pulling out the weeds & planting positive seeds
doing things for others leads to some of life’s richest experiences
I woke up groggy after my takeaway last night. Probably ate a little more than I should have.
You know, when you wake up, and it feels like it’s about 10am, and you’re like, “Damn, I got things to do, and now I’ve slept in…”
Well, yeah, that feeling hit me. But to my pleasant surprise, the wooden alarm clock beside my bed read 7am.
The sun shone through my window.
Time to get up.
Happy days.
I normally start every day the same: wake, shower, meditate. Without fail. The only thing is that I’d spent the past two days almost housebound. Injections in my knee for an old football injury and vaccinations for my trip to Asia had me feeling run down.
I couldn’t raise two dead arms above elbow height, and I had a knee feeling like it’d been hit with a baseball bat; they don’t lend themselves well to getting out and about. Two days housebound had me climbing up the walls. I needed to get out before I even thought about anything else.
As that morning sun burst through the gaps in my curtains, I knew the first thing I needed to make the most of it. It was time to stretch those legs. My hair was in no fit state to go out in public, but I just threw a cap on and got myself out. I could feel every ounce of resistance telling me to check my to-do list, emails, and everything else, but there was no keeping me inside now.
I took my normal walking route with a few detours to make it a little longer.
Man, I forgot how good it feels to feel the morning sun on your skin and the breeze along the hairs on the back of your calves.
On the way back, I stopped at the corner shop to pick up peanut butter and bananas for a smoothie.
The old lady at the checkout smiled at me, and I smiled back. She seemed so content working that job.
It almost made me feel a little envious.
I walked back along the quaint, narrow road that leads to my house and noticed the avenging weeds growing out from under my neighbour’s fences and along the pub. Avoiding the cigarette butts and bottle lids, I made it back to my own house as my attention turned to the weeds growing from my own drive. I planned to get home, meditate, make a smoothie and do some lesson planning, but the shining sun on the first day of June drive had other plans.
I got the gardening gloves on and set about the small sprouting weeds coming up from between the pavers outside my little house. I’d set about these a few weeks ago, but there was more. They were all smaller this time. I couldn’t work out whether they were ones I’d missed last time because I’d focussed on all the big ones or whether they were just new ones that had grown back since the last time I checked. They’re the ones you look at and think, “Ah, that’ll be fine, it’s tiny!” and carry on as you ignore it to pull out the bigger ones.
Focusing on small weeds feels fiddly and frustrating, but ignoring them is a mistake. All big weeds started out as small ones that were once ignored, so pulling out a small weed now is one less big weed to pull out in the future. No matter how small they may be, they can become bigger problems if we don’t deal with them while they’re still small.
Gardening is a metaphor for meditation. Tibet meditation master Geshe Kelsang Gyatso reminds us that the seeds for realisation exist in the garden of our mind. Our meditation practice is how we cultivate them.
If you want to cultivate a crop, you must remove anything that might obstruct its growth, such as weeds or stones.
You must then fertilise the soil and provide the right conditions for the seed to germinate.
This is how we must also treat the garden of our mind, where the weeds are like our harmful views, habits, and experiences from the past that we must let go of.
Only then will the seeds of Dharma have the space to flourish in our minds.
This runs through my head every time I pull out weeds now. It makes the process quite enjoyable. In fact, I pulled out all of my neighbour’s weeds down my street. It felt like I was pulling out the small and large weeds in my own mind, taking the time to see them for what they really were.
Eventually, the weeding no longer felt like a metaphor.
As I crossed the border from my own property and started cleaning up land that did not belong to me, I remembered the value of going beyond myself.
The value of not seeing my time or priorities as more important than anyone else’s.
I picked up the cigarette butts and bottle caps. I pulled out the nettles, weeds, and thorns along the road.
I doubt anyone would have noticed, but it was a small step forward in doing more to go beyond myself.
More recently, I’ve started to realise how doing things for others leads to some of life’s richest experiences.
Going the extra mile. Kindness compounds, contaminate with the pandemic of peace
So true. The owner of the parking lot that we use never does any maintanence and there are weeds sprouting all over the place. Last year I went out to clear the space around my car. Ended up cleaning the whole lot and it felt amazing. Everyone probably thought it was the useless owner but just seeing the clean space made it worth it anyway.