Bodhisattva activity

So here we have the mid-July report. As our northern hemisphere summer gathers pace, the expanded garden has been taking advantage of 70F-80F days to put on foliage. More foliage than fruiting, admittedly, but there will be some things.

Here we have the squash patch. As we're not trying to save squash seed this year, it's a hodgepodge -- push aside the leaves and you may see assorted zucchinis, straight necks, butternuts, spaghettis, Sweet Meat, delicata, or pie pumpkins forming. To save seed, we'd need to choose maybe Romanesco zukes (summer) and butternuts (winter) and put them in two different gardens -- the ones we have are over 100 feet apart, to prevent crossing. Crossed squash are welcomed -- they can be cooked up for poultry all winter -- but not preferred.

We're told to chop and drop the leaves to help the bees find the flowers, and we've done some of that, but also noticed the flowers are reaching up through the canopy and definitely finding the bees. I'm impressed. 

Sunchokes in the near distance were planted this year as a wind barrier -- we find wind is blowing more of the time and desiccating plants more as compared to a decade ago. That corn in the foreground may not come to much. Well, we suspected it was not going to be a great corn year, so there's only a small packet of a sweet hybrid planted there.

Here is the main spud bed, about sixteen by thirty feet. They're putting more effort into flowering than usual, and appear to be much appreciated by the pollinators. No idea what's going on below, though. We weren't able to loosen the soil very deep during lockdown -- just snaffled over it with a cultivator. Deep mulch would be the ticket but there wasn't a lot of that on hand either. Fingers are crossed.

I mentioned we have a number of willow trees that were once bean poles. Here's one in progress in one of the bean trellises.

Lettuce and carrots taking advantage of the bean shade. It's 88F today and there is a bona fide heat wave coming in.

We had a few extra beans and cukes so made a string trellis against the garage with some tee posts.

Romanesco is much featured in current menus.

The collard patch grows apace.

We have two kinds of comfrey, the Bocking 4 or 14 seen here and, at lower right in the shade, the ancestral kind that can spread from seed, not as big. Both are medicinal topically and make great mulch or compost tea. We find the old comfrey puts up with drought better than the Bocking and we don't at all mind it taking over as you can raise poultry on it -- they don't seem prone to the alkaloid problems we've been warned about.

Here, it's disposed along the "moat" fence. Ducks can crane their necks through the mesh and self- serve without wiping out the plants.

:::

The sangha's current assigned reading includes Living by Vow by Shohaku Okamura. It's an exegesis of some of the chants used in Western zendos. He addresses the concerns of those, especially newcomers, grappling with what seems to be an inordinate amount of ritual in Zen ("I thought this was going to be liberating").

His choice of a key word is "vow," which he explains is not a complete translation of the Chinese and Japanese word(s), which connote something more like "resolve." "I resolve to ...." One does not fail if one does not achieve 100% of what has been undertaken, or perhaps even if one does not achieve any of it. Scale and certainty are perhaps less important in Mahayana Buddhism than sincerity and a willingness to try things.

The activities that are recommended to try are simple enough: "do not do bad things; do good things; serve all beings." What's emphasized there is not personal "salvation" but service to the community. Ultimately the community is everyone ("all beings"); but a sangha comes together to practice service. Student barbers practice on one another for a reason. 

To light the candles on the altar in a prescribed manner brings some order out of chaos and provides an opportunity for a kind of gracious mindfulness, but also for offering the gift of light. As we learn to work within the rules of our practice, we free ourselves up to concentrate on the contentless content of our practice -- the place where freedom begins to emerge without an overdose of self-regard.

Ritual is everywhere, I think. Aside from being a Zen nun I'm also a member of the Society of Friends, North Pacific Yearly Meeting affiliated. This flavor of Quakerism has no liturgy, no creed, and no professional clergy. Yet when one comes to Meeting for Worship, one knows what to expect -- greet the greeter, walk slowly in, settle down in the silence, wait in silence for an hour together, listen to any testimony that arises. The clerk or an appointed closer says "good morning, Friends" and shakes hands with those nearby, the handshake spreads round the room, and there are announcements. All this is nothing if not ritualistic, yet it clearly expedites the central concern -- the sitting together in worshipful silence, from which springs the Meeting's service to the wider community.

At the moment, this is taking place virtually, in online Meetings, but you get the drift.

Most cyclical religious (and humanistic!) activity, I think, has this function: to season service with wisdom before offering to the world. It is a dance, and we may call it sacred.

Gardening, to me, is such a sacred dance. 

