Tend to your Garden

I liked this so much, I had to share it with my readers, Thank you Jug..
Voltaire's final word of advice to his readers was: Tend your garden.What did the French philosopher mean by this? Did he really want all of us to become gardeners, cultivating roses and mowing the lawn? Not
really, though there are worse things that one could do than looking after a garden. But what Voltaire meant was that after we'd done all our philosophising, sailed the boundless seas of contemplation in search of
eternal truths, we still had to get on with our day-to-day, mundane lives. We had to earn a livelihood, look after a home, raise a family, help out with domestic chores. In short, we had to tend our own garden.
We had to engage in the minor, often humdrum activities, that go to make up our earthly lives.

Tending one's garden, in this sense, is not merely a practical necessity. It could, and it does, have benefits which might be called spiritual. When the Nobel prize-winning West Indian poet, Derek Walcott, was asked
by an interviewer what he liked to do when he wasn't writing poetry, he replied that he liked to paint.

"Oh, I didn't realise you were an artist as well as a poet," said the interviewer.

"I'm not an artist," said poet. "I don't paint pictures. I paint things. I paint the walls of my house, my fence, my roof. I find it relaxes me."

What Walcott was talking about was something that many people who live on the outermost limits of consciousness - be they poets, or scientists, or sages - have long realised: reach for the sky by all means, just
remember to come down to earth after you've done so.

It's like a high-altitude mountaineer who, daring all dangers and difficulties, ventures into the thin cold air of the tallest of peaks. Having taken in the all-embracing view that he commands from the lofty height that he has reached, the prudent mountaineer descends to the flatness of the plains, where the air is thick and heavy and dense with the oxygen that our bodies and our brains need to perform the routine functions of everyday life.

We can't forever live in the rarefied air of mountain tops or the pinnacles of consciousness; we must come down to the flatlands of daily reality to draw our breath and take comfort from the familiar and the predictable. It's like an athlete, or a student studying hard for an exam. If the athlete trains too hard and for too long, or the student studies without the relief of a break, he will suffer a burnout: the body and the mind, pushed to the limits and beyond of endurance, will seize up.

That's why poets paint their walls. Or why monks - be they Buddhist or Benedictine - who live the meditative life in monasteries ensure that they have a daily regimen of manual work: growing fruits and vegetables,
keeping butter lamps lit, polishing stone and bronze. Mahatma Gandhi and his disciples followed a similar discipline in their ashram, where they cooked their own meals, swept the floor and cleaned the lavatories. Bapu knew that such menial tasks were experiments in truth as valid as turning the spotlight of consciousness within oneself.

In Judaism, the monastic life is actually forbidden. All Jews - including the rabbis, who are not priests, but scholars - must live and work within the general community. Prayer and spiritual observances are important, but equally important is the pursuit of a profession, the earning of a living.

So by all means meditate, lose yourself in the rapture of heightened consciousness. But don't forget that garden you still have to tend.

Is it sprouting a suspicion of weeds?