The Beauty of Becoming Yesterday marked the first day of spring. For many of us, this is a welcome change. A friend told me last week how she’d stopped to marvel at one of the season’s first signs: green and white snowdrops blooming in her neighbor’s yard. As she stood admiring them, her neighbor stepped outside to join her, and together they cheered in the driveway, celebrating this promise of winter’s end. Where I live, the season arrived with cloudy skies and a cold drizzle. I found myself thinking of the old rhyme: April showers bring May flowers, which further reminded me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s simple yet profound teaching: No mud, no lotus. So often we try to bypass the difficult, messy parts of life, eager to reach the beauty on the other side. But just as a seed needs rain and mud to grow into a flower, we, too, are wonderfully shaped by the challenges we face. Thich Nhat Hanh expresses this perfectly in “ The Miracle of Daily Mindfulness”: Happiness is made of non-happiness elements, just as the flower is made of non-flower elements. When you look at the flower, you see non-flower elements like sunlight, rain, earth — all of the elements that have come together to help the flower manifest. If we were to remove any of those non-flower elements, there would no longer be a flower. Happiness is a kind of flower. If you look deeply into happiness, you see non-happiness elements, including suffering. Suffering plays a very important role in happiness. With each season, nature offers us this gentle reminder. The cleansing rains, the tangled weeds, the mud and muck — all of it plays a role in growth and new beginnings. Likewise, our own difficulties can serve as fertile ground from which something worthwhile emerges. The three teachings below capture this lesson beautifully. May they inspire you to refresh your practice, tend to yourself, and embrace the beauty of becoming something new. —Lilly Greenblatt, digital editor, Lion’s Roar |
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It takes root; it grows; it blooms. Cheryl Wilfong on how meditation practice is cultivated like a garden.
If you don’t have an established practice, I recommend beginning your meditation by softening the heart. First, visualize a place of still water. This feeling may last for only a second. Notice that. Next, express gratitude for the blessings of your life, even the common things that you take for granted. Third, practice loving-kindness toward yourself. This tenderizing of the heart is like preparing the soil in our garden — we turn the soil and add the compost of caring. Then we plant the seeds of mindfulness by focusing on the breath, sounds, or sensations. After your timer goes off, try to sit in a chair by a window with a nice view, or perhaps on a deck. With a cup of tea in hand, contemplate an aspect of a recent dharma reading. or stroll around a garden. You know what your houseplants look like if you forget to water them for a while. The same thing happens with our meditation practice if we neglect it for a couple of weeks, or even for a few days. We water our practice by sitting daily. We support our practice by sitting weekly with a group. We fertilize our practice by reading dharma books or listening to dharma talks.  |
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Shunyru Suzuki Roshi said “Be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice.” Elissa Altman describes how the same goes for your salad.
Too much of anything is just that — too much — be it on the plate, in the bowl, or in the ground. We expect perfection: we spray our gardens to keep them pristine, we spray our iceberg to keep it flawless, we fertilize our lawns to keep them emerald green. We have been trained to believe that all weeds are bad weeds, meant to be poisoned, pulled, subdued, conquered. Suzuki Roshi said “Be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice.” As in meditation, it is the most difficult and relentless weeds that are also often the most enriching, and the most flavorful. The balance is always knowing what to pull, and what to keep, and always how to live with what stays. |
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For Valerie Brown, her garden is a teacher of the dharma. In every bloom she sees impermanence, nonself, and nirvana. Ultimately, everything and everyone changes, despite resistance to change. Flowers decompose; a child becomes an adult; day becomes night. The shifting nature of reality calls on us to practice — to love, to care, to accept, to occupy space and time, to release, to let go.
This loving and letting go is the essence of gardening, and it’s a lesson I relearned in my garden through an old flowering wisteria that was growing over the cottage roof and threatening to rip off the shingles with its branching, leafless, wooden tentacles. Slowly, little by little, I cut back the vine and trained it over a substantial wooden pergola. In late spring it bloomed a voluptuous cascade of blue to purple flowers, perfuming the air for a time, until the petals fell. Impermanence teaches me that things ripen, flower, and fade away in a continuous cycle of beauty, being, and becoming. It teaches me gratitude and appreciation for each day, each moment. I’ve learned that I can change my relationship to the abuse that happened to me like I can shape a vine, with love, understanding, patience, and practice. There is hope, healing, and growth.
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