In his book, Building My Zen Garden, Kieran Egan is designing and installing a Zen garden in his backyard. Amidst the troubles with weeds, agressive shrubs and undesirable elements encroaching from the neighbors’ yards, he sets about building a fence. It’s amazing how much conflict he must overcome and what compromises he must make all in the name of peace and tranquility.
One stimulus to gardening, which maybe one wants not to acknowledge, is that it is as close as humans get to creation… The gardener presumes to become God-like… [and] we want to make a paradise. Our paradises need boundaries, fences, to separate that wilderness beyond our control from the area where we can attempt out work a compromise with nature. Even the Garden of Eden had a fence, through whose gates Adam and Eve were expelled….
But yet, paradoxically, in the Zen tradition, the whole universe is contained in each of its parts, and the garden is a part of the whole that is the world, wilderness and all.
Image Source: www.truthbook.com
These ideas of peace and conflict, paradise and wilderness, control and release, protecting your boundaries yet living in harmony seemed somehow to fit with today’s Presidential and our state and local elections.
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