Pumpkins

Our writing circle has convened the morning before Halloween, and Sonya, just back from time with the Dalai Lama has brought beautiful Buddhist wisdom to inspire our writing today. But I want to write about pumpkins. I try re-reading her prompts, all the while something inside me impatiently fidgets and squirms waiting to write about pumpkins.

The pumpkins are lined up in double rows on the kitchen counter waiting to be cut and scraped and baked. Their rock hard exteriors will pucker and darken as the oven’s heat softens their inner flesh, readying it to become pies and soup. They will scent and warm the house while the oven transforms them from bountiful harvest to delicious ingredients.

Seeing them on the counter, the children squeal and lick their lips as they proclaim their love of pumpkin pie. They pat and stroke them and choose their favorites by size and shape. Nate has asked for pumpkin loaf this year along with the pies, and Anabella wants pumpkin butter. I like this idea of pumpkin bread and butter.

Pumpkins are my favorite things to grow, with corn and sunflowers running a close second. Something stirs in me when the raised beds have all been prepared for planting and it’s time to head off to buy the seeds. There’s always a grandchild along for the seed buying and we giggle when we see the little packets with a carved Jack-o-Lantern on the front. While the child is excitedly predicting GIANT pumpkins, I am caressing the packet of Sugar Pie seeds and again marveling, as I do every year, that this little rattling envelope purchased on this warm spring morning will be the source of our Thanksgiving pies on a distant autumn afternoon. To me this is proof of the existence of magic.

It’s become a ritual for us to buy a packet of Ghost Pumpkin seeds every year as well. The children love the spooky thought of ghostly gourds, but no matter how lovingly we plant and tend them, we never see them come forth. While weeding and watering the Jack-o-Lanterns and Sugar Pies, I think of the Ghosts growing robustly in some unseen realm and fulfilling their spectral destiny out of the range of my vision.

The pumpkins have a bed all to themselves. Once planted, the bare earth stares back blankly day after day until that special day when the fat sprouts spring out of the ground with their seed hats still attached.

Watching them grow still fascinates me. Long leggy vines that go on and on to wherever they like. This year some of them wandered over to the corn bed and climbed the stalks. The bendable stickers on their sturdy stems don’t quite sting, but they do discourage anyone from trying to divert the growing path of these determined orbs.

The leaves get so large that the children call them gi-normous and humongous and speak of garden fairies living beneath them.

When the glorious saffron yellow blossoms appear, I think of my recipes for squash blossom sautés but can never bring myself to disturb the plants’ intentions by picking them.

When the fruit is set, I watch and wonder which ones will ripen, remain attached to their stems, and swell up fat and roundy. A few will cast off their umbilical stems and stay small and hard. They’ll go into the chicken coop where the hens will diligently peck away at them until their treasure trove of smooth ivory seeds is revealed and voraciously devoured.

Pumpkins are harvested last, long after the zukes and cukes and corn. I wait until the last possible moment because gathering them signals the end of the year’s garden. I cut them free from their now tough stems with both sadness at the end of another season, and relief at the end of the work of growing food. Loading them into the wheelbarrow, I feel satisfied and abundant.

The day after Halloween I’ll see a few pumpkins shattered in the street when I walk the dogs – sad remnants of the prior night’s raucous revelry. Our pumpkins will have two or three more days of being lovingly lauded on the counter, before taking their turn in the oven. At their Thanksgiving appearance a few weeks later, I’ll remember their journey from seed to pie, and give thanks for the wonder of pumpkins.

You're Right

A Sufi teaching story featuring the wise fool Nasruddin has been dancing through my mind lately. I was asked to facilitate a council of three spiritually oriented groups that were being fragmented by a conflict affecting all of them. The groups, while independent, operate as intersecting microcosms, with some members belonging to all three.

The situation was emotionally charged, and several people felt that they’d been deeply harmed by others’ behavior. The pain being felt by everyone was palpable.

In the Sufi story, Nasruddin is asked to serve as judge to settle a dispute between two families. Upon hearing the first family’s claims and grievances, Nasruddin proclaims, “You’re right!” When the second family tells their version, Nasruddin again declares, “You’re right!” His wife, having overheard the exchange, whispers to him, “They can’t both be right.” Nasruddin replies, “You’re right!”

I don’t see Nasruddin as the naïve fool who too easily accepts influence from anyone; but rather as the sage who expands his judgment to affirm the perception of rightness that each of the three hold. He is a wise one who knows that there is rightness in everyone and looks for it.

