Tricycle | Awake in the World

The garden, wrote British author Thomas Hill in 1577, is a “ground plot for the mind.” Granted, “but also for the heart,” I reckon early this morning, down on my hands and knees, weeding the sinuous paths of our newest, four-month-old kids’ garden.

Gardens are not created or made, they unfold, spiraling open like the silk petals of an evening primrose flower to reveal the ground plot of the mind and heart of the gardener and the good earth. At least this is the way the kids’ garden evolved when, early last March, my 23-year-old dharma buddy, Suehiko Ono, and I stood on the ragged, 40-foot-by-40-foot spit of weedy wasteland where we have been scrubbing and storing our compost buckets for a few years and watched as a new garden emerged, hissing and wild-eyed, from out of our minds.