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| Through the kitchen window -- October 15 |
The sunchokes are all down. I'm using the chopped up stems to provide organic matter in the grow bags, and throughout the gardens.
Garlic is planted. This is considered too early; but they come up quickly, handle frosts well, and I can cut leaves here and there to cut up small, like onion greens, and include in meals. I like this better than anything to do with the cloves, which I do use -- but preferably by blending with the water used in, for example, rice or beans.
Brassicas are holding up through the first frosts. Beans are done. I've separated the last beans into "for seed" and "leather britches."
Such
activities are future oriented, to be sure; but it's just housework.
Whether or not I will ever eat these beans is unknowable. This is how it
is with all plans. On the one hand, be prudent in your actions. On the
other, do not attach to outcomes.
We are in deep drought. I'm using captured rainwater in a watering can with the rose off, stepping along the beds at shady times of day and watering each plant at its base.
A monk asks Zhao Zhou: What is the enduring essence of Buddhism?"
Zhao Zhou replies: "the cypress tree in the courtyard."
The monk, who had had some instruction on the trap of dualism, said "please do not teach me using objects." "I am not teaching you using objects." "So, what is the enduring essence of Buddhism?" "The cypress tree in the courtyard."
The cypress tree in the courtyard is here now. The teaching is not about the tree. It's about the nowness of anything and everything, and the tree gets to be the handiest example.
Now is always now, and we are embedded in now as nodes of the matrix of now, and not as discrete enduring entities.
We're taught by our DNA to disbelieve this, as the disbelief helps DNA project itself into a posited future. We make plans.
Those interested in the future easily bring themselves to plan theft. "I must have this to bring myself food and water to live" is understandable, but then "I must have this to bring myself pleasure, comfort, prestige" is going to bring ourselves trouble.
Make agreements to secure food and water, and engage in Right Livelihood to make it so.
Much farther than that, though, we encounter resistance. There is strong competition for pleasure, comfort and prestige.
Some may try to corner the market on pleasure, comfort and prestige by means of power: the power of bullying, of accumulating compound interest, of fraud. The ultimate in such behavior is military conquest.
The Buddhist precepts are instructions on doing without such strategies, which is difficult to accomplish without also doing without egregious accumulation of pleasures, comforts, and prestige.
Hence Gotama's modeling of Buddha for us displayed the marks of kindness, compassion, empathy and equanimity but also supported kindness, compassion, empathy and equanimity through a lifestyle of consciously chosen poverty. It is difficult for those engaged in becoming rich to evince kindness, compassion, empathy and equanimity.
Homeless beggars who became homeless beggars (under Buddha's instruction) on purpose in order to deepen their practice and propagation of kindness, compassion, empathy and equanimity were called arhats.
They taught how to live in the now.
Like, you know, the cypress tree in the courtyard, which is busy doing just that.
-- shonin