And see the peaceful trees extend
their myriad leaves in leisured dance-
they bear the weight of sky and cloud
upon the fountain of their veins.
from “Envoi” by Kathleen Raine
In the Zen tradition we say of old teachers, “they planted trees.” It’s not just a metaphor. Planting trees is the activity of a buddha, an awakened being, and it makes perfect sense. For one thing, trees improve the scenery, and for another, trees guide the way.
A well-tended tree grows. My teachers, being grandfathers each in their own manner, planted trees. How noble, how worthy, how kind.
How to grow a tree is how to grow your life.
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Inspired again by my cousin’s etegami art.
If my practice doesn’t make me more tolerant, humble,
A student comes to a teacher and asks, “What is the way?” You might wonder this yourself from time to time. What do I do? Where do I go? Is it this way or that? What next? What if? Did I miss the turn? If you don’t see the way, you don’t see it even as you walk on it.
This must be one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, and I just realized I never brought it home to publish on this blog. If you can do the first one, the next nine take care of themselves.
Somewhere in the deep trench of what I call my “first life,” a friend gave me the book, A Year in Provence. The happy misadventures of an English novelist and his wife in the French countryside was a megaseller. It went on to spawn a TV miniseries, several sequels and the undying flattery of imitators—an entire genre of nonfiction pretenders that persists to this day. You know, books like A Year of Doing This, A Year of Doing That. They appeal to us because we all want to ditch our lives and end up somewhere other than a ditch. Makes for pleasant tripping, if only in our dreams.
