May 19, Tuesday

This morning I worked in the garden first thing so I'd be done by noon before the sun got too. hot. Now it's 2:00 PM and I'm just getting to my writing. On days like these I often think of a story that Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, tells about a woman who enjoyed his poetry very much. When she saw him working in the garden she said something like this, " Thay (meaning teacher), why do you waste your time planting lettuce when you could use your time so much better for writing beautiful poems?" After reflecting on her question he answered, "If I do not plant lettuce seeds like this, I cannot write poems like that." He often uses this little story to illustrate his teaching, "This is like this because that is like that."

As with most of this gentle master's teaching, it seems very simple at first. On deeper reflection we see that it is very profound. This teaching can be applied to almost every situation from reasons that a child may act out inappropriately to the deep roots of wars around the globe. "This is like this because that is like that." This is the lesson that many people wanted to ignore after the 9-11 tragedy. It is the lesson of global warming, the disappearance of species, the drug epidemic and every social problem. The trick of course is that you must have the courage and the opportunity to look deeply enough to see the roots of the problem and then address those root causes. If more people were able to do this deep looking we might not have a "war on drugs" or even a once a year "Earth Day". Of course solving the huge problems of our world cannot be done by one person or even a few people. We need many, many people looking deeply and sharing what they see.

But think about it. If you are in the age group of 20 to 50 years or have family members in this group, you know that for the most part the lives of these people are crazy. There is no time to think deeply and hardly any time to think at all. I'm going to use my daughter-in-law Ana as an example. I hope she doesn't mind. She's so busy that she'll never read this anyway. Ana is an absolutely beautiful human being. She is responsible, capable, intelligent as well as loving and good. She is married to Kelly, Jim's son and they are about to have (any minute) their third child, Charlotte, who will join Shayna who is 6 and Lucas, who is 3. Ana works full time at a successful ad agency in downtown Atlanta. They live about 45 minutes from her work. Kelly teaches high school. His mom takes care of the kids while they are at work. One of the parents has to drop them off and pick them up after work each day. Do you have any idea how busy Ana's life is? It's truly crazy!

There was a period a couple of years ago when she was hospitalized twelve times in a year with chest pain. She had every cardiac test imaginable and finally was diagnosed with stress related chest pain. This is not uncommon. Millions of young women particularly do not have a minute of truly quiet time - no time to process what is happening in their lives let alone what is happening on the rest of the planet. No time to plant lettuce or write poetry and of course no time to look deeply into anything. This is not just an individual tragedy, it is a tragedy of much larger proportions.

Here's another example. Two young mother's who had been bringing their families to the open and affirming Episcopal church have decided to start going instead to "The Brand New Church" - one of those new mega-churches of the conservative evangelical right. They are making the move, they say, because the kids want to be with their friends from school many of whom go to this other church. These mom's say they just don't have the time or energy to address the issues with the kids. In telling me of this situation, a gay member of our church said, "They don't realize that those kids are going to be getting things from that new church that they may not want them to get." He meant homophobia for one thing of course. Wonder if those mom's have even had a quiet moment to sit down and contemplate this decision. Perhaps it would take more than a moment to look into the decision and identify what is really important in choosing a community where your children will learn some of their deepest values.

Living with intention takes time and support. Meditation and true support of each other are so needed in the world right now yet it is almost radical to suggest them as necessary skills to be taught to our children. If meditation and contemplation were taught in our public schools imagine what a different nation this would be. This might be too subversive for acceptance at this time but gardening in school is an idea whose time may have come. A garden is a place where, just as in meditation, a child can learn to look deeply and slow to the rhythm of the natural world. One example of a successful school garden is The Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkley, CA where for 13 years they have had a schoolyard garden at Martin Luther King Middle School. Wendy Johnson speaks of her involvement as a founder of this project in her book Gardening at the Dragon's Gate - at work in the wild and cultivated world. She is an amazing woman, a brilliant writer and a passionate gardener. Her book is a masterpiece of writing and of soul. She writes of the school garden:

Beauty counts here, but not always in an orderly, sequential fashion. Zig-zag loops of butter lettuce, a sun-shaped bed of winter wheat with ten long rays of ripening grain grows in the blue haze of Hopi corn, and bloodred 'Empress' tulips push up through wet ground at the edge of the known world. When the students of Edible Schoolyard leave their garden at the end of the day the land expels a long exhalation of relief and then waits all night long, with one eye half open, for the children of paradise to return.

Can you imagine being a child in such a garden and not being deeply affected by it? That brings me back to the same place I was when I started this beautiful Spring day. I woke up and thought, "Ah, the garden, it's a good place to start." Tomorrow I am wishing for some children to come along so that I can entice them to the garden with the taste and feel and beauty of the first sweet, juicy, red strawberries. Who knows what this radical experience may bring.