I have been letting go of myself over the last year or so (and no, I don’t just mean not watching my waistline).

I’m talking about a small “garden” of river stones and gravel next to my garage. While it is admittedly a very poor imitation of a Japanese Zen garden, I have enjoyed creating it and messing around with it over the past few years.

What’s a zen garden? Here is what I understand of the concept. Take any space you have available and dump sand, gravel, and a few rocks—any and all of the above, to create a surface which can be designed, redesigned, and “contemplated.” One of the big concepts of a zen garden is that it should be tended. That is, on a regular basis, the gravel and sand should be raked, often in a precise pattern so that curved or wavy lines may emerge on the surface. If slightly boring, I have found it to be very relaxing and, indeed, thought provoking.

How could what amounts to a fancy sandbox be thought provoking? I like it because it’s always changing, mostly by getting messed up due to natural forces such as rain and wind. This provides a chance for me, the owner of the sandbox—er, zen garden, to restore order by raking it back out and moving the stones around, if I choose to do so.

Herein lies the part where I have been letting myself go. Not only have I left my garden untended for months on end, but I have been satisfied to walk past it every day (I can’t get to my car in the garage without seeing it) without taking action to rectify the obvious creeping disorder in the garden. It’s as if I have accepted the chaos and dysfunction of the zen garden as a true reflection of the chaos and dysfunction going on in the greater world around me.

Let me just contemplate that for a moment. Every day I glance at the zen garden and notice disorder. I make the choice not to intervene. This is “the way it is.” Acceptance of the dismal.

But you know what? That’s ugly, and unnecessary. My zen garden has gone untended because I choose to live with the dismal, not because dismal is my only choice.

While it is true that I can not do much about the macro events of the world, there, in the space between my garage and my house, was the area where I could restore some order, beauty, and yes, even some zen. Most think contemplation of their garden should be done only once it’s been tended, but I say that even more valuable contemplation can be had when the garden is in its most disordered state.

At those moments, we should be able to visualize how we could improve the garden. How we could begin to bring it back to a state of greater order and beauty.

I dig the debris out of the area behind the garage where it has been washed in, then begin to even out the sand and stones. I retrieve my river stones, carried by the year’s rains into the gully behind the garden. While I am taking the stones back to where they belong at the top of the garden, I recognize my favorite ones, admiring their colors, shapes, smoothness, and character. My labor moves to contemplation and then to discovery, and then beyond just a re-creation of my old garden, into the creation of a new garden in the place where my old garden previously lay in disrepair.

This process is another kind of journey for me. Like all journeys, it is partially about cooperating with the process of transformation. There is no movement—my zen garden has not traveled. This journey is not a trip, but rather the transformation or rediscovery of what was there before, with the addition of what I wish to make it “this time around.”

We cannot always be in the journey. My zen garden is not tended every day, or even every week. It turns out that it was okay to leave it unkempt for so long, because, when the time was right, when I was ready to return it a more ordered form, it was there waiting for me. While tending to my ramshackle garden, my contemplation brought me to the question: is my zen garden unsightly when it’s in such a condition? I believe the real question I was asking myself was if I too had become unsightly during the time I was unable to tend to it. Was it, and I, “bad” to let go of order?

Here is where I stray from the traditional Zen teachers of the past. Their zen gardens were meant to be an exercise in creating and recreating a kind of perfection, both in the garden and in one’s self, as the tender of the garden. Lack of defect was purity.

My contemplation brought me to a different conclusion. My garden had become defective because it had devolved from order to disorder. However, this seeming impurity was really a remixing of the elements of the garden, so that they could be rediscovered, and re-envisioned, and yet another creation could be formed from the same rocks and sand. It’s infinite. It’s all part of the natural ebb and flow of circumstance, nature, and our own selves.

Maybe it turns out that I was not “letting myself go” during these past few months, or not in the traditional way of thinking about that. But rather I was letting myself go, as in letting myself rethink, rebuild, move on.

Now that I have derived such a wonderful wisdom from the contemplation of the rocks in my zen garden beside my garage, let me admit that this also sounds like a version of the classic truism, “just because you put lipstick on a pig, it doesn’t make it beautiful.” It’s true, my zen garden is in much better shape than before, and was fun to ponder while I ignored the elephant in the room. Turns out, that elephant is me! So, let me now start tending to the emergence of this Covid-19 bulging waistline, which I have also “let myself go” to.

In the meantime, I may borrow just a little bit of lipstick from that pig, and place it on this elephant with some nice baggy Hawaiian shirts this summer. It will make me more beautiful, right?

Zen out on that.

Tending my Zen Garden