First Fruits

I’m so pleased with the cutting garden my husband and I planted this summer. It’s too young to be giving us flowers yet (everything was planted as seed), but soon, we will have a variety of colorful flowers for bouquets for the shrine, friends, and house. As it stands, it’s about 20-25 feet long, and is doing fine.

This week - on June 22 to be exact - we dined on the first fruits of our garden: summer squash. My husband steamed it, I drizzled some olive oil over mine, and he melted butter on his. Pink salt on both. We grew these squash from Franchi seeds, an early yellow variety. And there’s lots more on the plants.

The sparrows who made a home - then a family - in our birdhouse, have returned after a short absence. We’re wondering if they’ve come back to make more babies, or if it’s a different pair of sparrows altogether. But I love the fact that the birdhouse is getting heavy use. Come fall, we’ll clean it out, and hope that birds use it as a shelter through winter.

This weekend, the Shin Buddhism class meets again for meditation and Dharma instruction. I’m really looking forward to it. I looked closer at Wesleyan’s College of East Asian Studies for a possible distance-learning opportunity, but found none. 

So now, I’m poking around the internet for others. The San Francisco Center has some non-credit offerings. The University of South Wales offers a distance-learning master’s degree in Buddhist Studies. All worth checking out. But maybe I should just finish this Shin course at Wesleyan first!

Summer is here, the garden is doing beautifully, the Shin class is amazing, my husband had a great Father’s Day weekend, and he and I are going to the Maine coast soon for a few days and nights of rest and relaxation. All is well. So grateful.

May all beings be happy.

May all beings be safe.

May all beings be free from suffering.

/II\

Namaste.