Cultivating the Soil of Listening

Just as a gardener may enrich her soil with compost, lime, and minerals, or plant a cover crop of peas and oats, we too need to tend to our inner lives by cultivating the conditions from which we can spaciously listen and grow.  In the next few posts I’ll be writing about the opportunity to offer ourselves kindness, strength, courage, and gentleness as means of nourishing our soil in such away that life can begin to grow and blossom.

While working with a teacher recently I became the soil, I spoke and lived for a while as the earth. It was good.  I needed to settle and find my vast inner resources. Our lives depend on this earth. And the earth depends on our caring not only for the soil beneath our feet, but also the soil of our beings.

I am the dark, rich, alive soil of the earth.  I sense along with the stillness, a great deal of movement – there is room here to breathe and to connect, room for worms to digest and seeds to sprout.  I open wide to the sun as he pours his warmth on my great back.   I am tingling with organic matter.

Life grows in the earth when there are the right conditions in the soil. Making rich top soil is work that is deeply under appreciated in our culture.  We think broccoli grows at the supermarket and that we can have deep inner awareness by following the latest seven step program.

Zen priest, Kosho Uchiyama, writes in his book, Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice, “There’s an old saying, ‘The poor farmer makes weeds, the mediocre farmer makes crops, and the skilled farmer makes soil.’ I have spent my life trying to improve the soil, or practice ground, where I practice.”

Join me in the soil.