Tomatoes and Weeds

I am both full and exhausted after two weeks at camp “peace-ing together, piece by piece.” As I reflect on the last two weeks, I find myself thinking about the words of our key-noter, a new and wise friend, who said, “It’s a lot easier to weed our garden if we know the difference between a weed and a tomato.”

That’s true of literal gardens. If you’ve ever worked a garden, you might know how difficult it can be to tell the difference in an overgrown plot between a weed and the plant you’ve intended to grow. So how to tell what is intentional growth and what is not?

Weeds are not violent exactly, but they can choke out the goodness of flowers and vegetables we desire to flourish. What about the violence we live with, both externally and internally? How is this like weeds that choke what we desire to flourish within ourselves?

In the yoga workshop I offered to middle and high school students these past two weeks, I wondered with them if we might consider all that was not-peace. Individually, students wrote of the things that pulled them away from being oriented toward peace.

These notes rested beneath white “graffiti” sheets that they filled with another set of sticky notes on which they anonymously shared a place where they experience peace, their own personal “thin spaces.” This is the Celtic understanding of a place in which heaven and earth are somehow closer, less separate, a place where we feel more oriented toward God’s imagined dream for the world.

In this visual, the “not-peace” didn’t go away—it was still very much there—but it was being held by the “peace” that rested over top. I wondered with them how this might feel, to practice embodying the experience.

As they lay in Savasana, I asked them to imagine a world in which their thin space was more real in their body. I asked if they might imagine themselves there in the place. What it smelled like, sounded like. What they saw there. What perhaps they tasted, touched, who they were with. I asked them to tend to the feelings they felt inside their body through their imagining.

I don’t know how this all landed with them exactly. I don’t know if the concept I imagined them experiencing was at all what they did experience or if they were able to engage their senses to embody being in a space of peace. But I know that this is the beginning of understanding the difference between a weed and a tomato. Recognizing what we desire to flourish as peace requires a recognition of what isn’t, not because the “weeds” of not-peace ever go away, but because it’s impossible to tend to that which we haven’t learned to recognize fully.

Each time we embody peace, we cultivate a greater awareness for the violence we’re also embodying. Gardens, both the external kind and the internal, contain the possibility for transformation. The more weeds we learn to recognize, the better able we are to see the tomatoes.

Friend, where is your thin space? Can you imagine yourself there? Can you imagine yourself seeing what is there? Smelling, touching, hearing the space? Who is with you there? What are you doing? Can you imagine it so fully that you see it, like a fully grown, nutrient dense vegetable growing stronger while every “violent” weed fades toward the background? I wonder.

A day on retreat with Jen and me this September might include waking up to see the sunrise over the Southernmost tip of ocean in Portugal, followed by morning yoga in a room overlooking boats on the bay while the sound of birds creates a background melody. Then breakfast of fresh baked breads, salmon, eggs, fruit, pastries, yoghurt (so many choices!) coffee (and perhaps a mimosa) around a big table with new and old friends becoming a community together on retreat.

The afternoon might unfold into some time at the pool or perhaps an excursion to a winery or the nearly 700-year-old fort that stands majestically on the cliffs above the sea. A walk through the accessible beach town for delicious fresh seafood, pasta, or perhaps ice cream and some shopping might be in order. Then evening yoga, a freshly prepared group meal with wine service, the sun sinking into the same ocean could fill your evening.

Or perhaps you sleep late, read a book all day by the pool, dive into the waves, surf. Sagres is pure magic. Retreating with Jen and me is sacred and precious time. And it’s all yours to be led through or decide to be led nowhere at all.

Join us by clicking here: Delight in Sagres