Blinding heat divides day from night,
Brands short shadows into fecund soil.
Green tendrils, heavy with beans,
Coil around rustic bamboo racks.
Violet flowers gape erotically among velvet leaves :
A single gourd contains the entire world's dream.
There is a great comfort in growing your own food. You are close to the soil. You use the basic elements -- water, sunlight, earth, air, and plants -- for your work, your sustenance, and your pleasure. You nurture your garden from seedlings to mature plants, tending, pruning, weeding. Year after year, you see cycles come and go, from sprouting to harvest to withering, to seeding again. You eat your plants to live. You don't mind and they don't mind. Some day, you will fall back to this earth, back into the sun-baked dirt, and you will become food for the plants. It's the way of all life, and it's all very agreeable. Those who follow Tao say that all reality is like a series of nesting circles : microcosms within macrocosms. What is close at hand is a microcosm of what is far away. Why search all over for Tao? It is all contained in the seeds of the gourd growing in your garden.
Personal Interpretation
Gardening is yet another way to be close to Tao. When we grow our own food we must put forth different kinds of effort at different points during the year. We must work in accordance with the elements of our environments. In the end the product of our efforts becomes our food, our means of sustaining ourselves. We will return to the earth when we die, and in time our decaying forms will help new life to spring up. We are part of the great cycle of life, and gardening is one of the acts that makes this apparent. Is there any simpler way to give our thanks than to put ourselves wholly into the cultivation of life?
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