There are lots of books that tell you how to compost.  They’re filled with lovely pictures of wood boxes, metal screens, tubs, and containers filled with worms (vermiculture).  The text is romantic and seductive, promising that for a few dollars you too can have something rich and dark which will fulfill your wildest horticultural fantasies.

Something gets lost in the translation from book to earth around here. The best we’ve managed are piles of smelly, slimy rotting vegetables.  However, the skunks and raccoons seem to think we’re doing just fine.

Transforming our vegetarian gourmet delights into fertile earth is as much of a mystery to me as the creative process, in art and in the life of practice.  I follow the directions, build the magical three containers, put in the table scraps of my days into the first one, dig deep with Manjushri’s pitchfork (yes, it’s a pitchfork, not a sword in my part of the world), and wait.  And wait.  And wait, until I am distracted or so frustrated I just go buy a bag of earth someone else had made out of their own scraps.

(I have to make a comment here about today’s 108buddha.  I really dislike the colour.  But what are you going to do; it’s what showed up for today.  Such is the makings of compost.  Like, not like – degeneration doesn’t discriminate.)

So I continued to fill those containers.  Then I learned something.  One of those Fine Print Teachings: don’t add fresh scraps to cooking compost.  It’s like continuing to add ingredients to a cake while it’s baking.  That’s why there are three boxes: fresh scraps which then get turned over into the cooking box which then get turned over into the simmer-until-done box.

Oh, she said.

Practice is like that.  “Are you using zazen or letting it use you?”

Oh, she says.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

This life of practice is challenging.  The almost three weeks we spent away from home and garden had serious consequences.  As you can see the lettuce has “shot” – I’ve never seen lettuce flowers; they’re very cute.  The tomatoes succumbed to the heavy rains and intense heat; we’ll be lucky to get a dozen or so from the boxes.  We got one meal of green beans and yellow squash.  The bean plants and two baseball bat-sized squash are destined for the compost pile.

The other types of squash however are running rampant.

I’d planted spaghetti and crookneck squash which didn’t seem to have taken before we left.  And here they are shoving around the roses.

I love an orderly life – I love an orderly garden which to me is external proof of an equally orderly internal environment.  Apparently, my desires are not on the agenda this go around.  Or perhaps, it’s a clear message that my internal life needs a Master Gardener.

Practice sends me the same message.  I tend to get very organized and obsessive about making it pretty.  And then, some part of life takes me away and what was once pretty becomes wild and unruly.  Or it becomes a psychological bully that insists everyone’s way has to give way to my Way.  That’s the time when two really important practices come into play – both in gardening and the guck stuff.

Let go.  Order is subtle.  Things tend to follow a path that isn’t immediately evident.

Compost.  Everything gets 10, 000 chances.

When I first starting sitting, order had to be forced out of chaos – in the room, in the mind, in the body.  I haven’t quite let go of my need for order.  I’m just not as ruthless about it, I hope.  At the same time, the discipline grows out of skilfully illuminating each so that the other comes into relief.

I mentioned to Carole at ZenDotStudio that I’ve never been successful at composting.  That’s true in a gardening way; it’s also true in a practice way.  Managing impatience for change and a desire for permanence is tricky.  And when they sit on that cushion with me, it gets crowded and precarious.  So I’m learning how to prune away what isn’t necessary in this moment, what has yielded its fruit, what has shot to flower.  These go in a pile for the worms and bacteria to transform.  They are more powerful and skillful at that than I.

Thank you for practising,

Genju