Blazing Light, Love's Song

The vibe is palpable. Textured and layered. Densified tingles of Mother Earth’s magnetic field ripple through feet adorned only with socks, then up through the body. And an endless variety of textures greet one.

• morning wetness on grass and plants
• dew drops poised gracefully on delicate flower petals
• the stem, leaf, and fruit of each species of plant so distinct to the touch, eye, and one’s consciousness
• the soil textures depending on amount of sun or shade  through the day, quantity of worm castings each season from the kitchen worm bin, and the locations that got homemade compost and got trucked in compost
• the sun, the breeze, the cooling of cloud cover, the shrinking of me as sun intensifies and the stretching of tomato, corn, and bean to drink every photon.

The outside of Purple bush beans are slender, smooth and graceful. They are a long-time favorite. Rattlesnake pole beans (green, long beans with purple striations) seem to initiate an ever-so slight additional texture, kind of like hands that need a little cream. Then the Kentucky blue pole beans (classic green beans) have the outer  texture of really fine-grain sand paper. Yellow bush beans are similar. Then, the Cranberry bush bean comes in. The pod is rougher, tougher, and more stout. They are all string beans, though Rattlesnake and Cranberry can be grown for shelling and dried beans. But, goodness gracious, the textures!

A garden is a sensorial delight! A heaven world for pollinators, worms and underground creature, for devas and other ethereal beings, as well as the human beings that play in this display of emptiness and form.

Emptiness is the mother of all the shapes, textures, scents, herbs and produce. Emptiness is the womb which births food as medicine and herbs to address almost all ills. Emptiness brings forward bright red berries from green leaves, and thorns. Beauty, intimacy, joy, a sense of belonging, of being grounded, embraced, and welcomed are my morning repast and twilight tantra – every day. Woven. From magnetic field to the different softnesses of flower petals, the nowness of a butterfly – defying gravity unto itself – landing on a goji berry flower, so small as to almost not be seen. Emptiness.

The trees parade abundance too! Shapes and types of leaves, differing color tones, spikes on one tree, and the conversations of the Aspens in the wind. Emptiness is cornucopia, diversity, abundance; and yet so terribly misunderstood if its only meaning is void. Void of. Naught. Not.

Early on, Romans and then Christian missionaries, both steeped in philosophies of dominance, of human beings being flawed from the get-go and of rectification or atonement necessary for this, translated sunyata (Sanskrit) as emptiness as in a complete lack. Null. Void and void of. The yes/and of sunyata was totally incomprehensible to them. It continues to be in various circles and conversations.

Yes, lack. As in lacking of glommed-on fabrications of personal mind. Lacking projections that the me casts onto everything.

Yes, void. Just as the space in front of one’s face is void, will always be, and has always been. And, because of this quality, emptiness provides and is the matrix from which all can come. Endless variations, textures, colors, experiences, awakenings.

Sunya, the root word, indicates zero; as in it was not raining, now it is. There were zero buildings or parking lots on such and such meadow, now there are. There were domiciles inhabited by people, now they are not; or now the domicile has returned to the Earth from which it came.

Even as a contemplation or in meditation, emptiness is never a lack. The experience is unmistakenly vibrant, clear, blissful and peaceful all at the same time. No lack there!

So, as the garden enters Autumn phase, its abundance might be more appealing to humans but abundance has never been absent. In every dimension relatedness has invited all beings. Gardening is a lot of work; and it is intimate presence. Every moment. From seed starting to seed gathering; from first taste to last munch. From soil, to compost pile, and back to ground again.

Various buzzing beings hover, nestle, caress, drink, rub, and hum with yum. There is a  general bliss with the variety of flowers. Vegetable plants blooming, from grande winter squash and pumpkin flowers to delicate tomato blossoms to cilantro which is just a mass of white, fragrance, and pollinators. The holly hocks are visited and penetrated by different humming bird species through the day and by humming-bird moths day and night. So intimate.

Beans and peas are often the same color as the stem of the plant. Whether climbing or bush variety, both vegetables can be invisible to the eye. The best way to pick is with your fingers feeling inside the tangle. Upon sensing a bean or pea, one then feels the quality and maturity of the veggie: its length, plumpness, and general readiness. So intimate. Depending on the purpose of string beans, they are picked young and slender for stir-fry, medium length and sweet for pickling, longer for blanching and freezing, while the ones that escaped one’s fingers and glance are fat and several inches long, those are let go to seed.

Shelling beans are delicious cooked young as a string bean. Then, the whole patch is let go to full plumpness and length, let stand to the sun and wind (ground watered, of course), then in late October or early November -if one can dance- you lay all the vines with pods on an old sheet and stomp on it. Dancing breaks the dried, hard beans out of their now brittle pods. Winnow it on a windy day. Let the wind take the chaff as it is tossed in the air. Since my legs can’t dance anymore, I crush the pods into a big metal bowl with garden-gloved hands, then do a version of wind-winnowing. It’s all good. It works. So intimate.

Peas are similarly addressed. Snap peas are picked young and usually don’t even make it to the basket, let alone to the house. Peas for stir fry are picked when long and still flat, but they will grow into shelling peas like the kind frozen in the grocery store when let grow.

At some point the plants will start to yellow from the bottom which indicates a new cycle of intimacy. This one is inside the pod. The bean or pea is storing up its nutrients and sugars for the next generation. The outer pod starts to toughen, not palatable at all to eat. This deters many grazers in Nature – where all these plants come from. It deters human grazers, too. Now, an end of life cycle has begun – same as for us and our pets. The plant is no longer supple, our body does this, too. The plant starts to make new sounds: creaking and moaning with the wind and no longer balanced in itself. Squash plants, summer and winter types, really show this. They topple oddly with the wind; their groundedness no longer stable. Like us. So intimate.

Winter squashes and pumpkins have to be cured before brought in for cold storage. That’s an intimate moment for plant and the human being tending the garden. With the plant’s display of aging and fullness of growth achieved, the gardener cuts the fruit from the mother plant, leaving a stem on the fruit. One notices the universality of umbilical cord in the whole process, an umbilical cord that one has watched feed this baby and make more babies through the season. The stem is left not to be a handle, which probably most people think, but for the same reason that a newborn’s umbilical cord is left with a stem and why mammal mothers don’t remove/chew their newborn’s dangling cord. The pumpkin and the baby have to seal this severing with their biochemistry. Inside the stem, intimately, a capping of life force is going on. Final sugars are congealing in the stem and hardening which signals the outer shell of the winter squash to do the same. For infants and mammal babies something similar is happening. It’s a hardening, in that, nourishment and protection now are an external process.

The pumpkins and squashes harden off in the field or garden bed for several days, then are ready for long term storage. Their life cycle is complete; now they nourish life for others. Be mindful of frost. Frost interacts with the sugar-water which is like unto the water ubiquitous through our bodies. You’ll need to eat those pumpkins right away; they won’t store. It’s all so intimate!