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The Spirit of Gardening Quotes for Gardeners Druids
Listen,
all creeping things -
the bell of transience.
I want Death to find me planting
my cabbages.
- Michel De Montaigne
If you really want to draw close to your garden, you must remember
first of all that you are dealing with a being that lives and dies; like the
human body, with its poor flesh, its illnesses at times repugnant. One must
not always see it dressed up for a ball, manicured and immaculate.
- Fernand Lequenne
Live each day as if it were your
last,
and garden as though you will live forever.
- Author Unknown
Fear no more the heat o' th'
sun
Nor the furious winters' rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
- Shakespeare
The Illusion of Immortality. By Croliss Lamont. Introduction
by John Dewey. Fifth Edtion, 1935, 1990. New York, Continuum,
Frederick Ungar Book, Half Moon Foundation, 1990. Index, notes, 303 pages.
ISBN: 0804463778. VSCL.
“Remembering that I’ll
be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make
the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations,
all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in
the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that
you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you
have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason
not to follow your heart.”
– Steve Jobs
Old men ought to be
explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets - East Coker # 200,
1943
Planting is one of my great
amusements, and even of those things
which can only be for posterity, for a Septuagenary has no right
to count on any thing but annuals.
- Thomas Jefferson
I love the fall. I love it because of the smells that you speak
of; and also
because things are dying, things that you don't have to take care of
anymore, and the grass stops growing.
- Mark Van Doren
"Belief in our mortality, the sense that we are
eventually going to crack up and be extinguished like the flame of a candle, I
say, is a gloriously fine thing. It makes us sober; it makes us a little
sad; and many of us it makes poetic. But above all, it makes it possible
for us to make up our mind and arrange to live sensibly, truthfully and always
with a sense of our own limitations. It gives us peace also, because true
peace of mind comes from accepting the worst.
Deprived of immortality, the proposition of living becomes a
simple proposition. It is this: that we human beings have a limited span
of life to live on this earth, rarely more than seventy years, and that
therefore we have to arrange our lives so that we may live as happily as we can
under a given set of circumstances. ... It made us therefore, cling to
life─the life of the instinct and the life of senses─on the belief that, as we
are all animals, we can be truly happy only when all our normal instincts are
satisfied normally. This applies to the enjoyment of life in all its
aspects.
A sad poetic touch is added to this intense love of life by
the realization that this life we have is essentially mortal. For if this
earthly existence is all we have, we must try the harder to enjoy it while it
lasts. A vague hope of immortality detracts from our wholehearted
enjoyment of this earthly existence."
- Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937, p.155-160.
I conceive that the land belongs to a
vast family of which many are dead,
few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.
- A Chieftan from Nigeria
"So we'll live, and pray and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies ...
And take upon us the mystery of things
As if we were Gods' spies."
- Shakespeare, King Lear, V 3
Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set; but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!
- John Milton, The Hour of Death
Earth, that nourished thee, shall
claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold.
- William Cullen Bryant, Thanatopsis
Now the gardener is the one who has
seen everything ruined so many times
that (even as his pain increases with each loss) he comprehends - truly
knows - that where there was a garden once, it can be again, or where
there never was, there yet can be a garden.
- Henry Mitchell
You find a flower half-buried
in leaves,
And in your eye its very fate resides.
Loving beauty, you caress the bloom;
Soon enough, you'll sweep petals from the floor.
Terrible to love the lovely so,
To count your own years, to say "I'm old,"
To see a flower half-buried in leaves
And come face to face with what you are.
-
Lack of love for the vegetative,
subtle, cthonic, pagan,
and sexy aspect of the world means death.
- Alan Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, 1968,
p. 135
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Tao Te Ching
Chapter Number Index Standard Traditional Chapter Arrangement of the Daodejing Chapter Order in Wang Bi's Daodejing Commentary in 246 CE Chart by Mike Garofalo |
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| 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 |
| 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 |
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Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
Old time is still a-flying
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
- Robert Herrick
... in gardens, beauty is a
by-product.
The main business is sex and death ...
- Sam Llewelyn,
Come my spade. There is no ancient
gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers,
and grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession.
