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.