Emotional compost
Thich Nhat Hanh describes turning emotional garbage into compost, and using it as we tend to our spiritual gardens. In his book, Taming the Tiger Within we should not try to throw away or discard our anger, but rather sooth it, transform it into a positive emotion. Much as we take grass clippings, leaves, and banana peels and put them in the compost pile, instead of the land fill.
In the compost pile we take garbage, tend to it, transform it, and use it to feed a beautiful garden. In the land fill, we take garbage, put it out of sight out of mind, but it never goes away. It becomes a problem to be dealt with later on down the road. Organic matter which would become nutrients in a compost pile, when buried deep within a landfill, never decompose. They just take up space. Similarly, we can take our anger and darker emotions, and transform them into something beautiful. Or, we can ignore them and allow them to fester. We can feed and indulge them. Either way they never go away. They persist to become something worse. They persist to make us miserable.
We could take the analogy even further, with a karmic perspective. The planet will eventually recycle all the waste and toxins we release into the environment. Over the course of millions of years, plate tectonics, erosion, and cataclysmic events will recycle and reconstitute everything, bringing it all back full circle. Similarly, even the most mismanaged miserable lives, the most abusive and violent people, the most sinful and self-destructive souls will get the chance to come back and do this over and over an over again, even if for thousands of years, until they get it right.
With anger and hate we have the same choices we have with garbage and trash. On one hand, we can transform waste, recycle it, transform it into something beautiful. On the other, we can bury them, ignore them, or indulge them until they grow and accumulate to create more misery.
Eventually, maybe millions of years, both the polluted earth, and the polluted soul will be cleansed and purified. The question is, then: What do you want right now? Right now do you want a toxic, polluted planet? Right now, do you want violent and war-torn societies? Right now, do you want a life of suffering? Or, would you rather something different, NOW. You will get it eventually. But do you want it NOW?
A.J., Proudland Landscape, LLC © 2007
Labels: compost, garden, gardener, misc, philosophy
Sticks and Stones . . .
We should all be a little kinder to one another. Sticks and stones hurt, but words and attitudes actually hurt more. It is words and attitudes which lay behind the choice to wield sticks and stones, or swords and guns. Not to mention that, words wreck their own special psychic damage. Let's be kinder, www.charactercounts.org
A.J., Proudland Landscape, LLC
Labels: misc, philosophy
The Essential Question--Why Garden?
The essential question then is, why do I do this thing called landscaping? Why be a landscaper of all things? Given my experience and education, I could, after all, do many more lucrative, less stressfull and straining, and certainly less messy things to earn my bread. Being a professional landscaper--a designer and a contractor--is stressfull, if only because of all the utterly uncontrollable things to which one is subject. Take the weather, for example. Rain is good. Rain is bad. So many things we do, cannot be done in the rain or, sometimes, for days after a rain.
Now, if it is raining on a somewhat normal cycle here in Georgia, then that sucks up a good portion of every week. But, you can't pray it doesn't rain. If there is no rain for any period of time, then that is bad for so much else we do (i.e., helping plants grow and live). In fact, the few years of drought we had in Georgia a few years ago have had dramatic, and permanent impacts on the way landscapers work, especially from a regulatory stand point. However, I digress. The point is that there are myriad things over which we have utterly no control, yet the results of which we are held responsible for. This is just one stressor, and why would one choose that life?
I love being a landscaper. I am a landscape designer. I am a gardener, and landscape contractor I own and operate a complete-service landscape services firm. We are involved in the full spectrum of landscaping operations. There is just some inexplicable joy I have (many times) envisioning, planning, overcoming the inexorable, and creating.
There is an article asking a similar question about why we garden. The answer is not easily answered. For me it is a primordial urge. An ancient compulsion. I am called from deep within to willingly choose to sweat, to freeze, to be mud stained, to back ache in this fashion. In Georgia, with our clay soils, several creator analogies come to mind.
In Japan, there was a class of priests, shitateso, who were landscape designers. Later, this became a lay class, but also became a "Way." It became a path toward enlightenment. In essence, it always was a path toward enlightment, toward mystical unity. Life on this planet was not designed to be "easy" in the modern convenience sense. However, it is designed to be easy from the stand point of walking through this life, addressing the things that present themselves, as they present themselves, not attaching emotional judgements to them. It rains and this creates things which make other things easy. It rains and this creates things which make other things difficult. The "hard" or "easy" enters when we put an emotional judgement on the rain and its effects.
This sounds very philosophical, and it is. And this is why I love landscaping, gardening, mud, sun, trees, rain, and all that comes with it. Because, it is about taking things as they are and as they come. Philosophy attempts to explain things in a conscious, intellectual framework. Gardening allows me to experience things on a primal, pre-intellectual plane. All the explaining in this rant is summed up when I prune my Okame cherry. (priests who move rocks). Washing the red clay mud stains from my hands says all of the above and more.
A.J., Proudland Landscape, LLC. © 2007
Labels: contractor, design, gardener, landscape, Okame, philosophy
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