Harvest Time

Here's a little shot of some of the work I did at The Altered Image workshop I took a couple of weeks ago. When I wrote the initial post about the workshop I talked about how much I liked the instructor's (Tony Bounsall) suggestion that we look on our work as creative compost and then as a lover of metaphor I stretched this to include all of our life's material as creative compost.

Our wonderful blogging friend 108 Zen Books ran with the compost analogy in a fun series of 5 posts which you should definitely add to your life/garden manual. A couple of days ago I noticed the weather in the garden take a distinct turn in the direction of fall, the air cooled, the sun's intensity waned even though it remained bright. The quality of the light changed in a way I can't quite pinpoint and a feeling of quiet and order settled over everything. Clouds roll around forming, disintegrating and reforming, the weather changes a myriad times each day. The manic intense energy of summer has headed off to another hemisphere.

I have been doing some seed saving: kale, parsley, mustard greens, foxglove, lettuce, onion, nasturtium, cilantro, radish. And this morning I decided it was time to remove the lavender of it's dried stalks. As I rubbed the tiny flower heads off onto a piece of newsprint, it's intoxicating scent filled the air and I thought "harvest". We have been talking about compost in terms of our practice, our training, living our lives, whatever you choose to call it. How about the harvest? Where does that figure into the picture.

We could talk about karma and that we harvest what we sow. Trite perhaps but seemlngly true enough. It is like the story that the grandfather tells the small child about the 2 wolves that live inside us, the angry one and the kind one. When the child asks which one will win, the wise grandfather reminds her that it is the one we feed that grows. So it is with harvest, I think. The seeds we nurture and cultivate, watering and tending, giving them our attention, those are the seeds that will grow in our hearts. The choice is always ours. It is easy to fall back into the dark tangled weed patch of unconscious habit but at some point we stumble out, hat askew, morning glory twined around our left ear. You get the picture. Such is the gardener's life.

When I think of harvest I am reminded of something my Zen teacher used to say to me when I told a story of where I was astonished that something had gone so well . She would say, " those are the fruits of your training." And so I think that about the harvest, that if we are diligent and train and work with our "stuff" in earnest then gradually, often without notice, change comes about. Slowly, surely, we advance in the direction of the little rows of compassion and , the patch of letting go and a basket full of all acceptance. This is the work of a life time, many lifetimes, if you will. If we can remember that this is the most important work we will do in our lives, then there will be something to harvest. And being human, of course sometimes we forget, get blown over in a ferocious storm and fall into the thistle patch, but that's okay. We just get back up, pick out the prickles and gather up the hoe again.

All this harvest talk makes me think of ripe tomatoes and fat squash but it also make me think of a line from Daishin Morgan's little book "Buddha Recognizes Buddha". He says "training and enlightenment are not separate". And so the spiritual garden is like this: we are always planting and weeding and watering and harvesting. It's all going on at the same time. And all the while if we are good organic gardeners we keep adding to the compost heap, because it will feed the garden and make our harvest rich and strong and luscious. Hey, is that a hay seed I see behind your ear?

Finding A Bigger Container

I have added 2 bits of text to this piece since I last posted it and referred to it as unfinished. A friend tried to convince me it was done but there wasn't that sense of completeness that I feel when a piece is done. It needed those little black and white marks that we identify as words, but sometimes they are just pattern for me, line and mark. And yet I have chosen them for both (a little cut out from an old Tricycle mag) their meaning and their identity as visual pattern.

And in reading a little book called "Buddha Recognizes Buddha" by Daishin Morgan, a Soto Zen monk in the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, I realized I didn't need to separate finished and unfinished, words as meaning or as pattern, that this separation is an artificial construct of the mind. It causes me to see things in a limited, non expansive way. These opposites that we create with our thinking are really products of our mind rather than anything tangible or real. We use them to describe and order our world, us human control freaks!

My mind did an expanding acid trip kind of thing as it's grey jelly like tentacles glommed onto Daishin Morgan's suggestion that things don't exist in duality. Sure I've heard this before, but somehow it found a soft spot in this hard old noggen to sink into, so I want to try and share it with you. If it seems like just so many words, well, that's okay too!

So the meaning and visual identity of the box of text in my picture can exist together. The fact that at one point my painting may seem finished to one person and unfinished to another person, or I may have different hits on it when I look at it at different times, all this can be held in a larger container . No problem, doesn't mean I won't do something about either of these things, that's not the point. Is it the western mind or simply the human mind that seeks to carve things up into little bits so it can be digested by our limited sense of logic. We get uncomforatable around things we can't know in our head, things that seem to big for our tiny cranial spaces.

I am squatting at a friends place in Victoria (as I was teased by another friend). Delightful friends offered us their place in Victoria as they buzzed down south for a wedding. So we popped into town to have a cracked windshield repaired and hang out. Last night as I chose a little bedtime reading I noticed "Buddha Recognizes Buddha" on the dresser. I'd already seen a little excerpt from the book in BuddhaDharma magazine and then a copy on another Dharma friend's table when I picked up the key for my squat (do squats have keys?). Okay I figured, it's time to open up this book for a little look.

Judgmental mind was prepared not to like it. I sat this tradition (OBC) for 4 years and have moved in a slightly different direction, as I listened to my heart. So I could feel the tug to put it all in the little package of been there, done that, it falls short. However as I read the first chapter, then the second I found myself melting into the kindness it exuded. Is that a strange thing to say about a book? I could feel the kindness of the words and the writer. The other thing I sensed was that Morgan was showing us how huge a container the Dharma really is. I saw it as a beautiful basket that didn't exclude anything, the mundane, all our troubles and fears, our faith and joy and a sense of something greater all had room to roll around and brush up against each other in this basket. Is there room for my laundry in there?

In his first chapter called "undivided existence" Morgan says, "I used to think enlightenment was something that would come when I was good enough or had done enough training, but such a view kept me from awakening to its presence... Our real nature is enlightened... However we can live in ignorance of it so awakening is necessary. Training is to live as an expression of enlightenment -- it is not a means of acquiring enlightenment."

How kind is this to point out that we are not lacking? Is this not an empowering notion? Now call me crazy but I perk up and see my potential when someone points out that we all have Buddha nature. Call me a sinner and I'll probably live up to your expectations. At the same time Morgan sets this idea apart from the delusion that we are perfect and don't need to train which has been proposed by some. We don't need to discuss the pitfalls of that viewpoint. He goes on to remind us that if we are angry, that's it right now. We need to be with it and experience it and keep our eyes open to see where that anger points us. Is it a call to action? Is it pointing out our attachment to our point of view? Examine it deeply enough and it will tell us what the next step is or isn't.

So after Morgan kindly reminds us that training and enlightenment are not separate (this idea initially courtesy of Dogen, the big Soto Zen cheese) he reminds us how to work with it: "Sometimes fears and desires affect my choices, but fears and desires are no longer the evil they appeared to be before. They still have the same effect as always, but the difference is that now they are part of training and enlightenment, rather than an outside enemy." These things are "the way itself" Morgan points out. I will read on with gusto and heartily recommend this little book. It can probably be had via The Throssel Hole (OBC) website.