Good Friday. Slugs ate my cavalo nero and baby beans. Decided I have to use snail bait until there are enough veggies to share around. At the moment the slugs are just too greedy, so they must be destroyed.
Which brings me to the subject of hypocrisy! I have started reading a lot about Buddhism and sitting (meditating) daily, for 15-20 minutes. Meditating is difficult. I have to bring myself back to concentrating on my breath probably hundreds of times but I do believe it calms me eventually. Of course after a few days I began to feel smug, wandering around with a painful little loving-kindness smile on my face, then bang! some trivial annoyance occurs and my temper flares.
The internet has many, many useful resources for meditating, including downloadable audio guided meditation. Buddhanet is a wonderful resource.
Anyway, the first precept of Buddhism is not to take the life of any living thing and I have just killed about five slugs. Hmmm. And I eat meat. The Dalai Lama, in his excellent book How to Practice, advises that Buddhist monks are not necessarily vegetarian, as they will eat whatever is given to them. Interesting.
Last week I spent three mornings doing some one on one teaching with a Year 10 student, which was very satisfying. I haven't written much more of my story, my motivation just kind of petered out, unfortunately. I got bored with the story. I will finish it, though.
Sowed lots of carrots, which have just germinated and prepared some soil to transplant three roses. Weeded the driveway, cut back the ficus and secretly dead-headed the neighbour's roses, my version of guerrilla gardening.
My goal for the week is to keep sitting and reading Buddhist literature, prepare the veg garden for planting, make bread every four days or so and try and be mindful.
Later
I planted the roses. Planted out the lurid purple plant grown from a cutting taken from Mum's nursing home, some nasturtiums and lots of parsley. The latter is smothered in snail bait.
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