This morning when I awoke, the first thing I did was take a walk outside to mow my little bit of lawn. Most of the property is under a high shady canopy of oaks and pines, so I don’t have much grass. Mowing takes me about 15 minutes. However, preparation for mowing takes longer. I walked around picking up the branch deadfall and taking it to the street, then moving the garden hoses out of the way, unkinking them as I did so. I thought about how I keep several hoses connected to each other so I can walk the entire front or back with one length of hose. That’s fine until I stop watering the far-off plants as often, in which case I begin dragging the hose all over itself and it eventually kinks. When I’m stretching it out to full length each time I use it, that doesn’t happen. When I get lazy and want to only water the plants closest to the house, doing only the bare minimum and neglecting the plants on the outer perimeter, the consequence to that is that I spend more time smoothing the hose and getting the kinks out.
Another consequence is that the neglected plants on the perimeter shrink down and become small and sparse. I thought how like life that is. If I don’t take the time to be in the Now moment and to give things my full attention, I can run into kinks down the road. Things I didn’t see first time around, since my mind would have been off wandering around on its own, willy nilly unless I’d trained it to be the silent observer, so I could more clearly listen to the messages my surroundings would send me.
The hoggish potato vine has begun to take over the back parts of the yard, choking out what I’ve purposely planted there. I wasn’t prepared with a spade, so many of the seedlings I pulled out left the seed, the potato, in the ground. Even knowing I would have to deal with it later, I continued to do it. Then I caught myself and stopped. I could either do it completely, or pull another weed. Like the potato vine, sometimes giant intersections of wedelia cross my yard and it can take massive strength to pull it out of the ground. I find myself doing the same thing with it, pulling out only what’s easy to pull out and leaving the tough jobs for later. The consequence of doing that is that leaves a bunch of tough jobs looming to be done “later.”
If I have too much that I’ve left to do “later,” that can be a buzzkill in my Now. Can I in good conscience begin building my bamboo fence when I should really be weeding and watering the perimeter instead? I have to ask myself the hard questions: Is the point that I have an extra few hours do do whatever I want or is the point that the weeding and watering needs to be done? Do I have to do my obligatory work before I can play? Who decides what is obligatory? Who decides what is play?
If I can begin to see my obligatory work as play, then I’ve got easy answers when the garden asks the hard questions. The garden can be a relentless guru. When you begin to really see everything and everyone in your immediate area, right in front of you, never doubt they are a teacher sent to you for a holy purpose. Listen for the hard questions because your answers let you know who you think you are.
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