When I feel wronged by another, it seems natural to find fault and see them as the sole offender. I can easily move myself in the role of the victimized one and lose sight of the offender’s humanity. I separate myself from any shared longing or experience that I may have had with the other person, and neglect to look for any role I may have played in creating the situation.

There’s a physical quality I notice when I engage in this kind of separation. I tighten and constrict: I literally harden my heart. In their book Embracing the Beloved, Stephen and Ondrea Levine speak of noticing their bellies tighten when they argue. To help one another come back to a place of centered openness, they’ll ask, “How’s your belly?”

Mucking about in my victimhood is often quite delicious at first. It seems to be a familiar inner place that I’ve furnished quite comfortably. But soon I can find myself looking around for other old grievances to dredge up and severe discomfort sets in. I recognize that I am causing myself to suffer, as much or more than the offender did. The painful constriction of my hardened heart prompts me to look for another way to understand what has happened.

Often it’s hard work, and usually it takes some time. Meditative breathing can quickly soften my belly and my hardened heart, but then I must go to work on my mind, which as my teacher Byron Katie says, believes it has only one job – to be right.

She also says that the greatest gift you can give anyone is to let them be right. In Katie’s world, everyone is right.

Sitting quietly with my mind, suspending judgment and curiously watching what comes up can be fascinating – is it ever quiet, I wonder? I notice that once my mind sees the suffering, it begins to shift, and I can see my sameness with the other. I tell myself that, just like me, this person is trying to experience as little suffering and as much joy as possible in this lifetime, and I can both feel and know the truth of that.

My softened mind, along with heart and belly, then helps me to know how I want to move forward. Sometimes I’ll want to reconnect with the other person, sometimes part ways, sometimes do nothing. I know that whichever it is will be a path of peace for me.

This is the energy and awareness I hope to bring whenever I’m asked to help with conflict. Knowing there is rightness in everyone, I’ll look for it, and perhaps, somewhere in the ethers Nasruddin will be saying to each one of us, “You’re right.”

It's The Only Thing That Makes Sense To Me

It was one of our first conversations and we were each offering up the kind of information one gives when wanting another to really know them. I asked about her spirituality and she replied, “It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.” Her plainly stated answer imprinted on me instantly, and I knew that I’d hear her words, spoken in her same soft declarative tone, in my mind a thousand times in the years to come.

She went on to tell of explorations of different paths and traditions over the course of her life. Each was still dear to her, each layered reverently upon the one before it, so that now she could draw from a deep well of the sacred for comfort and expansion.

Later, reflecting on her statement, I marvel that I’ve never framed my own spiritual journey that way, at least to myself. I can feel the quiet certainty of this simple phrase deep within me, and know that this lens will now forever be one through which I view my own spirituality.

I too have explored myriad paths and practices since childhood, and along the way collected many inner lenses to peer through when I find myself once again pondering Spirit, and why its exploration has always been so necessary for me.

Once on a road trip to a meditation retreat with a friend, both of our minds in the free float musing of long highway miles, I asked, “What do people who don’t have God do?” He jokingly quipped, “Drugs, don’t you remember.” I laughed that I did.

As a child of the 60’s, my spiritual questing had included psychedelics, though not instead of God, as much as in search of Her. And decades later at a transpersonal psychology conference in the Brazilian rain forest, I heard a a respected speaker present a professional paper entitled 'Might the Gods Be Alkaloids?' just before I was invited to experience ayajuasca with the Santo Daime people.

Spirituality seems to have always been a guiding principal in my life. My teachers have been the Sisters of St Joseph, the red rocks of Boynton Canyon, the bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, the Sikh seatmate on a flight from Frankfurt. Ammachi, Ram Dass, Myrtle Fillmore, Poonjaji, Gangaji, Tensing Gyatso, Pir Vilayat Kahn, and Demeter all sound like names of relatives in my ear. The license plate on my car says MYSTERY.

Each sage and saint has shaped my way of seeing, each teaching has built upon what came before it, and never has the mix brought discord or dissonance. While the Sufi’s say you can’t cross a river in two boats, their God-drunken poet Rumi says, “Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

I like traveling around on Rumi’s field. I take comfort that there is no map to be had, and that sweet encounters with fellow field travelers can happen at any time.

And now comes another field traveler – a lovely woman who says that her spirituality is the only thing that makes sense to her. I receive this as a teaching, one to add to the mélange of personal scripture that I carry tenderly around inside me.

Here is another one like me, another who knows of Spirit as both a quest and a place to rest, a journey and a destination. In offering me a glimpse of her heart, she gives me a new way of understanding myself, and of knowing a little holiness.

I give thanks. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.