The number 11 has energy that calls to me. It has always been so. This day, so far, is no exception. Already in email a very special letter has arrived, from my dear colleague and friend, Zinai Shi, the vice director of the Luminary Buddhist Monastery of Taiwan. Then, a phone call from one of the founders of an ecovillage which is committed to permaculture, here in New England, and which I was able to visit this past weekend.
Permaculture is not new to my Buddhist friends. One of my favorite photos of my dear departed mother is from a visit by my parents to Taiwan, when we spent a night at the rudimentary rural temple complex. Mother was very uncomfortable on the tatami mats with no mattress and only a few duvets. There was a laywoman from the area who stayed in that room, living at the temple to help with the gardening. She was very devout and prayed aloud in the sacred language with her beads, which frightened my mother. When she stopped sobbing, I learned she worried I was becoming a Buddhist. Rather than ask why this would be such a disaster, I only tried to reassure her. Although, when the huge gong immediately next to our resting place called the sisters to prayer at 4 am, her anxieties began all over again.
After breakfast one of the nuns who speaks excellent English took us on a tour. When Mother saw their garden, completely free of pesticides and weed killers, wholly organic, her face finally lit up into a wonderful smile, and from that moment on, she was able to relax and relate to those shaved-head women. A connection had been made.
The photo here is one view inside the wonderful multi-seasonal garden at the entrance of the Rodale Institute, which is visited by many for education and enjoyment. Ancestors from my mother’s family are buried in a small, brick-walled cemetery there, because eight generations of her ancestors owned that land before the Rodale family bought it. Mother understood gardening. And that served as the bridge for her to relate to my friends, the Luminary Buddhist nuns of central Taiwan.
Only recently, I pointed a friend in Asia to the Perelandra garden website, a co-created garden I want to visit someday.
Perelandra in Virginia, USA
Machaelle Small-Wright, whose vision created Perelandra and who continues to teach about the relationship of our species and the living planet called Earth, once said a garden is not possible without human activity. Gardens don’t start themselves. Sure, you might trip over a zucchini vine while on a walk through a nature preserve, but only if a seed got transported there by a generous bird and managed to derive nourishment enough to grow. It's a garden only if humans somehow were involved.
Like permaculture, gardens do not need to be on an outdoor plot of soil. Gardens are wherever human beings decide to combine the elements provided by nature to create something new and useful, according to Machaelle. When we create a garden, or a farm, or even just grow some herbs or bulbs on a windowsill or balcony, plants will flourish more when we honor them, and consider them entities with which we are co-creating something useful to the cosmos.
When I was growing up on the farm, this time of year the seed catalogs began to arrive. Vegetables, fruits, herbs, all appeared in bright colors and many variations. These became, for me, the stuff of wonderful day dreaming. I miss those. They beckoned us to go on during gray cold winter days. Browsing them counteracted despair. They were the heralds of life as a garden.
This is a gray cold winter day in my life, as the farm that has been in the family for generations, lovingly husbanded by my parents, has been sold to another family. For some, the money mattered more than the vision or the family ties. I will do what I can with what remains to me to insure that the vision does not die. I’m still searching for a physical location in which to invest myself, but for the moment, this writing is enough.
In winter, indoors, I speak with, and listen to, my poinsettias. In the tropics they are considered a weed, a wild plant. Now, they epitomize the festive season, a superb example of what can happen when humans honor the spirit of a plant!
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