Show and Tell: My Summer

Summer's over. I know because Labor Day was days ago. Who cares that the equinox, the authentic end of summer, is three weeks away, proving how artificial our designations are, just like the Buddha said. The beach towels have been put back. Now is the time everyone in first grade and on Facebook is doing show and tell about how they spent their summer, and I got caught up in this surge of self-expression and confession. My labor of Labor Day was to sit down and take dead reckoning, so I could show what I did under the sun and tell where it got me.

What jumped out right away is that I may have broken a world record. I have six blueberry bushes, here in the cold, acid soil famous for blueberries, but I did not get as much as one hint of blue on any of them. Not one. Granted, they have been struggling over the years from lack of water, sun and attention, but at least they used to begrudge me a cupful of berries to remind me why I brought them here. Now that I've actually spent this summer watering and weeding and fending off the Japanese beetles, they gave nothing. Just like a guy you start being nice to, they snubbed me.  Believe it or not, a farmer says I am probably not doing enough. Maybe they need special acid adding fertilizer to combat their complacency.

Black raspberries were the other berries I tended. I dedicated them to the taste of small batch black raspberry ice cream that's hard to find. Nobody sells black raspberries, so if I want to enjoy them, I must grow my own. That's why I make sure my scraggly canes get water and sun and motherly love, even when other plants don't. This year I got about a dozen berries, except I didn't. I was proudly watching those precious black thimbles plump up, being very generous with my limited water, waiting for the right moment, and when I thought it had come, I went with great expectations to pick and everyone of them was gone. A clean swipe. Not one telltale trace of the culprit on canes so hidden inside my property, nobody but me knew they were there.

I had to go to the farmers' market to buy berries, green cardboard box after green cardboard box of them. This was a must-do. Berries say summer in all its lushness. Berries say Nature has a present for your happy being on earth day. And they are vegan so there's no arguing over whether you should eat them or not. Berries are right here right now.  Help yourself. Their later is jam, the warm comfort of June in January.

That part is do it yourself so I made lots of jam, a decade high of least 3 dozen jars. It's an instinct, a habit, an attachment. I have been making jam for over 40 years and now people wait for it; they actually expect it. It's become their habit and attachment. Sometimes think I get invited to dinner or get silly holiday gifts because people know I'm going to reciprocate with a jar of my preserves. Who knew in our time of supersonic jets and supercharged communication, handmade jam would be something to cherish?

That's heartening. It means we do want to remember we're still human and we get it that life has highs and lows, seasons and sometimes somebody stops the mad scrambling for money and makes something old fashioned authentic just for the love of it. My bit for upping our sorely neglected humanity skills is to keep making jam until I pass the tradition on. I've been looking for an heir and this summer I found one. My childhood friend's granddaughter clambered onto a chair, said "give me that", took my wooden spoon and with beaming delight of a five-year-old watching a magic trick, stirred up a batch of peach. She had been waiting for this since last summer when she was 4 and we made blueberry.  She just loved the way the blueberries suddenly became "schmush" and schmush suddenly became jam she could take home in jars. She already knew who she was going to give this year's peach batch to.  "Mommy, Nana, Trini... she's the babysitter... . I want to make apricot next time," she said, as she went triumphantly out the door in bright pink crocs. "She doesn't even like apricot," her mother wrote me from Manhattan, "but she can't wait to make jam with you. You are making memories that will last a lifetime, providing an experience she wouldn't normally have."

Speaking of experience, we had six--make that: endless-- weeks of cold dreary rain when I wished like hell for sun. Then miraculously we got ten days of hot sun with high humidity so to make the miasma go away I prayed for rain. Obviously somebody heard me because we got more rain than anybody needs. I had to  pray for sun. Really, who wants tans and swims and the slam of the screen door to be rained out?  Apparently the universe got it because the sun showed up. It must have started having a really good time because it just stayed there in the sky shining like hotcakes for weeks and weeks...three and a half nonstop weeks. I got so worried about my water supply and my exposure to UV rays, I prayed for rain. Yes, I spent my summer being just like the annoying cat who wants to be in when it's out and out when it's in: never satisfied. Right on, Buddha.

I spent a lot of time fighting with "things." You know: trying to totally shut that baggie with the infernal pink and blue lines, dealing with that idiotic plastic piece that always falls off the so-called "zip lock" bags, straining to snap in the closer on a bra, struggling to open an unused envelop sealed by the humidity, getting bird shit off my car's sun roof...all those damned things that frustrate the hell out of you and your patience and unleash cursing. Until you realize you're letting yourself be humiliated by inanimate "things." How sick is that?

