Farm On

For this episode I'm going to step out of the usual mode and talk to someone who stumbled onto gardening by a twist of fate, and who uses her garden's many lessons to teach us the living wisdom in our natural world. KAREN MAEZEN MILLER is a Zen priest at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles, and the author of Mama Zen, Hand Wash Cold, and a slender book called Paradise In Plain Sight which is the focus of our talk. Through Maezen's no-nonsense prose, rocks convey faith, ponds preach stillness, flowers give love, and leaves express the effortless ease of letting go. And the green space that provides her so many lessons is no ordinary patch of land, but a 100-year-old Japanese garden that she painstakingly restored with no prior gardening experience. This "one foot in front of the other" approach is often referred to as The Path in Buddhism, and I begin our conversation by asking Maezen about her own path from starting a business to shedding the trappings of success, and eventually earning the robes of a Ze