divine – The VeganAsana

Squirrel by Karl (turnbullsx3) on Flickr

Subtitle: Even Those Dang Squirrels are Divine

It’s been a summer of gardening at The VeganAsana house, for the first time in a long time, and the first time ever with more than a dozen or so plants. And it’s been quite a learning experience.

First, there was the reading and planning. I drew plot designs and looked at seeds. I read about the different problems that could crop up in a garden and resigned myself that I would probably have one of them. But, I was ok with that.

I imagined all of the delicious, home grown, organic food that I would produce for my family, their eyes open wide with wonder at the dinner table (cue choir of angels). This was me in May.

Then in June, things were growing. GROWING in my garden! Wow!

You should have seen it. The plants were beautiful and green and strong.

The sunflowers were immense. The tomato plants were getting huge and the zucchini plants were flourishing.

We were eating pounds of green beans. And if the kids didn’t look at me in amazement when I produced plates of fresh green beans, at least they ate them.

And then July happened, and it all went to heck.

The squash and pumpkin plants that I planted by my home-built (with help from my pal, Erica – shout out!) trellis started looking a little dodgy. So did the zucchini. I thought they were being overwatered.

I slowed the watering down and waited on the rain to chill out. And then I noticed some odd sawdust looking stuff at the bottom of the stems. Wait a minute! I read about this! (DUM DUM DUUUUUMMMM!)

The dreaded squash borer! Yep, I had squash borer. Boy oh boy, did I have squash borer. Every single zucchini plant was infested. All the pumpkins were too. Almost all of the winter squash, as well. I was not happy. I was not happy at all.

I removed borers from my plants (I couldn’t kill them, because they are beings after all, so I just relocated them). I reburied stems. They died anyway. Four squash plants and two pumpkin plants survived. I thought horrible things about those borers at first, but then I gradually let it go and got back to the idea that they were just doing their thing, eating their food, raising their little slug-babies.

So, ok, whatever, no zucchini for me. And, also, maybe there would be no pumpkin. Right. And it wasn’t looking good for squash. Sure. I’ve got tomatoes!

But, there was a little hitch in that plan. The mighty mighty (Bosstones? No.) squirrel.

My house is squirrel central. We have had them nesting in our oven vent, living in our eaves, rustling around in our attic, and eating our bird food. It’s squirrel happy town. I just didn’t realize how much they loved tomatoes.

Squirrels adore tomatoes. They will take every single freaking tomato from 12 tomato plants. All. Of. Them.

I cannot even blame them. I love tomatoes too. I like them on sandwiches, alone, in salsa and pico de gallo, and fried up when they are green. I would eat tomato every day and so would the squirrels.

I don’t mind sharing, and at first I thought that maybe they would slow down and just eat their half and left me my half. And, anyway, I still had other stuff.

But then the remaining pumpkin (with little baby pumpkins on the vine, awww) got powdery mildew. And that spread to the squash that were still there. The peppers were too shaded by the tomatoes and stopped growing and I hadn’t thinned the carrots enough, so they were not producing much. And the squirrels were not confining themselves to half.

Bah. Humbug.

So, here we are in September. I have another batch of zucchini plants going and some fall plantings, but my hopes aren’t too high. I did have another meal of fried green tomatoes today (the hot sauce spray seems to be slowing the squirrels down a bit for the green ones, but they still get eaten too fast to ripen), and we’ll see if I get any more.

But, I’m working on my bhakti yoga. Bhakti is about a surrendering to the divine that could mean a God or Gods. Or, it could mean the universal being. But, in any case, it means something about seeing the divinity in self and others. And, I’m pretty sure that includes the borers, and the fungus (among us), and the mosquitoes, and even the squirrels.

So, while I am still going to practice some additional non-harming vegan-like methods of keeping some of my garden for my family next year, I’m not going to be angry at the squirrels for taking the tomatoes or the borers for eating the zucchini stems. Because, they are just doing their thing, and they, too, are divine.

In yoga teacher training this week, we discussed the final niyama, isvarapranidhana. Isvarapranidhana refers to the idea of surrendering to the divine. Coincidentally, the day before I had read the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. In this novel, the main character, Siddhartha, embarks upon a quest to find the divine, and to establish how he might best surrender to it (that’s quite the bullion cube explanation of this story, but it works). As we talked about this niyama in class, and as I considered it afterwards, and during my time observing a class today, I thought about the book and how I might utilize it to work through my own understandings of isvarapranidhana.

