In Eau Claire, Wisconsin the other day, police were looking for someone who aggressively threw cheese at someone’s car. If news were always of this sort I wouldn’t have been hovering above despair last weekend. But this weekend I am feeling much better. There are several reasons. The biggest one is Thich Nhat Hanh.

Since January James and I have been using the Plum Village app for some nightly short guided meditations. Plum Village is a monastery in France founded in 1982 by Thich Nhat Hanh. In February when I was doing a bit of exploring, I discovered that there is a Plum Village affiliated sangha (community) that meets about a mile from my house every Thursday night. I checked out their website. I emailed them about attending a sangha and what the expectations are. And they were so kind and welcoming and asking of nothing, that we decided to go to a gathering.

The gathering begins with a brief explanation from the person who is facilitating the evening (this is a lay community, there are no ordained nuns or monks but several people have received lay training). Then they ring the bell and we have twenty minutes of silent mediation. Then they ring the bell and we all stand and the bell rings again and we have 10 minutes of walking mediation. When the bell rings, we return to our seats. The bell rings again, and the person facilitating the evening, the one doing the dharma talk, explains expectations for listening to the dharma talk and the dharma sharing afterwards. Then there is the twenty-ish minute dharma talk. Dharma means teaching.

Since the sangha is affiliated with Plum Village, the teaching is in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh’s engaged Buddhism, a branch of Zen that seeks to apply Buddhist ethics, teaching, and meditation practice to social, political, environmental, and economic justice. Dharma talks we’ve attended have been about many topics including interbeing, Feminism and Buddhism, and breathing with Mother Earth.

After the Dharma talk comes dharma sharing when anyone can share about anything they are practicing or struggling with but mostly people share about something that comes up as a result of the dharma talk. This part is deeply uncomfortable for me and I have yet to share, choosing instead to practice deep listening while others share. I feel like I am getting close to being able to share though because I am beginning to understand sharing isn’t all about me. In fine Buddhist tradition, sharing is a way to help those who are listening by allowing them to practice deep listening and compassion and non-judgment. Plus it helps the person sharing because who doesn’t want to be truly heard with compassion and non-judgment? I just need to get over myself and my fear of being judged. And since we’ve been attending a couple times a month we are getting to know other people and I am feeling like I can trust them.

All that to lead up to a couple short teachings by Thich Nhat Hanh that I listened to early in the week that made a huge difference and are helping me shift perspective. Part of why I was feeling so horrible is because I felt so powerless, I wanted to do something. Well, in Thich Nhat Hanh’s (he is affectionately called Thay, or teacher) teachings, just being is doing. But of course being doesn’t mean sitting on the sofa and staring at the wall, that’s not being. Being is an action verb. To be is to live and to live means to be fully alive and to be fully alive one must be mindful. To be mindful takes a lot of practice and hard work and understanding. It’s sort of like the Buddhist version of “be the change you want to see in the world.” You change the world by changing yourself. Or, like when you are on an airplane and they tell you in an emergency, put your oxygen mask on first before helping others. I am finding that Buddhism in general, and Thay in particular, have much to teach and plenty of instructions on how to go about “being the change.”

So that helped me feel better. Then I started reading A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis by Susan Murphy. I mentioned about two weeks ago hearing an interview with her that was really good. And her book has turned out to be perfect for how I am feeling. Murphy is a Buddhist nun in Australia and her book is about how zen koans are meant to push the listener into a state of uncertainty and not-knowing. From a place of not-knowing all sorts of things are possible. Her book is about using koans to help with the uncertainty of the climate crisis. Actually, she’s moving towards the climate crisis as being its own koan. She talks a lot about not-knowing and how uncomfortable it is and why it is important to learn how to be ok with the discomfort. It’s all quite wonderful and exactly what I need right now. I’m about halfway through the book. I borrowed it from the library but might need to buy a copy of my own so I can dip into it whenever I want to in the future.

If you are interested in reading a non-Buddhist, non-spiritual book on the same topic, then consider Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder fo Being Unsure by Maggie Jackson. Jackson is an award-winning journalist and her book is about why being uncertain is important from a social science and psychological perspective. She employees lots of studies and statistics and none of the Buddhism.

We humans like to be certain about things but as the saying goes, the only sure things are death and taxes. All the other things, we like to delude ourselves into thinking we know what’s going to happen. After so many years of gardening you’d think I would be really good at the whole uncertainty thing. Nope. Uncertainty produces so much anxiety for me that I spiral down close to despair like last week. But I am feeling like I have gained some great tools this last week. Also, James and I took a world detox day on July 4th—our brand of independence, and didn’t check email, read or listen to the news, and stayed off all social media. It was amazing! We plan on making it a regular thing on the first Saturday of every month with the option to expand it to twice a month.

At this point in summer the last three years we were in drought. This year we’ve had so much rain that I have yet to actually need to water the garden because the weather has been good enough to take care of it for me. And the garden is happy!

