Checking in With my Gardening Muse

And myself!

For Easter we invited my gardening muse and her family over for dinner. I prayed she wouldn't ask about the garden. I worried because I had just had a horrible revelation about myself, brought on by gardening.

Gardening makes me nervous! It makes me neurotic! It makes me crazy!

I worry about every little seed and whether it will come up. I worry whether I am doing it right, whether I got the soil mixture right, whether it is too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry. And whether I got dud seeds. But mostly I worry that I will do something that will mess it all up.

Two days after I planted a few plants and a lot of seeds I walked down the stairs and a beautiful zucchini plant Jonathan had planted was flowering. It was perfect, healthy, and I wanted to pluck it and fry it up Neapolitan style. But here is the weird thing. Rather than thinking: Hooray, this zucchini plant is thriving, I bet mine is, too. I thought, Oh No, I am just too scared to go up and check my plants. In fact, the more scared I got, the more paralyzed I became. I simply could not make myself go up to the back garden. And if you saw the Peruvian terraces I have to scale to get to my garden boxes you would know that it would be very easy to never, ever go up there again.

All of this had been running through my mind: my fear, my worry, and my reaction to my worry, which is to run away.

But Oh, my gardening muse, she was so wise.

"Oh I feel the same way," she said. "I worry about them all like children."

"It's true," her husband chimed in. "I saw her out there this morning, hunched over her tomato plants with a look of fear and worry in her eyes."

"Really?" I said. And I got all confessional like therapy.

"Let's go," she said. And she dragged me up into the back garden in my dress, she with a glass of red wine in her hand.

While we walked she gave me a pep talk. "Don't worry," she told me. "You have to think of this as a giant experiment. This may not be the right place. Your seeds may be no good. This may not be the right place in your garden. You are just learning and seeing what happens."

Her words were balm for my soul. She climbed up the uppermost terrace and the boys helped unwind the hose. She stood there in her Sunday best, wine glass in one hand, hose in the other, and sprayed away, looking so dapper and confident and Easter-y. She looked at a limp Amazon chocolate tomato plant that looked like it had already given up. It hurt me to look at it. She took it in her hand gently, and said, "Don't worry. These are very sensitive."

"Oh."

She talked me through it and gave my plants water and by the end of her hose-down they looked like they might resurrect.

I thought about how my garden has a Buddhist lesson for me. You see, it is so easy for me to do the active part of things. To begin. To buy. To dig. To build. To plant. But the waiting and watching and nurturing part for me is torture. It just kills me. I would rather run away and never look back.

But I must be Buddhist. I must force myself to look each day. I must look at the plants that are dying, the plants that are thriving, and do what I can for all of them, no blame. Just observation.

Today (two days later...it took me a day to digest all of this) I climbed back up. It took me until 4:30 but I made myself look, and water. The Amazon Chocolate looked like it might survive after all, and the cucumbers and zucchini are thriving. I felt a little bit stronger. But it is the daily practice that matters--as with everything--not the dramatic resurrection.

I pray I can make myself go back up there tomorrow.

Who ever thought there would be so many mental blocks to a garden?

Practicing Non-Attachment

This Buddhist concept is important--perhaps the most important of all--but so hard for me.

As a Navy brat I did not get a chance to be attached to that many things. So the things I clung to--the very few--which I don't like to tell people about because some deep superstitious part of me believes then they will be stolen away--I keep secret. Or close to my heart. And I become VERY attached to.

They are not usually material things. They are usually a thing I do which brings me great joy, or a friend, or a place I love. Perhaps I pick things like these because they feel harder to take away. An activity is portable, a friend can still be reached if you try, and a place remains--like a perfect postcard--waiting for you to come back.

But even these rules do not hold. Activities change depending on where you live and what you have access to. Friends are tops-but the sweetest moments are still ephemeral. Just true--no matter how much you want it not to be true. And places--you promise yourself you will return, but it can take longer than you think, or worse still, you go back and it is different.

