Yours in the Dharma:  Essays from a Buddhist perspective by Sandy Garson

This blog, Yours in the Dharma by Sandy Garson, is an effort to navigate life between the fast track and the breakdown lane, on the Buddhist path. It tries to use a heritage of precious, ancient teachings to steer clear of today's pain and confusion to clear the path to what's truly happening.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The Kindness of Dangers



I hold few certainties, but one self-evident truth that won’t let go is how food here in Maine tastes better than food back in California. This probably sounds like madness or heresy because California food is so glamorously famous—as golden as the state itself is hyped to be. And who thinks “food!” when they think of the frozen north that is wintery, stony Maine? Frankly, not even people who live here. When I told my doctor this past weekend that good eating was a big reason I was so glad to come home, she told me I was obviously blinded by emotion, or maybe just blindsided by wishful thinking.

As I have done many times, I explained that although my taste buds believe food grown in the alluvial soils of the Kennebec River outshines all other produce in the world, I could never explain why. Then my old friend Sam Hayward, Maine’s renowned five star chef, got invited to a vaunted culinary cook-off at a northern California winery chosen because it featured picture perfect vegetable gardens. Sam was told to help himself to whatever he needed to create a signature meal. As he reported when he returned, he kept running from the kitchen to pick more and more from the garden because no matter how many zucchini or beans or whatever he harvested, he just couldn’t get the intense flavor he was used to. “That produce looked gorgeous,” he said, “but I couldn’t coax taste from it.”

Sam was so perplexed, when he got home he went straight to his local farmer to get exactly the amount of produce he’d picked on the initial round in California. Then he made the same recipes. Flavor flooded back.

Discussing this with his farmer, Sam figured out that those annoying boulders the spring thaw shatters and tosses to the topsoil every spring from the depths of the deep freeze continually enrich the soil with minerals, and help to aerate it. Melting snow, cresting rivers and spring rains organically irrigate it. Best of all, the short, tense growing season that follows, infamously marked by erratic weather, makes growing an adventure race in which extremes of hot or cold, dry or wet breed an ever-changing array of temperatures and insects the plants have to work furiously to defend against.

In other words, the difficulties are actually blessings. In order to survive in perilous conditions, vegetables have to rev up their energy to quickly produce extraordinary amounts of the chemical hormones that translate as flavor. So, while they may appear small, blemished and/or stubby, Maine carrots, strawberries and tomatoes are likely to be tasty.

This unexpected truth of suffering was dittoed a few years later at a northern California winery famous for producing incomparable zinfandel and infamous for not producing enough to satisfy the hunger for it. The sign on its unmarked gate said: “One bottle per group.” Since it was a chilly, damp February day with no grapes growing and nobody else in sight, the proprietor himself came out to let me in and I got to brazenly ask how he managed to make such unique wine in the midst of so many neighboring competitors. “Because,” he said, “I’m the only one who doesn’t irrigate the grapes. I make them fight to survive. That makes them rev up all the chemical compounds they’ve got. I believe the hard time they have makes them flavorful.” When I told him Sam’s theory of Maine vegetables, he gave me two bottles of his wine.

Yesterday I made jam from two quarts of Kennebec River strawberries, pretty much the way I have for the last 35 years. My body can’t tolerate sugar so I have always ignored the recipes that come with the canning jars, telling you to put in seven cups of sugar, and put in a little more than one, the vital minimum required for preservation. This produces jam that won’t last forever in the refrigerator but I can eat it and everybody seems to love because, as they keep saying when they ask for more, they can actually taste the fruit.

For the last three years, as a kind of experiment, I have made strawberry jam in California from fruit produced by a vaunted organic strawberry farm. All of it is consistently photogenic and also so consistently gigantic, I could use any berry for a badminton shuttlecock. Even though I put in the same amount of sugar for the same measure of berries I use in Maine, the result is always mawkishly sweet with few chunks of berry remaining in the jar. The California berries collapse into bland sugar that nobody compliments and I can’t eat.

This morning the goat cheese lady who wins awards for everything she can produce told me the secret was in the forage. "I've been out to Point Reyes to see the famous dairy herds. Our goats here eat fresher forage because it dies back in wintertime and gets born fresh every spring. That's what people are tasting in my cheese."