Today I picked the first green beans. Bush beans since they are ready before pole beans. The pole beans will likely get going in about a week or so and then I will have beans coming out my ears. I’ve also been picking black raspberries, gooseberries and black currants. We’ve been able to add lettuce greens to our salads too. The cherry tomato plants have little green tomatoes on them. There are four jalapeños on the plants with more flowers all the time. The basil is finally big enough to begin picking a leaf or two to add to things. The butternut squashes are vining and I am training them up the ladder trellis.

Today I picked a bunch of the top set onions from the walking onions. James and I peeled off the outer skin and we put them in a quart jar with some fennel and cilantro from the garden and some brine to ferment.

The gundru ferment of arugula leaves we started two weeks ago should be ready to taste about Tuesday. It is certainly stinky—a sour fermenting smell combined with that special brassica smell is a potent combination. Hopefully it will taste good.

The garden wildlife is pretty amazing right now. James and I watched in fascination the other day as a tiny jumping spider on the screen door chased after three gnats that were hovering around. We cheered Spider on as they came so close to catching a gnat several times but missed. We could have watched all day, but didn’t so I don’t know if tiny jumping spider ever got their lunch.

Further afield, there are birds flitting everywhere. Butterflies, bees, so many ladybugs this year, and when I was picking some fennel for the onion ferment, I saw a tiny first or second instar black swallowtail butterfly caterpillar. This means the fennel is about to get chomped, but it’s completely worth it and the fennel will recover.

Something else that has recovered is the summer squash. I removed the squirrel cages today because the sprouts have gotten their second leaves. So now I have more zucchini and crookneck squash plants than I had planned the first time I planted seeds only to have the Wanker squirrel eat them all. If I am counting right, I have one crookneck that survived the first planting. I have four squash from the second planting (zucchini or crookneck I have no idea), and under the now removed cages I have five zucchini and four yellow crookneck. I had five crookneck but I accidentally pulled one out when I was weeding this morning. Since there are now so many squash plants in a small area, I might need to intentionally pull some out. They are so late getting started, it will be a late summer squash bonanza. But better late than never!

As for Wanker the Squirrel. I mentioned last week it seemed they were sick. Well, Monday morning on my way out the front door to work, I found Wanker dead at the foot of Melody Silver Maple. We held a squirrel funeral Monday evening and buried them in a corner of the front garden beneath Melody.

Squirrels are hard to tell apart, but since there has been no squirrel digging or eating in the garden since the squirrel we think was Wanker got sick, I’m pretty sure that was them. However, squirrel shenanigans are not entirely over. It turns out the screen climbing squirrel was not Wanker because we’ve had Spidersquirrel climbing the screen twice this week. The fun never ends!

Reading

• Book: Chicken of the Sea by Ellison Nguyen and Hien Bui-Stafford. This is a children’s picture book written by the son of prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen (who helped write the story) and drawn by the son of prize-winning artist Thi Bui (who helped with the drawings). It is the story of a bunch of chickens who get tired of the barnyard and run off and join the crew of a pirate ship. Utterly delightful!
• Book: Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell. This won the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. It’s a slim novel that takes place over the course of several generations on Vancouver Island in Canada. The story begins a decade or two from now when the oceans are rising, fires are even worse, and people are moving off the island to someplace they hope will be better. At first I though it was going be really depressing, but it ended up exactly right, neither depressing nor hopeful, not apocalyptic but not utopian solar punk either. Quietly realistic. People stay on the island. They adapt. Life is not easy but it’s also not a nightmare. It’s about survival and art and relationships, and how you have no idea what the things you do now will mean for the future.

Quote

“I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

~Robin Wall Kimmerer

Listening

• Podcast: Tech Won’t Save Us: How Degrowth Will Reshape Technology with Jason Hickel. Host Paris Marx talks with Jason Hickel professor and author of Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (a good book, I read it last year). A really good conversation especially if you don’t know what degrowth is and why capitalism needs to go.

Watching

• Series: The Big Door Prize. Have I mentioned watching this before? We saw a couple episodes and then forgot about it and now we are back watching it again and really enjoying it. The Morpho machine mysteriously appears in the grocery store of small town Deerfield. The machine will tell you who you are destined to be. Do you find out what the machine has to say or not? And if you do, are you prepared to accept the answer? It stars Chris O’Dowd who James and I both love.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

This past week James made a braided bread spiced with everything bagel seasoning. We enjoyed some of it with pasta that had leftover tamarind lentils on top. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture before he sliced it in half.

We also had barbecued tofu sliced on homemade whole wheat bread along with sliced radishes, homemade sauerkraut, homemade sunflower cheese, and fresh arugula from the garden with homemade potato chips on the side. Did you know you can make oil-free potato chips in the microwave? Seriously! We discovered this about two years ago and have never looked back.