Taking Rest in a Restless Age

Spring is here, brothers and sisters - at long last - and we’re starting work at the homestead in preparation for the 2019 food gardens.

Last weekend, my husband tilled the garden beds to bring up dormant weed seeds and let them germinate before tilling them under in a couple of weeks. It’s a gentle, Earth-friendly way to keep weeds down. He raked away remnants of autumn’s leaves and mowed the lawn, did some repairs to the deck, and cleaned out the shed. A nice surprise was that he also tidied up my gardening area in the shed. All I have to do now is go in there and organize for seed starting work.

I got an early start on our favorite imported Italian flat-leaf parsley seeds, and last weekend planted five flats of seeds, placing them all on a warm germination mat in the kitchen. Parsley seeds need to be at a consistent minimum 72 degrees in order to germinate.

There’s a pot of arugula on the deck, started from seed about two weeks ago. I even bought a young rosemary plant last week. It still has to come indoors at night. I’ve been poking through our baskets of seeds, sorting out this year’s varieties. Next week, I’ll order Italian sunflower seeds. I hope to have banks of sunflowers again this year. Everything is moving along as it should.

I had deep conversation with a friend last weekend, a woman who spends much of her time worrying. She worries about how others perceive her, about finding a husband and having a child before she believes it’s too late, about people who don’t seem to like her, friends she’s lost, and even the friends she has. She worries about her looks, health, finances; about meeting work goals, job security, and getting old. She worries about being rejected, unloved. She worries about the future a lot. She worries about things over which she has no control.

I think she wanted advice, but I felt I didn’t have the advice she wanted to hear. I decided to step off the ledge anyway and share with her my thoughts on worry. 

It is possible to lift the burden of worry. It takes deep inner work and requires some letting go. Two things that many find hard to do.

I’m not talking about being free from pain. There are mountains of pain that nothing can move. Pain is going to come, of that we may be sure. But worry is different: it’s like pain before the pain, or pain before the pain that never actually happens. It's a fruitless burden.

There’s a lot to worry about on this mad planet. As if there aren’t enough perceptible things close to us to worry about, we have the daily news feed to give us even more: frightening events around the globe that affect us psychically more than tangibly, things that gnaw at our minds and of which we can do little to fix. Acts of terrorism, the murder of children, the homeless, starvation and malnutrition, school shootings, emboldened racial bias, animal cruelty, North Korea launching missiles like BB guns, climate change, and attacks on basic humanity.

Pile on top of all that the concerns of my good friend, who is restless and doesn’t sleep well at night because she’s getting older and her face is changing and she wants a baby and she thinks no one loves her.

All I could share with her were my experiences, which are neither definitive nor implicit. These are the things I had to take on and let go, so I could develop myself in such a way that it betters the world.

I told my friend two things: to stop eating animals, and to meditate as much as possible every day.

The first was a no-brainer for me after I became completely aware of not just the brutalization of animals so we can eat them, but also the great and oppressive psychic burden that we carry when we eat the flesh and secretions of animals that lived in pain and fear and died in terror.

When we consume the bodies of these animals, we take into our bodies all the horror, anguish, and adrenaline of the animals who were bred, orphaned, caged, tortured, and slaughtered so that they could land on our plates. When we stop bringing this wretchedness into our bodies, a great healing begins. Our minds begin to rest. Anxiety subsides. The subtle guilt about being part of the barbaric practice of killing and eating other living creatures suddenly lifts.

Bottom line: ages ago, when early humans had restricted access to food, who foraged for fruit and greens and nuts and even ate soil, the ability to hunt and kill animals was needed if humans were to survive. But we’re no longer living in early anthropological times - we have access to an array of foods that are all plant-based and that meet all our nutritional needs. The necessity of eating animals is long since over.

There’s a great relief involved in turning away from animals as food. That freedom is waiting for us. Whether we fully realize it or not, every time we eat the body of an animal, we cringe a little inside. All of us.

Daily meditation is the most powerful tool we have in releasing ourselves from worry. Meditation is a tactile way of releasing the concerns of self and ego and turning the attention to the macrocosm, to the totality of everything, where worries of selfdom and identity disappear.

Want to free yourself from worries about growing old, being loved, or keeping your job? Meditate every day and you’ll discover, without a doubt, that you are actually a part of an all-embracing macrocosm that is safe, benevolent, beautiful, and vast.

The Buddha described worry - kukkucca - as a form of attachment, as one of the five hindrances to enlightenment, and warned his disciples against it. He taught them ways to let go of the beliefs that keep worry going and prevent the heart from knowing deep rest.

I told my friend that I believe that life is meant to be lived joyously. There are things we have to do and things we have to let go of to find the joy. These two practices – abstinence from using animals as food, and daily meditation - are coextensive with inner peace. I have yet to meet anyone who hasn’t been born again though them. It really is that profoundly simple.

Barbie xo