- Shakespeare, Hamlet V,i
A man shall ever see, that, when age
grows to civility and elegancy,
men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely;
as if gardening were the greater perfection.
- Frances Bacon
Is childhood ever long enough, or a
happy time, or even
a beautiful summer day? All of these carry the seeds of
the same fierce mystery that we call death.
- Eugene Kennedy
Then again, if the
plant is slow growing, and you are getting older, you may want to start with a larger plant.
I find myself buying larger plants each year.
- Bill Cannon
Take the goods the gods provide, and don't stand and sulk when
they are snatched away.
- Mary McMullen
Everything you cherish
Throws you over in the end
Thorns will grab your ankles
From the gardens that you tend.
- Robert Hunter, Aim at the Heart
There are many tired gardeners but I've seldom met old
gardeners. I know many elderly gardeners
but the majority are young at heart. Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because
too many hopes
and dreams are yet to be realized. The one absolute of gardeners is faith. Regardless
of how bad past gardens have been, every gardener believes that next
year's will be better. It is easy to
age when there is nothing to believe in,
nothing to hope for; gardeners, however, simply refuse
to grow up. Thomas
Jefferson said once, "Though an old man, I am but a young gardener"."
- Allan Armitage
The ultimate inspiration is the
deadline.
- Steve Karmen
When it comes time to die, be not like those whose
hearts are
filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they
weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over
again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die
like a hero going home.
- Mohican Chief Aupumut, 1725,
Native American Quotations
Someday I'll be a weather-beaten
skull resting
on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream.
- Ryokan, 1758-1831
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful.
It's the transition that's troublesome.
- Isaac Asimov
Through winter-time we call on
spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when the abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all:
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring time has not come--
Not know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.
- William Butler Yeats
In the presence of
eternity,
the mountains are as transient as
the clouds.
- Robert Green Ingersoll
Cherry trees will blossom
every year;
But I'll disappear for good,
One of these days.
- Philip Whalen, 1923 -June 26, 2002
Zen priest, Abbot of San Francisco Hartfort Street Zen Center
Associated with West Coast Beat poets
Drive your cart and plow over the
bones of the dead.
- William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
Then here's a hail to each flaming
dawn
And here's a cheer to the night that's gone
And may I go a roaming on - until the day I die!
- Gravestone in the Adirondacks
There is still no cure for the common
birthday.
- John Glenn, U. S. Senator, at age 75
I do not believe in personal
immortality; it seems so unnecessary.
Show me one man who deserves to live forever.
-
If a tree dies, plant another in its
place.
- Linnaeus
A ruin is not just something that
happened long ago to someone else;
its history is that of us all, the transience of power, of ideas,
of all human endeavors.
- George Schaller
Paradise -
I see flowers
from the cottage where I lie.
- Yaitsu's death poem, 1807
So Funny, the Pekin duck, lies between
Thurber [the golden retriever],
the birch, and the Chinese stationary bamboo, and has made me
remember that my garden has always included dead pets,
and most likely always will. One way or another - even in New York City -
animals find their way into my garden, I water them
and they come up roses.
- Patti Hagan, 1989
We must endure our thoughts all
night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
- Wallace Stevens
Our blessed Savior
chose the Garden
for his Oratory, and dying,
for the place of his Sepulchre; and we do avouch for many weighty
causes, that there are none more fit to bury our dead in than in our
Gardens and Groves, where our Beds may be decked with verdant
and fragrant flowers, Trees and Perennial Plants, the most natural
and instructive Hieroglyphics of our expected
Resurrection and Immortality.
- John Evelyn
Everything you cherish
Throws you over in the end
Thorns will grab your ankles
From the gardens that you tend.
-
Let children walk with Nature, let
them see the beautiful
blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous
inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows,
plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star,
and they will learn that death is stingless indeed,
and as beautiful as life.
- John Muir
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man
is fear - fear of the unknown,
the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
- Henry Louis Mencken
Nothing is right and nothing is
just;
We sow in ashes and reap in dust.
- Violet Fane
It is old age, rather than death,
that is to be contrasted with life.
Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a
destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute
dimension. . . . Death does away with time.
- Simone de Beauvoir
The early bird gets the worm, but the
second mouse gets the cheese.
- Author Unknown
We come from the earth, we return to
the earth, and in between we garden.
- Author Unknown
Vain vision! when the changing world each day
Sees some such lordly pleasance pass away;
When the mere stripling knows my symbols all
Worn tokes, heaven hypothetical,
Nature indifferent, and the dreams of men
Figments of longing which we must condemn.
Yet keep these plants, O Man! a kinder time
May yet be moved by them to better rhyme,
Or moved, like me, to place his pleasure low,
On the firm Earth, whence Men and Blossoms grow.
- Ruth Pitter, 1897-1992, Other People's Glasshouses, 1941
"I can tell you, then, that I
am afraid of death. Not of what we imagine about death, for this fear
is itself imaginary. Nor of my death whose date will be recorded in the civic
registers of the state.
But of that death I suffer every moment, of the death of that voice which, out
of the depths of
my childhood keeps asking , as yours does: "What am I?" and which everything
within us and
around us seems bent on stifling. When this voice does not speak - and it does
not speak
often! - I am an empty carcass, a restless cadaver. I am afraid that one day it
will fall silent
forever, or that it will wake up too late - as in your story of the flies: when
you wake up,
you're dead."
- Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue, 1981
A perennial is a plant that would
have come back
year after year if it had survived.
- Author Unknown
"I pray that you will have the blessing of being consoled and sure about your
own death.
May you know in your soul that there is no need to be afraid.
When your time comes, may you be given every blessing and shelter that you need.
May there be a beautiful welcome for you in the home that you are going to.
You are not going somewhere strange. You are going back to the home that
you never left.
May you have a wonderful urgency to life you life to the full.
May you live compassionately and creatively and transfigure everything that is
negative within you and about you.
When you come to die may it be after a long life.
May you be peaceful and happy and in the presence of those who really care for
you.
May your going be sheltered and your welcome assured.
May your soul smile in the embrace of your anam cara."
- John O'Donohue (1956-2008)l,
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, p. 230.
If you are not killing plants, you
are not really
stretching yourself as a gardener.
- J. C. Raulston
Fate! Fate! All things
pass away;
Life is forever, youth is for a day.
Love again if you may
Before the stars are blown out of the sky
And the crickets die;
Babylon and Samarkand
Are mud walls in a waste of sand.
- John Gould Fletcher, 1886-1950, Mexican Quarter
Nothing retains its form;
new shapes from old. Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives.
In all creation, be assured, there is no death – no death, but only change and
innovation;
what we men call birth is but a different new beginning;
death is but to cease to be the same. Perhaps this may have moved to that,
and that to this, yet still the sum of things remains the same.
-
Ovid, Metamorphosis
There are no secrets.
It's just we thought that they said dead
When they said bread.
- John Cage
Eternity is not something
that begins after you are dead.
It is going on all the time. We are
in it now.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Everything ends with flowers.
- Helene Cixous
Love this Earth as if you won't be
here tomorrow;
show reverence for your Garden as if you will be here forever.
- Scottish proverb
Perhaps if Death is kind,
and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.
We will come down at
night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.
- Sara Teasdale, If Death is Kind
In the garden the door is always open
into the "holy" - growth, birth, death.
Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden
we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
- May Sarton
What is life? It is the
flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in
the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs
across the grass
and loses itself in the
sunset.
- Crowfoot
If a healthy soil is full of death,
it is also full of life:
worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only
the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.
- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977
Pity! The southerly trees
have shed their leaves.
Nobody comes to appreciate the mountain's beauty.
Tomorrow I too will float away.
My reflection gone from cool streams.
- Cheng Man-ch'ing
Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist
breath of decay.
- George Meredith
Keep not your roses for my dead, cold
brow
The way is lonely, let me feel them now.
- Arabella Smith, If I Should Die Tonight
Spring and Summer, Spent
For Others, While Fall Days Lead
To My Wintertime
- Author Unknown
Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope, tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him:
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And - when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening - nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do.
