Devotion, like Summer Returning

Zen Lessons 2025 4 30

What sort of work takes place on the mountains?
Planting winter melon and then planting gourds.

If your efforts fall a little short
Your fields will be covered in weeds.

           - Stonehouse, a bridge from Chinese to Korean Zen circa 1300

(-)

Devotion goes where the easy work ends. It is an edge. Not just the digging of fence post holes and the pulling out of stumps. Its the every day effort of planning, weeding, planting, weeding, pruning, harvesting, pulling, planting, planning again

There are a lot of different sorts of hard work, different sorts of devotion. 

There is the concentration on a problem, where it looks like you are doing nothing.

There is checking every day for diseases, parasites, and tiny weeds. And checking the Wheel barrow tires, fences and gates, hoses and spigots. Which nobody notices and looks like an old person wandering around.

There is the doing this year round, every year, for many years.

There is the cutting down the huge dead tree, a weekend long affair. Which is easy to notice and respect. It gets the nieghbors' attention.

In spring, mustard and lettuces return as the redbuds and dogwoods flower. Strawberries spreading, horseradish lifting, asparagus launching. There are the blossoms drifting across the slopes of the summer garden as butterflies float above them. There are now ripe melons and tomatoes.

Everyone sees this.

The rye, oats, millet... high and green in the fall. Dense green potato leaves, and shovels full of potatoes. Easy to see, all the surfaces are soft and green and then fade, and Scarlet and Orange open their fans. And then, Winter Comes Home.

Winter is wise, retreating, sheltering. It should cover ambition. Itself is a form of devotion, like all of the dharma, like all of "nature". But nature includes us, too.

Winter returns as it can, accepting the constraints we impose and the chaotic inputs our species pumps into the world. "Returning as it can" is a form of love. Devotion. It isn't "effort" or "ambition". It is "just returning", like the inhale after the exhale. 

Until it can no longer.

At that moment Winter cedes half and the earth and sky to the Summer, which forms its own "returning just as it can". Being part of this is just being in Summer.