The Hacker Life

For the last two weeks, I've been playing what feels like God but I'm Buddhist, so I'll go with playing Mother Nature...because, well,  that's what I've been doing in the yard.  I obsessively go outside armed with clippers, shovels, hoe and bags of shit because, or so I think, right now I need to remedy achingly ugly personal circumstances and bring sunshine back into my life. A circumference that's achingly beautiful created by my own wit for everyone to see feels like Aha! Take that! 

Scheming my very own site/sight for sore eyes has not been easy. For one thing, Mother Nature has such copious and fiercely stubborn networks, I don't think even the Chinese military could infiltrate them. She's got underground filaments running everywhere: under stonework, around tree roots, through hard-pack gravel. They even push through clay. Dandelions, cud, crabgrass and strangling purple vetch reach further afield than Comcast promises and pretends. Their social networking puts Facebookers to shame. Every day I am out there digging, yanking and clipping endlessly thick tangles, pulling one thread after another, proud I've whacked the hell out of those weeds only to find more greeting me a few days later.  These "Likes" are stronger than Stutznet because, even with the NSA and CIA by my side, I don't think I could hack deep enough or far enough or fast enough for mission accomplished. Buddha knows I have tried but as Karmapa likes to say: nothing happens.

Of course by definition, a weed is an organic plant an MBA has not yet found some use for. Many if not most of the elegant perennials we treasure in our gardens have shockingly humble origins as somebody else's wild thing. Statuesque siena September Eupatorium, which I admit I have lovingly amassed, is familiarly known --and sold--as Joe Pye Weed.  Here's what, ta da,  Fine Gardening says about my perennial Cranesbill geraniums: "Geraniums occur as wildflowers widely—around the world from alpine slopes to low grasslands and woodlands—so there’s likely to be a geranium for any garden... ." The thing about being Mother Nature is that I get to decide what use they are for mine.

The stupid thing about me out there tearing up and cursing dandelions is that I like to eat dandelion greens at the start of spring. Their unique ability to flush the body of toxins is Nature's perfect cure for winter sluggishness. I buy the greens at farmers' markets or organic food stores and although they're three times the size of what's in my yard, they are still just dandelion greens. The stuff I am furiously yanking out as toxic waste. 

Obviously I am not with the program. Mother Nature apparently adores these garish little creepers that polka dot the place and wants them around because she has endowed them with the sneakiest ways of thriving to spite my massive eradication effort.  She won't even let me mow them down. They have the damnedest habit of falling over, lying down and playing dead when my cheap push mower rolls over them, so they can bounce right back as soon I move on. You have no idea how maddening it is when you think you have a weapon of mass destruction to get the finger like that dozens of times. And even if I do manage to decapitate one or two, I only make matters worse: everybody knows those yellow heads become that gray fuzz the wind so effortlessly carries and carelessly sows. Dandelions have set up a survival system that makes all those Congressional incumbents look punk.

But I have to say it's just as polarized. Dandelions, purple vetch, cud, tansy and crabgrass, aka witchgrass... everybody is on one side or the other, absolutely unwilling to reach out and cross over.  Mother Nature loves these plants because she keeps 'em coming. Polite society hates them because it has us paying millions to "weed them out." They make a place look derelict and you look slovenly. Just like the Buddha said: we all see the world exclusively through our own experience.

So digging up dandelions and hacking through vetch networks to make way for impatiens, salvia and agertum makes me, at least right here in my own little world, the supreme being who decides what lives and what gets thrown into the compost pile to reincarnate. Oops, wait... I don't dare throw dandelions, tansy, crabgrass or vetch into the compost pile because they'll easily commandeer it. Truly getting rid of this stuff is actually a humungous problem worthy of a strategist not connected to Iran or Afghanistan or the ever faltering Democratic Party. This is a huge obstacle to me getting my way right now.  And because I so badly want to be in control of something, this insult feels like "do you get it now?" ploy Mother Nature thought up to teach me to live with what's happening--without thinking it's just one more depressingly ugly circumstance I have to fix.


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