For landscape designer and writer Zachiah Murray, walking into a garden is like walking into a meditation hall. She becomes grounded. Like the conscious energy that lingers even after the practitioners have gone, the plants call her to the present.
But then Murray is practiced in the Buddhist art of returning her mind to the present, and returning it again and again: she spent months walking blindfolded and barefoot through the thick wilderness of New Zealand, learning to see nature without seeing, and four years studying mindfulness and meditation at the Meru Interfaith Seminary at the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment in San Jose, where she was deeply influenced by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh.
Murray’s recently published book, Mindfulness in the Garden: Zen Tools for Digging in the Dirt (Parallax Press, $16.95), reminds us that the mind is an important tool to have in the garden, that it can softly tread the intertwined paths of the living, breathing world of plants and the inner landscapes they reveal in the one who tends them.
“Often our spaces are a reflection of what’s happening within us. So when we weed, it gets a lot more simple, and we get a lot calmer and quieter,” says Murray. We are sitting in the loudest breakfast joint in midtown, where pots and pans clash and babies squeal, but Murray, with her short curly head of hair and steady hazel gaze, is unfazed by the wall of noise. She blesses her food with a sanskrit prayer and tucks in.
I am familiar with the purifying clarity that comes from weeding. It’s similar to the feeling you get after you clean your room, and it recalls the Japanese concept of misogi—creating order from chaos. It’s a mental benefit to gardening often overlooked in favor of the more obvious physical and economic benefits of growing one’s own food, and another reason why anyone with space—rented or other—should consider taking the time to connect fingers to earth, seeds to soil.
“It’s an interesting turning point when you start to take responsibility even though you don’t own something,” says Murray about the decision to garden on land we rent but do not own. “It’s a deep spiritual teaching that we don’t really own anything anyway if we can’t take it with us, right? The only thing we can take with us is how we develop ourselves as spiritual beings, as consciousness.”
I recall my recent ambition to do just that, and three failed attempts to grow carrots from seed. All three times, voracious weeds sprouted in the places I had anticipated dainty carrot tops, and the sprouts that did emerge were pecked down to little nubs by a gaggle of baby quails. Naturally I shouldered the blame, cursing my childlike hope for carrots.
When we accept that we aren’t actually in control of anything, we suffer less, responds Murray.
“The depth and truth of who we really are reveals itself perhaps more in our response to our challenges… When taken in the proper way, challenges can snap us back to our senses,” she advises in the chapter “When Seeds Don’t Grow.”
Leaving the trampled ego behind, I returned last night to the site of failed carrots, removed my shoes and pushed the tiny seeds one more time into forgiving soil.