- William Shakespeare, King Henry VII, 1613
There is a kind of immortality in every garden.
- Gladys Taber
Oh roses for the flush of youth,
And laurel for the perfect prime;
But pluck an ivy branch for me
Grown old before my time.
Oh violets for the grave of youth,
And bay for those dead in their prime;
Give me the withered leaves I chose
Before in the old time.
- Christina Rossetti, Song, 1849
A human being is part of the
whole called by us "universe" ... We experience ourselves, thoughts and feelings
as something
separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This
delusion is a prison for us,
restricting us to personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to
us. Our task must be to free ourselves
from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and sense in which
they have obtained liberation from the self.
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to
survive.
- Einstein
The Spirit of Gardening: Quotations for Gardeners
Sometimes prettiness doesn't quite cut it.
I suspect it was partly for this reason
that the great eighteenth-century landscape designers always made sure to include
a note of mortality in their compositions - a gothic ruin, a forbidding grotto, a
scary chunk of statuary. They wanted the passing cloud of some momento mori to briefly darken the sweet pastoral scene, inducing a tinge of melancholy in the
visitor and, perhaps, rendering the pretty more poignant. William Kent went so
far
as to plant dead trees in his gardens on the theory that if a garden was to be a
world unto itself, it had better make room for the darker shades of feeling
as well as the sunny ones.
- Michael Pollan, Consider the Castor Bean
But well-a-day, the gardener careless
grew,
The maids and fairies both were kept away,
And in a drought the caterpillars threw
Themselves upon the bud and every spray.
God shield the stock! if Heaven send no supplies,
The fairest blossom of the garden dies.
- William Browne of Tavistock, 1591 - 1643, Visions
When gardening, I have one gift you
won't find in any manuals.
I know it's strange, but I can change perennials to annuals.
- Dick Emmons
In the long run we are all dead.
- John Maynard Keynes
After killing off a number of plants
inadvertently, it may be hard
to face horticultural euthanasia. ... But the misfortune of these
mistakes goes beyond a small blot on your garden. The sad relics
are the lessons your are refusing to learn. ... After four or five
years you have to make an assessment of your selections and stop
nursing along specimens that long for requiescat in pace. You will
be amazed what a lift it will give to your whole garden to
be rid of these ghosts.
- Patricia Thorpe, Growing Pains, 1994
In a few generations more, there will
probably be no room
at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them,
no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then
ceased, but with it there will also have passed
away the last smile of the world's youth.
- Marie Louise de la Ramée, The Quality of Mercy, 1900
For we must bear in mind that the
greater number of garden pictures
known to us are taken from tombs.
- Marie Luise Gothein, A History of Garden Art, 1928
Thou are gone from my gaze like a
beautiful dream,
And I seek thee in vain by the meadow and stream.
- George Linley, 1798 - 1865
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Months and Seasons Quotes, Poems, Sayings, Verses, Lore, Myths, Holidays Celebrations, Folklore, Reading, Links, Quotations Information, Weather, Gardening Chores Compiled by Mike Garofalo |
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The woods decay, the woods decay and
fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world.
- Lord Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892
Men fear silence as they fear solitude,
because both give them
a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.
- Andre Maurois
Do not stand on my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn's rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in the circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
- Anonymous
Shed no tear - O, shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Weep no more - O, weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root's white core.
- John Keats
One of the truest of
gardening sayings is that you have to be cruel to be kind. If things are left to go overgrow, they look out of shape, scale and control.
- Brian Davis
How astonishingly does the chance of
leaving the world improve a sense of
its natural beauties upon us. Like poor Falstaff, although I do not 'babble,'
I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I
have know from my infancy - their shapes and colours are as new to me
as if I had just created them with superhuman fancy.
- John Keats, 1820
For the sake of goodness and love,
Man shall let Death have
No sovereignty over his thoughts.
- Thomas Mann, Magic Mountain
The constant recollection of death is
the test of human conduct.
- Marcus Aurelius
For those who live neither with
religious consolations about death nor
with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene
mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled.
It can only be denied.
- Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor
Old gardeners never die.
They just
spade away and then throw in the trowel.
