Family Gardening

We are beginning to see the first flowers of spring. They are mostly tough Oklahoma weeds that send up little purple flowers. Taz has been collecting them from yards on the way home for me and presenting them with much enthusiasm. Before the warm up we had our last ice storm for the year – which shut down school for about 3 days until it all melted. A little snow came down too and Taz tried to make a snow man out of it. It was a little mini-man. My friends from Minnesota will crack up over the picture! She got so into “sculpting” the little mini-man that she laid down on the front porch on her belly while the melting ice from the roof dripped onto her.

Once the ice broke Slim started into the vegetable garden project. He built a huge raised garden box and then got a friend to help him haul in some top soil and compost. We relied quite a bit on Mike McGrath and his You Bet Your Garden series on NPR, http://www.whyy.org/91FM/ybyg/. This is definitely the biggest garden project we’ve tried and we’ve got the whole family involved!

My mom always had vegetable gardens when I was a kid, and I remember the fun of planting the seeds in a long row. She’d tell me how far apart to plant the seeds and I’d dutifully use my finger trying to estimate 1 inch or a ¼ inch. It seemed really important at the time. When I got older dad taught me to use the big tiller. At 5 foot tall my mom really couldn’t handle the beast, so I’d be out there wrestling with it in February trying to break the ground. I must have looked pretty funny out there with my rail like tom-boy body wresting with this huge tiller. Inevitably I’d get the machine stuck deep into the dirt in the middle of the garden. I’d start swearing and kicking it, and then finally give up. I would have to wait for my dad or my brother to show up. This always frustrated me.
Dad would question how in the world I got the tiller that deep and stuck, and then he would demonstrate the proper tiller operation. I think the tiller might have weighed as much as I did.

Dad’s family had always gardened too. My grandmother had studied botany and human anatomy at the University of Minnesota, back when girls didn’t go to college. She liked doing technical science drawings including botany drawings. Gramma and Grampa’s backyard was a wonderful place if you were a kid. They had a screened in porch with a little electric fountain that I would beg Grampa to turn on. Gramma grew many beautiful flowers and plants, all sorts of interesting varieties. In my childhood memory it was a big house with a huge backyard, a wonderful and special place. When I was in my hometown recently I drove by and laughed as it was just a standard little middle class split level from the 70s era, with a very small yard! Although it was a small yard much of it was under cultivation of some kind, and ever year Grampa grew the most amazing tomatoes. He was proud of his tomatoes and he would bend down and hand me some to take inside to Gramma. I would stand on a stool next to her in the kitchen and wash the mud off.

Once we got all the backyard chores done, Grampa and I would go hang out in his big leather chair in the living room, while Gramma and my mom would work on dinner. I’d sit on his lap and watch him put tobacco in his pipe. He’d light the pipe and give me a butterscotch candy and we would watch the Lawrence Welk Show together. The pipe smoke never bothered me, in fact I liked the way it smelled, it was kind of sweet. Plus I’d get the butterscotch…. When a funny skit would come on the show he’d start belly laughing, his whole body would shake. I didn’t always understand what the joke was on the TV, but I’d start laughing too, because he was laughing.

Breath Meditation

Over the last year I’ve gotten quite a few inquires about meditation classes. Although there are many great groups and teachers in the OKC area, I hadn’t found a teacher I felt fit with our community. I’ve asked my friend Erik Braun to teach a beginning meditation class in April. The class will meet on a Sunday afternoon in April, date tba. The event will be free, and those who want to will go to dinner afterwards. Erik is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at OU. He has been meditating for many years, attending workshops and retreats, and is a student of Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

For my readers who live elsewhere, and may not practice yoga at all, you can try just sitting and focus on your breath for awhile and see how it makes you feel! My guess is that if you try it, you will feel a lot better. It doesn’t matter what your religion is – as Thanissaro says below – “the breath is common property.” As a Christian, I have found the Buddhist traditions and teachings quite helpful, and often find similar teachings that I missed before when I return to reading Christian texts.

Erik sent me the following transcript from one of Thanissaro’s teachings. You can find more of his writings at:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/index.html

Basic Breath Meditation Instructions
By Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The technique I'll be teaching is breath meditation. It's a good topic no matter what your religious background. As my teacher once said, the breath doesn't belong to Buddhism or Christianity or anyone at all. It's common property that anyone can meditate on. At the same time, of all the meditation topics there are, it's probably the most beneficial to the body, for when we're dealing with the breath, we're dealing not only with the air coming in and out of the lungs, but also with all the feelings of energy that course throughout the body with each breath. If you can learn to become sensitive to these feelings, and let them flow smoothly and unobstructed, you can help the body function more easily, and give the mind a handle for dealing with pain.

