Adding 'oomph'

A good friend of mine has a big ol' citrus tree that has stood in their front yard for fifty or sixty years. Her tree has seen a lot of living from the position of guardian of the house. My friend also carries a deep affection as she and the tree have been sort of 'partnered' in the sharing of life happening in the house. So, it was with a sense of horror my friend became aware around the beginning of the year that her tree seemed to be quickly moving past elderly and into it's final season.

Discussions between she and her husband included the possibility of having it cut down but she just couldn't bring herself to give up yet. Intensive TLC was the choice of action. After one of our drenching winter rains, she dug out the weeds and debris that had accumulated around it's trunk and dug down even further to loosen the soil. She then got a BIG bag of citrus tree fertilizer and mixed it into the freshened and loosened soil.

Apparently the heavens approved of her actions for another drenching rain arrived soon after and pushed the fertile nutrients down toward the root system. An especially important action as old trees have deep roots and it takes a good bit of water to have the nutrients make their way deep into the root system. A couple weeks ago I arrived at her home and by golly that citrus tree has a new lease on life! Spring-green leaves enrobed the branches and one could almost feel the vigor of new life radiating from it's branches.

I tend to think of trees as apt metaphors for human beings: a long life span; changes that come from seasonal growing, ripening and releasing back to the soil; the capacity to offer beauty, shade, fruit and nesting places for life. Seems to me that we share some real commonalities with trees, including our need for occasional pruning and fertilizing.

Fertilizer is used to invigorate: fortify, strengthen, refresh existing soil and plants so that new growth may continue and be as optimal as possible. Like trees, we human beings, need to be strengthened and refreshed and occasionally, like the old tree, we may need some intensive fertilization in order to have our 'oomph' our vigor: healthy growth; strength renewed and refreshed.


Fertilizers tend to be nutrient dense meaning in a bag of fertilizer virtually everything is full of good stuff with very little waste product. Fertilizers for people also need to be nutrient dense, that is, containing lots of vigor-producing potential with very little waste product. Renewing and refreshing demand quality.


In my experience, there are a couple different methods of providing a nutrient dense soil for living one's life. One method involves providing regular 'sunshine' which is necessary for creating a warm atmosphere for living. Since sunshine is generally a daily occurrence, I tend to think of the actions I do on a daily basis as those which create my personal sunshine: my time of quiet in the morning, my gratitude list and appreciative thank yous, a deliberate orientation of discovering blessing and whatever reading I am doing to support my belief system which may be meditations and/or reading a particular book. These are my actions for generating 'sunshine' in my life but they are not necessarily how I give 'oomph' or vigor to my living.


Vigor or 'oomph' for living comes from the ingredients added to living that create my perceptions. My perceptions about living {which is what we do all day} will absolutely create the environment I live in because how I perceive life is how I experience life. When I perceive life as fearful, the thoughts and emotions I generate are primed to respond to fear. When I perceive life as delightful; full of small pleasures, I will generate an expectancy of wonder and curiosity about where wonder may be found. When I perceive life as hopeful, the tendency is to look for experiences that fulfill the desires and expectations contained in what I hope for.


Sometimes we go through a difficult patch in living where our expectations of how life is 'supposed to be' just kind of collapses and life seems shaky and unstable and like a plant, we begin to wilt from an intensity that depletes the nutrients of our environment. Several years ago I became divorced after a long marriage and despite thinking I was prepared for the separation from my old life it turned out that I was not prepared for the pervading sense of uncertainty about life and living that the divorce birthed. Uncertainty seemed to invade my whole being: how can it be that I am so fearful; how can it be that I don't know how to do _____; how can it be that I am so lonely? how can it be that all my familiar life roles seem to have disappeared? The uncertainty and the fear which ran through me like a constant hum, drained my vitality in a way I had not experienced since the grief of suddenly losing both of my parents.


I am sure that whatever salvation I experienced during this time came from continuing my daily actions of turning on the 'sunshine' which is probably how the fear at least stayed at a low hum most of the time rather than gut-clutching anxiety. However, like the old citrus tree, it became more and more clear that my spirit was demanding some intensive fertilization. As the fog of change began to lift a little, I realized I needed 'something' but I was not sure what. My uncertainty had pervaded even my confidence in how to feed myself. One day however when I was in a bookstore and a book, literally fell into my hands. Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chodron probably saved this ol' tree named Mary from being chopped down by life at that time! Comfortable With Uncertainty is a small book that is easy to digest as it is short readings based on Buddhist principles of living.


