Tao Te Ching
Kurhan/Dreamstime
Gardening
Most people seem to think about gardening in terms of fun, flowers, and free food. It has many more less obvious benefits however. For example, mixing Biochar into our soil mixes and even spreading it on top of the soil can create huge environmental benefits. It can improve microbial activity that sequesters twice as much CO2 as in regular soils. Gardening techniques can reduce fire risk, prevent erosion, and increase the soil's oxygen and water holding capacities. Converting a grass lawn to a garden represents one of the most consequence-producing gardening projects. On a small scale, we can even help reach the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
Quotes (80)
“There is infinite space in your garden; all men, all women are welcome here; all they need do is enter.”
“When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily.”
“And a marvelous herb of the soil grows here,
Whose match I never had heard it sung
In the Dorian Isle of Pelops near
Or in Asia far hath sprung.”
“However well a man sows a field or plants a farm, he cannot know who will gather in the fruits; another may build a beautiful house, but he knows not who will inhabit it.”
“Plant mulberry trees around the homesteads and people will be able to wear silk. Promote the breeding of pigs and fowl and people will be able to eat meat. Assure farmers the time to cultivate their fields and families will not suffer from hunger.”
“Once plants reach their height of development, they wither. Once people reach their peak, they grow old. Force does not prevail for long. It isn’t the Tao. What is withered and old cannot follow the Tao. And what cannot follow the Tao soon dies.”
“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
“Pleasure for an hour, a bottle of wine; pleasure for a year, marriage; pleasure for a lifetime, a garden.”
“How lucky, if they know their happiness are farmers—more than lucky, they for whom, far from the clash of arms, the earth herself, most fair in dealing, freely lavishes an easy livelihood.”
“It is impossible to deny the good of life to any order of living things… Those that deny the happy life to plants are really denying it to all living things.”
“All pleasure and pain arise in the mind so cultivate mind’s nature; awaken consciousness in the heart’s core.”
“A field which has not been worked will not bear fruit even if the six grains are sown.”
“If you throw the six grains in a meadow, there will be no sprouts.
If you plant seeds in a plowed field, then you get results.”
“The beauty of my garden is invisible... I use no magic to extend my life; Now, before me, the dead trees become alive.”
“Those who plant something well, plant it without planting. Thus it is never uprooted. Those who hold something well, hold it without holding. Thus it is never taken away.”
“And when the Moon says, 'it is time to plant,' why not dance, dance and sing?”
“Water the ground of appreciation and love, sew the seeds of compassion, and watch the tree of awakened heart grow.”
“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”
“And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.”
“When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.”
“What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”
“What is success? To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived”
“The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.”
“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
“It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.”
“It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.”
“I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
“In my garden I understand dimly why evil is in the world and in my garden learn how transitory it is.”
“The mind can be influenced like a plant, like a cell, like a chemical element; one has only to introduce it into a series of new circumstances or a new setting.”
“Every time I talk to a savant, I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”
“she still had that something which fires the imagination… that somehow revealed the meaning in common things… to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last… It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. It's true life is invisible, hidden... What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”
“Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.”
“Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.”
“Song brings us health, and color will heal wounds…therefore, I advise to keep more flowers. Plants wisely selected according to color are healing.”
“The old agricultural view of the world in terms of seed and growth did far more justice to the complexity and irrepressible expansiveness of things.”
“In my Utopia, every family, including philosophers, would apply half of its working hours to growing its essential vegetables on a plot of land around or near its house”
“Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”
“I go forth to seek —
To seek and claim the lovely magic garden
Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.”
“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.”
“So instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers, plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul.”
“What torments me tonight is the gardener's point of view... When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all the gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men... It is the human race and not the individual that is wounded here”
“excessive interdependence of systems increases the likelihood of collective disasters... A partial degree of independence with regard to food production is in fact coming to be considered a matter of national security in most parts of the world.”
“agricultural practices have brought about dramatic decreases in the number of animals and plants of most native species and have simultaneously increased the numbers of other animals and plants... earth is constantly changing through the agency of all the forms of life which are part of it, including humankind.”
“Emptiness is the garden where you can't see anything. It is the mother of all.”
“Ultimately, it is not the growing technique which is the most important factor, but rather the state of mind of the farmer.”
“Some weeding, composting or pruning may be necessary at first, but these measures should be gradually reduced each year.”
“Without attention, the human sense of wonder and the holy will stir occasionally, but to become a steady flame it must be tended”
“If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth”
“The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.”
“Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven’t done a thing. You are just talking.”
“We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.”
“All culture has the form of gardening: the encouragement of spontaneity in others by way of one's own, the respect for source, and the refusal to convert source into resource.”
“To garden is not to engage in a hobby or an amusement; it is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise”
“Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?”
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.”
“The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.”
“We can plant the moon of bodhichitta in everyone’s heart and the sun of the Great Eastern Sun in their heads.”
“How different this world would be if our leaders spent as much time in their gardens as they do in their war rooms.”
“What if cultivating your own garden were the best way to help the world? What if your little backyard could, with the proper care, grow enough vegetable and fruits to feed a million people? What if your gardening inspired a thousand of your neighbors to do the same?”
“psyche, the Greek word for 'soul,' can also mean 'butterfly'... what depths of joy lie hidden within that pinpoint of a brain? The whole world contained in a garden, in a single flower! All time contained in a summer's day, and life one all-embracing multi-orgasmic fragrance!”
“There was nothing Suzuki Roshi liked more than working in his garden.”
“Blow up your TV...throw away your paper...move to the country and build you a home. Plant a little garden...eat a lot of peaches...try and find Jesus on your own.”
“civilizations, cultures are organisms seeded (seeds = teachings) from another unseen world and planted”
“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”
“A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.”
“Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter-gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers. Yet the future belonged to the farmers. In 1850 more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants, and in the small villages along the Ganges, the Nile and the Yangtze nobody knew anything about steam engines, railroads or telegraph lines. Yet the fate of those peasants had already been sealed in Manchester and Birmingham by the handful of engineers, politicians and financiers who spearheaded the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, railroads and telegraphs transformed the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons, giving industrial powers a decisive edge over traditional agricultural societies.”
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