What is it about the presence of spring that turns neighbors into worker bee beavers glued to a mission of recreating a better looking yard than last year? They put in over forty long a** hours of work M-F only to spend 48 more hours on Saturday and Sunday bending over, chopping, digging, replacing and whatever else is required to match the picture on the cover of Home and Garden.
The more I drove down our quiet city street the larger the guilt bubble expanded in the core of my gut; I’m not a Home Depot/Lowes lovin shape shifter with gifted powers to unmask the hidden art in a hillside more ancient than Native American’s arriving BC. The perfect yard isn’t long slivers of grass blades that tickle the areas between your toes in ways no human can excite the heart’s invisible passion.
I love it when the six pack of white tail deer wander into the rose garden and spend twenty minutes devouring the leaves. I laugh a child’s giggle when momma flops down near a gnome and acts as if she’s talking to something made of ceramic. I crave the true to life beaver that spends its afternoons gnawing away on sticks stuck in mud then hauls it away to the assumed secret hiding place.
Therefore I keep my circle 110% Carolina.
Maybe I’m wrong but the lack of sidewalks shouldn’t be stacks of perfectly cut twigs for the trash people to easily pick up. As bad as I feel about being stuck behind a Sunday driver in the rat race, I’m not afraid to respect everybody’s journey toward locating inner peace outside each of their separations between church and state.
My biggest weakness is a true love for the bald tree. A single white twenty five foot sky scratcher that’s given up on sprouting lime colored leaves in spring. Every year I’m scolded by the passerby’s to let the tree go, “Cut it up into itty bitty pieces and give it back to nature!”
What gives? Bald isn’t just a human trait! The bald eagle is unforgettable! South Carolina peaches aren’t hairy they’re fuzzy which according to some rule books is bald. The Chinese Crested dog is bald. Bald Head Island is for tourists and what about how Mt St Helens suddenly becoming bald in the 80’s?
I can’t imagine walking up to a bald headed man and saying, “You’re numbers up.”
Buddhist Monk Thick Nhat Hahn calls each experience shared in our front yards a flash of insight. Every family with their yards of plentiful flowers, brick design, paths of stone and little water fountains of peace has good intention, the main being an unexposed strength to preoccupy what your job or career has taken away. Your front yard is the best medicine for stress.
No matter what you choose to bring color to this spring and summer Thick Nhat Hahn explains that each creation separates you from the dictator that prevents you from enjoying the wonders of life. Your first step is mindfulness. Putting yourself in the present.
Research shows that what we put into our front yards is the exact opposite of what we’ve been trained to do in a world of business. Corporate America expects you to do several things at one time. Every new shape of technology may promise an easier way to perform our duties but in the end it leaves the door open for you to do even more work.
Front yards don’t demand multitasking. Mindfulness teaches us the correct way to succeed in happiness; one vision or project at a time. Front yards give us focus which serves as an invitation to other living things such as deer that eat my flowers, beavers that take down innocent seedlings and crows that bark louder than a dog six blocks from a blaring radio another state away.
You can’t buy the ability to bring joy to suffering. I don’t give a rats butt if you’re a CEO or a billionaire with a television show, without mindfulness and the presence of the present you are in essence giving permission to the dictator to continue controlling your deepest wish to be nothing more than happy.
At work there is fear, pain, sickness and weakness from the strongest sales team, doubt, pouting in corners, shame, hatred and jealousy. Your front yard tells a different tale. I have a bald tree with no leaves that happens to share the funniest stories! When I’m not listening being bald makes him so different that no matter how clouded the mind and imagination is it’s got the power to reach out and say, “I need your belief in the now to be in the now.”
End the suffering…befriend your front yard while allowing others to do the same in their own way. Learn to walk in true peace by helping to creating it.
I will always believe in you first…
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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