Flowers in the Garbage ...

There is a well-known quote by Buddhist monk,  Thich Nhat Hanh,  that goes like this:
"Out of the garbage,  flowers grow."

This gem depicted above is one such by-product of an urban street curb.   She took my breath away.

Ironically,  I discovered this treasure while I was out on my newly-established Tuesday morning routine of picking up trash around my neighborhood.    I would find today there were many "flowers in the garbage".  

One profound discovery came in the form of a fortune from a fortune cookie that would be my mantra for the morning's garbage collection:   "You can do everything you ought to do."     What this revealed to me in the midst of my routine was that a defect of mine is to find shortcuts.  To not carry something out to the very last detail.   To skip over,  rush and plow through to get to the end.  To find an easier,  softer way.      I was doing this wih my trash pick up;  the obvious pieces that were easy to get to and which caught my eye were the ones that got scooped up.    I kept hearing the words over and over:  "You can do everything you ought to do"  and this propelled me to look under bushes,  under cars,  just below the curb.   I had been missing a world of garbage that begged to be properly discarded !  

I began to make the connection to my healing teacher's piece that I just wrote about earlier this morning and our relationship to linguistic space --- which includes the environment.  What was the "quality" of garbage and which pieces stood out and caught my line of vision more than others?   I am aware that there was something in this inquiry which would help me to understand why I skirt over details.   The garbage that I was most drawn to were the larger, more glaring disruptions in the space as well as those pieces which shimmered -- like foil or newly strewn plastic wrappers or colorful straws.   You could say that these pieces of trash had "attractive" qualities.  To find the other pieces of garbage that didn't have these qualities meant that I had to presence myself more into the space,  changing and adjusting my view to take in more than the shiny objects but now the dull, flat,  even squashed ones.   I needed to bend more,  to slow down,  to soften my focus.   Ahhhhh...  this is part of the last segment learned in our Impersonal Movement practice:  having the eyes gently touch the space and not having a hypervigilant reaching out to the space with the eyes.   Hypervigilance is a long standing strategy of mine;  it has helped me to survive by quickly scanning my surroundings and spotting the things to watch out for.   In doing so,  I miss the "juicy" stuff beneath the surface  -- the details.   When I can let down the guard of my hypervigilance that moves me quickly through a space,  then I get to relax into the space and into myself and everything gets to be seen and revealed.

Oh my God this is so fucking cool !

There were not just flowers in the garbage but a whole underground trash arboretum !

And when I was finished my task for the day,  it was really complete -- in every sense of the word.  No stone unturned,  no wrapper or flattened can or piece of plastic left untouched.   A true feeling of gratification was here for me that felt more authentic because I knew that I was not rushing to meet an outcome but rather I was present and moving with each act of picking something up,  each piece that was located and dropped into the bag.  

I recognized that if I can give this much attention to my gardening,  to my work,  to my relationships to anything I come into contact with,   then I will not be focused on an end product,  attached to a certain outcome,  or desirous of a certain result because of an expectation.  Digging dirt gets to be digging dirt and so on ...

In invaluable lesson that rose up from the litter;  the flowers in the garbage ...