MARCH NEWSLETTER

FLOWERS AND VEGETABLES

I flew to Portland Oregon on an emergency visit to help support my father during a difficult passage. It was a challenging visit because he is 89 years old and has been having debilitating pain in his back due to severe arthritis. At the time of my visit we were not certain what the problem was, what level of care he’d need and how to work with the emotional and physical challenges that lay before us. As we went to doctor appointments and checked out different housing and care options I felt the gray amorphous dark side of life closing in on me. My father, my brother and myself were getting so caught up in the nitty gritty we forgot the reason we were working so hard to stay alive.

I don’t have a lot of wiggle room for depression to enter my life. Both of my grandmothers were clinically depressed, both committed suicide. So when that dark sticky seductive force that the Buddha called the hunger to not be, vibhava tanha, whispers in my ear that this world is not worth the work it takes to navigate its dangerous waters I sit up and take notice. Sometimes I spend awhile there in that state of desire to not be. It is usually compassion that pulls me out to serve, to love, to use this life, no matter how fractured it is, to leave the Earth a better, kinder place for my having been there. I’ve learned to work with this tendency towards depression. I take the stance that, Okay, maybe my life is not how I would have liked it to be but this life is precious and whatever my life looks like I’m going to use it from here on in to be part of the solution. Sort of like a solder throwing himself into the battlefield after the woman he loved shunned him. Everything, everything can be used for our dharma garden.

It reminds me of a Zen garden. In a Zen garden there are flowers scattered amongst the vegetables. We need the vegetables for sustenance but cannot live without the flowers beauty. Life requires us to attend to survival needs but life must also have beauty and love interlaced between doctor visits, bill paying and grocery shopping to make living worthwhile. During the darkest days we need to find flowers, twigs, stones, running water and other reminders of nature’s wondrous bounty, and drink them in. So I brought my father some tulips, chocolate and raspberries.

It is so easy to get caught up in the necessities of life or get pulled down into the dark whisperings, and forget the things that make life worth living. When funds are low the first things to be cut are the art and music programs. The thinking is that these programs are expendable and not as vital to a child’s future as math and science. I once saw a program on Leonardo DaVinci put on by a government grant that aimed at increasing interest in math and science. What they failed to portray in that program is the importance of art in DaVinchi’s life and how that nourished the creative thinking that he would use in his scientific discoveries. We are so quick to cut out beauty and love when times are difficult. Kahil Gibran wrote, “I prefer death through happiness a thousand fold to life in vain and in despair.” And in the same piece, “The life of the flowers is hope and fulfillment and peace; tears and laughter.”

During challenging times as we are busy taking care of business, during dark days when we just want to hide under the covers and never come out, never wash another dish, it is so important to spend some precious time remembering beauty and love. When our loved ones are sick, when we are feeling hopeless, when we just can’t see a solution to our problems, we can take a moment to breathe in the beauty of nature, of human love, of small potent pleasures before going on with the business of living.s

Jacqueline

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