For those who haven’t read the book, a little synopsis (plot spoiler ahead). Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin (not to be confused with Siddhartha Gautama – or the Buddha, though a contemporary in the story), very skilled in the practices and philosophies of the Brahmin and a “star” of the community, but he is not confident that what he has learned has really allowed him to fully see, or surrender to, the divine. So, he leaves the family seat and becomes an ascetic, giving up all of the pleasures of the physical form. Eventually, after much time passes, he encounters the Buddha and his teachings, and, though compelled, feels that what he perceives as the dualism of the philosophy is ultimately unsatisfactory. But, this encounter convinces him that the ascetic path is not helping him to reach the divine either, and there is something to be said for the glories and wonder of the physical. He becomes a trader (and lover of a very “learned” woman) and enters a worldly and refined life. This too proves to be not the answer for which his heart is searching. In confusion, he leaves the city and wanders, finally alighting in the company of a simple ferryman he had met years before. As he stays with the ferryman and becomes his apprentice, he finds the answers he has been seeking in the voice of the river and the way in which it speaks of the unity of all things (the Om).

The story is interesting to me as a story, but also as a parable of the life of seeking “TRUTH” and the divine, and the ultimate slipperiness of those ideas. As Hesse writes in the text, “When someone is seeking…it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything…because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.” This feels right to me. When we hold on to one TRUTH and one reality, how can we hope to learn anything beyond or in addition to it? If I already know what “bliss” or “enlightenment” will feel like, what happens if I’m wrong and I actually achieve bliss? Will I even notice that I have?

While the point is made in the text that we have to stop looking so hard for what is the divine, because it’s not something we can find and claim and own, in the end, the experiential world provides Siddhartha with some clues about where divinity exists in unity. “The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth…in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future…Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man [are] only separated by shadows, not through reality…Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.” Nice. Time is a human concept. We put labels on things and place some in the past and some in the future. What if it isn’t a line? What if all that was and all that will be is now? Then the beauty and unity and wonder of every thing is in every thing. Yes? The divisions between are ours – our constructs.

(lifting a stone) “This,” he said playing with it, “is a stone, and will, after a certain time, perhaps turn into soil, and will turn from soil into a plant or animal or human being. In the past, I would have said: This stone is just a stone, it is worthless, it belongs to the world of the Maja; but because it might be able to become also a human being and a spirit in the cycle of transformations, therefore I also grant it importance. Thus, I would perhaps have thought in the past. But today I think: this stone is a stone, it is also animal, it is also god, it is also Buddha, I do not venerate and love it because it could turn into this or that, but rather because it is already and always everything– and it is this very fact, that it is a stone, that it appears to me now and today as a stone, this is why I love it and see worth and purpose in each of its veins and cavities, in the yellow, in the gray, in the hardness, in the sound it makes when I knock at it, in the dryness or wetness of its surface. There are stones which feel like oil or soap, and others like leaves, others like sand, and every one is special and prays the Om in its own way, each one is Brahman, but simultaneously and just as much it is a stone, is oily or juicy, and this is this very fact which I like and regard as wonderful and worthy of worship.”

So yeah, what can it mean to take this idea and apply it to the notion of isvarapranidhana? Well, that’s a challenge, because, as Hesse also says (through Siddhartha), as soon as we put such ideas into words they loose something (which I’m definitely experiencing as I write this post). Something here speaks to me, however. It’s the same something, though expressed in a different way and with more emphasis on detachment and less on love, in Buddhist teaching. While I struggle with the idea of giving up my efforts to any particular god or gods, there is something in this notion of unity and oneness and completeness (yep, having trouble finding words for it because all of our words are based on temporal reality and division).

As Siddhartha reaches his ultimate state of understanding in the text, we learn that he is “one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of things.” That, I think, I can get behind. Of course, maybe the question is how. But, maybe it’s not, as well. Because in seeking a way to surrender, perhaps we fail to really surrender…

Something to ponder (or not).

Namaste,

Tag Archives: divine

Baby’s Got Bhakti: Vegan Organic Gardening with Love

Subtitle: Even Those Dang Squirrels are Divine

Isvarapranidhana and Siddhartha