But I expect my yoga teacher to remain the same. She is one of the ones who espouses Buddhist precepts, and I need her to help me do so.

But my beloved yoga teacher is going on a journey. She is Tara Judelle, yoga star of the Hollywood YMCA, beautiful, flexible, philosophical, wonderful. I never speak or tell her what I think. I am a quiet, diligent student (except when I am breathing heavily in parsvovapassana, or something that sounds like that, when my liver is being wrung out and my hamstrings are about to snap) preferring to express my appreciation through effort.

She is going to Bali, and I am so happy for her. She deserves for some major good karma to shower down on her. I hope she visits the monkey temples, dances the dances, climbs Gunung Agung, the belly button of the world. But I will miss her.

She is a wonderful, sustaining, steady force in my life. I am trying trying not to feel attached--to believe another yoga teacher, who has much good to offer--new poses, new wisdom--will enter my life, via the YMCA. I am grateful for what I have gotten.

Namaste.

Vaya con dios, Tara

Facing the Wave-breasts-first!

I have read a lot more Buddhism since my friend, Natalia, died of breast cancer. She had me read to her in her final hours from the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and things that happen at times like that stick with you, forever. One thing that struck me is that Buddhism, or at least the way Westerners talk about it, use a lot of surf and water metaphors. That resonated for me -- since I love to surf.

I read a fair amount since her death--because I felt scared when she died. I was not ready. My spiritual house is not in order. I need to figure out what it is I believe and how I want to live and how (emotionally) I want to die. The rest I cannot control. But that I can.

One thing Buddhism demands is that you live awake. That you are totally in the moment--not thinking about the past or the future. It is about turning and facing the wave. When something scary and terrifying and horrible and maybe even exciting is racing toward you, do NOT turn your back, do not run. Turn around, look at it, size it up, take it on. That is the only way you will survive. That is the way to get through it.

I am a procrastinator. I face real waves. I know how to do that. I know how to go over the top and dive through. I know how to go under and escape the rough water. But the psychic waves are harder. I run. I close my eyes. I look away and try to pretend they are not happening. And like real waves, they knock me off my feet and pound me in the surf.

So I am trying to be better. From the big things to the small.

Today I went to get my annual mammogram. For me the issue is now so loaded I am practically quaking by the time I walk through the door of the imaging center. It does not help that the place I go-- the Beverly Tower Women's Center -- is cold, institutional and matter-of-fact. On top of that, a woman my age went there with a lump she was worried about, they told her she was fine, and a year later she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer--in the exact spot she had asked them to look at. Young women are hard. Our breasts are dense.

Still. You go in, they squeeze your breasts this way and that. Not tenderly like a lover, matter of factly and coldly. Like a meat cut. (Although the technicians tend to be the most human and kind.) You get all these photos taken, and a few weeks later you get a letter in the mail--formulaic and impersonal--telling you you are fine, or that you are not.

Last year they found something strange in me. Not a lump, but fibrousness. They told me to come back in 6 months (all in an impersonal letter, in difficult to understand medical language and no way to talk to the doctor or ask questions). My OB was aggressive--she is awesome--and sent me to a breast specialist at Cedars. I was so upset at that point that I started crying hysterically in the hallway and a white-coated woman ushered me into a small, windowless (soundproof?) room full of boxes of kleenex where I could cry freely. They were afraid I would send other semi-hysterical women over the edge, too, I am sure.

In the end I got an MRI--terrifying--and everything was OK. Needless to say I was not excited about going again.

Today I went. I faced the wave. I got the mammogram. I got the ultrasound. And today the Doc who signs off on the impersonal letters actually came out and talked to me. What a difference it makes. They gave me an ultrasound just to be sure. All clear. They told me so on the spot. I was so grateful I cried. I felt my whole body go limp. I was even more scared than I had thought.

But I faced the wave. I looked for the truth. And now I can move forward, put the worries behind me, and use my energy for good things. It's a tiny step on my Buddhist path.

Do you get nervous when you get mammograms? Do you go weak in the knees? What do you wish your doc did to make it easier?