I also spent a lot of time, read that: a lot of time, fighting very animated things, breaking the vow not to kill by attacking Japanese beetles with all the verve and gusto of the Egyptian military eradicating Islamists. I had the same excuse: I was protecting living things from destruction, struggling to sustain stability. And I did. After six years, the flowers actually opened on my rose of Sharon. Who knew they are that pretty: dainty carmine-streaked white roses.

Alas, my bad karma for the massacres ripened immediately. The plant for which I killed those invaders most energetically was a gorgeous full bodied knotweed, which is one spectacular weed. It has spiky red flowers that rise exuberantly from skinny stems like raised hands waving for attention. It has Persian provenance. It has lots of busy bees. Since bees are dying in droves everywhere, I figured it was my duty to keep them keeping on here. That's why one night during a drought, I took a bucket of kitchen sink water out to douse the bush and before I even knew it, something malevolent stung me.  In the wrist. I never saw it coming. My wrist just swelled like hell and got red and hot and I saw two mini fang-like marks. I had to curtail my activities to keep covering them with the old-fashioned poultice of baking soda and water.

In the midst of all this home work, I branched out, which is to say, I networked. I made a huge effort to stop staying home and got the good luck to meet people who live right here in my rural vicinity, people who turned out to be worth knowing. One of them is an American brahmin Zen priest who has established a Zendo in his house thousands and thousands of kilometers from where the Buddha began, right here in my boondocks. At my convenience at a dinner table about three miles from me was a Zen priest of impeccable lineage (San Francisco Zen Center no less) who two miles away organized sitting meditation six mornings and five evenings a week with a longer Saturday morning session that included his talk. He had a football build and a shaved head and so oozed that fierce inscrutability of Zenjis, even amid rapt dinner conversation, that as soon as he'd gone, the other fellow at the table blurted: "This guy really knows something; you can just tell."

As it happened, the zendo turned out to be an option to the startling new "Dzogchen Meditation Center" a mile away. I pass it almost every time I leave my house and I know the fellow who established it. I think I've already said, earlier in the summer, one of Rinpoche's special lamas, who started calling from afar, told me to do more meditation, and bingo! two centers for it suddenly appeared in walking distance of my house. Was that a hint or what? Well, I didn't take the hint. I just couldn't rouse myself to get to 7:30 AM Zazen or 9 AM Sunday morning Dzogchen or miss the Saturday morning farmers' market. It was just too much to ask of me.

I figured--okay, I rationalized, I could find out what that the Zen priest knew with a little DIY. That's the craze these days, everything DIY, right? So when I felt I needed meditation time, I got into the hammock. I lay on the lounge chair on a gorgeous cloudless day to practice open sky: mixing my mind with its infinite space. I slipped into my bright yellow kayak and paddled to the rhythm of mantra. I was here and now: summer on the water. Summer in the water when my karma took a nosedive and the kayak tipped over. Hint hint.

I did make an effort. I drove six hours through blinding rain, thunder and the horrors of Massachusetts traffic to hear the one among Rinpoche's precious now designated for teaching in the West as his "heir."  Tulku Damcho spent the weekend going over the lists compiled by the great organizational genius, Gampopa, who launched our lineage. Nearly top of the list among the first of the lists of what to  do to get to enlightenment was appreciating the importance of having an animate, healthy human body. Above all we need to appreciate the crucial gift of life, like the gift of handmade jam. Since we can't know when life's going to end, we don't have a moment to waste. Now is the time.

Six hours in Sunday traffic gives you a lot of that time to think about life's chances, and how I spent the precious sunny days of summer using the good time of life to have a good time. Whoever stole those black raspberries, as my Tibetan goddaughter would insist, removed an obstacle for me because this summer I had the good karma to get out and meet a Zen priest only two miles away. I had the good karma to keep the jam tradition going. I had the good karma to get a message about how annoyed I get fighting with things. The one day I vowed to be less leaden and more aware of nimbleness, I stepped into the kayak and I immediately capsized, spilling me and my clothing into the sea. There was a hint that upending isn't as devastating as I always fear. I certainly hope that's the takeaway because this summer I was exposed to and surrounded by so much Dharma, yet I didn't take advantage of my good fortune. I turned into one of those six blueberry bushes that wouldn't produce a berry. Obviously I need a dose of special "acid" releasing fertilizer, read that "hard times" or as the Buddha would say, suffering, to combat my complacency. Maybe that's why winter's coming like the rains after all that sun.


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