Paradise in Plain Sight: Lessons from a Zen Garden

Author

PROLOGUE

PARADISE

One day when Buddha was walking with his disciples he pointed to the ground with his hand and said, It would be good to erect a sanctuary here.

— BOOK OF SERENITY, CASE 4

On a late Saturday afternoon in the early summer of 1997, after a string of auspicious disappointments and wrong turns, my husband and I found ourselves in the backyard of an empty house on a quiet street in a suburb of Los Angeles. The backyard was Southern California’s oldest private Japanese garden, an oasis of ponds and pines that had stood mostly intact since 1916. It seemed like paradise with our name written all over it. We knew in our bones that the place could only be ours, and with it, the little house alongside it. The next day we put money down and a month later, we moved in.

The overwhelming certainty that we belonged there was soon followed by the overwhelming certainty that we didn’t. Once we arrived, we hit the bookstores and local nurseries. We studied up on Japanese gardens: their esoteric architecture, history, and symbolism, and the very special ways to rake, weed, prune, plant, and water. We sought opinions, called in experts, and asked for conservative estimates — ha! — to redo this or that. The more we learned, the more we doubted. Perhaps we had overreached. It was too much work. It would take too much money. We were fools, without the right tools, training, or time. No wonder no one had wanted to buy this place but us. It wasn’t paradise, but a colossal pain in the neck.

One day I ran across a single line in a thick book that made it all simple. It told the original meaning of the word paradise before it became a mythical ideal, imaginary and unattainable. Before it pointed somewhere else.

The word paradise originally meant an enclosed area.

Inside the word are its old Persian roots: pairi-, meaning around, and diz, to create (a wall). The word was first given to carefully tended pleasure parks and menageries, the sporting ground of kings. Later, storytellers used the word in creation myths, and it came to mean the Eden of peace and plenty.

Looking at it straight on, I could plainly see.

Paradise is a backyard.

Not just my backyard, but everyone’s backyard. Teeming with weeds, leaves, half-dead trees, moles, mosquitoes, mud, dust, skunks, and raccoons. With a novice gardener and a reluctant groundskeeper.

Like the entire world we live in, bounded only by how far we can see.

I began to garden. I got scratched, tired, and dirty. I broke my fingernails and ruined my shoes. I yanked out what I could have kept and put in more of what I didn’t need. I pouted and wept, cursing the enormity of the task. I was resentful and unappreciative. But when I ventured afield, sidelined by things that seemed much more entertaining or important, I always came back to this patch of patient earth. Time after time I realized that everything I want or need — the living truth of life, love, beauty, purpose, and peace — is taught to me right here, no farther away than the ground beneath my feet. I am a pilgrim, as we are all pilgrims, making my way through a paradise hidden in plain sight.

That’s what this book is about: plain sight.

From the start, let me say that everything you will read here is a metaphor, and nothing is a metaphor. The best way to understand this is by not trying to understand. This book isn’t really about Zen, and it isn’t really about gardening. It might seem like I’m talking to myself, but I’m talking to you.

Now, about this paradise. You’re standing in it.

For years, I’ve invited everyone I meet to come see the garden. And what I mean is to come see this garden. This garden that is your life.

It would be good to erect a sanctuary here. A paradise of your own.

Part One

COMING HERE

Have faith in yourself as the Way.

CHAPTER 1

CURB

The View from a Distance

A monk asked, What is the Way? The master replied, Stop standing at the crossroads gazing into the distance.

— THE RECORD OF TRANSMITTING THE LIGHT

First you have to find the garden. It seems far off, but it never is.

You will arrive at a place you’ve never been before, and you will enter it. Then you will come to see that your life is the life of the entire universe. You may wander off, but you will keep coming back. Eventually, you won’t go anywhere else.

This is where it begins. It begins on the curb.

There is something haunting about looking into other people’s houses. You can see the past and its long shadow of pain. You see wasted potential: ten thousand futures gone missing. You see a lot of stuff that no one needed to keep, do-it-yourself projects that should have been left undone. You see what people love, and by their neglect, what they don’t. You see a lot of bad carpet. On this day of house hunting, my husband and I saw nothing that we would ever want to inhabit.

The day had not gone well. More than a few days had not gone well. We were nearing the end of our second year of marriage and finally looking for our first home together. We had lived mostly apart, taking a measured approach to combining our single households in separate states. I wasn’t happy it was taking so long, but my insistence triggered his resistance, and the gap between us widened.

