An Episode of Sparrows

 Some flowers salvaged on my walk home from the station, and a delicious orange juice that Dad made :)

 
This passage from a book by Thich Nhat Hanh really encouraged me today, forcing me to think differently about some things, and opening up some new possibilities. Hopefully you will enjoy the metaphor too, and maybe even take something supportive from it yourself.

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"Our consciousness is a living thing, something organic in nature. There are always waste materials and flowers in us. The gardener who is familiar with organic gardening is constantly on the alert to save the waste materials because he knows how to transform them into compost and then transform that compost into vegetables and flowers. So be grateful for your pains, be grateful for suffering - you will need them.

We have to learn the art of transforming compost into flowers. Look at a flower: it is beautiful, it is fragrant, it is pure; but if you look deeply you can already see the compost within the flower. With meditation, you can see that already.

The same is true of our mental formations, which include 'flowers' like faith, hope, understanding and love; but there is also 'waste material' like fear and pain. The flower is on its way to becoming compost, but the compost is also on its way to becoming a flower. This is a principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to be 'thrown away', not the waste, nor the flowers.

If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness. We know well that suffering helps us to understand , that it nurtures our compassion, and that for this reason it is vitally necessary for us. We must know how to learn from suffering, we must know how to make use of it to gather the energy of compassion, of love, of understanding."

- Thich Nhat Hanh, True Love