- Herbert V. Prochnow
Old gardeners never die, they just go
to seed.
Old gardeners never die, they are
just pruned back hard and repotted.
- Authors Unknown
Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime,
Rot and consume themselves in little time.
- William Shakespeare
Old gardeners do die, and plenty are
slowly spading away.
We did not come from dust, nor shall we return to dust, nor are we dust in the wind.
You are deluding yourself if you think that death is an illusion.
Springtime for birth, Summertime for growth; and all Seasons for dying.
All the living stand on the dead.
The living produce the living, the dead decay into compost.
Everyday, the Angel of Death visits the garden - someday too I will touch Her
wing.
Being dead means nothing to the dead.
Honor the dead by showing compassion for the living.
Graveyards and landscape gardens, coffins and flowers - fitting friends.
- Michael P. Garofalo,
"Look at us", said the violets
blooming at her feet,"all last winter we slept in the seeming death...
but at the right time God awakened us, and here we are to comfort you."
- Edward Payson Rod
There the wild flowers spring and the wee
birdies sing,
And in sunshine the waters are sleepin',
But the broken heart it kens nae second spring again,
Though the waefu may cease frae their greetin'.
Oh, ye'll tak the high road, and I'll tak the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland afore ye;
But me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.
-
The Bonnie Banks O' Loch
Lomond
Hands tremulous as cherry blossoms
kept
Faith with struggling seedlings till the earth
Kept faith with him, claimed him as he slept
Cold in the sun beside his upright spade.
- Phoebe Hesketh, Death of a Gardener
I do not wish to die -
There is such contingent
beauty in life:
The open window on summer
mornings
Looking out on
gardens and green things growing,
The shadowy cups of rose
flowering to themselves-
Images of time and
eternity-
Silence in the garden and
felt along the walls.
The room is suddenly
filled with sun,
Like a sacrament
one can never be
Sufficiently thankful
for. Door ajar,
The eye reaches across
from one
Open window to another,
eye to eye,
And then the healing
spaces of the sky ......
- Alfred Leslie Rowse
Even as a caterpillar, when coming to
an end of a blade of
grass, reaches out to another blade of grass and draws
itself over to it, in the same way the Soul, leaving the body
and unwisdom behind, reaches out to another body
and draws itself over to it.
- Upanishads
There is a Reaper, whose name is
Death,
And with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.
- Henry W. Longfellow, 1807 - 1882
What a sad sight - dead butterflies
Hanging upon a spider's web.
- Shiki
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
- Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning, 1915
The timing of death, like the ending of a
story,
gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
- Mary C. Bateson
Death is more universal than life -
everyone dies but not everyone lives.
- Author Unknown
If I'm ever reborn, I want to be a
gardener—
there's too much to do for one lifetime!
- Karl Foerster
“Scatter my ashes in my garden
so I can be near my loves.
Say a few honest words, sing a gentle song,
join hands in a circle of flesh.
Please tell some stories about me
making you laugh. I love to make you laugh.
When I’ve had time to settle, and green
gathers into buds, remember I love blossoms
bursting in spring. As the season ripens
remember my persistent passion.
And if you come into my garden
on an August afternoon
pluck a bright red globe,
let juice run down your chin and the seeds
stick to your cheek. When I’m dead
I want folks to smile and say:
“That Patti,
She sure is some Tomato!”
- Patti Tana
Henry Mitchell, the great 20th century garden writer, reportedly died planting daffodils with his neighbor.
At last I am leaving:
in rainless skies, a cool moon ...
pure is my heart
- Senseki,
Of all footprints, that of the
elephant is supreme.
Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.
- The Buddha
Come to the sunset tree!
The day is past and gone;
The woodman's axe lies free,
And the reaper's work is done.
- John Milton
The rustling of the silk is
discontinued,
Dust drifts over the courtyard,
There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
- Ezra Pound, 1885-1972, Liu Ch'e
The implication of the content of the Yasai
Hehan is that the issue of life
and death for all beings, sentient or insentient, always returns to the essential
teaching of the Buddha. Blurring the conventional distinction of things,
this message applies as much to vegetables as to humans.
