doing what is right in front of us is a gift. We can only do one thing at a time.  

Or that we are held in a sea of change, embedded in the process of life. The whole thing is a living system, everything included in and depending on everything else.  

In the evenings after yoga, it is still light out. The days seem impossibly long and full. It seems clear now that the first lesson has to be that there is beauty. You and I - all of us - we don't have to do the biggest thing or become a Nobel Prize laureate or Mother Teresa. We can (and do) do small things that contribute to the flourishing of all. Gardening, working, loving someone well, creating beauty in the ordinary and everyday moments of life.