Tag Archives: gardens

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landscape

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Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are.

Jose Ortega y Gasset,
quoted in Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson

We had an interesting discussion in sangha about opportunity and destiny.  I had read a passage from Jimmy Santiago Baca’s autobiography A Place to Stand.  Baca is a writer and poet who was incarcerated for 15 years for drug-related crimes.  He was illiterate up to the age of 21 years; as a child his family was the target of his father’s drunken rages and Baca became phobic about going to school.  The turmoil in the family was so intense that he became lost in the battles (given his experience of bigotry advancing in what was available as education may not have been possible anyway, I imagine).  He slowly wove a life of drug use and crime.  Just prior to reading Baca’s book, I had skimmed through Fleet Maull’s Dharma in Hell (OK – full disclosure: I’m cramming for the Core Chaplaincy retreat next week at Upaya).  Maull went through his own hell serving time which, in his case, deepened his Buddhist practice (before prison, he was Buddhist while running drugs etc. – go figure).  Both men have formed organizations and developed programs for prisoners; Baca founded literacy and writing programs while Maull founded the Prison Dharma Network.  Canadian inmate Roger Caron, on the other hand, didn’t fare as well.  Infamous as an armed robber who repeatedly attempted escapes, he wrote Go-Boy! and two other books.  Unfortunately, despite the success of his book and rubbing elbows with the well-heeled in Canadian social circles, he dropped into several abysses that eventually lead to a desperate armed robbery in 1992 while high on cocaine and stricken with Parkinson’s disease.  His life closes in a hell of dementia and advanced Parkinson’s.

In sangha, we shared about the way in which our landscape shapes our vision, our choices, our destiny.  We wondered if it would have been different for Maull had he been assigned to the laundry section and not the medical facility where he became attuned to the need for hospice care.  Would Baca have become the prize-winning author if he couldn’t envision the opportunities opened to him within the container of his fate?  Of course, we wondered about the rolling hills and abysses of our own landscape.  Did we see what was available or carve it out of a parched ground?

Interestingly, the quote by Gasset above took on greater significance in the context of Baca and Maull’s books.  I don’t know anything about Gasset (yet) other than what I found via the Oracle (Google).  A philosopher, he asserted that who I am is inseparable from the circumstances I am in (don’t quote me on this!).  It harkens back to the embodied mind of Varela and the process of self as emergent.  But, I’m in over my head here.  The take-away lessons from Baca and Maull are about letting go (without erasing) and entering a dialogue with the container of our lives – be it a wide panaroma or a small container in an urbanscape.

In the context of gardening my life, it makes me look more deeply into the factors that shape my body, speech and mind – not only in the wide swath of fields, hills, and valleys but also in this tiny cut of soil I’m rooted.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

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500/5000 vision

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About two years ago, Frank had eye surgery that restored his vision to 20/40 – meaning he no longer needed corrective lenses. Having lived from childhood with 20/750 vision, he’s learned many adaptive (and not so adaptive) ways to cope with Coke-bottom eye wear and eventually with contacts which corrected his vision to legal limits.  The surgery took restorative treatment further with two new lens implants; I think one is even a bifocal lens!  The ability to relish a blue sky and that finally being able to really see me didn’t send him screaming into the hills is not the punch line to this story of our relationship.  The gift of new visual range brought into harsh relief the ways we had sculpted our growth around each other to manage the limitation.

I’ve never quite understood the whole vision terminology in the first place but learned enough to know that 20/40 means you don’t think the moose crossing the driveway is a big dog.  So, the fact that after the surgery he still couldn’t find the jam jar on the fridge shelf 10 inches away did not compute.   My logic is impeccable: if you can see something at 20 feet away as clearly as I can when I’m 40 feet away, and if we’re both 10 inches away from the damn jam jar why the heck can’t you see it too!  Try as he could, he could neither explain nor help me understand this predicament.  I, on the other hand, have many explanations that involve unpruned neural pathways, avoidance, gender differences in object pattern recognition, and subtle aversion to my homemade jam.  But none of this actually resolved the problem so he has learned to pick up and read the label of each jar on the shelf and I’ve learned to leave the room to write my blog until he bellows, “Found it!”

All poking at hubby aside, growth, spiritually and otherwise, is about vision.  First, it is in the transition between seeing with old and new eyes (the term refers to one of Joanna Macy’s stages of “work that reconnects”).  Seeing with old eyes is watching an old movie or reruns of a TV show; the brain uses an auto-fill similar to the way your computer fills in a word when you type the first few letters.  Nothing changes because nothing changed. Using new eyes brings things into relief from a familiar ground, highlighting the edges and contours that would have been missed when transmitted through the lens of the old eyes.  Of course, you know we’re not talking about the eyeball anymore.  It’s now about the way in which our assumptions, stories, and desires draw us into the lines, contours, shading, and tone of our experiences.  It’s also about the repetitive nature of how we attend to our environment; what I see today will differ from what I see tomorrow (or the next moment) – all at the mercy of being internally 20/20 or 20/800.

Wendy Johnson, in Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, describes one of her teachers, Harry Roberts, who asked the gardening students to look over the vegetable garden and into the coastal meadow that rose behind it.  Over a year, they described each week what they saw – developing trust in their vision.  About a year after they began this practice Johnson describes noticing the appearance of a sliver of green under dried brown grass.  It took that repeated effort with unattached vision, entrusting that clarity would emerge with time and seasons, to see that one spot in a field which could protect and support new growth.

Second, growth requires a powerful range of vision. It isn’t enough to simply focus on the blossoming and shoots of this season.

“Remember in your thinking,” Harry once said to me (Johnson), “That this is a Buddhist community.  And we are trying to live like one.  Buddhism is forever.  It’s not a crash program for the next five weeks.  We are looking at things from the perspective of five hundred years.  Buddhism is not a religion.  It is a way of life.  If we make it five hundred years we will make it for five thousand.  We are building for the future.”

We need to cultivate the power of this range of sight.  Playing with this concept, I imagined that the Buddha and other enlightened teachers saw our potential from 2600 years ago and we perhaps only began to appreciate that potential about 200 years ago (conservatively estimated); that gives us a vision range of 200/2600.  Not quite spiritually blind but still likely to need correction.  Now the question remains: what will be necessary in our practice as individuals and a community to adjust that vision so that it is 500/1000 or 2500/5000?

Thank you for practicing,

Genju