Livin' the Blues

Sitting here in silence, thinking about all the times I've heard this emptiness in the silence. I hear it now - vastness and emptiness - and all the objects around me look hollow and frivolous. I'm floating in space.

Yesterday, I worked for hours in the garden. It feels good to sit in the earth, with bugs scuttling around and over me, feels good to put my naked hands in the dirt and pull out the weeds one by one. The weeds are quite pretty unto themselves, deserve a nicer name, but I am clearing them away for my little shade garden under the tall maples. I encountered roots, deep in the earth, thick and strong as rope, roots you could never imagine such little wisps of plants possessing. I suppose all life takes root first, and then it grows. Even before stalks have grown tall and buds have opened, roots of immeasurable strength and tenacity are spreading wide.

It's the way of life and it's also the cause of suffering. We cannot grow without roots; we go through our days attaching ourselves to whatever feeds us, and our roots are severed again and again. So as long as we live, we are bound to suffer, for we cannot live without forming attachments.

(The blackberry roots are shocking. I find a knot under the surface of the earth, follow it down with my shovel, take a firm grip, and pull. The soft loose soil gives way all around me as a network of long shaggy ropey wood pulls taut in all directions. There is no end to these roots. I can't pull them out.)

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