Grow Your Mindfulness
Years ago, a friend gave me a tiny aloe vera plant as a housewarming gift. I was instantly taken by the sweet, green addition to my home and soon began acquiring more house plants for my indoor garden. Caring for them was an exciting new hobby, offering me a way to connect to nature in my city apartment.
In the years since, I’ve found both comfort and wisdom in caring for my plants. I now live somewhere with outdoor space, where I spend a lot of my time tending to an unwieldy vegetable patch in my backyard. I’ve watched a variety of vegetables and plants grow from seedlings — tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and herbs.
With each new leaf, I feel a deep sense of joy. Some plants have thrived, while others — despite my best efforts — have died, returning to the soil from which they came. The ever-changing nature of my garden reminds me not to hold onto things too tightly. While I can offer my garden my best love and care, there’s plenty involved in the life of a plant that I can’t control, much like life.
As I nurture my garden, I find myself in a natural mindfulness practice, fully present in the moment as I tend to each leaf and bud. The act of gardening becomes a form of meditation, teaching me to embrace the impermanence of life and to find peace in the process of both growth and decay.
The three teachings in this Weekend Reader invite us to recognize the wisdom we can learn from the act of gardening and how tending to plants helps us to grow our practice, too.
—Martine Panzica, Assistant Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar |
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Cheryl Wilfong on how to practice the four foundations of mindfulness in the garden. Practicing mindfulness, we don’t need to improve our garden in any way. We are ordinary gardeners with ordinary gardens, and we’re doing the very best we can, given our resources of time, money, and other commitments. Let’s embrace the ordinary beauty in our backyard. Let’s tune into that happiness. Mindfulness is a forget-me-not reminding us to be here now.  |
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Mark Frank’s five steps to successfully doing nothing — in your garden or any other part of your life.
We may garden with the goal of harvesting perfect heads of broccoli, using all manners of pesticides at the slightest sign of danger. But in the practice of nothingness, accepting what broccoli comes is the most honest way I know to interact with the land. After all, insect damage is a mark that the vegetable is also a living thing, a part of the whole biological world. We can learn more from partly eaten broccoli than from perfect heads.
Watching the cycle of life and its testimony to life’s transience is one of the greatest lessons of the fields. I have learned to watch for and cherish the vegetables, vines, and trees that want to be here. Fukuoka writes, “Do not ask what to grow here, but what grows here.” Listen to the seasons, smell them, feel them on your skin, and watch what each one brings.
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Valerie Brown returns to gardening to recover her broken spirit, and discovers what really grows in a garden is love.Growing a garden is an act of love and hope. A garden cannot be planted without them. They are as essential as soil, air, and water for the garden to grow. My love for growing things began decades ago in northern New Mexico, when I was working as a farm hand at a high desert research farm. There I planted forty pounds of garlic, one clove at a time, surrounded by mesas, pastel-colored canyons, cliffs, grasslands, and streams. I fell deeply in love with soil, air, water, and sky. It was there that I began to realize that to grow a garden, to plant a clove of garlic or a seed, or a tree, is the living theology of love. It is to water seeds of love, peace, and compassion. |
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