Weeding Meditation

 A forest path at Staveley camp site

I'm taking a break from words, both written and spoken, from tomorrow until next Monday. I'm going on an insight meditation retreat led by Stephen and Martine Batchelor, a wonderful team of teachers who are making their third visit to New Zealand. The retreat is at a camp site near Staveley, close to Mt Somers. The camp site includes a couple of acres of remnant native beech forest. Beech (tawhai/Nothofagus) forests used to cover all the mountains and foothills of Canterbury, and extend out to the plains.

I love to do walking meditation in the forest - except I keep seeing weeds.
Weeds as big as trees (sycamore, rowan and hawthorn) and all the other
rampant exotic plants which can easily colonise a small patch of native bush
and rapidly destroy its ecological integrity and natural beauty. They include
cotoneaster bushes, Chilean barberry, blackberry, nasturtium vines and other plants with nice seeds and fruits which are easily carried by birds. 
I tune them out when I am meditating, but in the break times I come back to the forest with secateurs, loppers, a weeding hook and a pruning saw, and do what I can to make more space for the locals.

If one is a skilled weeder (and I have had heaps of practice, and know how to
tell a desirable plant from a weed even when it is very small) then weeding can be a meditative experience. The eyes and hands do their work almost
automatically, and the mind is free to rest in the present, if one so pleases. In my own garden, I find that I enjoy weeding for this very reason, and have no wish to attack weeds with machines or sprays. These are not at all restful or conducive to meditation.

Last month I was on my knees in the vegetable garden, weeding a space to plant tomatoes, when there was yet another of the earthquakes we have been experiencing in these parts since September 4. I felt the earth rolling beneath my knees, in a sinuous way. Now that was something to meditate on!

Dawn lights the peak of Mt Somers, above a dark band of beech forest.