Song of Cultivation

Spring 2022
This Guest House Life © – Quarterly Newsletter
Volume 1 Number 2 Spring 2022

When to plant? What to add? What to remove? What to innovate and create? What to risk growing?

It is early Spring in New England. The grass is greening. Snow Drops and Daffodils have emerged from the ground bringing hopefulness and beauty. Seeing these new blooms, my two and a half years old grandson, Jasper said, “they are lovely.” Lovely, indeed. Birds are mating and nesting; the perennial gardens are riotous with new shoots, a reminder of thirty years of loving labor and the work and enjoyment before us in this new season. Over the last month, as the last remnants of icy snow returned to liquid water, the planting beds in the vegetable garden revealed their emerald-green blankets – the Winter cover crop of Rye grass sowed in late October that I’m now turning back into the soil.

Turning toward Spring as Winter’s rest is over…Turning in the Rye…Turning in the compost and the last remnants of Marsh Hay. The season of cultivation has arrived bringing its unique efforts, questions, and treasures.

When to plant? What to add? What to remove? What to innovate and create? What to risk growing?

* * *

Begun in the coldest moments of the Winter, our Guest House Awareness community has now been together for sixteen weeks. Across these first four months we have oriented ourselves around the essential theme of “cultivation.” Serving as our Pole Star, the words of Hazrat Inayat Khan have been our inspiration and guide, the field we are working, the axis around which we are turning…

What a great treasure it is when a person has realized that in them are to be found all the merits and all the faults which exist in the world, and that they can cultivate all that they wish to cultivate, and to cut away all that should be removed! It is like rooting out the weeds and sowing the seeds of flowers and fruits. One finds that all is in oneself, and that one can cultivate in oneself what one wishes. A world opens for the person who begins to look within themselves, for it is not a little plot of ground that they have to cultivate, they have a world to make of themselves and to make a world is sufficient occupation to live for. What more does one want? Many think that life is not interesting because they make nothing, but they do not realize that they have to make a world, that they are making a world, either ignorantly or wisely. If they make a world ignorantly then that world is their captivity, if they make a world wisely then that world is their paradise.

When to plant? What to add? What to remove? What to innovate and create? What to risk growing?

As a community, we have been cultivating our world. Cultivating attention, recognizing within ourselves the seeds of war and peace while sowing, inwardly and firsthand, the seeds of peace. We’ve begun exploring our inward heart, our sacred duty (dharma) as members of the planetary community, our capacity to recognize and refrain from conditioned habits and patterns, and, most recently, plumbing the depths of stillness, silence – the art and practice of repose and relaxation of body and mind, heart and soul.

Across the next several weeks, we’ll turn our attention to the domains of sensation, exaltation, emotion, and feeling. Modern psychological research suggests that emotions are universal. Cross-cultural data suggests that we experience five basic emotions: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and enjoyment, and that there are universal triggers of emotion – stimuli that often cloud our judgment and restrict our capacity to respond rather than react. No doubt, we are probably all familiar with these five basic emotions, our triggers, and the habitual reactions that often ensue.

Yet, emotionally speaking, is this it? Do these basic emotions comprise the primary range of our feeling humanity? Surely, we are larger. Recall the Buddha’s four Brahma-Vihara – “perfected abodes” referred to as “exalted” and “sublime” states enlivening human conduct: love or loving-kindness, compassion, unselfish joy, and equanimity. Selfless and shot through with generosity, surely, we carry within us the tastes and fragrances of these realities. If not, how could we recognize their existence in our everyday lives? How could we cultivate them? And what other traces of the sublime comprise our treasury? What of joy, ecstasy, awe, wonder, transcendence, and mystery?

Offering our attention to these often-overlooked dimensions of our lives is not an escapist impulse. Not the proverbial “spiritual bypass” that denies, suppresses, searches for escape, or mistakenly imagines that we have transcended the necessity of confronting our dragons and meeting, face-to-face, the shadowlands that often plague our lives because we have not given them their due. Quite the opposite. All these aspects of our lives deserve our attention, analysis, and understanding. And yet…Rumi reminds us that “man cannot live by bread alone; he must have wine!

Here is a taste of that wine from my old teacher, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan:

Ecstasy is the magic out of which life is born, the wand that opens doors into unpredictable perspectives. It is simply fulfilling one’s zest for life with all its wonder, if one can take life’s pain without self-pity, its attacks without bitterness, and its inevitable setbacks without discouragement. Ecstasy is the intoxication in which creativity thrives, the motive power in that supreme faculty inherent in the human being – creative imagination – the ability to anticipate, to prefigure, to forestall, to imagine how things could be if they would be as they might be.

Ecstasy is triggered off every time that one rises above oneself, every time one frees oneself from a constraint in one’s circumstances, in one’s way of thinking, emotions, self-image, every time one discovers the cosmic bounty and inexhaustible innovativeness invested in one, in fact, when one discovers the creator in one, as oneself. Ecstasy lies in waiting in anticipation of the delight of sniffing out the richness of diversification dormant in the unexplored drabness of many people’s lives.

By example, a snow-covered landscape may appear bleak until one discovers the enormous wealth of crystalline patterns in the snowflakes under a microscope. We could exploit the bountiful richness hidden in our lives if we could first earmark it and then make something out of it. Creativity is the thrust of ecstasy discovering unexplored richness and making it an actuality in our lives.

And so, as we prepare to walk into the fresh Spring fields taking up the next phase of our personal and communal cultivation, each of us will have the opportunity to sing ourselves into the questions:

When to plant? What to add? What to remove? What to innovate and create? What to risk growing?