That’s what can happen when you’re used to having your way.

We had met and married at the brink of middle age, each secure in our separateness, from entirely different worlds. He was an engineer, and I was a spiritual type. He was a loner, and I was a joiner. He believed in the metric system, and I believed in miracles. But the real difference was that I wanted everything to change, and he didn’t, at least not yet. This kind of tension always surfaces between people, because for-and-against is a struggle we bring to everything we do. To prove it, just grab hold of what you think is your side of things, the right side, and tug. Wars like that can go on for — oh, I don’t know — forever. You’re putting all your effort into pulling a rope and then blaming the other side for the blister.

After barely a year of long-distance dating and then a fast-track wedding, I wanted to take up residence together, start a family before it was too late, and turn my world upside down. Sounds reasonable. But he wanted to take his time and have a plan. Sounds reasonable. Two reasonable people locked inside two different versions of reasonable: proof that reason alone doesn’t bridge a divide.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, a two-career couple living in two parts of the country was called a marriage of the ’90s. People marveled at our invention, but what I really wanted was a marriage of the 1890s. Barring that, I’d settle for sharing a zip code.

People who knew about our peculiar standoff would stammer in disbelief, "Didn’t you decide where you would live, uh, before you got married?" The simple answer was no, and I blamed myself. I took great care, in my precarious approach to an impossible dream, to disrupt as little as possible in advance. Haven’t you ever done that? Reached for something you want, on any terms, then seen that what you’d wrought was bent and half-broken, not quite working the way you’d thought it would?

I admit I had been less than clear about my intentions because they had been less than clear to me. Why did I, an independent, self-made woman, want to marry at all? Have a family? Willingly give up a last name, a job, and my own remote control to move across the country? With someone who was, for the most part, a stranger? To his credit, a benevolent one.

Because I thought something was missing in my life, that’s why, and I didn’t really know what. That’s how we all live, as if we’re missing half of ourselves, and whether we think that missing part is a person, place, or purpose, we call it our better half. Our best self. The new me. Even happily ever after. The best parts are nearly always the parts we think we don’t have.

At least, that’s how it looks from the curb, where we judge ourselves at a distance from everything and everyone else. We can stand on the curb for a long time, turn it into a crossroads from which every direction seems unappealing or even dangerous, afraid to take even a single step, so accustomed are we to feeling unlucky, unloved, or stuck. That day, I felt like all that, but I was about to get my way. Everything was about to change. It always is.

The feeling that we are separate — outnumbered and under attack — is where the spiritual life begins. It’s the curb you have to step off of to get to the other side.

Sensing ourselves as separate is an illusion, but it’s a crafty illusion. We’re not separate at all, but it seems that way. It seems as if all our problems are caused by someone or something else.

We were kidnapped at birth and raised by strangers who never loved us. Misjudged by critics and overlooked by higher-ups. Unjustly accused and mistreated. The pawns of a system rigged against us. Ill-favored by fortune, betrayed by our friends, born too soon, born too late, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Undefended against an immutable force that’s either standing in our way or running us over.

I’d been around the block a few times. Been stupid and wised up. Had it all and tossed it out. Made one plan and then another, then another. Lost in love and trusted someone again. And yet I was sinking into the pall of a malignant conviction — that I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for, not today, not next week, maybe never.

That was me out there on the curb, looking into all creation, a many-splendored world arrayed at my feet, thinking this isn’t it this isn’t it this isn’t it.

No matter what your story is, whatever your creed, you come to a spiritual practice looking for paradise. It’s a paradise you’ve never seen yet feel as if you’ve lost. The question is whether you’ll recognize it when you’re staring it in the face.

You may not be able to change the way you think about yourself and the world, at least not in the first chapter of a book. But you can stop believing that all your thoughts are true. Because they aren’t. There is another truth you may never have seen, and with it comes another way to live. It’s called the Way.

From the curb you’ll see the gate. From the gate you’ll see the path. From the path you’ll see the ground, and overhead, the sun and moon to light your way. These signposts will bring you to paradise.

We had exhausted our options by the time the agent drove us down one last street and surprised us by pulling over.

Let me show you this one just for historical interest. It’s empty, and you might not get a chance to see it again.

Whatever it was, I could hardly tell. The view from the curb was curtained by a stand of giant bamboo behind a rusted iron fence. Inside the fence was a worn-out gate. Inside