It’s planting season on the homestead and this year I’m faced with the same strange dichotomy that I experience every planting season. I love gardening, but I don’t want to do it.
Many people have the idea that vegetable beds and flower patches are beautiful all year, and I’m sure that’s true in the southern US states where the seasons are rain, summer, and hotter summer. But up north we get all four seasons. Summer and fall are lovely. Winter has a certain stark beauty when everything is covered in snow. But the garden gets ugly at the beginning of spring. Weeds pop up before anything else and anything that isn’t covered in weeds is a brown, muddy mess.
So, I have lots of work ahead of me.
I need to pull the weeds, separating out the ones that are good for my rabbits to eat. I need to repair the garden beds that didn’t survive the winter. I put in some perennial flowers last season in the hopes that they would come back again year after year and provide food for the bees.
Some of them survived the winter, but many of them did not. So I’ll need to figure out what to do about that.
I know the joy and satisfaction that I’ll feel in late summer when everything is blooming and beautiful. I can see the smiles on my relative’s faces as I bring them fresh produce for their homes.
“The potatoes are ready and I’ve got some eggs . . . who wants them?” will be the message in the group chat, and I’ll laugh as people race to call dibs.
Just thinking about it gives me a case of the warm fuzzies. But that future seems very far away. Right now it’s cold and rainy, and my world is covered in mud, weeds, and dead plants.
I’m also contending with the sad truth that growing vegetables is a young man’s game. Gardening is quite literally in my blood. There are farmers on both my mother’s and my father’s sides of the family.
When they left farm life to find work in the factories of northern cities they kept that part of their life going with gardens. I spent my childhood playing in family gardens, but somehow I missed the part where they all disappeared.
There must have been a year when I didn’t look out into my backyard to see my dad turning over the soil with his roto-tiller to plant tomatoes, but I can’t think of when it happened. There must have been a day when grandpa didn’t call me to come pick up collard greens for my mom like he did every year, but for the life of me I can’t remember when they stopped coming.
I just know that one year the gardens were there, and the next year they weren’t.
It’s not hard to figure out why they went away. My parents had more kids and my father got busy with work and sports schedules. My grandfather got older, as men tend to do, and one day the hard ground didn’t give way to his garden hoe.
Such is life.
And while I’m happy to start another growing season, I’m also sad. Because I know there will come a summer when my vegetable beds remain empty and my flower beds are choked with weeds.
Two thousand, six hundred years ago, the Buddha named this turn of events. He called it impermanence. And he stated that everything in the universe changes. Impermanence is the cause of great suffering in our lives because things never seem to change in the ways we like.
Our favorite television show goes off the air without filling all the plot holes. Our boss gives us more responsibility without giving us more pay. And even in the moment when we get what we want, even when life moves in exactly the way we’d hoped, we’re reminded that things won’t always be this way.
Joy always turns to ash in our mouth.
And if the story ended there, it would be a very sad one. Our lives would be empty and meaningless as we moved from one inevitable disappointment to another. But Buddhism gives us a solution to this quandary in the First Noble Truth: “Life is Suffering.”
On the surface, this may seem to make things worse instead of better. Life is suffering and life is always changing! But if we take these two facets as the norm, an interesting thing happens. A spotlight is shone on the moments when we are not suffering. We experience the moments when life is exactly as we want it to be with more depth and attention.
Simply put, we stop taking our happiness for granted. And we make a point of enjoying life whenever we are able.
There will come a day when I can no longer pull weeds from my garden beds—when I’m too old and tired to push a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Eventually I’ll sit on my porch in the middle of summer, and there won’t be anything good growing in the garden.
But until that day comes, I’ll cherish every potato that I pull from the ground, every pepper I pick from the vine, and every seedling I nourish in the greenhouse.
I know these happy moments won’t last forever, and that’s what makes them special.
Namu Amida Butsu
Related features from BDG
From Loss to Liberation: How Impermanence Shapes Our Lives
Is It a Quarter-Life Crisis or Just Impermanence? Buddhist Lessons for Young Adults
Befriending Impermanence
The Extraordinary Gift of Impermanence
Buddhistdoor View: Aging Is Impermanence’s Greatest Lesson
Impermanence, Suffering, and Non-Self