Easy to digest applied in that the readings are only two or three pages long but for me, they required a lot of chewing as the words were about as nutrient dense and fibrous as one could find. Part of the nutritional content of the book for me was that I was only vaguely familiar with Buddhism and so my conditioned responses to spirituality were unable to kick in. Everything I read I had to chew and chew, mull and mull while writing responses and questions in the margins. As I continued working with what I read I realized that I was slowly pushing the barrier of fear around me outward. Life felt less restricted, I breathed easier and my thinking began to clear. It was a while before I realized that the fear was receding not only because of the content of the book, but because I was learning a new way of perceiving life.

New learning always invigorates and as I disciplined myself to being committed to the reading, the questioning and to incorporating new ways of seeing and responding to life I found myself renewed and refreshed. For those of you who may be curious, although I am deeply grateful to Pema and to other writers I read who gave me glimpses and direction into Buddhism as a path of living, I am not Buddhist. For me, a personal God will always be essential to life and this is not a tenet of Buddhism.

Mindfulness however is a core tenet of Buddhist living and I will be forever grateful for this perspective on living. As I slowly acquired the new learnings on mindfulness and began to engage them as practice, mindfulness taught me that despite the pieces of life that had been cut away - pieces that had been very familiar and therefore very comfortable - my life was the life happening today. That seems so obvious that it's almost embarrassing to write the words and yet, truthfully, much of the time many of us are not living the life that is happening today. Much of our interior life of feelings and emotions tends to continually link forward and backward into remember when, if only, what if and someday when .....


Emotionally moving backwards and forwards between the past and the future and frequently linking feelings happening now with the past or trying to change how I feel with future hopes is a hallmark of our contemporary culture with it's seductive blend of media and marketing. When we hook into this way of living - and it takes deliberate decisions and actions not to hook in - life tends to move so quickly and so sensationally that we are not even aware of what we are doing as we watch television and surf around the Internet often completely oblivious to the reality that neither of those activities generally have anything to do with my life being lived today. And actually, most of the uncertainty and fear I was experiencing at that time was linked to 'fond' remembrance of what was past or scenerios I projected onto the future: almost no fear existed when I became mindful of now.

Curiosity was a vital tool in learning to become mindful of right now. Pema states in Comfortable With Uncertainty that used properly, curiosity can completely shatter fears based in the uncertainty of life, and a great deal of the fear we adult humans lug around is based in our life experiences that have taught us just exactly how uncertain life really is. No matter how 'uncertain' life is in the big scheme of things however, this moment: a mindfulness of now, has very little uncertainty - it simply is.

Learning to pile moments of now; moments of 'isness' atop one another one at a time is how emotional stability - equilibrium - is created. Curiosity was the was the energy I learned to use to see the bricks of now as I was rebuilding my life. Curiosity eventually became a perception of life; a way of living that when activated has the capacity to loosen my clinging and clutching on 'must' and 'have to' so as to be open to new learning. Curiosity always invites new learning and new learning is absolutely one of the very best nutrient dense fertilizers that exists!

When my friend treated her tree with intensive TLC and fertilizer, she used what was designed for the specific tree she was feeding. She was also careful to follow the directions because fertilizer used incorrectly can either cause harm as it is powerful in its density of components and can burn the roots or it can end up being a waste of money because not enough is used and so nothing happens. So too when we use spiritual or psychological tools of growth. Tools used without understanding and improperly applied can cause harm and when we don't follow the directions regarding the proper amount of attention and time we can end up feeling disgusted and angry because we see no improvement or change.

Tomorrow I will explore curiosity as a tool of perception because as is true with anything capable of creating powerful results, curiosity has both negative and a positive aspects and requires learning how to be used. Mostly what needs to be understood about curiosity is in the suffix of 'ity' which means denoting the quality of. When we become or use the quality of curious it is important that we are deliberate in what qualities we choose to employ.