Serenity for me is often found in a garden. There’s a different way of being when I spend slow time around plants and flowers. My mind enters into a state of focused energy. I look at each flower and each plant, and the more I look in this focused state the more I see.
My photography is my excuse for meditating in the garden, and the garden is my sanctuary. One does not really need an excuse to enter a sanctuary, but it helps to cloak my act of devotion with some veneer of practicality.
It is good to put aside the rush of modern life. Leave the cell phone outside the garden—unless you need it as a camera trigger, or to find your way through the maze of a large Japanese garden.
Forget about business, receivables, the needs of kids, the politics of empire. You are here in the garden. The flowers are expending their short lives in part to give one grace to enjoy. Water is flowing. Hummingbirds are engaging in their quick motions, using their long tongues to lap nectar. Within a blossom a bee is replete with pollen, its side panniers bulging.
All senses are occupied, but in a peaceful way. This may be my garden, but I am not the one controlling sun, wind, and weather. Clouds drift lazily overhead. The sun shifts the angles of shadows, casts heat, life, and life, and heliotropic flowers respond. Fragrance drifts on the breeze. The time is yours, now, and forever, and no reason to fill this sweet ephemeral moment with the clamor of the monkey mind. The garden is exquisitely peaceful.
Sometimes it rains, and the joy, the pure joy as wetness abounds. Each moment is a passing world, and it is yours to enjoy in quiet contemplation.
When it is my garden, the pleasures are even more sweet. I am the steward. I know these rocks, these plants, these trees. Here is the maple I planted a quarter of a century ago when it was a small sapling. Here’s the cherry tree that I planted when my son was born.
I shape, comfort, and work with each square millimeter, trying to tease out the essence that the garden is showing me. It is pleasing that my garden is small in dimensions, so that my tasks are manageable, not grandiose, and not a chore.
Each new flower is a blessing, and I tend the plants helping the stressed and providing fertilizer and comfort to the green living beings.
In my small plot, I am benign gardening god, and my hands and touch are in the dirt and on every vista.