So good looks aren’t everything, convenient climate isn't a head start, and big isn’t necessarily better. There is reason to rejoice in at least this truth of suffering. It hardens us up to withstand the elements by developing do or die all the coping skills we’ve got. It brings out the best in us. Maybe that’s why everybody wants to have at hand what the late Gordon Lightfoot called “rainy day people.” Substance is always delicious.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/


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Friday, July 03, 2009

WHY KNOT



The inspiring website, www.ecobuddhism.org, not only has His Holiness the Karmapa’s aspirations and instructions for saving the Earth, but also teachings by my beloved guru Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche. The site has posted one from Oxford, England late in 2007 in which Rinpoche candidly addressed the sad subject of denial. After he made aspiration prayers for the environment, some very clear headed human asked if we all weren’t behaving exactly like the Tibetan monastic and social elite of Lhasa back in 1950, myopically partying as usual despite abundant evidence that a Chinese Communist invasion had become a clear and present danger. Here is the exact question:

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche observed in his memoirs that Tibetans simply did not want to hear about the impending Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet in 1950, even though there were obvious and abundant signs. Is there a parallel with the global human situation now?

And here is Rinpoche’s answer: “This is pretty much the same phenomenon Tulku Urgyen was describing. It is very parallel. Because it is a parallel situation, we need to wake people up about global warming. We should make aspirations and recite prayers. And we need to have a lot of publicity. These two together will make powerful, effective action.”

Lamentably, we Americans seem to have supersized the Tibetan way: we are in denial about denial. All the news fit into print keeps revealing how ineffective aspirations, publicity and facts are in even denting the armor of entrenched habit. Story after story says this country is belly up. States can’t pay their bills, sick people can’t either, 10% of the working public can’t get a job and 10% of houses have been foreclosed.
China doesn't want our money to be the gold standard, Iran and Pakistan don't want our politics, Europe doesn't want our advice, nobody wants our shoddy products. The United States of America is as bankrupt as General Motors for the same reasons: the past is past and we don't want to make the changes necessary for the present.

Someone should give the Senate and its corporate handlers a prize for defying gravity. Now is the time, yet it is beneath them. They and we are so stuck in old ways, there are no wheels in revolution. Howard Dean has diagnosed these people as seriously addicted to same old same old. The so called climate change bill passed in time for Independence Day doesn't change anything about our dependence on fossil fuels, least of all dirty coal burning, and the gutting of national health care seems a ditto. With health insurers using our premiums to set our representatives against our best interests, you don't have to wonder who those hired voting hands really represent. Welcome to supersized NIMBY. Change? Not In My Banner Years.

The news, which includes stories that not even Obama wants to make minor changes like abolishing the discharge of gays from the military even if he knows it's the morally correct thing to do and would snap everyone to attention, defies the law of impermanence. You can't help but think the evident yearning polls show in this country for financial fairness, medical attention and environmental fitness--for radical change--is being almost as ruthlessly repressed as the yearning for voice and democracy in Iran. No matter how many Paul Reveres ride the news cycle warning us what could be coming, nothing happens-- except the guys at Goldman Sachs get even bigger bonuses, with a side of blessings from the Federal Reserve, dba the Federal Deserved.

Addiction to the status in the status quo and the instant high of fundraisers blinds people to the present fast fading fate of planet Earth and equally fast fading glory of this country. That's the sadly exact replay of the comfortable Lhasa elite. With their own health care, private planes, limousines and prepaid travel, our so-called representatives have become Mad Magazine cover boys grinning like a good Lhasa aristocrat: What me worry? As though they're going to be immune to climate change and carried heavenward in some political rapture, they turn their tongue to the other cheek, their one and only concept of Other. Except of course for the soul mate in Argentina.


As it's portrayed daily in the news, Wall Street and Washington business as usual has become a great visualization of everything the Buddha listed as a cause of suffering: attachment (to the past), aversion (to change), massive ego or self-interest uber alles and massive denial of the absolute truth of interdependence and impermanence. Throw in lack of generosity, discipline, exertion, and wisdom. America has indeed become Tibet in 1950. Even though we know what happened next, we have made no change in the denial of change.

Alarms may go off, but they don’t necessarily wake people up. That's the truth of suffering.


~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/


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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.

Yours In The Dharma 2001-2008, Sandy Garson @copy: 2001-2008 Sandy Garson
All rights Reserved