Pea Pod Practice
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| Wed, 03-28-2007 - 2:16pm |
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/70/story_7045_1.html
"Pea Pod Practice
Like a garden, our spiritual practice sometimes needs a little heat before we can break through resistance and grow.
By Wendy Johnson
At Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a monastic training center in the mountains of Big Sur, I once worked with a woman who was about ten years older than me and a very serious Zen student. Marga was an ordained priest and not thrilled about being assigned to work in the garden with a brand-new Zen student as her supervisor, and I was always a little tentative around her. She was formidable and ruthlessly methodical. Whenever she questioned my stammered directions, she would raise both eyebrows at me, slowly, like a heavy velvet curtain rising on a performance of "Waiting For Godot." But Marga believed in the dignity of real work, so she followed my directions efficiently and energetically.
On a cold February morning, when ice puddled under the dark zendo eves, I showed Marga how to sow snow peas on a south-facing fence line in the upper garden. Three weeks later, when the peas pushed through the cold crust of their garden soil and unfurled in the low light of the winter sun, Marga was the first to report their germination to me. She had been checking the pea line every night after zazen and a few times during the day, as though her faith in herself and in the truth of the living garden depended on that one slender line of Oregon dwarf gray sugar peas. When they sprouted, so did she. "What amazes me most," she confessed, "is that these peas had been growing all the time, long before I saw them come up."
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I thought this was lovely, how our spirituality is so tied with "real life." ;))
Gypsy
)O(
