Keep Heart

May our heart’s garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers – Thich Nhat Hanh

It is hard to embrace this moment as a time of awakening and blooming when we are surrounded by so much suffering. Outdoors, I am spending most of my time in the backyard, enjoying the surrounding gardens. This is the perfect place to be reminded exactly how growth works.

Before everything in the garden is in bloom, it is stark and gloomy. The death that preceded it nourishes a new beginning. There is not much to see above, but underneath is teeming with life; preparing to emerge as something beautiful to the observer. When we see it, we remember everything has it’s place in a cycle of life.

We do need to tend to the gardens of our cultivation. We cultivate our home and garden for the purpose of helping us live well. Our heart’s instinct to grow and love must be similarly cultivated in order to flourish in our modern world. Just as too many are deprived of livable environments, too many are deprived of the knowledge that they are both lovable and loving. What can emerge as something beautiful is deprived of what it needs to survive. If we see the whole of life as our garden, we must tend to this problem.

If we have been paying attention, we have been shaken by this pandemic. We are becoming aware of the depth of our connection to one another at the same time. We are waking to the fact that there is far more below the surface than we may have once thought. No one is immune to this disease, just as no one was ever immune to the multitude of problems we were once quick to ascribe to others. In short, our collective consciousness is teeming with life.

Will we approach this gloomy, soiled and wormy mess with terror? Or, will we give it the sunshine, air and water it needs to emerge as something beautiful? Our incredible, fragile, pounding, broken and irreplaceable hearts must now decide. For some, it is a greater act of faith than it will be for others. It may surprise us just who has to leap the furthest.