January 26, 2011

March has been trying to poke its head through this past week. It made it a few times! But not today. That January sun just isn’t high enough to burn through this fog. For a few hours during the March ‘breakout’ I felt the pull of the garden soil on my spirit. Part of the garden takes the form of raised beds. The idea behind the raised bed approach is that the soil warms up quicker, there is better drainage so it dries out more rapidly in spring, and the soil where veggies grow is not compacted by the gardener’s heavy foot.
Soil compaction is a serious problem that has accompanied modern agricultural techniques.
Huge mega-tonned tractors roll over the soil—cultivating, seeding, harrowing, spraying, and harvesting. While the top 5 or 6 inches is fairly loose, the soil underneath becomes very compacted, prohibiting deep root development. The forming of a bed, be it a raised bed or simply an area set aside to not be stepped on, is an advantage I have over the mega-farmer and furthermore it allows me the opportunity of participating in the experience of establising sacred space.
Sacred space is always accompanied by prohibitions. Don’t walk on this bed! “You must not enter the Holy of Holies, lest you die!” (a reference to the ancient temple in Jerusalem) I would not claim that the sacred space of the raised bed in the garden is of the same significance as the Holy of Holies but there is a thin thread of connection which goes far beyond the fact of prohibition. Maybe it is as simple as “Be aware of where you are at. Everyplace is not the same as any other place.” God said to Moses out of the burning bush. “Take your shoes off! This is holy ground. The beds in my garden say, “Keep your feet off! This is special ground.”

The more I think about it, as I finish this cup of tea, the more I wonder if there is much more sacred ground than what I am aware of? The ground where the klldeer lays her eggs. The ground from which the volunteer violet surprisingly erupts….the ground upon which my father suddenly fell and breathed his last….

January 5, 2011
For all of my adult life I have heard the phrase “Live in the now” and even though it is associated with all the New Age voices that have been telling us how to live for the past several decades I have come to embrace it in my own way. I prefer to say, “Be present where you are” but in my mind the phrases are interchangeable.

Watching dementia slowly spread its wings, like the shadow of a great bird, over the small figure of my mother has recently caused me to pause and take another look at this notion. Dementia strips away memory. The short term loss is most readily noticeable but long-term is also going. Mom wakes up and doesn’t know what day it is. She asks the same basic questions every morning. Who is here? Has Zoe gone to work? What time is it? What am I supposed to do now? In one sense she is very much “in the now”.
She’s not thinking about what happened yesterday or the day before. She doesn’t have a game plan for the day. She is not ‘burdened’ by duties and responsibilities….or guilt and shame. She is literally ‘in the now’….very present where she is. Isn’t this exactly what the New Age gurus want to see in their disciples?

What is missing for mom, of course, is any sense of context. What I am witnessing is that the ‘the now’ without context is disturbing and sometimes terrifying to mom. ‘Being present’ without a context is about as far away from being ‘blissed out’ as one could get!

This brings me to my conclusion. The notion of ‘living in the now/being present where you are’, cut off from any discussion/awareness of context, is pap. I am present with a cup of tea and a laptop. I am ‘in the now’. But the context of this ‘being present’ is boundless! I think the mystics are closer to reality when they talk about all of time being present in one moment….but that discussion will be over a different cup of tea.

Now I am going to be present outside with my chainsaw….each moment an eternity of time! Ha!!