Here is part of a letter from a reader:
Hi, Something in your blog reminded me of when I lived in the boonies. While walking in (from the road) one day, the snow was just starting to melt, I noticed something beautiful off in the brush. It was a soda can someone had tossed. What was interesting was my reaction. The beauty was still there and it was a soda can. At the time it reminded me of a peacocks feather. To this day, for some reason, (the sight of) discarded cans can bring on a certain appreciation.

In a similar vein I remember well one winter afternoon going into the parking lot at Shasta Abbey. The snow was melting and turning to slush. My usual way would have been to pick across this unpleasant sea with revulsion. Not so this particular time. To my great amazement what I saw was perfection, an icy beauty in the grey ugliness! Yes, and coming upon slushy streets has not been the same since.

It would seem that this ‘seeing with new eyes’ comes unbidden and is probably not an uncommon experience or particularly Buddhist or ‘spiritual’. It just happens.

Have you ever watched a blue heron fishing? There it is standing stock still readying itself to snap up an unsuspecting fish? For an age you and it wait, but nothing happens. You start to doubt, Is it real? It doesn’t move, then gradually there is the dawning realization that it isn’t real, it’s plastic!

Plastic flowers too can be so real seeming, it’s hard distinguish them from the real thing. While in the Temple in The Netherlands a few of us gathered for a meeting beside the fish pond where a blooming Water Lilly sat amidst glistening leaves. I kidded the guests, It’s not real you know. A shadow of a doubt was sewn, successfully but not for long! Just what is it about coming upon the man-made in nature that is both strangely attractive and deeply disturbing at the same time?

In the photo above all is well with the world, nature is going about it’s business of blooming and leafing. But what is that rising above the bushes? A head. A real head, or what? In actual fact it’s the Angel of the North standing beside the A1 greeting visitors with wings outstretched. Art placed in natural surroundings, especially sculpture on any scale, finds me examining my conceptions of…well gardening actually!

I think the disturbance is about the truth of impermanence. Creating successful gardens is, it seems to me, about working with impermanence with a light and playful hand. And I hope gardeners will continue to place sculptures within their creations. Yes, and I hope to see the occasional plastic pink flamingo or pixie in their shrubberies to disturb us even more!

It’s good to have our realities challenged.

This is the window of my room. Yesterday, with much help from my neighbour, I dressed it. First we put up a light blocking blind, blue on the inside and white on the outside. This proved to be a complex operation as the blind needed to be cut to fit inside the window recess. It took over two hours, what with getting sums wrong the first time. Wrong in the right direction thankfully. After a quick restorative snack we recalculated measurements and then returned to the exacting work of trimming the blind, again.

Doing projects like this is when years of formal meditation proves it’s self. When the going gets tough and you would rather take a nap; keep going, keep up the careful work, not cut corners and remind yourself it’s basically a worthwhile thing to do in essence. My companion in activity said, by way of encouragement, something like, ‘people remember the care involved and tend to forget the hardship’. So true and true of the life of meditation as well.

My original plan was to buy some fancy curtaining while in The Netherlands. Traditionally, and rather oddly, their windows are dressed down to about knee length with white lacy obscuring curtains and then the calves, so to speak, are left bare. Sometimes a host of pot plants hide the view of the interior, but often the living room is in plain sight. So it’s hard not to take a peek while passing by. That’s just the way windows are dressed, or were. At the temple the windows onto the street have obscuring plastic with tasteful images cut out. As you can see I’ve ‘gone Dutch’ as one of the monks remarked on seeing my new window treatment.

This is one of the oldest buildings in Amsterdam, it’s in the same square as the English Church and a one time Begijnen community. Not much evidence of window dressing there. More on the Begijnen another time.

Two good sangha friends have reached their 60th year of life. This is the culmination of the ‘age of Wisdom’ and the start of the ‘seeing of the mountain to ascend’.

You both will have to ask somebody wiser than me what that means….