My writing about the garden is an effort to produce dance notation. It chronicles seasons and strategies, up and downs -- a life, mine, but also a microcosm of the life of society. I'm active in a cyclical way, performing annual tasks: seeding flats, building up beds, spreading compost, setting out plants, irrigating, harvesting, putting the beds to bed. The aim is to find the wisest ways to do food hyperlocally, and impart what has been found. Sharing the ritual of constructing a bean trellis from willow growth, it is hoped, serves as an instance of bodhisattva activity.

Every act of kindness, no matter how small, provides space for good things to happen. -- Sensei Alex Kakuyo

Someone might need it

Much of my winding-down life these days is spent in Zoom meetings of Zen sanghas or fighting COVID misinformation and fascist propaganda online (not on Facebook -- I'll leave that to my friends there). I know it might not be the best use of my time but as a relatively impecunious seventy-one-year-old who needs to stay home, these are things I can do, such as they are.

Much of the rest of it is devoted to raising, to the extent of my ability, more food than I personally eat, because the little I know about that is most of what I still know how to do, in a world that has, mercifully, left me behind. Let's see how that's going.

Up at the hut, in March, I planted two small beds of store-bought organic red potatoes. The vines on one have died back, so I've pulled back the mulch to see how they did.

Not too bad. I've given away half and put the rest in storage. I don't think they are the best keepers, though, so if some of my other spuds turn out, we might keep those and eat or distribute these.

One of our strategies this year is to utilize the "flower" beds along the east and north side of the house for greens. 

For this I seeded flats from the "old seeds" jar; usually that gives me mostly Red Russian kale and a smattering of lettuces and such, but this year, for some reason, most of what sprouted turned out to be collards.

That's actually a bonus; we're not that into collards and neither are those we give food to, but they hold up exceptionally through the winter (and are tasty after frost), so they represent food security and close to the house at that. There's also some Fordhook Giant chard, which is good through the summer and a personal favorite. It goes well with the Romanesco zucchini, which has just begun producing.

Most of the kale is in three of the beds in the "kitchen garden."

Summer things are very slow this year. Beans have been non-starters, along with corn -- soil is still 62F well into July. But we persevere.

The "field" garden, or the two-thirds we had given up on due to persistent bindweed, is back in service. Every few days I have pulled back the black plastic one row at a time, replacing it incrementally with kraft paper, and planted sunchokes, five kinds of potatoes, winter squash, pumpkins, tomatoes, and sweet corn.

The bindweed doesn't seem to have figured out the kraft paper, but it does run to the light, which is wherever I've put in a transplant, so I go around pulling up the climbing vines as they appear on the growing squash or spuds. So far, so good.

Germination of the "certified seed" potatoes that I bought for extortionate prices has been so-so to downright spotty. The worst performers seem to be the Pontiac Reds, which were developed in Florida and probably prefer warm sand to our stony, frighteningly cold clay. But in March and April there was a nationwide run on seed potatoes, and by the time I got serious about expanding the garden, the Pontiacs were all that suppliers could still offer -- which suggests they are not all that popular.

The broad beans I planted at Daughter's place did quite well. I've dried down a two gallon bucket full; these are for seed. I'm also (trying to) save kale, beet, and chard seeds. It's difficult; there's too much humidity still.

It does look like it will be a good blackberry year. We'll be needing that. Cherries did so-so but were welcome; pie cherries did well and will be a help come winter. Some figs are coming in.

Pears, plums, peaches, quince, nectarines, apricots and most of the apples are sleeping off their record year of 2019. The Gravenstein, Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, Cortland and Egremont Russets will maybe produce about a fifth of what they did then, but that's enough to keep me busy.

Gravenstein ripens first and is our favorite for apple butter

I have learned, after some experimentation, that green apple drops can be gathered, sliced and cooked and they are quite edible. They help bridge the gap between cherry time and true apple season.

The creek has finally dried up (or down, falling with the water table), giving me access to some wood I'd like to cut up.

But I'm tired. It might not happen today. Another cup of mint tea sounds good right about now.

:::

I know I've bitten off more than I can chew. Don't we all, all the time?

But an ambition to do well is, I submit, not a bad thing.

In Mahayana Buddhism, it's the only thing: in the Bodhisattva vows we make promises to do the impossible on behalf of the innumerable, so to speak -- not that we're expected to deliver it all, at least any time soon. The point is to make sure, as circumstances permit and to our varied ability, that the steps we take are in the general direction of right doing.

In my readings (Barbara O'Brien, Circle of the Way, p. 281) I have come across a gatha by her teacher Jion Susan Postal that ends:

With infinite kindness to the past, infinite service to the present, infinite responsibility to the future.

Kindness to the past: toward what I have not done well, toward what we have not done well. O'Brien points out it's not the same as forgiveness -- more like forbearance.

Service to the present: find money to send. Water the corn again.

Responsibility to the future: if there's not much else happening, I will try to save kale seed.

Someone might need it.