Click here to go to the next issue

Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day

#2507 - Sunday, June 25, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee  

    "It would never occur to most of us that 'plants' say anything at all, except in terms of what we read into them, or try to use them for. Yet in their responses to this wonderfully rhythmic and varying earth they are the most expressive of all forms of life."
— John Hay in A Beginner's Faith in Things Unseen  

---------------  

"The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided."
—Thomas Moore in The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life  

from  Gardening as a Spiritual Practice: http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/blogs/maps.php?id=15669 which also reviews several books on this theme, such as:    

The Japanese Way of the Flower: Ikebana as Moving Meditation
H. E. Davey and Ann Kameoka present a sturdy and illuminating examination of kado, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. This art contains meditation exercises and aims for harmony, asymmetrical balance, artlessness, impermanence, and oneness with the universe.  

  Mazie Lane and Bob O'Hearn have a new list!  

"If you're passionate about gardening
and want to share your enthusiasm for it,
this is the group for you. This is a journey
into the love of the garden, and the love we
have for this wonderful blossoming that is our Life."

Welcome to the world of the garden mystic!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GardenMystics/    

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
And of thy meager store
Two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.
~  Sheikh Muslih-uddin Saadi Shirazi, The Gulistan of Saadi,   1270    

Mazie and Bob moved to (where else?) Paradise, and while Mazie is busy turning their own yard into a gardener's paradise of roses and flowers, Bob is also documenting this transformation with artistic photography. To access the main photo site, go to: http://www.1heart.us/gallery/main.php   There are 5 main sub-albums there: Close-ups (which is where most of the floral shots are),  Only Dreaming (surreal and creative photoshop-type stuff), Artists (work of others which I play with, sometimes adding text), and then Cascades (from our sojourn in Humboldt County), and Paradise.    

http://www.1heart.us/gallery/v/Close+Up/Close+Up/World+in+a+Dew+Drop/51.jpg.html     T

his grand show is eternal.  It is always sunrise somewhere;
the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling;
vapor is ever rising.  Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal
dawn and glowing, on sea and continents and islands, each
in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

~  John Muir  

  "Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones bruise even at too heavy a human touch. Every strawberry you have ever eaten has been picked by callused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represents someone's knees, someone's aching backs and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat."  

—Alison Luterman, quoted in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield
 

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

—Gandhi

Because half of the world's vanilla crop is grown in Madagascar, the whole island smells like vanilla ice cream.  

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

—Wendell Berry

    "Only nature can be truly random and beautiful"
  —Scorpittarius    

…with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly.

—Emily Brontë  

from AlphaWorld  

The Source   God has never really spoken,
though a thought once crossed His mind.
It is the echo of divine
silence

we hear the birds sing, and that
is the source of all
we see and
touch.   from Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, Translated by Daniel Ladinsky  

www.Poetry-Chaikhana.com

May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.

Thich Nhat Hahn