One time, some years back, I tried to upgrade my literary IQ by reading Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden Pond,” trying to catch up on a subject I’d skipped over in high school because I was more interested in boys and basketball.
All the hippies back in the ’60s raved about the book but, frankly, I didn’t get that much out of it, other than the fact that Thoreau made a big deal out of gardening. People later told me the book was about transcendentalism, which I still don’t know what that is. I just thought it was about planting beans. Thoreau talked about how much he spent on bean seeds and this and that and kind of parlayed his experience into an ethic of life, which I think is a stretch.
Even though the higher implications of the book went over my head, I still think about Thoreau every year when I’m planting, and now harvesting, my beans. Of all my garden plants, I love beans the most and, to tell you the truth, I think Thoreau would have had a decent book if he’d just stopped at that.
Whether you have a philosophical bent or not, beans kind of force you to be “in the moment,” as they say, and pay attention to what you’re doing. I go out every morning hunting for new beans, dangling from the vines like earrings, and pick what I can find. But if I go back out a few hours later I’ll find even more beans that obviously were hiding the first time around; either that or I wasn’t looking hard enough. Most likely the second option.
So the next time I go out to look for beans I try to be more focused on what I’m doing, and I discover that if I’m quiet and listen, the beans kind of draw me in and reveal themselves. They’re there, but they’re camouflaged among the leaves and blossoms, and it takes some time and concentration to really see what’s what. It’s what some people might claim is a Zen-like experience, although I don’t really know what that is, either, except I know some people try to superimpose highfalutin meanings onto ordinary experiences like fly fishing or bird-watching that they claim are meditative and mind-expanding. I can’t speak to that. I’m just picking beans.
In his book, Thoreau expressed some guilt about whacking out the native weeds in order to get his bean field going, but I have no compunction at all about ripping weeds out of the soil, stomping on their seedy little heads and dumping them into the trash can. Thoreau wrote: “I was determined to know beans,” by which I guess he meant he wanted to learn how to grow a good crop. But I can tell you, you can’t know beans if you let the crabgrass get the upper hand.
I love gardening, but I don’t sentimentalize it or draw some deep spiritual meaning out of it the way Thoreau did. Perhaps that means I’m a shallow person, and I’m OK with that. If you’re shallow, you don’t have to work so hard. Thoreau apparently had some alternative agenda in mind with his beans, like selling a book. I’m just thinking about dinner.
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