- Yoshiaki Shimizu, Multiple
Commemorations
Don't think there are no crocodiles
just because the water is calm.
- Malayan Proverb
I take my
strength from the mist in the hills
I take my strength from the standing trees
I take my strength from the running stream
I take my strength from the whispering breeze
My heart breaks again, no need to know why
We’re here but for a moment and then we must die.
And there were times when one yielded quite shamelessly
to the
sentimental. They were more likely to be times of crickets, I
think, than of birds - when it was impossible not to feel, like
another essence of the sunlight, the bittersweet of life that
lingers about old houses, and places where men have died, and
things that forgotten hands have touched.
- H. G. Dwight,
Gardens and Gardening,
Atlantic Monthly, 1912
Worldwide
many suffer -
even as peaches ripen.
Exactly at noon -
the branch cracks,
loaded with peaches.
One by one they drop
on the ground, ripe
peaches -
at day's end.
- Mike Garofalo,
Cuttings
In the garden
I will die.
In the rosebush
they will kill me.
- Garcia Lorca
I will garden on the double run,
my rhythm obvious in the ringing rakes,
and trust in fate to keep me poor and kind
and work until my heart is short,
then go out slowly with a feeble grin,
my fingers flexing but my eyes gone gray
from cramps and the lack of oxygen.
- Richard Hugo, The Way a Ghost Dissolves
I don't feel good.
- Luther Burbank's last words
Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!
- Steve Jobs last words
This is the last of Earth! I am content!
- John Quincy Adams last words
I'll sleep well tonight
- Henry Ford's last words
Cold
Mountain Buddhas
Han Shan and Han Shan Te'-Ch'ing
Wait without thought, for
you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness be
dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
- T. S. Eliot, Four
Quartets - East Coker # 130, 1943
I am spending delightful afternoons
in my garden, watching
everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything
departing, and I love everything with more passion.
- Emile Zola
Be happy while you're living,
For you're a long time dead.
- Scottish Proverb
Birth, copulation, and death. That's
all the facts
when you come to brass tacks.
- T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
- May Sarton
My robe hangs in the garden,
dripping like a tree.
One day I'll step
out of my body
exactly like this.
It's easy to die.
Just give your breath
back to the trees
and the wind.
- Peter Levitt, 100 Butterflies
If you rest, you rust.
- Helen Hayes
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not
want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul;
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
- King David (circa 950 B.C.) Bible, Psalm 23
To the fuki plant,
dandelions, and their kind that lie for long patiently
under the fallen snow, comes the season of breezy spring. No sooner
do they see the light of the world, stretching their longing heads out
from the cracks in the snow, than they are instantly nipped off. For
these plants isn't the sorrow as deep as that of the child's parents whose child had accidentally died? They say everything in the plant
and tree kingdom attains Buddhahood. Then they, too,
must have Buddha-nature.
- Kobayashi Issa, The
Spring That Is Mine, 1815
Gardening for food is one of the most
important ways in which we
can encourage positive health. I would also suggest that this links
directly to our conceptions of death as a society. By attempting to
create boundaries between death as life and distance ourselves
from processes of decay, I feel that we cut ourselves off from
process of life, such as the process of growing food, of touching
the earth (literally), making compost and the realization that
rotting is the precursor of fertility and growth.
- Joanne Tippett,
Wherever humans garden magnificently,
there are magnificent heartbreaks.
- Henry Mitchell
DANCE
Written by a teenager terminally ill with
cancer.
"Have you ever watched
kids
On a merry-go-round?
Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?
Ever followed a
butterfly's erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?
You better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won't last.
Do you run through each
day
On the fly?
When you ask "How are you?"
Do you hear the reply?
When the day is done
Do you lie in your bed
With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?
You'd better slow down
Don't dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won't last.
Ever told your child,
We'll do it tomorrow?
And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?
Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die
Cause you never had time
To call and say,"Hi!"
You'd better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won't last.
When you run so fast to
get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and
hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift....
Thrown away.
Life is not a race.
Do take it slower
Hear the music
Before the song is over."
The Spirit of Gardening Website
Last Modified or Updated on June 26, 2020.