The Apple Gardener

Sally was ready to begin her compulsive schedule of doing an hour of work in the garden. Gardening is good for mental health. Gardening was her time to empty her mind. This was her time of meditation. She decided to do a 21-day challenge and journal her no-thoughts during mindful moving meditation. She noted the irony of this intention.

Day 1: The sun was shining. Images flitted alongside thoughts. I imagined an impersonal Atman, or a divine essence, that manifests as a drama on the stage of nature, telling a story face to face with another life.

Day 2: I am working on one small area at the far end of the garden. It is hard to observe thoughts. I want to echo my own interpretation of divine laws instead of seeing nature. I am working on letting go of the need to imitate a concept of happiness while gardening.

Day 3: It rained all day. I went out and pulled weeds. I am restricted by my impression of external socially generated standards.

Day 4: Nature has an artless design. I am doing what I can to control my need to create my imagined normal. I have to choose what to restore, what can be salvaged, and what waste to get rid. I still have to figure out what to learn, retain or extinguish, in order to make sense of the disturbed psychological and physical manifestations of what I think is normal.

Day 5: Jotting a few lines is becoming part of my normal springtime routine. Normalcy establishes a sense of reasonable predictability.

Day 6: I breath intentionally to reduce my alpha waves. They occur during a normal wakeful state. I am trying to alter electric currents of the reticular activating system of the brain stem to adjust cortisol, serotonin and dopamine and create a deep-thinking reflective state of the intellect. Perhaps aligning within a field beyond normal will brings together convergent and divergent thought. I feel like I am sleepwalking.

Day 7: I noticed what becomes hidden in plain sight. The apple tree appears barren and possibly dead. I cut it hard a few weeks ago. The dry summer, followed by harsh fall winds and bitter winter cold, may have been too much. There is a season for everything. Life and death are normal.

Day 8: My daughter visited. When two or more people share the same unfolding landscape, they organize and normalize the world with familiar reason and rationality. I talked about Todd. I learned his dialect of the language of mathematics. Todd said that each person creates their own normal, originally described as the carpenter square, the perpendicular tangent to a surface. Gauss called the ellipsoid of constant probability density the normal.

Day 9: Todd helped me to look beyond the mean part of normal, the central point of where roughly 2/3 of events occur. The events outside the statistical norm, identified as the Q function, or the tail probability, is applied to reinforcement learning. Individuals do their own statistical cost/benefit analysis and calculate the expected outcome of taking a specific action- be it safe or a risk.

Day 10: Normal is often a socially submissive default program. It is sometimes important to oppose the norm. Slavery, and trying to assimilate indigenous peoples, once were accepted as normal. Humans often act like caged penguins, pandas and pangolins, who transfer innate normal social structures of the wild into unnatural environments. Tourists visit places where pop-up carnivalesque shops appear as if they are normal. Normal is over-rated.

Day 11: I was thinking of satirical impression of social norms that Thorton Wilder described in the play Our Town. Normal leaves a ghostly impression that haunts vague memories of what was and has disappeared. Wars once marketed as a fight for liberty and freedom have become a complex excuse for a business venture.

Day 12: The eyes of the beholder alter how normal things are visualized. Todd explained how the organic architecture of life extends into the world of fractals, in an affine space, that is based on relationships that do not necessarily have a common point of origin. Relationships cause a domino effect and test the limits of tolerance, then renormalize as they form a multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz, i.e. an estimate of a solution to a problem that guide actions to obtain a more precise answer.

Day 13: I noticed the observer effect. The act of observing or measuring a system inevitably changes its state or behavior. The garden knows it is looked upon.

Day 14: My grandson came to work with me. He said 'sometimes an hour is a long time, but this hour seemed very fast.' Concepts of time have changed. Time once measured by the movement of the planets, moon and stars, evolved into sundials and led to the use of the waterwheel or sandglass that measured the rate at which resources were consumed or transferred. Mechanical clocks measured time and then were replaced with the ultimate crystal ball, the frequency of vibrations of a given number of cesium or silicon, or osmium atoms. Time is relative.

Day 15: I think a light turned on. Common legends, fables and cultural myths spontaneously teach socially subjective paradigms. Interpretation depends on brain development, hormones and embedded associations hidden in a background of ignorance. Declining physical or mental functions are normal. Changes and death, through wars, age and disease, bring confusion, suffering and trauma. Normal is relative.

Day 16: I mowed and strimmed the yard. Life is an impermanent piece of art that reflects the impermanence of existence.

Day 17: I worked on the Iris bed. I let clumped points of the rhizomes occur in the normal curve. They form an invisible focal point. I see an imaginary mass that will be beautiful.

Day 18:I noticed the buds are swollen on the apple tree.

Day 19. The apple is a member of the rose family. The rose holds the five-point star on the seed case and forms the shape of the seed and flower of life on the Tree of Life and Wisdom. Todd showed me it also forms the path of Venus. I saw Venus last night. Bless those astronomers who could map the path over the years.

Day 20: The apple tree is blooming. I feel like the Greeks serpent Ladon who protected the golden apples that Atlanta dropped to select her preferred man in a race for her hand in marriage. The golden apple of the Hesperides, the daughters of the evening and nymphs of the west, was a symbol of immortality. One was the Apple of Discord that led to the Trojan War. The apple is a poison that destroyed the fabric of society. It was the forbidden fruit of unrestrained knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Todd was a great apple gardener. Hard to believe he died 15 years ago.

Day 21. The garden looks good. Decline is normal. I need to grab the curve by the tail. The house goes up for sale today. I am ready to go into a retirement home.