So let's all meditate for a few minutes. Sit comfortably erect, in a balanced position. You don't have to be ramrod straight like a soldier. Just try not to lean forward or back, to the left or the right. Close your eyes and say to yourself, 'May I be truly happy and free from suffering.' This may sound like a strange, even selfish, way to start meditating, but there are good reasons for it. One, if you can't wish for your own happiness, there is no way that you can honestly wish for the happiness of others. Some people need to remind themselves constantly that they deserve happiness — we all deserve it, but if we don't believe it, we will constantly find ways to punish ourselves, and we will end up punishing others in subtle or blatant ways as well.

Two, it's important to reflect on what true happiness is and where it can be found. A moment's reflection will show that you can't find it in the past or the future. The past is gone and your memory of it is undependable. The future is a blank uncertainty. So the only place we can really find happiness is in the present. But even here you have to know where to look. If you try to base your happiness on things that change — sights, sounds, sensations in general, people and things outside — you're setting yourself up for disappointment, like building your house on a cliff where there have been repeated landslides in the past. So true happiness has to be sought within. Meditation is thus like a treasure hunt: to find what has solid and unchanging worth in the mind, something that even death cannot touch.

To find this treasure we need tools. The first tool is to do what we're doing right now: to develop good will for ourselves. The second is to spread that good will to other living beings. Tell yourself: 'All living beings, no matter who they are, no matter what they have done to you in the past — may they all find true happiness too.' If you don't cultivate this thought, and instead carry grudges into your meditation, that's all you'll be able to see when you look inside.

Only when you have cleared the mind in this way, and set outside matters aside, are you ready to focus on the breath. Bring your attention to the sensation of breathing. Breathe in long and out long for a couple of times, focusing on any spot in the body where the breathing is easy to notice, and your mind feels comfortable focusing. This could be at the nose, at the chest, at the abdomen, or any spot at all. Stay with that spot, noticing how it feels as you breathe in and out. Don't force the breath, or bear down too heavily with your focus. Let the breath flow naturally, and simply keep track of how it feels. Savor it, as if it were an exquisite sensation you wanted to prolong. If your mind wanders off, simply bring it back. Don't get discouraged. If it wanders 100 times, bring it back 100 times. Show it that you mean business, and eventually it will listen to you.

If you want, you can experiment with different kinds of breathing. If long breathing feels comfortable, stick with it. If it doesn't, change it to whatever rhythm feels soothing to the body. You can try short breathing, fast breathing, slow breathing, deep breathing, shallow breathing — whatever feels most comfortable to you right now...

Once you have the breath comfortable at your chosen spot, move your attention to notice how the breathing feels in other parts of the body. Start by focusing on the area just below your navel. Breathe in and out, and notice how that area feels. If you don't feel any motion there, just be aware of the fact that there's no motion. If you do feel motion, notice the quality of the motion, to see if the breathing feels uneven there, or if there's any tension or tightness. If there's tension, think of relaxing it. If the breathing feels jagged or uneven, think of smoothing it out... Now move your attention over to the right of that spot — to the lower right-hand corner of the abdomen — and repeat the same process... Then over to the lower left-hand corner of the abdomen... Then up to the navel... right... left... to the solar plexus... right... left... the middle of the chest... right... left... to the base of the throat... right... left... to the middle of the head...[take several minutes for each spot]

If you were meditating at home, you could continue this process through your entire body — over the head, down the back, out the arms & legs to the tips of your finger & toes — but since our time is limited, I'll ask you to return your focus now to any one of the spots we've already covered. Let your attention settle comfortably there, and then let your conscious awareness spread to fill the entire body, from the head down to the toes, so that you're like a spider sitting in the middle of a web: It's sitting in one spot, but it's sensitive to the entire web. Keep your awareness expanded like this — you have to work at this, for its tendency will be to shrink to a single spot — and think of the breath coming in & out your entire body, through every pore. Let your awareness simply stay right there for a while — there's no where else you have to go, nothing else you have to think about... And then gently come out of meditation.