Mid-day Meditation – Gardening Practice

Join me for a short sharing and meditation from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, True Love: We have to learn the art of transforming compost and flowers. Look at the flower: it is beautiful, it is fragrant, it is pure; but if you look deeply you can already see the compost in the flower. With meditation, you can see that already. If you do not meditate, you will have to wait 10 days to be able to see that. You look deeply at the garbage heap with the eye of a meditator, you can see lettuce, tomatoes, flowers. That is exactly what the gardener sees when he looks at the garbage heap, and that is why he does not throw away his waste materials. A little bit of practice is all you need to be able to transform the garbage heap into compost and the compost into flowers.  The same is true of our mental formations, which include flowers like faith, hope, understanding, and love; but there’s also waste material like fear and pain. The flowers on its way to becoming refuse, but the refuse is also on its way to becoming a flower. This is the non-dual duality principle… : There is nothing to throw away.