Holy Shit

I think of this November moment when frost has definitely done in the perennial plants and shrubs as manure time. Not to be confused with early November Election year bullshit time. I'm not talking about what's been dropped all over us. I'm saying I've been known at this particular point after Halloween to show up at some innocent person's horse barn like a wayward trick or treater, asking if I might snag a few bags of the poop on the floor. I get away with this because people with horses are especially thrilled to get rid of that shit. It just keeps coming, like the kind we're all shoveling ourselves out of all the time nowadays. Nobody in their right mind wants to take that crap but horse manure is known in gardening lingo as "dressing." It's very useful. So I want it.

Let me tell you, it marinates the soil like hotcakes. Raw manure--from a horse, cow or chicken--is hot stuff. When its fresh, all its chemicals components are cooking so fiercely, the garbage bags I scoop it into really do feel warm. On the ground below rose bushes and other perennials, that heat works like a down comforter to keep these fragile plants from freezing and getting their roots snapped off. Spreading it around is like sending the plants to Florida for the winter.

Eventually of course the conversion of powerful chemicals like nitrogen and potassium cools down. It couldn't happen at a better time. Snow melt and spring rain push those powerful nutrients down into the soil just as the plants are waking up and hungry for breakfast. Do they ever eat it up.  You want to talk about an obesity epidemic...those shit infested plants double or even triple in size, fulsomeness I like to interpret as a thank you for giving them Florida without the hassles and bling.  

Seeing the miracles this shit can make, I totally get the guru spiel about not getting the full bloom of enlightenment, aka liberation from suffering, without applying fertilizer. And what is the fertilizer the gurus unanimously recommend to grow enlightenment?  Our own personal shit. If we don't have any neurosis, craziness, regret and confusion, we've got nothing to work with, nothing to realize or purify and so end up in the breakdown lane on the path.  Here's the exception that proves the rule of emptiness: tiz better for a meditator to have dirt on hand than to be empty-handed. This time of year reminds me how sacred shit can be. The Dharma, just like the garden, is a place where if you got it, you can flaunt it.







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