Pam cut three dahlias and arranged them beautifully. These glowing flowers sat on the altar for her last talk. Some people came up to look at the flowers after the talk to see if they were real. After examining the flowers, they came to me to praise my gardening skills.
Growing these dahlias takes very little skill. Some effort, yes. The gardener’s job is just to learn a few things and then let the plant do what it does and manifest. An amazing thing about dahlias is the way they multiply over the years. The orange variety started as just a couple plants and those few multiplied to dozens over the years.
How do they multiply? In the fall, the tubers need to be dug up, cleaned a bit, allowed to dry some but not too much, placed in a cardboard box in material like peat moss, vermiculite, or wood shavings, placed in a cool dark space and misted a couple times over the winter. If done correctly, in the spring a clump of tubers from one plant might have enough eyes to yield five or more new plants.
The Bodhisattva vows to save all beings. How could this be done? Not by placing the burden on oneself to be The Savior of all beings. So silly. You can’t. I can’t. To think “you” and “I” is to be lost. One simply attempts to engage in Bodhisattva activity to the best of one’s ability.
Every spring, there are tubers that do not make it. I have opened boxes where I hoped to see healthy starts and found rotted lumps. That was the case when I opened the first box of the beautiful orange variety this year. My heart sank. What if I had done something wrong with every tuber? But as I opened the other boxes, I found them filled with eyes showing astonishing potential to grow and flourish.
In a little book I just read by Mindrolling Jetsn Khandro Rinpoche titled How Not to Miss the Point, Rinpoche tries to articulate the essence of Buddhism. Here is what she comes to: “To be a Buddhist is to be absolutely honest and true to the best that a human mind has to offer.”
Do those words do you any good? They do if you know there is a path, a process, a tried and true method for finding and resting in the very best of the human mind and heart. What we can do is work that method to the best of our ability. We can lift our life into the Dharma, as Pam put it in her last talk.
The flowers are in full bloom these days. I can look into the face of a single dahlia bloom and see there are potentially hundreds in the future. All I can do is dig carefully, put them in the right environment, and do my best to help things along. That is all any of us can do; give those tubers the right refuge and give your precious human life a shot at flowering to the best that a human mind has to offer by following a path.
You don’t become The Bodhisattva to save all beings and neither do I. I’ve heard Khandro Rinpoche talk about the burden people put on themselves thinking they must do this great work in some heroic, solitary way. Not so. She says you can be an oar on the great ship of Bodhisattva work or even a little floaty toy pushing the boat, as she puts it.
The older I get, the less clever I try to be. I follow instructions on how to over-winter dahlias instead of trying to find my own way with trial and error. Sometime along the way, we need to find the equivalent in our practice of a method for caring for tubers over the winter to become flowers in the summer. We need to be able to look at ourselves and see that this image in the mirror that might seem to us as dull as a dried dahlia tuber really does have the potential to flower into the best the human mind has to offer.
Once we acknowledge that potential, we should each get busy doing the work. As I mentioned, there are different mediums these tubers can be placed in for the winter. Pam has been talking about the 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva and Drew has focused on the Satipatthana Sutta. Both are fine mediums. I rely heavily on the Brahmaviharas and Paramitas for my medium.
The Buddha Dharma offers many teachings, various paths, and diverse methods to move toward a flowering. Will you get there? Will I? Who knows? But the very effort to flower encourages others to do the same and we are in this garden together. No race to flower first. Just garden your life to the best of your ability.
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Join us for an exploration of the book We Were Made For These Times; 10 Lessons for Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption by Kaira Jewel Lingo. Our first session will be September 16th, Barb Lahman leading. We will meet monthly downstairs on the third Tuesday, immediately following the dharma talk. I attempt to keep our meetings to one hour. We start as close to 7pm as possible and end by 8 pm. Please purchase your own copy of the book. I would ask that you have read the preface and the first chapter of the book so that we can begin our discussion that first evening. 
