At Home in the Muddy Water

Winter Harvest

May we exist like a lotus, At home in the muddy water. Thus we bow to life as it is.

Yesterday I harvested some carrots and then made a delicious Moroccan Carrot Salad with some fresh spelt bread for dinner. I was delighted with the sweetness of the carrots and even more delighted that they were so crisp in the middle of January! It is nice to know that some food can be left in the ground and harvested during the winter months. I have often wondered what we would do (will do?) if food couldn't be transported from warmer climates. Saul and I and Mollie want to learn more about canning and drying food, but it's good to know that we can have fresh food in the winter as well.

I am always struck by the amount of dirt that is involved with harvesting vegetables! In the Buddhist book discussion group I belong to at the Yellow Springs Dharma Center we are reading a book called "At Home in the Muddy Water" by Ezra Bayda. The above quote is recited at Zen meditation retreats after each meal. As I was pulling carrots out of the mud yesterday I thought about this quote. When I harvest food that has a lot of mud and dirt on it I become much more aware of all the labor that goes into bringing our food to the grocery store. It has to be planted, harvested, packaged, and transported. When I harvest and clean our food I realize what must be entailed in the cleaning and sorting of food on a mass scale. When we meet our food in the grocery store it is so neat and tidy, the vegetables are similar in size, the roots and tops are trimmed off, there are no bugs...

I think the connection to mud and dirt from which our food comes is actually a great loss to our collective psyche. I like the quote about being at home in the muddy water and I think it also applies to being at home in the dirt and mud that is part of growing food. The quote says that when we are at home in the muddy water we "bow to life as it is." We want life to be clean, neat, and sanitized, but that really isn't how life is at all. "Life as it is" is full of surprises, complications, ups and downs, and unexpected twists and turns. It is messy and dirty and full of bugs! Being more closely connected to real things in life - growing food, fire, animals, weather, the natural world - helps us also to accept life's more harsh realities (loss, grief, pain, suffering) with more grace. When we experience the cycles of life and the muddy water on a regular basis in the natural world, they don't come as such a surprise when we have to face them in our own lives.

We are also disconnected from the value of good soil when we never really see it. When it is all washed away for us by the time we get to the grocery store it is easier for us to build shopping malls and housing developments on essential farmland because we don't have a connection to the value of the soil. It is easier to spray pesticides on our lawns when our yard is just an aesthetic showcase and not a spot of land that is teeming with life.

The lotus is a beautiful flower that blooms upward and draws life from the sun, but its roots also extend into the muddy water where it also draws sustenance. We also draw sustenance from both the sunlight and the "muddy water", in reality and on a metaphorical level. Our dirty, muddy carrots made a delicious, crisp, fresh winter salad, but it took a bit of extra work to get them to the dinner table: bundling up, getting the shovel out of the shed, digging up the carrots on a cold day, bringing the muddy basket into the house, washing the carrots, and taking the compost bucket full of carrot tops outside. The work itself, however, had an intrinsic pleasure that was inextricably connected to the mud and dirt.

Snow Day

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Henry David Thoreau

It snowed today and the school where I work was closed, so I had a day of quiet contemplation by the fire. It is so cozy to watch the snow fall and listen to the fire crackling. Mollie and I took a walk through the neighborhood in the quietly falling snow and greeted our neighbors who were shoveling their driveways. We stopped to watch some robins quarrel in one of our neighbor's trees. I went out to get wood for the stove and then shoveled our driveway. After that I took some photos of the yard because it is so beautiful when it is covered with snow. The creek in the back isn't frozen, but it does have a thick layer of ice on the top, and the gardens are nestled under piles of leaves and now snow. Later I took the compost bucket out to the compost pile. All these small tasks - gathering wood, taking the compost bucket out, shoveling the driveway - are such nice ways to make contact with nature. They force us outside because they are tasks that involve us with life outside the house. I love the connection between our daily life in the house and the life that surrounds us in nature.

Of course all of these encounters with nature occur between and amidst checking our e-mails, getting our electric garage door opener fixed, watching Jane Austin's "Emma" on DVD, and answering our cell phone and our home phone (sometimes at the same time!). Modern family life, even when attended to with conscious awareness, is bound to include all the technological means of communication and functioning that are available to us. After all, we wouldn't be writing this blog if we didn't have some of these things at our fingertips! However, I think making the attempt to connect with nature is important as we connect with the world through our computers. Hearing the water flowing in the creek and the wind blowing snow across the field behind the house is a direct experience that can't be had in cyberspace. This hearing also includes seeing the snow fall softly and silently to the ground; it includes feeling the cold bite of freezing wind on my face; and it includes the fresh feeling of breathing in the winter air. As we chat, blog, skype, twitter, download, upload, and e-mail we can also cultivate activities that take us to the life that meets us outside.

To be admitted to nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded but excludes himself. You only have to push aside the curtain.

Henry David Thoreau

Happy New Year 2010!

New Year's Day 2010

I went out and explored the yard today. It is amazing that there is so much life outside even though everything looks dead and barren at this time of year. We have many perennials that will come up next spring, but it's hard to believe that they will live through the winter.

It is easy to understand why people who lived an agrarian lifestyle celebrated the Winter Solstice - the shortest day of the year which falls around December 21st. We usually try to mark that day by taking a walk in the Glen, cooking a meal of root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips), and lighting candles around the house. This year all the vegetables we cooked for our meal were from our own garden!


One of the reasons we like to pay attention to the Winter Solstice is because it is really where most of our ancient Christmas traditions come from. In fact, most religions have some kind of celebration of light around this time of year, so it seems important to give it a little attention. At the Winter Solstice we know we will begin to see more light each day and can look forward to Spring. I painted the picture below to commemorate the day.



The garden beds are covered with a lot of leaves and when I took photos of them they all looked the same! I've included a few pictures so you can see what they look like. These pictures aren't very interesting except by comparison, so I am putting pictures of the beds in full bloom also.







We went for our regular 2 mile walk as a family and then Saul and I put more wood at the back of the house for easy access when we are ready for it inside. It was cold out, but we have to spend these times outdoors in order to keep up with the wood. It is good for us to make that connection with the outdoors, even though sometimes we would rather just stay warm inside. We have used more wood so far than this year than we expected to, so we are still figuring out how to calculate how much we need for each year.


Saul's Winter Break